More ‘magic’, billions, water companies, justice and immigration

17 May 2025

After last week’s mutterings, a friend suggested migration could be added to the list of currently inexplicable things, which made me realise I’d inadvertently been anthropocentric and ignored insects, birds, fish and mammals that migrate for thousands of miles.

The best known is probably the arctic tern which commutes some 15,000 miles between summers in Shetland and summers in Antarctica but they have the ability to sleep while flying, closing down half their brain while the other half keeps the wings moving. 

Perhaps more impressive is the monarch butterfly which migrates annually between North America and Mexico and, though less well-known, the painted lady butterfly which travels between Africa and Northern Europe.  How do they do it?  It’s been suggested that they use the earth’s magnetic field to control their journeys but this is constantly changing as the magnetic poles move so they have to allow for the effect of the deviation if they want to get to the right place.

However, what I find most impressive is the fact that monarch butterflies don’t live very long and each migration is undertaken by newly-hatched butterflies that have never done it before so the route, and the allowance for magnetic pole movements, must somehow be genetically imprinted in their brains.

What will they do when the magnetic poles swap positions, which the alignment of magnetic particles in ancient rocks has shown they do?  It’s thought the swap doesn’t happen overnight and takes a very long time so perhaps the poles just drift away from the geographical poles until they reach the other end of the earth and the North Star becomes the South Star while the Southern Cross becomes the Northern Cross.  And, of course, half-way they’ll be the Eastern Star and the Western Cross, or possibly vice versa.

Many readers may remember my continuing problem with envisaging large numbers, like anything over 10.  Well, I’ve come across another example of just how impossible it is to grasp large numbers and the differences between them.  To help me picture the difference between a million and a billion, I was told to think in seconds:  one million seconds is about 12 days while one billion seconds is about 32 years.

Aaarrrggghhh!

I hope the people with more billions in the bank than they can ever spend will, if governments are too frightened to make them pay more tax, give it away to those people and countries whose need is so much greater.  I also hope that the wind is changing.  Last week, 40% of Centrica’s shareholders voted against the board’s recommended pay plans.  Chris O’Shea, the group’s chief executive trousered £4.3m last year and, yes, he took almost twice as much the previous year but the energy crisis encouraged them to impose huge increases on their customers’ energy bills, taking many of them even further into debt, while O’Shea (and other senior managers) get away with daylight robbery.

Thames Water (the one on the verge of bankruptcy) has a new CEO, Chris Weston, who took a £195,000 bonus after only three months in post and was asked by the Defra Select Committee to justify this.  “Because I’m worth it” he replied.  Can anybody can think of any sensible justification for saying this?

The government is now planning to block the payment of huge staff bonuses from a £3bn emergency loan to Thames Water, which claims these bonuses are vital to retaining its management and that they are its most valuable asset.  Whaaat?  Aren’t these the same managers that screwed everything up in the first place and led to the company being fined millions of pounds?

Down here, South West Water is owned by the Pennon Group and has increased our bill by 30% for the next year while chief executive Susan Davy generously waived her right to bonuses in the two years to March 2024 leaving her with a paltry £860,000 in the latter year (including the deferred reinvestment of shares).  My heart fails to bleed for her.

There’s also something wrong with our justice system when a peaceful Stop Oil protestor is sent to prison for 4 years and a violent child rapist gets 18 months.

And Peter Sullivan, 68, has spent the last 38 years in prison for a murder that forensic evidence has now decided he didn’t commit.

Another interesting comment came my way this week, something I hadn’t heard before, that the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

So which side should I take on Labour’s latest plans to curb immigration?  Keir Starmer this week spoke of a need to end the “squalid experiment in open borders” in what cynics might describe as an attempt to win Reform voters.  What self-respecting Respect member would be willing to support Labour?  It’s believed Nigel Farage celebrated Starmer’s comments with a bevvy and a fag.

Others saw a connection between Starmer’s view and the ‘rivers of blood’ speech given by the Conservative racist Enoch Powell in 1968.

Next week, all state benefits will be scrapped to encourage recipients to get on their bikes and find work (thank you Norman Tebbit, another ancient Conservative politician, for that suggestion) and the Isle of Wight will be declared an independent territory with 0% taxes through which all UK ‘earnings’ over £250,000 can be channelled tax-free.

And an old story to cheer people up.  The King of Sweden once visited Sir Paul Nurse, a Nobel Prize winner who holds 50 honorary degrees and is former President of the Royal Society and Chief Executive and Director of the Francis Crick Institute.  On the royal arrival, the receptionist rang Nurse’s office and said “Gentleman here, he’s … er … watcher say yer king of, mate?”

Magic v science

10 May 2025

Back onto one of my continuing interests this week:  the gulf between what we can explain and ‘prove’ and what we can’t explain.  The former is based on our latest understanding of scientific laws and hypotheses, which some people think must therefore be true, the latter can’t be explained by these laws and hypotheses and is therefore trashed by people who have shut the door on the possible realities of things beyond our current understanding.

The range of the inexplicable is huge and extends from fortune-telling to telepathy to crop circles to UAPs to ghosts to the existence of an afterlife to dowsing to healing to the location of our minds to after-death experiences and ley lines, to mention a few.  People have put forward theories about how some of these things work while others just accept their personal experience of one or more of these things without worrying about why they happened.

The boundaries between the explicable and the inexplicable are defined by the extent of our current understanding of things scientific.  Without repeating my worries about black matter / energy, think about psychotherapy.

A hundred years ago, people putting forward psychological solutions to human problems thought they were pretty cool but many of their ideas have since been developed and updated.  Remember that Sigmund Freud, who is remembered primarily for his obsession with sex, was preceded by a 19th century therapist who invented a device that gave ‘hysterical’ women orgasms and discovered this tended to relax them.  This seems hard to believe at a time when a visit to Ann Summers can now achieve similar results at minimum cost.

One of Freud’s more acceptable thoughts defined the three basic contributors to human activity as the ego, the superego and the id.  If one ignores these dated and often misunderstood terms, they can be used to parallel the development of humans from birth.  For their first couple of years, babies’ own comfort is their prime motivation but this develops into an awareness of their connections to family and friends and the interdependence of the people around them.  Most children then develop further and accept their connection with society at large and become fully-functioning humans, understanding the benefits of showing kindness to strangers.

How has this affected psychotherapy?  Fashions come and go but a study some years ago showed that success rates in curing depression hardly varied between talking therapies, medication and doing nothing.

In the last 150 years, we’ve discovered more about stuff that’s billions of miles away in space than about how the insides of our head work.

Take dowsing for example.  I’ve used two Bic biro tubes and two bent bits of coat hanger to find where the main drain ran under a neighbour’s garden.  I knew roughly where it ran so I knew where to look and, when the two wires swung inwards, then back out again as I walked on, we marked the spot.  The neighbour was naturally (?) very dubious about this so he had a go, slightly further over the garden and he jumped visibly when the wires also moved in as he walked forward.  We marked that spot, laid a rake handle between the two and that was the line of the drain, running at an angle across his garden, not parallel with the back of his house.

When he built an extension onto his house, he didn’t hit the drain and the digging showed that the line of the drain we’d marked was spot-on.

Detectorists use machines sensitive to electronic echoes to locate buried Roman coins and ring pulls.  Perhaps our brains could do the same if we let them?  What we do know is that nobody can explain how dowsing works.

Or ghosts.  A relative of mine once woke in the night in an old house and saw a ghost, a young woman in a long white shift comforting a baby by walking up and down at the foot of her bed.  “Oh,” thought Auntie Gertie, “poor thing”, and went back to sleep.

I’ve never seen a ghost but I nearly saw one once and, while I find it hard to believe in wronged lovers and dead dogs roaming the earth, I’m perfectly willing to believe that something in the multiverse allows them to appear to some people.

Sadly, I’m better at receiving telepathic messages than I am at sending them, so I can’t transmit messages saying I’m going to be late but I have received what seem to be telepathic messages.  Doubters explain it as a coincidence and even believers point out it might be due to precognition, looping back from future to the exact point in spacetime I experienced it.

We hear stories of clocks stopping at a time when somebody close to them died half a world away, and stories of children talking to invisible people before they’re told that such things don’t exist.

Some places also have atmospheres.  I’ve always felt a sense of great calm in Durham Cathedral and I once found myself feeling extremely uncomfortable in a 1930s Crittall-windowed semi-detached house in Hounslow that had, as far as I know, no history of murders or persistent indigestion and whose owners were charming.  I’ve had comparable feelings of calm in some woodlands and while watching waves break over rocks in Shetland.

It’s known that biofeedback can help people to consciously change some bodily functions.  To see if this worked for me, I once strapped on a gadget that told me my pulse-rate and lay down and, by monitoring my progress, slowed my heart from its usual 65 bpm to 39 bpm.  So why shouldn’t we believe in the power of healing using ‘magic’, whether it’s reiki, reflexology, meditation or prayer?                                 

I find it much harder to believe that any or all of these things might be a subjective response to yesterday’s crab sandwich than that they’re simply due to something – sometimes called paranormal – that our present level of ‘scientific’ understanding hasn’t yet discovered or explained.

Black moons and comets, rockets and aircraft, and an old journalist

4 January 2025

I think Donald Trump’s make-up artist is losing it.  We seem to be seeing more pictures of him with the demarcation line between the orange dye and the natural pasty grey colour of his face clearly visible round his eyes and chin. 

Did you all take advantage of the black moon on Monday night, when the stargazing would have been much more impressive than usual if it hadn’t been cloudy?  (As any fule kno, a black moon is the second new moon in a calendar month, which happens about once every 29 months.)  And if you missed the peak of the Quadrantid meteor shower last night, try again tonight if the sky is clear;  they’ll be streaking across our skies until 12 January at a peak rate of approximately 100 per hour or, on average, one every 36 seconds.

The shower’s radiant point is in the constellation Boötes but the flashes can appear anywhere in the sky.  The gently sloping graveyard behind our local church has a good dark sky and is a perfect spot to lie in comfort as you stare in exactly the wrong direction.

In 1997, I was staying at the head of Wasdale (which doesn’t even get TV or phone signals, let alone streetlights) under a clear sky, admiring Comet Hale-Bopp and took some stunning photographs.  Unfortunately, this was back in the days when we had to send our films off to Agfa to be developed – guess which film never came back.

One of my cousins has updated me on the new spaceport in Unst, Shetland.  It’s owned by Frank Strang who was an officer in the RAF, where he met his wife Debbie and worked as a PE teacher for 12 years before getting involved in various businesses, some of which were more successful than others, leaving him with a questionable reputation.

Rocket Factory Augsburg is a German company founded in 2018 with the aim of mass-producing high-performance, low-cost rockets to make space more accessible than ever before.  It was one of their rockets that exploded on the ground in August while its engines were being tested, due to “an anomaly”.  Nobody was hurt but you have to be really clever to think up an excuse like that for such a huge and expensive explosion.

The site itself doesn’t yet have piped water or mainline electricity and I treasure the thought that, when the rocket went up in flames, people were lowering buckets over the cliffs to collect seawater to dowse the fire.

The spaceport keeps itself apart from the island’s population and one of Strang’s other companies provides accommodation for RFA employees.  Locals are curious to know what Strang charges RFA staff for accommodation on an island where there’s nowhere else they could stay.

The RFA rockets are comparatively small and, after my recent reference to avian wingspans, it got me wondering which aeroplane has (or had) the longest wingspan.  The answer is that, of ‘real’ planes, the Airbus 380 800 has a wingspan of almost 80 metres.  The Ukrainian Antonov 225 Mriya, which used to piggyback Russian shuttles into the upper atmosphere on their way to the International Space Station, had a wingspan of 88m until the Russians destroyed it shortly after they invaded Ukraine in 2022.

However, the record is still held by the Spruce Goose (known to anoraks as the H-4 Hercules) which had a wingspan of 98m.  It had eight engines and was built by Howard Hughes during the Second World War with wings and body made of – you guessed it – wood.  It only flew once, for about a mile, on 2 November 1947, with Howard Hughes in the driving seat.  It was airborne for under a minute and flew for less than a mile, reaching a height of about 20m above the water;  it now lives in the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville in Oregon.

Actually, the record for the longest wingspan is held by the Scaled Composites Model 351 Stratolaunch with a wingspan of 117m but this doesn’t really count because it has a twin-fuselage (a catamaran in nautical terms) and is built solely to carry satellites into the upper atmosphere so they still have full fuel tanks when they get there.

Another curiosity of aviation history is the ‘flying wing’, an aeroplane that was all wing and no fuselage, leaving no room for people to fight over which overhead locker is theirs.  The lack of a body gave it aerodynamic advantages and the military advantage of being less visible to radar.  Northrop developed one that first flew in the late 1940s but a German, Hugo Junkers, had originally patented the idea in 1910.

In due course, these things developed into delta-winged aircraft, including the sadly-lamented Concorde (or the wholly unlamented Concorde if you lived on its flight path) and ‘stealth’ bombers that are still in use.  I thought Concorde was beautiful.  I flew on it once.  From Manchester to London.  It’s a long story. On another occasion, I watched it break the sound barrier but that’s a rather shorter story.

So let’s start the new year with something from one of my heroes, one whose reputation has remained untarnished in the 40 years since he died:  James Cameron (the journalist, not the film director).  He combined a gentle humour with a real anger at some of the world’s injustices and retained his slightly eccentric integrity to the end, writing and presenting beautifully crafted reports. 

In a 1984 BBC documentary, he said of Dundee (where he had worked on the local paper) “I knew little about politics in those days;  all I could grasp then – or, more accurately, assume – was that this sort of thing was bloody awful, that there should be well-off merchants at one end of town and an aching economic emptiness at the other.  It was obviously an unnatural state of affairs … and therefore to be rejected.” 

Interestingly, his write-up in Wikipedia is fairly basic but he would have smiled wryly to read the bit that says “Having worked for several Scottish newspapers and for the Daily Express in Fleet Street, he was rejected for military service in World War II.”  What better reason to be rejected for military service.

IgNobel contender, Stonehenge, Shetland’s big bang and English class boundaries

31 August 2024

Scientists have been researching the learning experiences to be gained from licking an ice lolly / popsicle and have called for this to be included in the national curriculum for primary schoolchildren because it introduces them to the concepts of heating and cooling on a personal level.  Surely this must be at least long-listed for an IgNobel prize this year.

Archaeologists have gotten excited recently by the discovery that the ‘altar stone’, now mostly covered by two of the fallen sarsen stones, originated in north east Scotland, Orkney or Shetland rather than the Welsh quarry where a lot of the other big stones came from.  Detailed analyses of the chemicals in the old red sandstone of the altar stone are consistent only with the northernmost sandstone in the UK.

While the Welsh rocks only had to travel some 200km from Wales, this stone came from about 750km away and raises the question of how it was transported.  An ‘easy’ suggestion is that it was carried much of the way by a glacier during one of the ice ages, except that it’s thought that the movement of ice sheets in the far north tended to ‘flow’ northwards, rather than south.  It’s therefore thought that it was probably moved south by a bunch of very dedicated (or stupid) people because it’s known that neolithic peoples did transport stone by sea, but very rarely so far and, even with tea breaks in Stonehaven and Skegness, it would have taken a long time.

It could presumably have been floated up a river to get comparatively close to the site of Stonehenge (even in medieval times, the River Cam was navigable as far as Cambridge) but there was a still some distance to drag the thing overland.

The question that fascinates me more is why anybody bothered to do this instead of using stones available closer to home and I have a wonderful vision of extra-terrestrials lifting it from an outcrop in Orkney and dumping it in the middle of Stonehenge, then giggling all the way home about the theories humans would produce some 3-5,000 years later.

There are also some clever (and funny) answers on the Quora website to a question about why it wasn’t built on the continent. 

In Shetland, during a test firing of nine rocket engines by the German company Rocket Factory Augsburg at the SaxaVord Spaceport in Unst on 19 August, at least one of them exploded.  The resulting fire was impressive enough to make the national news but nobody was injured and the launch pad was saved.  RFA said it was due to “an anomaly” and has said it will return to normal operations as soon as possible.  It added ““We develop iteratively with an emphasis on real testing”.

Why don’t these people speak English?  What all this corporate bullshit means is that they don’t know what happened but they’re going to carry on lighting the fuses again and again until they get it right.

To be fair, the accident did follow a successful test three months ago when they fired the engines for 8 whole seconds without mishap.

For those who are thinking of popping up to Unst to watch the next 8-second test, it’s worth remembering that it costs more to fly there from London, hire a car to drive the last 80 miles (over two RORO ferries) and book accommodation than it does to have a 4-day all-inclusive holiday in Turkey, or Spain or North Africa.

The recent references to Keir Starmer’s describing his background as “working class” started a friend wondering how accurate he was being, which then started me wondering what ‘class’ means nowadays. 

Back in the old days, when we still had mines and steam railways and manufacturing industries, I assumed references to ‘blue collar workers’ were to people who did dirty jobs and whose collars were more likely to show the dirt than if they’d worn white collars.  ‘White collar’ workers were therefore those who worked in offices which were cleaner so they could wear their shirts for more than one day.  This in turn was loosely linked to ‘class’:  ‘blue collar’ workers were working class and ‘white collar’ workers were middle class but such distinctions clearly applied only to the hoi polloi and not to the ‘aristocracy’ who often had no attributes except inherited money and didn’t have to work for a living.

The middle class then decided there should be an upper middle class and a lower middle class but it all seemed pretty arbitrary.  I once helped a market researcher friend who was looking for an AB person about my age to answer some questions for a poll and, when I asked, they said I’d automatically be downgraded to E when I retired.

Generally, the language people used and their accents would immediately disclose their class but as national broadcasts became less picky (it was rumoured that, after reading the news, Wilfred Pickles was disciplined by the BBC when he rhymed ‘Newcastle’ with ‘tassel’ instead of ‘parcel’), accents tended towards estuarine English as glottal stops and tortured vowel sounds tended to be played down.

In the mid-50s, Nancy Mitford took the mickey in an essay that differentiated between the vocabularies used by the English who spoke properly, who were U (‘Upper class’), and them as talked proper, who were non-U. 

Jilly Cooper then added to the fun by writing Class in the 1960s and, as computers made communications more anodyne, the distinctions dissolved even though somebody I knew, who was brought up in the Marches, moved away and still spent a long time trying to lose their ‘working class Erryf’d accent’ to acquire the speech and vocabulary of what they saw as ‘middle class’, thereby becoming ‘middle class’. 

Other distinctions arise from slang and the influence of foreign languages and my mother, who lived in Japan till she was 13, always used the word “spai” (if that’s how you’d transliterate it) for that sharp, dessicating feeling you get when biting into a sloe berry, a word I used for decades before realising it isn’t an English word at all.  Which probably just confirms my ‘E’ classification at the bottom of the class hierarchy.

Bad interviews, murder, crooks and the climate emergency

17 February 2024

Two bad interviews this week made the news.  The first one was Rishi Sunak’s Q&A session with members of the public on GBNews.  The introduction said that neither GBNews nor the prime minister knew what questions were coming but the presenter knew who was going to ask the next question so somebody somewhere had selected the questions.

I initially thought this was a brave thing for Sunak to do until I realised that he knew his frailties and had prepared answers that basically said “I obviously can’t talk about individuals but the government has achieved …”

Unfortunately, the camerawork was so bad, especially the camera that went round the floor in circles and showed Sunak’s back while he made his opening remarks, that I got very restless and went to do something useful when he said sending people to Rwanda would be “a deterrent”.  He’s trying to force through a law that would describe Rwanda as a safe place to send refugees so how can it be “a deterrent”? 

In Moscow, Tucker Carlson, a right-wing American journalist, interviewed Vladimir Putin.  Putin said afterwards he’d been surprised by the lack of “sharp questions” and wished Carlson had been more aggressive so he could have been aggressive himself.  Eh?  Putin can be tamed by gentle questions? 

In a later interview with Russian TV presenter, Pavel Zarubin asked him who’d be better for Russia, Joe Biden or Donald Trump.  Putin replied “Biden. He is a more experienced, predictable person, a politician of the old school [but] we will work with any US president who the American people have confidence in.”

The latest murder (presumably) authorised by Putin (presumably) is that of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny who was being held under a “special regime” in a prison camp inside the Arctic circle where winter temperatures can rise as high as -30^oC. 

Navalny consistently exposed and reported on fraud and government corruption and, in 2013, won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral election which was widely believed to have been rigged.  He went on to identify and report on a huge palace built on the shores of the Black Sea for Putin and, in 2020, fell into a coma after suspected Novichok poisoning by the Russian security service.  He was surprisingly allowed to go to Germany for treatment where he unexpectedly recovered.

However, Russia underestimated his bravery and his commitment to expose the corruption there and he returned in January 2021, knowing that he would be arrested and sentenced to a term in prison that he would probably not survive.

It’s also been revealed in the 2021 leak about a secret operation in 2016 that Putin had personally decided to support Trump’s election campaign because Trump was “mentally unstable” and such a leader would destabilise American society and weaken America’s negotiating powers.

Trump’s recent claim that he’d support Russia’s invasion of NATO countries if they didn’t contribute to the defence budget makes it look as if Putin’s assessment was right.  And yet Trump still seems to have the support of a frightening number of American voters who are happy to vote for someone who has already been found guilty in civil courts and is now being tried on umpteen criminal charges.

The most recent judgment found Trump, his eldest sons, and their associates guilty in the New York Financial fraud case and ordered them to pay more than $350m as well as banning him from running any New York business for three years (Eric and Donald Jr have only been banned for two years).  This is in addition to the $83m he had to pay to the writer E Jean Carroll for defaming her.

Judge Arthur Engoron wrote that, in the fraud case, the defendants’ “complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological”.  What we’re now waiting to see is whether Trump, who must now pay the $350m into the Court even if he appeals, actually has that much in liquid assets.

A study by the University of Michigan revealed this week that 15% of Americans don’t believe that the world’s climate is changing and glaciers and polar icecaps are melting.  What I find encouraging about this study is that it also implicitly says that 85% of Americans do believe the world is facing a climate emergency.

Other scientists have found that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (known to its friends as AMOC) has slowed by 15% since 1950 and is heading for a sudden shift.  The Gulf Stream, which keeps temperatures in the British Isles and western Europe temperate, is part of AMOC;  if / when the Gulf Stream fails, we will be reminded that southern England is at the same latitude as Newfoundland, where it is not unknown for the sea to freeze, Edinburgh is at the same latitude as the south of Alaska and Shetland is at the same latitude as the south of Greenland.

AMOC is a complex system of waters moving around the Atlantic ocean and carrying carbon and nutrients in the warmer surface waters northwards from the tropics.  When it gets to the Arctic Circle, it cools and sinks to the bottom of the sea and returns southwards.  However, as the world gets warmer, the Arctic ice sheets melt faster and reduce the salinity of the surrounding sea water which affects the sinking of the saltier warmer water so the whole system will just stop.

There seems little doubt amongst experts that this will happen if things don’t change although there are differences about whether this will happen in the next decade or the next century but computer modelling indicates that if it does happen, it will happen very suddenly.

The volcanic eruptions in Iceland have produced lava flows that inexorably consume roads and houses show just how puny and powerless humanity is so perhaps we should open our eyes and start taking climate change seriously.  We can’t stop tectonic plates moving but perhaps we can make small personal contributions by avoiding foods that make us fart.

Looking on the bright side

23 December 2023

The Conservative government has just made its second genuinely good decision in 13 years of power by announcing it’s going to introduce a new GCSE in British Sign Language to ease the lives of people who can only communicate by using it.  I once asked a signer at a conference how long it took her to learn to be that fluent;  when she said seven years, I gave up the idea of taking an evening class.

(In case you’ve forgotten the other good decision they made was to legalise same sex marriage.)

This week has also seen Michelle Mone getting a lot of stick after she admitted lying to the press and saying that she and her children wouldn’t benefit from the tens of millions stashed in a trust fund if she and Doug Barrowman were to divorce.  Then I saw part of a recording of her interview with Laura Kuenssberg and discovered she has the most wonderful Scottish accent, my favourite accent in the entire world.  She’s innocent I tell you.  I don’t care if she dolled herself up like a tuppeny tart for the interview or went down 28-nil to Kuenssberg.  Nobody with an accent like that could possibly be guilty of anything.

Well, that’s no worse than judging somebody’s guilt by their gender or the colour of their skin is it?

Also this week, the Civil Aviation Authority approved a licence for rockets to take off next year from the land of some of my foremothers and forefathers and Saxavord spaceport in the island of Unst has become the UK’s first licensed spaceport for vertical rocket launches, with the first rockets to take off next year. 

If you don’t know where Unst is, look it up – https://www.shetland.org/visit/plan/areas/unst – it’s as far north of London as Barcelona is south and is on about the same latitude as the southern tip of Greenland.  Of you’re interested in nature or Viking architecture (or space rockets), go there in June and get dive bombed by great and arctic skuas and watch the puffins hovering to see what’s in your sandwiches, and smell the sweet grass and see Edmondston’s Chickweed, marsh marigolds and carnivorous plants, and avoid being spat at by nesting fulmars.  Take warm, windproof clothes and walking boots to get the most out of your visit.

Quite recently, some 700 miles south of Unst, I had to drive down part of the M5 and proved what I’d hypothesised many years ago:  86.21% of the exits off the M5 between Birmingham and Cherbourg take you onto the A38.  Just when the M5 is settling down to the business of going somewhere, the A38 keeps creeping up on it. 

One advantage of using the A38 instead is that you can stop and collect roadkill for supper.  We have a friend who does this and says that, basically, the only rule is ‘fresh blood good, maggots bad’.  In a recent article on foraging for food, somebody who’d eaten fox said “I slow-cooked the fox overnight.  It smelt like wet dog. Tasted like it, too [and] the dogs turned their noses up, which is never a good sign.”  But he did say mouse is very tasty.  I would of course normally test these opinions before reporting them but I don’t eat meat …

Incidentally, did you know that everything about yew trees is poisonous except the red flesh round the stone – just be careful not to touch the stone while you’re nibbling off the covering.

We’re beginning to accept that overpaid chief executives are already genuinely doing the best they can in the job (if they’re not, why are they still CEOs?)  So why has their pay increased so astronomically when compared to the pay of people who actually do most of the work when they’re already doing the best they can?  And why are they so hostile when workers want their pay increased by much more modest percentages?

I was interested to see that 15 years ago, when the then chief executive of Shell, Jeroen van der Veer (who was very well paid), left Shell, he said “If I had been paid 50% more, I would not have done the job better.  If I had been paid 50% less, I would not have done it worse.”  So recognising the inequity of greed as a motivation and its disconnect from ability isn’t a new thing.

Next year, perhaps we can hope that executive bonuses and what is laughingly called ‘performance-related pay’ will be outlawed.

Another comforting thought, at least for those of us who worry about dementia, is that sufferers are generally not unhappy.  They accept that they have it but most seem unaware of what they’ve lost, or the burden – physical, emotional and financial – they put on their families.  I hope that, if it happens to me I will remain aware enough to take a big bunch of happy pills before I forget where they are.

Even more comfort came from America this week when the Colorado supreme court ruled that Donald Trump is ineligible to be re-elected under the constitution’s ‘insurrection clause’ (section 3 of the 14^th amendment).  No doubt the federal supreme court that Trump stuffed with Republicans will put the law above party membership … 

All over the UK, brave swimmers plunge into cold seawater every day of the year but the Portreath branch has recently complained to South West Water about sewage alerts on 26 consecutive days that stopped them squelching their way out into water that was deep enough to swim in.  In the news clip I saw, most of the swimmers were women and are part of Blue Tits Sea Swimmers group, founded and named in 2014 by Sian Richardson in Pembrokeshire – obviously somebody with a sense of humour.

And another joke I saw recently that made me smile:  retired couple, man sitting reading, woman looking out of the window.  Woman says “That couple over the road, every day when he goes to work, he kisses her goodbye.  Why don’t you ever do that?”  Man replies “Two reasons:  one, I’m retired and don’t go to work and, two, I don’t know her.”

Well, it made me smile, probably just because it’s silly, and the world would be so much better if there were more silliness.