Life in Millbrook village - Cornwall

Card from niece Janet - Artist Nina Hutton – Oyster catchers, always in pairs!

Our Brika coffee and Alan’s ‘Anzac snap’ made with black treacle yum!

Millbrook Pumping Station – still pretty despite its colours fading with time.  It was painted by primary school children 20 years ago.

At Foss Quay, a recently launched catamaran, one that Alan built in 1986 !   It was the first ‘Flica’ (a Richard Woods design) off the mould.

‘Sarona’ - Millbrook’s prettiest little timber sailing boat

International Peace Day – 20th September 2012

Brian Haw – Parliament Square Peace Campaigner against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since his death. the peace campaign at Parliament Square continues; now an incredible 4129 days since Brian Haw’s initial stand 2nd June 2001

248 days without shelter since tents were stolen 16th January 2012 by the London Metropolitan Police

Tucson Arizona  - USA

The highly vulnerable, unique & endearing marsupial - Australia

 

Ned Kelly bushranger and Australian folk hero

Sydney Nolan’s  ‘Ned Kelly’ 1946

The skeleton of Ned Kelly will finally be returned to his descendants 132 years after he was executed.
Last year, scientists identified Ned Kelly’s skeleton after it was found in a mass grave outside a now-closed prison.
The decision ends the family’s long quest to find and properly bury the remains of a man many Australians now consider a folk hero.

Ned Kelly is the only bushranger known to have left a detailed written justification of his actions, and his 'manifesto' is regarded by many as an early call for a republican Australia.  The 56-page document he tried to have published at Jerilderie -New South Wales, in February 1879 appears to be the final working of one that was first circulated at Euroa in December 1878.

It reflects the voice of a man who feels he has been deeply wronged. He admits to crimes but claims he was forced into them by a corrupt police force. He demands that squatters share their property with the poor.

Copies of the document were made by the police and by publican John Hanlon. John Hanlon's transcription of the Jerilderie letter was later purchased by the National Museum of Australia .

Cloud Atlas - from the Met Office archives

New Zealand plate stack: New Zealand's Southern Alps run along almost the entire length of the country's South Island.   In the bottom right of this picture you can see the peak of one of these 3,000m mountains. When the wind coming from the Pacific in the west hits them, it bounces off, causing clouds to become altocumulus lenticularis, a pile of plates shaped like the lens of an eye.

Sunset stratiformis:                                                                     Altocumulus stratiformis floating idly over central England. A stratiformis is simply a horizontal layer of cloud. They float at a medium height, which can be from around 2438m to 6096m

In this picture, windflow at Robinson Crusoe island ? off the coast of Chile ? hits the island's edge (bottom left), causing the clouds about the islands to spin off in clockwise vortices to create this incredible satellite shot

The ash cloud from the Icelandic volcanic eruption is captured on a satellite image as it approached the UK.

The drifting ash from the volcano Grimsvotn, in the top left of the picture, was taken by Nasa's Terra satellite, has been published by Dundee University's Satellite Receiving Station.

The white cloud sitting over north west Scotland is a low pressure system which has brought high winds and heavy rain to many areas of Britain.

The winds were coming from a north-westerly direction, blowing anti-clockwise round the low pressure system, drawing the ash plume from the volcano towards the northern half of Britain.

Giant Pandas – San Diego Zoo USA

A 20-year-old giant panda has given birth at San Diego Zoo, and set a record.
Officials at the zoo said it is the sixth cub born to Bai Yun, the most at a breeding facility outside of China. Zookeepers and researchers watched the birth via a closed circuit camera mounted inside the birthing den.  Zoo officials said Bai Yun (White Cloud) immediately scooped the cub into her arms and comforted the newborn.
Because of her advanced age, the pregnancy was considered high risk, but zookeepers said mother and baby are doing fine.

Saltaire village – West Yorkshire

David Hockney -The Love Potion – Tristan and Isolde 1987

David Hockney – West Yorkshire landscape-untitled

Display from Saltaire Museum -Joseph Walmsley’s design –1890’s

Teesdale walk Middlesbrough

Graffiti underneath bridge

Amazing Infinity footbridge across the River Tees

The Newport Bridge across the Tees - built in 1934

Giant dandelion clock – R iver Tees

Angela’s luscious, seriously chocolate torte - laced with orange oil and orange zest!

Alice in Wonderland - Celebrating 150 years – 4th July 2012

 
‘Speak roughly to your little boy
and beat him when he sneezes
he only does it to annoy
because he knows it teases.
I speak severely to my boy
I beat him when he sneezes
for he can thoroughly enjoy
the pepper when he pleases’

     It was Friday the fourth of July, 1852, 150 years ago this week, when Charles Dodgson, a mathematics don at Christ Church, Oxford, and his clergyman friend, Robinson Duckworth, took the three little daughters of the college dean boating on the river from Folly Bridge to Godstow village for a picnic. That fourth of July, observed W H Auden, was "a memorable a day in the history of literature ".
    Carroll described the "golden afternoon" of the boat trip in the verses that preface the book. He jokes about the bossy Prima, Secunda and Tertia, otherwise Lorina, 13, Alice, 10, and Edith, eight, who demanded a story. And so the tale of "the dream child moving through the land of wonders wild and new" came into being. He recalled later: "In a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy lore, I sent my heroine straight down a rabbit hole, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards."
   "We had tea on the bank," wrote Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, in his diary, "and did not reach Christ Church again till a quarter past eight... on which occasion I told the fairy tale of Alice's Adventures Under Ground, which I undertook to write out for Alice." And with the writing of the story, with the title later amended to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the nature of children's literature changed for ever.
     Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, has, as you might expect, umpteen references to the people the girls knew. The Dodo in the race was Dodgson himself; the Duck was Duckworth; the date of the Mad Hatter's tea party was the fourth of the month, the Mad Hatter may have been based on a local furniture dealer called Theophilus Carter, who wore a top hat and invented an "alarm clock bed" that woke the sleeper by tossing him on to the floor.

The Transporter Bridge & Olympic torch June 2012

This  landmark bridge which is celebrating its 100th birthday is to host the Olympic torch during its two-day journey through Teesside.
Middlesbrough's 225ft (69m) high Transporter Bridge - a symbol of the area's industrial heritage - will host the flame on 18 June, Locog has said.
At around 06:30 BST, the torch will travel across the bridge, through Middlesbrough and then head to Redcar.
After a trip along the Esplanade the flame will be carried to Marske.
Throughout the morning crowds will welcome it on its journey through Saltburn, Brotton, Loftus, Hinderwell, and finally on to Whitby.
Thousands of torchbearers have been recruited for the flame's 70-day journey across the UK before the opening ceremony in London.

Alan Turing and Life’s Enigma at The Manchester Museum until 18th November

Alan Turing – 1951 - National Portrait Gallery

June 23, 2012, is the Centenary of Alan Turing’s birth in London. During his relatively brief life, Turing made a unique impact on the history of computing, computer science, artificial intelligence, developmental biology, and the mathematical theory of computability.
2012 will be a celebration of Turing’s life and scientific impact, with a number of major events taking place throughout the year. Most of these will be linked to places with special significance in Turing’s life, such as Cambridge, Manchester and Bletchley Park.


Alan Turing may be most famous for cracking the Nazi's Enigma code during the Second World War but in this centenary year of his birth, an exhibition at Manchester Museum has chosen to explore his lesser-known, final work.
In the early 1950s Turing started an exploration into morphogenesis, the study of how living things develop their shape and structure from simple balls of cells.

World Refugee Day – 20th June 2012

“Refugees are ordinary people, too, except that through no fault of their own, they find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. As such, they are often required to dig deep into their own inner sources of strength…”
“It takes courage to be a refugee. Courage not to give up hope and to make the most of the hand that has been dealt. Courage to start a new life against daunting odds, eventually to become contributing and enriching members of society once more.”


Comedian Mark Thomas and Tendai, a refugee from Zimbabwe, taking the time to find out about each other's lives Photograph: Jenny Matthews/Refugee Action

More Springwatch! - UK

Photo by rdspalm
Juvenile Wren
Tory Island, County Donegal


Kingfisher

Climate Change

First place ‘Coat Star', by Mikhail Zlatkovsky, Russia


Second place: 'Butterflies', by Constantin Ciosu, Romania


'Crushed', by Ilya Katz, Israel

Our NHS is not safe in this Government’s hands

Serco's headquarters in Truro, Cornwall. Photograph: Jim Wileman

Staff and patients of the Cornwall out-of-hours GP service have raised fresh concerns about the level of care being provided by the privatised contractor Serco. They allege that only one GP was on duty from midnight to 8am for the whole county the night of 29 May.
They have also revealed that a switch to a new automated system to deal with patients' calls, in which call handlers following a computer-generated script replace medically trained nurses, led to queues of 40-plus waiting three hours and more for advice over the weekend of 26-27 May.

When Serco was awarded the £6.4m a year contract for out-of-hours GP services last October, one condition was that it introduce a new automated telephone response system that replaces trained nurses with non-medical call handlers to assess initial calls.

This NHS Pathways system has been promoted by the Department of Health as a more efficient and cost-effective way to dealing  with patients contacting out of hours and emergency services.
The Cornwall NHS service was previously run, not for profit, for £7.5m a year by a co-operative of local GPs and trained nurses to assess initial calls.

Springwatch! UK

Photo by Ernie Janes  (rspb-images.com)

Tawny Owl (Strix aluco), two young birds in a field of bluebells.

The short-haired Bumblebee !

Photo by James K. Lindsey

A bumblebee which vanished from the English countryside almost a quarter of a century ago has been reintroduced.

Around 100 short-haired bumblebees (Bombus subterraneus) were brought across from Sweden to repopulate areas where it previously thrived in the UK, and around 50 of the healthiest were released at the RSPB's Dungeness reserve in Kent. 
The conservation project to bring back the bee has involved the creation of flower-rich meadows and field margins in the landscape, which have boosted populations of other threatened bumblebees.

Although it vanished from this country, small populations have clung on in the South Island of New Zealand after being transported there on the first refrigerated lamb boats in the late 19th century to pollinate crops of red clover.

Native Bluebells in the UK

Artist: Christina Hart-Davies
Native bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta)  have narrow leaves, usually about 10mm or 15mm wide,

• have deep blue (sometimes white, rarely pink), narrow, tube-like flowers, with the very tips curled right back. 
• have flowers mostly on one side of the stem only, and distinctly drooping, or nodding, at the top
• have a distinct, sweetish scent
• Inside the flowers, the anthers with the pollen are usually cream.

Britain is home to up to half the worlds total population and so we have to protect this charismatic plant.

De La Warr Pavillion – Bexhill East Sussex 20-05-12

Art on the pebble beach



Artist Cerith Wyn Evans – Light/heat filament columns
De La Warr  Gallery 2

Nature’s World – Middlesbrough 16-05-12

Sheila’s Bramley Apple tree

Tenacity of nature – sculpture by Brian Russell

Apple blossoms on dwarf stock

Cowslips still beautiful – I say, though out of focus!

Moorhen eggs!

Quince blooms, magnificent tree

Plant absorption of CO 2

After Henri Rousseau

Late primroses




Hawthorn in bloom now from Teesside to East Sussex!