LATEST MOAN FROM YOU AND ME - 2021

I know someone who has just had their 5th child arrive and oddly enough, I offered my services along with a couple of building bricks...

 

As an example, tree clearing in the Lake district started, in a small way, with the Romans 2,000 years ago. About 600 years later there was a larger tree clearing done by settlers and then around 1,000 years ago was the biggest tree clearing by the Norse (mainly arriving through political problems) and they settled comfortably in the area. Lots of place names up there (or down there if you live in Scotland ) end in 'Thwaite' which means 'clearing' in Norse.

 

The law of unintended consequences.

Cuts to services and a lack of forward planning (or attempts to properly mitigate) are also significant factors. Many roads are no longer cleaned/swept, gullies are weed ridden and full of silt, drains restricted or even blocked and where there is a known issue it is never addressed because there is never enough money.

There is a section of road near me that floods all the time - anything more than light rain, it floods. Has done for almost twenty years that I know of and probably did before that too. After being one of many to complain to the council about it, we learned that the drains there are not actually drains but just soakaways and they sit in this dip in the road that always floods; two things could be done - either get rid of the dip to stop water collecting by raising the road height for about 150 yards at most and connect the drains to the sewers of the office block that they are right next to. But no, no funding. So it floods time and again and erodes the road surface. That will be being attributed to climate change next.

 

Yes, not much of a length of time for anything to do with climate.

I remember the Thames freezing over in 1963 and people walking on it. In the 1920's/30's my father told me he used to regularly used to skate on the Thames.

 

A different sort of moan:-

I rarely get involved in discussions about gender (started off typing 'sex' but decided that was the wrong word ) because as far as I'm concerned what people think about themselves, or others, is a personal matter. There are times when I think that people get too uptight about the discussions on gender and I think a lot of them are silly or a waste of time.

This time I can't help remarking on it. I have been in email correspondence with somebody at the National Trust and they sign off with their name and then, immediately along side the name, they put She/Her in brackets. What's that all about?

I don't give a tinker's cuss (apologies to tinkers ) what the gender of the person is and think that how they are expressing it is silly and totally unnecessary. The only thing I like about it is that it gives me something to moan about.

 

Good afternoon yes and I can remember walking across the river Medway in 1962/3 but not in 1947

I was working on this ship in 1963 and it was the only time I could say I could walk on water

 

I usually sign mine "Some Old Bird"

 

A moan this time at labelling.

I bought some plant mince to try a Bolognese with it.

It says on it "Congratulations! You have just done your body, the planet and animals a good favour". Looking further on the packet it says that the plastic that it comes in is non-recyclable.

Further in to its publicity it says "By eating plant based for a month you save up to 3 animals". If I eat 8oz of meat per meal every day (which I don't) that would be 15lb in a month.

A beef cow produces about 500lb of edible meat so their calculation is a tad out . So it would take me eight years to eat three cows and not one month.

Of course, if I just ate chicken it would work out about right and if I just ate mice they are completely wrong.

Fabricated figures like those tend to make me not want to bother with them again.