Another day, another reading

Posted on July 24, 2026 by james

First one (morning) is a little lower than usual here, but the others (both early afternoon) are pretty much where I’d expect them to be.

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Who is being given the hairy eyeball?

Posted on July 24, 2026 by james

BBC News story.

Honestly I don’t know if the average Japanese is more or less hairy than those of us in western Europe, but really? If the complainers can’t cope with this, where does it stop? Hair on arms? Fingers? In the ears? Eyebrow horns?

If you really can’t stand seeing someone’s hairy legs, just don’t look. It’s probably sexual harrassment anyhow if you’re spending too long looking at them.

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You’re a whatnow?

Posted on July 24, 2026 by james

From BBC News

an alien language specialist was hired to help her translate it

Alien language specialist? That’s a thing? Really? I guess at least we’ll know who to go to when we meet aliens for the first time.

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We all know that it hasn’t rained in England for decades

Posted on July 24, 2026 by james

This article, for example.

I’m slightly bemused by this paragraph

As of Monday, East Anglia, the West Midlands, Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire and London, Wessex, Thames, Solent and the South Downs, are in “prolonged dry weather”, the stage before drought.

Where exactly is “Wessex”? It seems to depend on who you ask. I assume the author doesn’t mean the area covered by Wessex Water as all the others don’t (to the best of my knowledge).

The second photo in the article also strikes me as slightly odd. What exactly is being watered there? I can’t see what the benefit of watering dry stubble would be, and soaking the bales of straw is just likely to cause them to rot.

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Eats, shoots and leaves

Posted on July 23, 2026 by james

An oddity this one, noticed whilst I was watering the polytunnel the other evening. Here’s a leaf from one of my tomato plants that’s sprouting a new shoot from the main stem of the leaf.

Not wishing to complicate life, I’ve snipped it off. I’ll have to keep an eye out for the same thing happening on my other plants too.

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Get orf moi larrrrnd!

Posted on July 23, 2026 by james

Clearly forage is getting tough to find for the creatures of twilight given the dry weather. Fortunately this one is just eating weeds, though the roe deer have done a fair bit of damage in my veggie plot this year so I’m not desperately keen to see them getting this close.

Deer aren’t the only ones I’ve seen about in the middle of the day either. I’ve seen a few rabbits risking exposure during broad daylight, presumably for the same reason as the deer.

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Who doesn’t like a bit of coleslaw?

Posted on July 23, 2026 by james

Though I do prefer it when made with mayonnaise rather than greek yoghurt, but my daughter doesn’t like mayonnaise so yoghurt it is. Cabbage from the veggie plot, honey from my bees. Sadly the onions and carrots aren’t quite ready yet.

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They didn’t kill Kenny!

Posted on July 23, 2026 by james

Sad to hear about Kevin Keegan’s death. He was possibly the first “celebrity” sportsman that I was aware of, perhaps alongside James Hunt and Mark Spitz.

When searching online to remind myself of things lost in the depths of my memory, I came across this little oddity.

From his Wikipedia page:

But from the search engine results:

I have no idea where the difference might have arisen. I wonder if someone had been diddling with the Wikipedia page because of the announcement of his death and that’s what the search engine picked up?

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Another unfortunate choice of words

Posted on July 23, 2026 by james

To be fair, I’m not surprised that she didn’t want a “big job”. Not given this heat, at least.

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I think my neighbour is “retiring”

Posted on July 23, 2026 by james

Or giving up farming, as it were. This is one of his fields. In almost twenty-five years he’s never left it go like this. Other fields are the same. He keeps/kept cattle, and whilst I’m sure I can still hear one occasionally, I don’t see any others about. All his fields appear to be empty.

I’m fairly sure there’s also some ragwort in the middle of the photo there. In the past he’s had a fit about that sort of thing, claiming it’s a “notifiable weed” (wrong, there’s no such thing and never has been).

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