There have, evidently, been a few of these in the past. Neither my personal phone nor my work one has ever received one though. Nor has my SO’s if it comes to it.

Edwards insisted that lessons had been learned and that in 2023 National Highways had carried out a full soil survey and a three-month tree analysis.

This revealed they had planted the wrong species in the wrong place, and provided valuable lessons about the most appropriate season in the year to plant a tree, he said.

As someone who has been involved in planting schemes, I can say that this is absolutely bog-standard basic stuff. There is no excuse for this at all. No-one employed as any kind of ecologist should have got this wrong. People should be sued for this at the very minimum.

Read, fiddle around on a ZX81, then a Cortex, read, cycle to and wander in a large local forest, read, sneak into and climb church towers, read, tabletop wargaming, read, sketching and painting. Did I mention reading?

I’ve read the books and thoroughly enjoyed them and am now thoroughly enjoying the show. The emphasis of the show is different, certainly, but in this case I am happy with that. After the first episode in which I was all ‘It’s not that way in the book…’ I am taking as it is.

My SO has not read the books and is also thoroughly enjoying it. It is probably her favourite show at the moment.

Yes. Why do you ask?

Yes. This is one of his Culture novels. I’ve been enjoying them so far.

The run up to a fortnight of holiday for me, so the days were simultaneously dragging and full of stuff that I was trying to get finished or progressed as much as possible.

However, now I am dozing in the sun with the requisite amounts of clotted cream and cider and a stack of books (Banks’ Use of Weapons at the moment).

Once the BH crowds have thinned, I will probably get out for some coastal hikes too.

A hornet has spent most of the week sizing up my shirt rail as a potential nest site. Persuasion hasn’t worked, so I have ordered a screen for the window.

I was only called in for one problem at work over the weekend, which was easily resolved,. Spent the rest of it sorting out the shed, pottering in the garden and reading.

In a week and two days I will be off on a regular holiday with friends for a fortnight. It always seems a long slog between Xmas and this one, so really looking forward to it.

From this strand of SF, Dennis E Taylor’s Bobiverse books are by far the most compelling. It has been a while since I found something that was as unputdownable. I don’t know that they are technically the ‘best’ in terms of literary merit or anything though. I’d say that Dan Simmons Hyperion probably wins on that front.

I’ve just started Iain M Banks’ Use of Weapons, it would be that. I’m catching up with some SF this year and am alternating the Culture novels with others at the moment.

I was working today because I had basically forgotten that it was a bank holiday. Anyway, no interruptions, so I got a lot done, AND I now have day of TOIL.

Tomorrow and Sunday will be gardening, sorting out the shed and stuff like that.

I will then probably stay under the duvet and read on Monday, unless the weather is good and I feel particularly enthusiastic, in which case there is a walk that I have been considering for most of the winter. That might be the day.

Current place: basically nothing. It’s an old house with thick joining walls. It’s great The only time we hear anything at all is when they poke the fire, since this is on the joining wall.

Previous place: we had a neighbour who clearly had some issues with noise on one side. We are naturally quiet people, with no kids or pets or anything, and we don’t have the TV on loud but she would start pounding on the wall when, for example, we were emptying the dish washer and putting stuff back in the cupboards at 9-10am, or a dozen other normal activities at normal times of the day. Meanwhile, we had someone on the other side who was working from home some of the time and we’d get him shouting down the phone most of the day at times (my wife got most of this, since she was at home most days) and watch loud sport stuff in the evenings.

The peak, though, was when Mr work-from-home was doing some renovation work in a bedroom. Either removing plaster or knocking a wall through or something involving hours of extremely loud hammering. Well, that came straight through to us and clearly Ms sensitive-to-noise could hear it as well, so that set her pounding on the wall, presumably thinking that it was us. There was a day when we were just sitting there listening to deafening hammering on one side and pounding on the other. At least my wife had some noise-cancelling headphones.

It was a nice place otherwise, but I’m very happy that we moved.

Butter and marmite or butter and honey. Preferably a couple of the former then a couple of the latter.

Overall pretty good, but inexplicably exhausting - but then, I’m getting older and everything is inexplicably exhausting half the time.

Meal out with friends, car washed and headlight fixed, went to see a Bach choral performance complete with theorbo and crumhorns - there’s posh. There is a haze of green on the branches now, and the blue-tits are definitely building in the nestbox.

Chumbawamba’s discography - or even just this one on repeat.

Sadly, translocation has a very low success rate. It lets the developers say that they’ve been good, but if you return to check 5 years down the line chances are the reception site will be in a very poor condition and the tranlocated population much reduced or gone altogether.

If we are on a position where Labour are saying that the tories protected wildlife too much, my hopes for wildlife are not high.

I’m in my 50s. This is not something that I have ever encountered in the street.

Perhaps, when walking through a park or similar, when I was in my teens or twenties, some kids might have kicked a ball in my direction a couple of times, with the hope/expectation that I would return it, but that it about as close as I have experienced.

Aliyev’s comments are short-sighted, delusional bollocks but… have you never had a candle as a gift?

By that age, I was into my third long-term job (> 5 years) and had had upwards of 16 short term ones - multiple part time ones at once, or some just for a few weeks or a couple of months here and there between the long-term ones etc.

48 doesn’t seem that unlikely - nor even an indicator that they will not be staying put for any length of time unless your job is a shitty one with a high turnover anyway.

Doctor who (2005) s01e07 - Kronkburgers on Satellite 5 in the opening scenes.