Claraisreading 🌿💙📚📚

Puffin Post! And yes, the kids' bits in the Sunday papers, the cartoons in Punch in the Dentist's waiting room, and the thing Neil said about how much stuff there was just lying around randomly to read.

Sub category: people who get the joke only because of years of listening to @backlisted.bsky.social and would otherwise be completely clueless.

(Also yes seriousness about hearing loss)

Northern Gannet (Morus bassanus) dying of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenze (HPAI). Once contracted, this disease invariably proved fatal for Gannets, and in 2022 ripped through Britain's breeding population, killing countless thousands of birds. Image © Jon Dunn

Northern Gannet (Morus bassanus) gathering marine waste to line its nest. This can have fatal consequences when birds entangle in plastic or nylon. Image © Jon Dunn

Gannets are fabulous. But they've had it tough lately. Marine pollution's a constant problem, and avian influenza hit them hard. The last thing they need is an annual hunt, even a small one in the name of tradition. Please consider signing to stop the hunt:

petitions.parliament.scot/petitions/PE...

yes, learned this at #WildflowerHour! Also, my local Cherry Plum is likely a seedling of a cultivated form, as the flowers and leaves are tinged with pink.

Golden yellow celendine flower amongst ivy leaves and heart shaped Celendine leaves on the woodland floor

Celendine finally in flower in the woods #wilflowerhour

SEPALS (writing in the dark)

Cherry Plum flower seen from the back - the sepals are those little bits behind the flower

Cherry Plum (with reflexed sapals!) #wildflowerhour

Box of seasonal greens picked today and picked up this afternoon. A great big frilly red lettuce, leeks, salad bags, Nero Kale & spinnach

Hannah Spencer walking into Westminster, sucking her teeth, tutting, and muttering "tell you what, you've had some cowboys in here."

Goodnight from Ashcourt Borough Council, where tonight’s meeting has been disrupted by angry calls to tackle the worsening phantom tram problem. Goodnight from the River Stannis, swollen with rain and a desire to break its banks in revenge for pesticide pollution. Goodnight from Hookland.

I'll post a picture when I pick the box up 🥬🥬

Saw this and ordered our weekly winter salad & veg box: will pick it up tomorrow. Support local small growers, folks!

There is a need for an immediate market garden support scheme, in time to stop hundreds of small farms and decades of horticultural knowledge disappearing just when it’s most needed. communitysupportedagriculture.org.uk/small-farms-...

Exactly – I've just enjoyed the John Clare piece, and I wouldn't have read it without your repost.

Black and white drawing in Charles Keeping’s distinctive patterned style, of a man riding a horse, with a boy sitting in front ot him. The Lord of Dean Comes Home

Text from Knight’s Fee by Rosemary Sutcliff: Next morning at low tide, so early that it was not yet full daylight, and the white mist lay across the marshes, Randal left the great Castle of Arundel that had been the only home he knew in all his first ten years, mounted before SirEverard on his tall roan stallion... ... it was not yet dusk, but the 'tween-light was blurring the outline of all things, when they came at last, two or maybe three miles down-river, to the ford of a stream brawling down from the high chalk, and saw through the smoke-soft screen of willows and alders the gleam of a firelit doorway reflected in the glossy darkness of a mill leat. "Yonder is the Manor Mill," Sir Everard said, as he steadied Valiant down to the ford and they splashed up on the farther side. "And now - does the wind smell different? We are on Dean land"; and a while later still, pointing, as the woods fell back, "See, up the valley yonder. There is Dean. That is your home, Randal." Looking where the finger pointed, Randal saw a straggle of deep-thatched huts and bothies strung along the track where it wound upwards towards the downs, the faint, irregular pattern of field strips striping the valley, and at the upper end of the straggle, set about with hawthorn and old fruit trees, a long low hall with its byres and barns around it. Beyond, a steepening coombe winding upward, and the whale-backed ridge of the downs against a sunset that was like the echo of a brighter sunset somewhere else. Soft blue wafts of evening woodsmoke lay across the village, and the sunset looked as though there were trails of smoke across it, too. And as he looked, a queer thing happened; for it was as though something in Randal much deeper and older than his ten years, said softly and with certainty, "Yes, this is home".

Charles Keeping’s distinctive children’s book illustrations -
here, in Rosemary Sutcliff’s Knight’s Fee, Randal leaves Arundel with his new master.
Keeping’s artwork is instantly recognisable;
Sutcliff’s landscape writing is deceptively simple and evocative:

Hope things improve 🌿

A screenshot of a website page saying Removed GRH6 Manage priority habitat species-rich grassland (endorsed) £646/ha Removed GRH11 Cattle grazing supplement (non-moorland) £59/ha Reason for including: Like the arable farmland wildlife package, most of these grassland actions have moderate to high uptake and deliver moderate to high value for money. Some (for example, GRH1: Manage rough grazing for birds) currently have low uptake but deliver high to very high value for money. They also support important grassland habitat for birds in the uplands. Overall, this package of farmland wildlife actions makes a strong contribution to our environmental targets. Reason for removing: GRH6 had moderate uptake. It was the only endorsed action in the SFI24 offer. It's being removed as part of the simplification of SFI26 as it required bespoke Natural England adviser endorsement. An equivalent of GRH6 is in the CS Higher Tier offer.

A species rich grassland

Next bit of madness

The removal of the species rich grassland offer

Oh dear lord where do I start?

Firstly species rich grasslands are rare

And that means there aren’t very many of them…
(Dear god, this is stupid)

Hence the ‘moderate uptake’

Because ‘RARE’!!! Ffs

This is a super resource for anyone trying to build their understanding of plant assemblages - particularly for ecologists carrying out habitat surveys. Heartily recommended!

Community ownership of community assets | Exeter Greens put people centre Secure and lasting outcomes with community control, that's what the Exeter Greens are proposing for the city through their budget amendments.

Community ownership of community assets | Exeter Greens put people centre

Secure and lasting outcomes with community control, that's what the Exeter Greens are proposing for the city through their budget amendments.

Thank you - perfect. I do not need any more internet today. We can all carry this with us through today’s sunshine and showers

Go steady!

You’re welcome! It was handy after the recent @backlisted.bsky.social on Iris Murdoch, especially for those of us who need to read more of her work.

👏🏻

@valarie.bsky.social you might like to read @lyzzybee.bsky.social on Murdoch, her enthusiasm is infectious!

That sounds… challenging, so well done for finding a way to approach it!

Oh, you brave people, I haven't tried either of them ;)

Reminded of this today…

251. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë — Backlisted For this year's Halloween episode, we take a windswept walk across the Yorkshire moors with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights — not as a tale of doomed romance, but as a novel steeped in gothic hor...

Also, we solved Wuthering Heights back in October so all this chat is completely unnecessary. @backlisted.bsky.social www.backlisted.fm/episodes/251...

That is perfect

Well done!