Thomas Halliday

The old poem says about the land around Moffat:

"Frae Annan-fit tae Eric-stane
Man and horse lang syne hae gane
Neath greenwood gay"

For so long, the greenwood has been held back by sheep, but it is returning quickly thanks to exclusion and rewilding. Relatively low cost and effort, high impact.

What with this and the Animals of Farthing Wood, 1990s kids TV was so so much more subversive than anything you find today, and that was great.

An 18th-century coded (but actually far future) leader on a throne with a very very tall periwig, a fat body, tiny short legs and a teddy bear. He is laughing with his mouth wide open. An advisor in a long green robe with a long grey beard stands nearby.

I just watched the first episode, and this is a fun line in 2026...

Oscar: Alright, I'll bring you up to date. The bad guy is the leader of the world - Thaddeus Vent - and he's after me!

[Cut to Thaddeus Vent on a throne, looking at a screen]

Vent: Use ... the *image generator* [evil laugh]

A fleeing cartoon blue grand piano with eyes under fire by laser beams in the dark city streets.

It's a BBC show from 1995 called Oscar's Orchestra, starring Dudley Moore.

Oscar is a grand piano that leads a group of musical instruments against an evil dictator who has banned music. He's on the run, and his mere existence is illegal, but he dedicates his life to saving imprisoned instruments.

A blue cartoon grand piano with eyes and with the keys as teeth, in which are sitting a worried looking tuba, a triangle with a baseball cap, and a blonde girl with a bandana. It's a still from Oscar's Orchestra.

I have a clear, old, memory of a TV show with a blue piano and a magical triangle that could become a portal, but until yesterday could never locate it.

Turns out it was about an anti-fascist underground revolutionary group, and I watched it aged 5 or 6.

Allowing our labour to enrich the modern tech aristocrats without compensation? Keir Hardie's spinning could be a new source of renewable energy.

Oh wow! That I didn't expect! Well, I feel honoured to be considered.

If it were me reading to my son's class (year 5) I'd pick something I loved at that age that they probably hadn't read - maybe the start of The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder or The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.

The exact book probably matters less than your enjoyment of reading it!

What a result!! Huge congratulations to the amazing Hannah Spencer - everyone in Gorton and Denton has just made history. This result shows @greenparty.org.uk can win anywhere, that the politics of hope can win over the politics of hate & there is no longer any such thing as a Labour safe seat 💚

Ellie Chowns did in North Herefordshire, a seat which had 63% Conservative vote in the previous election. The last non-Tory to win there was a Liberal in 1906.

Adrian Ramsey in Waveney Valley too, with an admittedly notional previous result of 62% Conservative.

The stack of books shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards. These are: False Calm, Small Earthquakes, A Training School for Elephants, Moonlight Express, Is A River Alive?, Somebody is Walking on Your Grave, Cautery, Tamarin, I Gave You Eyes And You Looked Towards Darkness, A Splintering, The Two Roberts, Theft, The Girl Who Raced The World, Epic Cities, The Lost Book of Undersea Adventure, The Atlas of Languages, Race to the South Pole, and right at the bottom, the tallest book, Otherlands.

Exciting news - Otherlands Illustrated has been shortlisted for an Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award in the Children's category.

Good to see that time travel counts, and looking forward to going into @stanfordstravel.bsky.social to find out how we've done!

www.stanfords.co.uk/edward-stanf...

North pole winter sea ice is now over a metre thinner than when I was born.
There's only c. 1.5 metres left.
#ClimateCrisis

A lot of this reminds me of cù-sìth, the local dog of the underworld where I grew up in Rannoch. It supposedly guarded the entrance to the fairy realms on Schiehallion, and if you heard it bark three times you would die of fear.

Said to be massive and shaggy, but it was supposedly a deep green.

The billion-dollar case for sustaining palaeontology’s digital databases - Nature Ecology & Evolution The authors survey community palaeontological databases, documenting their contributions to science as well as their vulnerabilities, and provide recommendations for the future of open science databas...

🚨 Hot off the press: Our look into of the palaeontological database landscape and its sustainability into the future.

Palaeo databases are invaluable and continue to transform our research field - but they are vulnerable... (1/6) 🧪 ⛏️

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The palaeontology cluster sits between historians and archaeologists, children's authors, open science advocates, and biologists, which makes sense.

But zoom in, and our *nearest* neighbours are "Queer Taylor Swift fans".

Which also frankly makes a lot of sense.

I was waiting for a palaeobotanist like you to weigh in on this, because my suspicion dials were up to 11. Thanks for using an analogy I can grasp!

It's me! I'm wearing my blue top and white trousers that is the Scotland croquet kit, wearing a gold medal and holding a silver salver, standing on a lawn.

Not since a fairly low quality tournament in 1900. There aren't enough countries that play to make it eligible right now - only about 30. But there's a good international scene that's often live streamed. And Scotland are not terrible. We won Tier 3 of the world team championships last year...

I played in my early teens until I was doing too much music to have that many hobbies. If I still lived in Scotland I'd probably have gone back to it rather than finding croquet.

Long history, though. My great great uncle James Brown was an early Scotland international in matches in St Moritz.

We've got a mystery rodent visiting our attic and making lots of noise, and the best bit about this is that the pest control is putting in a camera trap to figure out if it's a rat or a squirrel, and I'll get a notification on my phone!

Looking forward to some nighttime footage of the sneaky beast.

Which is all to say that in this case, the whisper network not only didn't manage to effect material change, but it didn't even do the bare minimum of warning people in advance. We also need institutions to have a backbone when it comes to employees who bully or harass in any way. [4/n]

And then, of course, about a year later, that person was among the concerted effort in the lab group successfully accusing Longrich of bullying, leading to the funding withdrawal from Leverhulme and his university preventing him from mentoring students, though not losing him his job or salary. [3/n]

The person that did accept the job got in touch with me via their supervisor to ask why I'd turned it down, and I couldn't say anything other than bad vibes, especially with accommodating new parenthood. I knew no more than that.

But those senior people clearly knew stories they didn't share. [2/n]

It's more towards the bullying side than other kinds of abuse, but I remember that when I turned down a postdoc job with Nick Longrich because something felt off at the interview, several senior people only said to me *afterwards* "I hear you dodged a bullet" and similar phrases. [1/n]

(1) Long 🧵 Time.
Today we learned that paleontologist Jack Horner (the same guy who helped give us "Jurassic Park") is in the Epstein Files. As a paleontologist, I feel compelled to say something because this touches my field and I want to make my stance clear on this...

A cluster of white snowdrops in bloom amongst a green flowerbed.

Imbolc. The snowdrops return to the garden. With a dark and rainy day, folklore says that the Cailleach can't go out to collect firewood, and winter comes to an end.

Jack Horner also apparently went fossil hunting in North Dakota with Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Robert F Kennedy Jr some time before the ranch visits.

Today, on the walk to school, we saw a tiny goldcrest confidently bouncing about in a bare tree. Never having seen one before, the boys were utterly engrossed. We ended up very nearly being late, but the time to stop and admire it until it flew away was so worth it.

Extract of Robert Burns' "When Princes and Prelates". The original text is "By sea and by shore! the Emperor swore, In Paris he'd kick up a row; But Paris saw ready just leugh at the laddie And bad him gae tak a mowe. Auld Kate laid her claws on poor Stanislaus, And Poland has bent like a bow: May the deil in her arse ram a huge prick of brass! And damn her in hell with a mowe" The Emperor here is the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II who became involved in the French Revolutionary wars in an attempt to annex part of France. For those who don't understand Scots vocabulary, "Gae tak a mowe" means "Go fuck yourself". Kate is Catherine II of Russia, who had just partitioned the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, destroying the countries until they became independent in 1918.

On this day in 1793, the Russian Empire under Catherine II continued its annexation of Poland-Lithuania in a series of partitions; they wouldn't be independent until 1918.

As it's also Burns Night in two days, here's what the bard thought of those trying to seize land and install new governments...

BIG news in Scottish palaeobiology, with evidence from Aberdeenshire's Rhynie Chert that Prototaxites has weird anatomical features that make it look like it's not actually a fungus but some previously unknown, entirely extinct *other* type of eukaryote.

So so cool.

A four-panel comic titled "how to get into nature". In panel 1, a person kneels in the woods, looking down at a red-backed salamander, and the text says "notice a living thing." In panel 2, the text says "notice some other things that live near it," and there's a starflower, springtail, ant, little wood satyr butterfly, and salamander on the leaf litter. In panel 3, covered in creatures, plants, and a colorful starburst, the text says "Notice the connections between them, discover the wider ecosystem, learn about its histories, and find yourself following links from bedrock to stratosphere, between biotic and abiotic, at scales both microbial and massive, until you’re hopelessly overwhelmed by the wonder of it all." In panel 4, the text says "Fall into a daze and let moss engulf you." The person from the first panel is still kneeling in the woods, looking happy as moss slowly engulfs them, and they're saying "This is for the best."

How to get into nature.