Nostr notes by The Garden Impressionists (Unofficial)

Unsettling An unusual post. This morning I was due to give the ...

2026-11-01T03:44:06Z

Unsettling

An unusual post.
This morning I was due to give the above short talk to a local group I’ve been a member of since its inception. Instead, I’m at home typing up this piece.
All was fine until 3 days ago when I discovered my talk was, in essence, being censored, not on the basis of the talk text, since they had no detailed idea of what I was going to say, but because of one image in particular, which was spied, like unexploded ordnance, benignly sitting amongst all the other PowerPoint slides. I was left with a decision – accept such censorship, make last-minute changes, and somehow pull off what was always going to be a tough ask in the time (whilst now seething). Or, though this wasn’t suggested in the email, I could decline to give the censored talk (had they even thought or hoped that this might be the result?)
I chose the latter option.
And what might this incendiary image be, you might reasonably ask. An image of the prophet? No.
Something obscene or pornographic? No.
The answer was this book cover.
Actually, a very clever and clear book cover image, I’d always thought, since not only does it include a question mark over an image of a melting world, but also clear text outlining what the author is going to be talking about. This image sat amongst a very few other images related to both our currently changing climate, past significant epochs of the world’s more extreme climatic phases, and one considering the huge problems with longer-term Met Office predictions.
I’d always thought that there was a great double entendre in this title – firstly, that the subject was (perhaps?) Unsettled – i.e. by no means all scientists agree. But also that once you’d read it (as, of course, I have from cover to cover) the reader might be left feeling a little unsettled, having had their previous worldview certainties intelligently challenged.
I now realise, however, that some people clearly feel there is perhaps a third sense of disquiet – that others might view the mere fact that anyone could write a book about this important subject as deeply unsettling. And thus, in today’s brave new world, to even show such an image in a public forum might be problematic, unsettling or provocative.
At this point, I should add that I’ve included the text of my talk, and some of the images at the end of my Meadow Musings webpage. I don’t want to include it here, since many, though not all, of my thoughts and images have already been included piecemeal in previous blog posts. For the same reason, I shan’t include all the many images which were included in the talk – they’d all been laboriously upsized by me for better projection quality for the talk, so they’d gobble up my data allowance, unless I spent yet more time downsizing them for this webpage.
As an addendum, I’m giving a little more context below to explain how I came to offer to do this talk, how the title was chosen, and how it was that the images came to be reviewed by others in advance of the talk – with hindsight, perhaps a risky idea for a speaker to agree to these days!
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Brief background to the talk:
A call had gone out at the previous spring meeting for contributions. Knowing that few offers ever materialise, I benignly suggested about 2 months ago that I could give a short talk about our moles and the impact of the drought on their numbers. This was considered by the group, and in response it was suggested I could widen the topic to what we had learned from the drought.
Initially I declined, knowing that would be a huge topic; I wasn’t really an expert, and anyway I’d struggle to put it together and prepare it in time. I was persuaded to give it a go, and on reflection thought I might be able to produce something interesting and informative, though I’d struggle to keep to a 15-minute brief, and in any event realised that it would have to be a personal insight – others would no doubt have learned/noticed other things. Hence my addition to the title of “thoughts and questions from a meadow steward/gardener.
Down to work… ideas, initial drafting, tweaking, word counting and speaking time checks, more re-editing, trawling my image database, image selection, image text addition, image re-sizing, final tweaking, practice read-throughs, PowerPoint creation, practice slide show, final actual talk-throughs with pointer and no text, collating and printing a few handouts for anyone keen to follow up on the links I rushed through. Phew! Clearly a huge amount of effort for a no-fee, volunteered contribution.
Of course most people don’t take so much time over a talk, but I’ve always tried to cram a lot in to prevent people nodding off. And the many images are also there to help me as visual prompts to remember (roughly) the text – I have no training as an actor, and attempting to ad-lib a limited-time, complex data-influenced presentation is a recipe for massive time overruns.
At this point, confident I was nearly ready, I liased and checked whether I needed to bring my laptop or just a USB with the PowerPoint on the day. It was suggested I send the PP file via WeTransfer for more seamless running and integration with other talks from a single laptop. Great – all done and sorted. The initial response was “beautiful pictures”. A few days later, I got a follow-up comment of concern that there were a lot of slides – would I get through them in time? I replied that my practice runs confirmed I could manage it in 17 minutes – if this were too long, then maybe cut off the introductory slides, but just let me know? Then the bombshell long email that the WeTransfer file had been forwarded to one or more other members to review, and someone had done a quick cut-and-paste of selected critics’ reviews of the Unsettled book, repeated in the email to me in red to ensure that I didn’t miss the points, and that the book clearly did not agree with the “scientific consensus”. Of course, the many scientific achievements or award recognitions for the author or his areas of research were not included in the email’s text. I was asked to consider removing all references to it and modify the talk at this late stage.
Cue considerable unsettling days for both myself and Fiona, that such a censorious approach should be adopted, from simply a review of images, with no attempt to establish what the textual context for those images was. And this for a meeting that was meant to be a forum for discussion, as well as informative presentations.
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I am also going to include a short post and poem I wrote almost exactly 2 years ago, shortly after I’d joined The Free Speech Union. Every week I receive their excellent newsletter, often with many examples of how ordinary people in Britain now come up against myriad attempts to suppress open, intelligent comment or debate. Click here for some very recent examples, many of which you’ll probably not have heard about elsewhere.
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(From almost exactly 2 years ago on November 4th 2024:
“The Last Man in Europe” was the alternative title George Orwell was considering for his last book, before finally settling on “1984”).
Earlier this week I received a letter with a strange small knobbly item lurking in the envelope. I tried to work out what it was by feeling it. I couldn’t see any obvious sender identification on the letter, and without telling Fiona, chose to open it outside.
It turned out to be a welcoming letter from the Free Speech Union, with a single clear page of their statement of values, and my membership number. The knobbly item was a faux gold lapel badge. I noticed some tiny text on it – in fact, the same logo and text is on their website, though I hadn’t donned reading glasses before to work out what it said:
‘Audi Alteram Partem’. For any as poor at Latin as I am, this summary of its meaning and significance is taken straight from Wikipedia:
“listen to the other side”, or “let the other side be heard as well”…
A very appropriate phrase for the FSU, I’d say. As well as this hard copy, I receive a weekly and monthly update of what they’ve been up to as an organisation recently. Including the interesting news today that their membership numbers have soared by 43% since the UK’s general election in July. (It’s now nearly 3 times as great as then!) So it seems I’m not alone in feeling a need to support their work.
The above Wikipage also has an interesting link to the familiar first word of this phrase – Audi, and why nearly everyone in the UK would be able to link this to something. Together with recent events, this got me musing, and this short post and poem is the result.
The Last Man in Europe (2024)
When we’re told what we ought to think
When we’re shown what we ought to see
When we’re fed what we ought to eat
Should we question if we’re really free?
When our words are corrupted and changed
When our trust in the law seems constrained
When our parliament’s questions are gagged
We’ve been hooked, and our lifeline’s been snagged
When the rules mean the rules for the rest
When free tickets and clothes clad the best
When the snake oil of populists burns
Are we woke, will we wake, will we learn
That history reminds us to strive
The dates might have changed, not the vibe
Will we sink, will we drown, will we swim,
Will we gain, will we lose, will we win?
When the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine
When the batteries won’t charge and the heat pumps won’t run
When ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ seems hollow and vain
Change era, switch tongue, chant ‘Audi Alteram Partem’ – in time.
Then resist all the grey, all the gloom, all the flags
All the woke ideology, sex madness wags
Dust off your copy and check out the dates
Orwellian prophet – our own fate awaits.

https://thegardenimpressionists.com/2026/10/31/unsettling/

#unsettling #metoffice #meadowmusings

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Society; A Rising; Pop goes the Weasel. Autumn’s first named ...

2026-10-27T03:25:00Z

Society; A Rising; Pop goes the Weasel.

Autumn’s first named storms arrived at the weekend.
Austen and Boelo swept across the UK in the space of two days. Here we lost our landline connection and had a few days of heavier rain, but otherwise the events fell into the category of fairly typical late October weather.
Despite the storms, the big underground wasp nest continues its impressive and incessant activity. I’d dug out “Endless Forms”, the recent(ish) book on wasp biology written by Seirian Sumner to confirm that at this time of the year, the colony will be about to collapse, with both virgin queens and male wasps being produced for the first time by the colony’s ageing queen. Her last act before dying, thus ensuring her line will continue into next year.
The new queens apparently mate multiple times with different males, away from the nest, as honey bees do, though the males don’t instantly die upon mating, as honey bee drones do. (From an evolutionary point of view, honey bees evolved from wasps).
It’s these mated queens which will then find a suitable spot to hibernate through winter, before, for those which survive, trying to start a new colony next year.
The other snippet I picked up was that wasps, like honey bees, are very aware of the visual landscape around their nest entrance, and can also detect blue and red. The suggestion was made that placing something red close to the nest entrance for a short while, and then moving it a short distance away, will confuse the wasps temporarily.
Always up for an experiment, I crept out at dawn with a coffee tin lid. Perhaps I didn’t leave it for long enough – after about 36 hours I moved it further from the nest entrance. However, I can report that our Welsh wasps carried on as normal, racing into their underground tunnel, unperturbed.
I reflected on their supreme levels of activity from the crack of dawn until the last daylight is ebbing away. And that, unlike honey bees, the all-female workers not only have a much shorter lifespan of around 16 days, but are also a little more generalist in their roles: so an individual wasp can potentially undertake nursery work inside the nest; or indeed mining or paper/cell building tasks as well as foraging for either nectar or protein. And some will perform more than one of these on the same day, according to the colony’s needs. What is known as a weak form of temporal polyethism, as is explained in this paper. (Temporal Polyethism and Worker Specialization in the Wasp, Vespula germanica, Christine R Hurd, Robert L Jeanne, Erik V Nordheim).
Even the hexagonal cell construction could be considered more demanding than the wax cells that honey bees construct: firstly they have to collect their raw material wood fibres, and then build the cells one at a time. They’re hexagonal, since this is the most efficient way of packing the most into a given space, and once one has been built, any new cells will only need 5, 4, or 3 new walls to be built when placed next to existing cells in the horizontal layers of a mature colony.
Honey bees could be considered to ‘cheat’, since their wax cells begin as cylindrical tubes, but as the cylinder walls are lengthened, the bees warm the wax, which then moulds into the hexagonal form due to surface tension forces.
Here’s an excellent summary of the merits of honey comb, and how it gets built by honeybees:
And for anyone who hasn’t seen it before, here’s my own short YouTube of how an overwintered queen wasp began to build her paper nest, above our bed a few years ago!
Once the underground colony has finally died, I hope I can excavate it, and some of the chippings – I’m intrigued to see if there are other, bigger stones, too heavy to remove, left in a pile of debris at the bottom.
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Society
“Long live the Queen!” Wasp-waist workers all cry,
Filled with hope as they blast out and into the sky
Or battle with chips down the scree-scattered slope.
Don’t they know she is doomed, that their own time is brief?
Neither mother nor daughters share playtime relief –
Early dawn until dusk, their dark portal is breached.
Ten thousands of trips go unnoticed, un-clocked.
Down there, underground, their harsh toil never stops.
Pulped-paper-formed hexagons soon will be filled,
While jaw-mining sisters scrape mud, sometimes spilled.
Summer’s drought now long-over, the rains have returned.
North wind chills the air, dull leaves dehisce and fall,
Bleak societal failure will soon end it all.
Yet you still struggle on, such respect you should earn:
Never paid, never thanked; life’s unfair – won’t you learn?
“Long live the Queen!” whispered faint, came the cries
As they blast down the adit from high in the sky.
But the queens had all flown, once the nectar stream waned.
The time-line is fixed. The pace though will change.
Few will survive, find their niche, build again,
Chip away, procreate. But most often, they’ll fail.
Vespine blue-print is clear: fear the sting in the tale.
13/10/2026
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The weekend before the storms, saw a brief settled spell of weather. Rising around 6.00 am the week before the clocks were put back, and with Fiona away for the weekend, I noticed the stars were stunning, so I wrapped up well in nightclothes and extra layers, and with a mug of tea, sat quietly on the swing seat and watched dawn’s colours rise.
It was so special that the following morning, which was very similar, save for a long bank of cloud to the east. I decided to repeat the exercise, but put my camera down after this initial photo, and just looked and listened.
It ended up being a very special hour.
And coincided with me very recently discovering the YouTube recording of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” concert from Barcelona in October 2002.
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A Rising
The energy long gone, wrapped well
For cold, dark air of that October dawn.
Beanie LED, dead-hour still-sitting, calm.
Still-sitting, soaking-slow; that seeping morn.
There was no light, yet countless stars lit up the sky
Dark line to East, marked cloud-front, sliding by.
No sun would glow, that die already cast.
No too-bright moon above, to steal the show.
A fireball shot – a star for me, was sent,
Burned South and low, was spent, sky rent.
There were no sounds, no acorns fell –
Slate-clattered down; no breeze to rip dead leaves.
Yet He had marked my presence, watched my moves,
And silent from behind, unheard, unseen
Swooped low and fast. Were talons stretched,
As if to grasp? The kill declined,
The thrill all mine, as silent overhead, wings wide,
His spectral silhouette swept into view
Banked, right, was gone. The stars leached, one by one, in new dawn light
Till Jupiter alone remained in deepening blue, still bright.
Spooked blackbird first broke cover, filled the void,
Cooped cockerel crowed, brief chorus riffed, then failed.
Full hour had drifted by. This nothing man returned to bed
To warm his bones, hear sweat-drenched songs, instead.
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The video which follows was the first song of that concert. Imagine him keeping up this intensity of performance for nearly another 3 hours. And doing it for a total of 120 shows in 82 cities over a span of 14 months.
This song was in fact added to the others he’d already completed, very late in the album’s genesis.
His song Nothing Man, although first penned in the early ’90s, was also reworked and made it onto the same album. Released and then toured by Springsteen and his band as the major work he produced in response to the attacks on the Twin Towers. Hard to think that happened 25 years ago this last September.
The last song of the concert (I believe), below, was also written for the same album. He was 53 at the time of this concert. Quite remarkable songwriting and performance. If these are unfamiliar to any readers, I hope that you are moved by them as I was.
And notice the shirt…it’s the same one he was wearing at the beginning!
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Standing inside our front door, looking out at the rain falling heavily as Storm Austen blew in, I had a sudden glimpse of a small, yet long, low, ginger-brown animal dash across the cobbles from North to South and regain some cover near the sheltering stone wall – I’d cut back most of the perennials last week, and top-dressed the border with lawnmower-collected chopped leaves and wood ash.
I was certain it was a stoat or weasel, which I can’t recall seeing up here before. I have vivid childhood memories of seeing their bodies strung up from a fence, along with crows, on the way into a wood at the foot of the Wrekin by the local pheasant-rearing gamekeeper. And of course I’ve occasionally seen one dash across a road at night, caught by the headlights.
For a brilliant guide to differentiating the two, smallest related members of the Mustelidae in the UK, watch this excellent YouTube by Yorkshire wildlife photographer Robert Fuller.
This convinced me that what I’d seen was a weasel, since, much to my surprise, it made a return trip and dash, pausing just long enough for me to get a reasonable brief view of its head and white chest.
Weasel tends to be used as a derogatory adjective and verb, which seems a little unfair for an animal that is a brilliant, fearless carnivore, as Fuller’s footage illustrates. Typically feeding on small rodents, though birds are occasionally eaten should voles and mice be in short supply. It needs to eat roughly 50 % of its own weight every 24 hours; is active during both day and night; and has a territory of roughly 20 acres, though that can massively increase should available food options decline.
In fact, our native weasel has the somewhat confusing scientific name of Mustella nivalis (mouse-hunting; snow), indicating that in colder climates it can gain an all-white winter coat.
My mind wandered to the nursery rhyme both Fiona and I could recall from our youth – or at least the first verse of it. (American readers will likely know different verses).
Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle.
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop! Goes the weasel.
What on earth has a weasel to do with this?
It turns out that there’s some dispute over what the lines refer to, but it first became popular as a dance tune in the 1850’s in London, before spreading further afield.
The tuppeny rice and (black-sic) treacle (to serve with a rice pudding) would have been cheap food for the urban working poor in those times.
The weasel is also the term used by hand spinners for a wooden device (an example is shown above) which allowed the precise measurement of a skein of spun thread. The wool was tied onto one section of the weasel, and for example, if it had been made with a 2-yard circumference, 40 revolutions would create a standard 80-yard-long skein. The weasel typically had a cam gear and a peg which ‘popped’ with an audible sound when the 40 turns had been wound on.
I wonder how people in decades to come will view the mouse with which I am controlling the computer I’m sitting at to write this. Should they find one in a junk shop, after electronic ‘mice’ have also been consigned to history’s scrap heap.
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I have no idea what spooked our sheep and drove them into the corner of our field – I’m sure something bigger than a weasel. And this was daytime, so it wouldn’t have been a badger, which last week caused a lot of damage overnight in our upper hay meadow for the first time in years – much later in mid-October than is usual.
The first snowdrops are up.
The season is turning once more.

https://thegardenimpressionists.com/2026/10/26/society-a-rising-pop-goes-the-weasel/

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