Cool Animal of the Month, 02/13: The Shouty Corvid of Twickenham

I haven't yet gotten a decent photo, but I'll update this when I do.  The Shouty Corvid of Twickenham is a bird - possibly a raven but I reckon it looks more like a carrion crow - who hangs around on King Street in Twickenham.  Its main pastime is perching off the end of bus stop roofs and shouting at passers-by.  I have no idea why the Corvid does this, but being such a character it's become very much a feature of the high street here.

Serious gardening next week.

Jam

So I caught a tutorial on jam making by Emma from the Butch Institute.  Gets home and made half a litre of raspberry and bramble jam, and some scones.  I haven't yet attempted to clot cream.

OM NOM NOM!

The joy of sales

Today I got a knitted fleece, a weatherproof fleece, and a fleece-lined goretex jacket all for £80.  I haz a warmz.  Slightly disconcerted that I now take a size 14 in outdoor jackets.  I don't mind, but it's weird.  I'm 9½ stone just now, at my heaviest I was 11 stone, yet at 11 stone I took a size 10 and at 9½ stone I take a 14.  How in the hell does that make sense?!

The Burchill Fiasco.

Read this,

and this,

and then this.

To those involved on the ground it's a game of Oppression Olympics, but to those running the Observer it's clickbait.  The controversy brings in readers, and the spike in traffic bumps up the Observer's advertising revenues.  That's it.  All the pain and the upset, the division, activists making enemies of those who should be friends, the abuse, the hounding, the forced-outing, the public harassment; it's all so the Guardian group can make a few extra quid.

Shifty bastards.

In defence of schools

Schools are too quick to close these days.  When I was a kid we trudged through a foot of snow...

But what's changed?

When I was a kid, the buses and trains were run differently than they are today.  Buses worked in the snow. Trains had a limit, but when that limit was reached the Men In Orange would be out on the line with shovels. Transport did what it said on the tin back then.  Today the trains shut down with no prior notice whatsoever once the snow gets past an inch.

Insurance was different too.  Snow cover is hard to afford these days.  Slipping on ice is now a suing matter, while back then it was one of those things. 

Staff who work with students have less autonomy today.  This is partly understandable; endless paedophile scandals and the general underfunded crapness of social services has led to overtightening of rules.  Where it gets to the point where a teacher cannot help a child put on sun cream, or hug a child who is distressed, I for one think it has gone too far.

Yesterday, the buses would run, kids could be gotten home safely.  If the worst came to the worst and a freak blizzard of biblical proportions snowed the town in at the last minute, the kids could be bedded down in the school hall and the cafeteria set to the bulk output of hot chocolate.  It never happened, but if it did then the teachers would get on with the job and be praised for it.

Today, the buses won't run, parents will need to leave work early and drive their kids home (if they can).  If the kids are kept in and our hypothetical blizzard happens, the teachers will be slammed for failing to foresee the unforeseeable, parents will become hysterical, the Sun will screech "but what if there'd been a paedo in there?!?!?!", and somebody will get sued into next Tuesday.

Headteachers today must - with no warning whatsoever - pre-empt the point at which the trains will shut down, the buses will stop running, and get the kids out with time enough to get them home.  Heads must judge if it will snow enough to shut the transport the night before, and decide if the two hours teaching they'd get done are as good as a wasted day.

You'd need a masters in geology and the wisdom of Solomon to balance all this and, inevitably, the balance will be gotten wrong.  It is natural therefore to err on the side of caution.  I don't envy them the task.

Bored now...

Snow is keeping me from doing anything in the garden with my offtime and I can't get near the Xbox alone for RPG-ing.  Cue me killing time on Minecraft, working out how to run a points system for a map-wide rail network using improvised XOR and XNOR gates.

In other news: Our Squeaky aced her GCSE Maths exam.  So proud :)

In Pictures: SNOW!

The garden

Snowy buddleia is snowy

A blade of Grazing Rye, sown as a cover crop between the rows of V. faba, pokes up from beneath the snow.  

The ramp

This is the inside of one of the bins, taken about half an hour after the binmen took the refuse.  Prior to them taking it, the bin had had a lid on it.  In the half hour since the closed bin was opened it managed to fill with snow to an inch deep at the base of the meniscus; and mark you that's a bloody deep meniscus, on the shallowest side it's 4 inches from base to height, and on the deepest side it's a foot.

So I went down to Radnor Gardens to see it in the snow:

This snowman was pursuing these ducks at a very sedate pace:

And downriver, Twickenham was shrouded in fog and snow.  It was hard enough to see that far in these mild conditions; if the wind picks up to a blizzard I would not want to be on the river, or on a bike, or doing anything whatsoever where a lack of concentration might kill me or someone else.  

Winter is in full swing!