Windows

Another photograph from my visit to Castle Howard, which has a wonderful collection of sculpture (alongside many other wonderful things). The art on display is also fantastic, and I loved the murals in the Great Hall; of special interest is the story of the firey destruction of a mural by Pellegrini and its eventual re-creation from a single black-and-white photograph by a Canadian artist, Scott Medd.

Not only that, but the house comes fully equipped with three cafes (we tried two; I can recommend the cream teas), a faintly absurd number of shops, and (on the day that we visited) some very damp Morris Dancers.

Weeping Angels

Todays photo has a rather Dr Who feel to it... at least, if you're obsessive enough to look quite hard for a connection. It's of a statue at Castle Howard in York, on a rainy August day.

I recently went up to York to visit a good friend who lives in the city. Three of us went for a day trip to Castle Howard, a very beautiful stately home featured in both the film and TV versions of Brideshead Revisited (not an entirely happy connection for me; I studied the book for my A-Level coursework an alarmingly long time ago) although it has to be said that the creators of their website were rather premature in choosing the tagline "it's a beautiful day", unless their definition of a 'beautiful day' differs radically from my own and involves thunderstorms. Perhaps they come from a drought-stricken land.

We had a lovely time anyway, and the castle and grounds looked rather picturesque wreathed in mist. However, having brought a picnic we struggled slightly to find somewhere to eat it, as there didn't seem to be an indoor picnic area. We were on our way to the Temple of the Four Winds when the rain apparently realised that it hadn't been trying hard enough, and the heavens opened. Along with a few other tourists, we ran for the only nearby shelter - the Temple itself - completely ignoring the "Warning: don't climb on these steps, in case you fall over and try to sue us" signs.

So we decided to have our picnic there and then, around the back of the Temple, looking out over the damp and rolling scenery beyond. It felt incredibly secluded, although the mood of tranquility was broken somewhat by my friend's anxiety that we would be caught in our illicit luncheon by a member of staff and 'get in trouble'. I was forced to eat the last falafel standing up, as she whipped the picnic rug out from beneath me. But we didn't leave until I'd taken a few photos of the lovely statues which guard the Temple on all sides.

Sunshine After The Rain

I went on a trip to the local Botanical Gardens with my mother one day and we had the most peculiar weather. All in all it rained - heavily - on four separate occassions, but always at a relatively convenient moment; on our first trip to the tea rooms for lunch (delicious soup... tomato and chorizo, I believe, which I loved), then when we were standing right by the large greenhouses, then twice when we were back at the tea rooms, enjoying another couple of well-earned cups of tea. These gorgeous flowers (my mum told me their name and I promptly forgot. She would be very disappointed in me) grew all around the greenhouses, and when the sun suddenly emerged from behind the clouds, like an increasingly confident streaker at a public sports match, they looked fantastic, all damp and fresh from the rain.

Yellow Tutu

Just coming to the end of its summertime life.

Reach

It's a flower. It is pretty.
I have nothing more to add.

Through the Wire

When I was taking the photo, I remember feeling annoyed that I couldn't evade the ugly wire in the background, but I actually don't mind it in the finished product - it actually almost complements the shape of the veins in the flower's petals (I believe technically they're not veins but xylem. Definitely a good word to know if you want to win at Scrabble).

Crumpled Glory

I adored these flowers. They're absolutely huge, with great blousy petals; even just looking at the picture, they're such a wonderful texture that I just want to reach out and touch them.

Pink Wednesday

When I was at school, my group of friends had a tradition of naming days of the week after items of clothing, and there was a rule that you had to wear whatever item of clothing it happened to be. Sadly I have long since forgotten most of them, but Mondays were always Pretty Knicker Monday (attractive underwear obligatory, and we weren't above conducting spot checks to ensure compliance), the idea being that Mondays could be rather depressing and a nice pair of pants would only improve matters. Then there was Odd Sock Friday, on which you had to wear odd socks. That one was, admittedly, less logical.

Later, we extrapolated this general principle to drinks at the local pub - used to meet once a week, usually mid-week. If we went out for drinks on a Wednesday, it was Woo-Woo Wednesday and we shared a cocktail pitcher of Woo-Woo. If we met on a Thursday, it was Rose Thursday, and at least one bottle of rose wine would be purchased.

Happy days.

Transparent Rose

This photo shows how transparent individual petals can be, but all together they build up into a really rich, thick colour.

Field of Gold

This photo was taken on an incredibly hot and sunny day, of a whole host of orange flowers growing outside a tumbledown greenhouse. As previous blog pictures can testify, I take quite a lot of photographs of orange flowers - I guess they must particularly appeal to me. It's such a cheerful colour that you can look over your photographs on a cold day and feel that summery glow all over again.

Ah, Melanie Phillips

I intended to shut the hell up about the riots, but - oh god, the Daily Mail. It begins with the world's clunkiest ever opening sentence - "So now the chickens have well and truly come home terrifyingly to roost" - and it gets worse from there. I guess Melanie Phillips - unabashed by the fact that her words have inspired exactly the right-wing nuttiness she claims not to support - just couldn't choose between adverbs. The fact that her editor didn't excise that unnecessary "terrifyingly" bodes ill for the standard of the rest of the article, and indeed - it's dreadful stuff.

Predictably she blames the riots on moral collapse and left-wingers; feminists and left-wingers and single parents (and left-wingers). Equally predictably, she skates alarmingly close to blaming 'the gays', or rather, as she delicately puts it: "the sexual free-for-all of ‘lifestyle choice’". Nice. It's also nice to see that when talking about single-parent households, she's even gracious enough to note that "white as well as black" households sometimes don't have fathers involved in childrearing. So, obviously, no-one could accuse her of racism there.

She speaks of "elective lone parenting" as the right thing to do would be to force all couples who have had children together to live under the same roof. In the same breath that she laments the lazy, benefits-guzzling unemployed who believe that other people should pay their way, she is outraged by the "onslaught upon marriage" by "a tax system that penalises married couples with a wife who doesn’t work". She notes that "Britain was once an ordered society that was the envy of the world — the most civilised, the most gentle and law-abiding." If Britain ever was the envy of the world, which I doubt, the only reason for it that I can conceive would be that people in countries across the globe may have wished that they, too, could belong to the nation with the big stick, instead of to the nation being thumped by it.

Melanie's solution to these problems? "A return to the energetic transmission of Biblical morality".
The entire article makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

Water Off A Duck's Back

As predicted, this has basically turned into a blog of flower pictures. However, contrary to popular belief, I do in fact take photos of other things! And sometimes there aren't even any flowers in the background. Exhibit one: this photograph of a mallard duck. I'm quite a fan of ducks; they are both cute, and delicious with plum sauce. Some people refuse to eat them because they're so cute - but I've never understood that. To me, it always seemed a bit bizarre to say that it's okay to eat ugly animals, but the beautiful ones should live.

I've also frequently been surprised that many of my friends don't know that the brown mallard ducks are the females, and the more colourful ones are the males. One good friend of mine explained that she had always assumed they were two different species of ducks that just "liked hanging out together"...

London's Calling

I haven't written anything about the London riots this week, largely because the subject is being covered in such intense and obsessive detail elsewhere and frankly I have nothing new or interesting to add, although I followed the coverage closely and will jabber about it a bit anyway. It was pretty surreal to hear about and see pictures of rioting in places I actually know - my family come from Lewisham and Catford in south-east London. On Tuesday night there was even a police helicopter over my house as some 'youths' in my town attempted a 'riot' (I believe they kicked over a couple of bins). It was all over in five minutes bar the cleaning-up, though, a very poor attempt at civil disobedience - it didn't even make it onto The Guardian's map of riot-stricken areas (interesting when compared to this map of child poverty in the UK, especially if you zoom in on London).

Given my recent fun with e-petitions, I was intrigued to note that the new top e-petition on the government website calls for people convicted of rioting to lose their benefits. I haven't been able to have a look at it, sadly, because the e-petitions website is continually crashing (they really need to sort that out, it hasn't been able to cope with the traffic at all).

There's also rumblings from David Cameron of a social media crackdown - he's said the government will be looking at whether it would be possible to ban people from social networking sites if they are thought to be plotting criminal activity. The government really does have a bee in its bonnet about social media - despite the fact that most of the riots seem to have been organised more through the heavily encrypted BBM (rioters are getting smarter! It warms the cockles of my heart).

It's true that they've played their role in the riots, but the same services also played a key part in organising the clean-up efforts afterwards, carried out by a demographic not so dissimilar to that of the rioters themselves. I'm pretty sure riots occurred before the invention of Twitter, and if many commentators insist that consumerism and greed (or even gangsta rap) was the sole motivation of the rioters, then it should be remembered that there are worse reasons to go on the rampage. Yes, these social media networks were used by the rioters to their advantage, but so were the good weather and the long summertime days, and no-one's suggesting that we create permanent artificial rain clouds over the houses of anyone who looks like a troublemaker. Anyone following Twitter on the nights of the riots would see that most of the relevant tweets consisted of shocked commentary, people reporting on events where they were, discussion of the media coverage, and later, talk of a clean-up. The vast majority of tweets on there were in no way a call to public disorder, at odds with their (mis)representation in a lot of the media. Hopefully Cameron's comments are just empty posturing to satisfy a public that wants to know What He's Going To Do About It.

Blue Monday

I'm going to make a terrible confession here and admit that I tend to write these posts well in advance and schedule them to post automatically. I know, it's cheating! But it means I can keep new photos appearing regularly even while I'm away or just extra busy. Or extra lazy, but obviously that never happens.

I was originally going to accompany this cheery vision of floral extravagance with an equally cheery aside about the Billie Holiday song of the same name which allegedly inspired huge numbers of suicides and was banned by the BBC. However, to my chagrin, I discovered that, in fact, said song was called Gloomy Sunday, not Blue Monday at all. Damnit!

In fact, 'Blue Monday' is the last Monday in January, allegedly scientifically proven to be the most depressing day of the year. Allegedly this was alleged by Sky Travel and the cough-cough scientific proof may have more than a couple of holes in it. So if you're reading this in January, fret not. Just go book a holiday, you'll feel much better...

Stripes

I'm still annoyed at myself for having sliced off the edges of the petals in this picture. I was in a hurry, we were just about to leave the garden when I suddenly saw these flowers and they really struck me. The combination of very vibrant, unusual colours with a rather standard and unexciting shape is refreshing.

Red Tailed Bumblebee

Bombus lapidarius, the red-tailed bumblebee. Or at least, I looked through an identification guide to British bees, and that's what I came up with.

The word "bombus", the genus name for bumblebees, apparently comes from the Latin word for "booming". Which frankly I think is something of an exagerration. Bloody Romans.

Sunshine Flower

Despite yesterday's outpouring of a single interesting fact, I'm back to wallowing in my own ignorance with today's flower. The photo was taken on a recent visit to Cornwall, where we visited several gardens, all of them absolutely gorgeous. My favourite was Trebah Gardens, which not only boasts its own private beach, but also has a bamboo maze, a shady secret passage beneath the giant leaves of huge gunnera plants (also known as "Elephant's Rhubarb") and (my new favourite word), a stumpery. Yes, even their collection of tree stumps is awesome.

A Short History Of and Lengthy Musings On: Tea

I love tea. It is a well-known fact about me, and one attested to by the boxes and boxes of different types of tea which are set out on my bookshelves. Oh, and the four different tea-sets I own.

My love affair with tea started when I was young, visiting my family in Ireland. One particular farmhouse, deep in the Irish countryside, was for many years the only place in the world that I would drink it.  Although precise statistics vary by study, Ireland undoubtedly has some of the highest annual per capita tea consumption in the world, so perhaps it was inevitable that I would become a complete tea addict sooner or later. Yet it was not some particular innate quality of the tea in Ireland which meant that as a seven year old I was prepared to drink it only there. It was the fact that my parents were so busy catching up with the family gossip that no-one noticed or objected when I regularly spooned half the sugar bowl's contents into my teacup.

What I never imagined at the time was that, in fact, my illicit sugary tea was part of a great tradition; some people believe that the Industrial Revolution in England and even the development of the British Empire were, in fact, influenced by the British people's love of tea. Boiling water before drinking it could combat some of the worst diseases of urban nineteenth-century Britain - including cholera, typhoid and dysentry, and on top of this, the tannins in tea act as a natural antiseptic. It's also suggested that the caffeine in tea helped workers in the new factories to make it through gruelling days of hard labour, at a time when the working day was shifting away from farming based around the solar cycle and towards indoor jobs timed by clocks. The reason that the Industrial Revolution happened first in Britain rather than elsewhere could be as simple as a cup of tea.

It isn't all teacups and rainbows, though. Tea was introduced to Britain in 1664 by Catherine of Baganza, the Portuguese wife of Charles II (interestingly, she's also credited with bringing the fork to England, although that innovation was rather slower to catch on; apparently it was seen as an effeminate affectation. Real men eat with their hands). This article notes that the increased demand for sugar to be taken with tea lead to growth of the slave trade, and that the Opium Wars with China in the nineteenth century were caused in part by tea; the British exported huge quantities of tea from China but found it difficult to create any successful imports to the country, until they began to develop the opium trade.

So it's a source of continual sadness to me that there's something about the (very hard) water where I currently live which means that the tea just doesn't taste as good, and it's one of the reasons I can't see myself living here long-term. Yes. Tea is that important to me. And I'm not the only one to take tea seriously.

This weekend I went to visit a friend in York and, naturally, drank copious quantities of Yorkshire Tea. The first time I really encountered Yorkshire Tea was immediately after my grandmother's death. My mother, with her usual waste-not-want-not attitude, brought my grandmother's half-used box of teabags home and insisted that we drink them all before she'd buy any more of our usual PG Tips. My tea consumption plummeted. I hated the stuff. It's very strong compared to the tea which I'd been used to drinking since childhood. But after a couple of weeks I became acclimatised to the flavour and now - well, if I ever have to move to Yorkshire, there'll be some consolation for being so far from my family.

Since then I've grown to like all different kinds of tea - herbal teas (more correctly, herbal infusions), green teas, Japanese genmaicha tea (also known as popcorn tea), American-style iced tea. Probably the most exotic example is the curious culinary experience I had on a trip to Canada a couple of years ago when I tried bubble tea - and loved it, despite its slim resemblance to any tea I'd ever drunk before. Bubble tea has now arrived in the UK, and I imagine that for the majority of tea drinkers here, the culture shock will be ten times worse than the surprise I felt on my first cup of Yorkshire Tea.

In conclusion: tea is always good. Go on, have a cup. You know you want to.

Raspberry Ripple Flower, and a Fact of the Day

The pattern of these petals is stunning and reminds me of an interesting thing, which I hereby present to you as my Fact Of The Day: some flowers have markings on their petals which we can't see, because they reflect UV light that our eyes don't pick up. Certain pollinating insects can see into different spectral bands than humans, and the flowers' colouring reflects this; sometimes what appears to us as a fairy unexciting bloom looks quite different if you use a camera which is able to record ultra violet or infra red light. There's a really nice website here which has photos of different flowers shown as they normally appear to us, and coloured to show the UV patterns and fluorescence which we can't see. Some of my favourite examples include this picture, which I think is featured in Richard Dawkins' book The Greatest Show On Earth, this very jazzy example, and this rather dramatic bloom, which clearly shows the "bulls-eye" pattern that a lot of UV-patterned flowers exhibit.
So next time you see a rather plain and insipid bouquet, just remember: perhaps it's your eyes and not the flowers which are at fault...

Rave Poppy

This poppy is just gorgeous, and I actually worked out what it is! Papaver orientale picotee, an oriental poppy. The colours are bright in this photo, but it's nothing compared to how bright they are on a sunny May day in a garden near Bristol.

Eagle Eye

This very handsome chap is a Eurasian Eagle Owl, one of the largest kinds of owl in the world. I met him at a craft fair in the spring. He was not terribly impressed.

e-Petitions: Let the Choir Sing On

The Government has just launched its new e-petitions site. This is where ordinary hard-working citizens, who are probably also law-abiding taxpayers, can create and sign petitions online, making suggestions for amendments to current laws and regulations. If a petition collects 100,000 signatures it is eligible for debate in the House of Commons.

Predictably enough, the site was initially inundated with demands to bring back hanging, although the petitions are already diversifying rapidly. A quick glance through the site suggests that the other most popular topics are leaving the EU and withdrawing from the Human Rights Act, as well as issues around sharia law and keeping Formula One racing on the BBC.

The possibility of a debate on the return of capital punishment has produced quite a lot of coverage in the media, and Andrew Percy MP, along with several back-benchers, has called for a referendum on the subject. Yet at present, the petition to retain the ban on capital punishment has twice as many signatures as the one to overturn it, and is by far the most popular petition on the entire site - a fact which most media coverage has thus far managed to overlook.

It will be interesting to see the final level of support for the two opposing petitions on capital punishment. But equally interesting is the sheer number of duplicate petitions on the topic; at the time of writing there are 75, 30 of which have already been rejected; other popular issues show a similar multiplicity of essentially identical submissions. One has to question people's dedication to their particular cause if they would rather start their "own" petition with two supporters, than sign up to an existing petition created by someone else and actually increase the likelihood of the topic's actually making it to the 100,000 marker. It's a phenomenon that's always been apparent with Facebook groups, as anyone who's ever searched for RIP Amy Winehouse knows, but one might have imagined that on a site dedicated to petitions - where the whole point is garnering the highest possible number of signatories - collectivism would have prevailed. If anything, though, it's probably an encouraging sign; as long as those individuals who believe that the Human Rights Act should be revoked persist in making separate petitions which fail to gain even 1000 signatures, the debate will never even make it to Parliament.

These petitions are wonderful for what they tell us about people; the current triumph of the petition to retain the ban on Capital Punishment is flying in the face of what certain newspapers would have us believe about "public opinion".

The sheer range of topics covered is impressive; their number is rapidly snowballing. Some give specific suggestions for improvements, such as this call to end public bodies using 0845 and 0870 numbers; others are more general, as with this demand for "bigger prisons with more convicts inside them". And there's a lighter side to the e-petitions as well. One particularly tongue-in-cheek example proposes public hanging for those who propose public hanging - the author states that "the proposed punishments for some crimes are so horrific that the proper punishment for proposing this punishment is the death penalty. After all, with all that DNA science we now have, we can always prove all the time who has proposed a punishment for a crime, and then propose punishing them appropriately".

One petition rather abstractly demands the building of prisons in "one or more West African nations", to house paedophiles, foreign prisoners and contract killers. Quite what these West African nations have done to offend the petitioner is unclear. Another suggests that our judicial process be replaced by the use of polygraph lie detectors in courts. The author notes that "Jeremy Kyle does it, why can't we?"

Allowing people to put their opinions forward in this way is a fantastic example of democracy in action. Some of the more popular petitions may prove genuinely worthwhile, and even the more outlandish suggestions deserve the chance to appear on the site - if only so that their failure to gain support is made clear.

It's often suggested that shifty politicians wilfully ignore "the voice of the people". On the evidence of this website, the voice of the people is like a huge, discordant choir, in which no two members have the same songbook (and half of them are making it up as they go along). Politicians must work hard to discern any one tune from the cacophany, and the most popular petitions on this site may make that task a little easier. Nonetheless, if the website proves one thing, it's that you can't please all of the people any of the time.

Perhaps most tellingly of all, there's also a large number of e-petitions demanding an end to e-petitions. As Joseph Blurton states in his submission: "We, the people, are idiots. Please, for pity's sake, ignore us more often."

Hoverfly

I am literally running out of even vaguely interesting/relevant comments to make on these pictures. I may have to cease attempting to be relevant and instead just say whatever comes into my head. Or I could shut the hell up, I guess.

Pink Me Up

Once again both insect and flower goes unidentified. You'd think all these photographs would provide me with great motivation to learn about English wildlife and botany but alas, apparently not.

Harlequin Ladybird

I had a lovely time taking some nice pictures of this ladybird last summer, so I was sad to find out that it's an invasive species and as far as the UK Ladybird Survey is concerned, it should be squished on sight and not treated to a photoshoot. Apparently in America it's known as the multicoloured asian lady beetle, which just seems an unnecessarily long name.

But it's not the harlequin's fault that his species is ruthlessly wiping out native ladybirds. He looks after his family, he keeps his shell shiny (if you look close you can see my reflection in the carapace), and I wouldn't be able to bring myself to squish him, even if we do meet again.

Purple Dahlia

This one I can actually identify. It is a dahlia. Of some kind. For those desirous of further information, Wikipedia tells me that the "dahlia is a genus of bushy, tuberous, perennial plants native to Mexico, Central America, and Colombia."

Interestingly, "the Aztecs gathered and cultivated the dahlia for food and ceremonies, as well as decorative purposes, and the long woody stem of one variety was used for small pipes."

It is also the name of Bertie Wooster's favourite aunt. And I think we all know that's more important.

Om nom nom

Once again I must confess that, shamefully, I don't know the name of the insect or the flower. All I know is that it's pretty and excitingly orange. And it came from somewhere in Warwickshire.