Pastel Perfect

I was surprised to see that I hadn't already blogged this picture, because I am quite fond of it! I love the colours of the hydrangea and the contrast with the little marmalade hoverfly (which looks like it's balancing on one leg in that picture).

Whilst I don't know the name of this kind of hydrangea (I would guess it's hydrangea macrophylla?), it's apparently a lacecap as opposed to a mophead - meaning that it has large, showy but sterile flowers around the outer edge of a number of much smaller fertile ones -you can see the two types in the picture. Mophead hydrangeas are the ones you immediately think of when someone leaps out from behind a wall and shouts "hydrangea!" - i.e., the ones with big round fluffy-looking flowerheads. The colour of your hydrangeas will be affected by the pH of the soil, which is rather interesting.

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.