A large white waterfowl with orange feet stands in front of a door. On the door is a cardboard sign secured with tape that reads, "DO NOT LET THE DUCK IN." Adding insult to injury, I think the duck might be a goose.
Whatever you do,
I wrote about Guy de Maupassant in Brittany for the @financialtimes.com. They took some gorgeous photos - especially lovely online, if you’re a subscriber…
And I also took some of my own.
Despite it all, there’s a lot of hope about.
I took action with The National Trust. Please share this important action
campaigns.nationaltrust.org.uk/page/186395/...
From coal mines to clean energy ⚡🌱
Across the UK, former collieries are becoming hubs for solar, wind, and geothermal power, quietly driving the energy transition.
We’re already turning our past into a cleaner future. So why aren’t we talking about it more? 🤔
Did BBC radio 4 #Today programme really just do a whole package about drilling in the N Sea without once even mentioning #climate change? And not having anyone challenging the one-sided claims of former BP boss? So irresponsible #bbcr4today
My books are 99p on Kindle at the moment. As ever, I have no idea why, nor if it's a good idea, BUT they are very very cheap - and I like the idea of people reading them...
amzn.eu/d/02ZSXK7u
This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.
Strikes me as an absurd threat, either we need the 4000 new training places or we don’t
Fantastic to see this thinking in Humshaugh 👏
Villagers are pushing for energy independence through the HELM project, installing monitors across homes and community buildings to understand how they can rely less on the grid and lower bills.
This is community‑led innovation 🌱⚡
A man kneels on the branch of a tree, sawing it so he and the branch will fall. ‘It seemed to make perfect ecological sense’ - Glen Baxter.
Oh no, the utterly brilliant Glen Baxter has died. My mum bought me 6 ‘Glen Baxter’ plates - this is the only one that survives.
It arrived! 😬🥳 Out 7th May.
Wind & solar are currently producing 65% of Britain's electricity. Meanwhile, renewables now offer 30,000 more UK jobs than oil and gas. Meanwhile, we're in a climate emergency. Meanwhile, we're in a fossil fuel supply crisis. Meanwhile, the Tories and Reform want to scrap Net Zero. grid.iamkate.com
At any rate we will not stop reading fictional stories, because it is in them that we seek a formula to give meaning to our exis-tence. Throughout our lives, after all, we look for a story of our origins, to tell us why we were born and why we have lived. Sometimes we look for a cosmic story, the story of the universe, or for our own personal story (which we tell our confessor or our analyst, or which we write in the pages of a diary). Sometimes our personal story coincides with the story of the universe. It has happened to me, as the following piece of natural nar-rative will attest. Several months ago I was invited to visit the Science Museum of La Coruña, in Galicia. At the end of my visit the curator announced that he had a surprise for me and led me to the planetarium. Planetariums are always suggestive places because when the lights are turned off, one has the impression of being in a desert beneath a starlit sky. But that evening something special awaited me.
Suddenly the room was totally dark, and I could hear a beau-tiful lullaby by de Falla. Slowly (though slightly faster than in reality, since the presentation lasted fifteen minutes in all the sky above me began to rotate. It was the sky that had appeared over my birthplace, Alessandria, Italy, on the night of January 5-6, 1932. Almost hyperrealistically, I experienced the first night of my life. I experienced it for the first time, since I had not seen that first night. Perhaps not even my mother saw it, exhausted as she was after giving birth; but perhaps my father saw it, after quietly stepping out on the terrace, a little restless because of the (to him at least) wondrous event which he had witnessed and which he had jointly caused. The planetarium used a mechanical device that can be found in a great many places. Perhaps others have had a similar expe-rience. But you will forgive me if during those fifteen minutes I had the impression that I was the only man, since the dawn of time, who had ever had the privilege of being reunited with his own beginning. I was so happy, that I had the feeling-almost the desire-that I could, that I should, die at that very moment, and that any other moment would have been untimely. I would cheerfully have died then, because I had lived through the most beautiful story I had ever read in my entire life. Perhaps I had found the story that we all look for in the pages of books and on the screens of movie theaters: it was a story in which the stars and I were the protagonists. It was fiction because the story had been reinvented by the curator; it was history because it re-counted what had happened in the cosmos at a moment in the past; it was real life because I was real, and not the character of a novel. I was, for a moment, the model reader of the Book of Books. That was a fictional wood I wish I had never had to leave. But since life is cruel, for you and for me, here I am.
The beautiful closing of Umberto Eco's _6 walks in the fictional woods_ --- the book is explores what makes narrative work, how it operates relative to truth, why we distinguish betw fiction and nonfiction. A great read for writers, scientists, anyone w/ an interest in narrative
Spain's renewables build-out has structurally decoupled its electricity prices from gas markets. Gas now sets the price in only 15% of hours, compared to 90% in Italy.
Countries that invested early in clean power are far less exposed to fossil fuel price shocks. Those that didn't now pay the price.
Spring on the way.
Oaks by the lake.
This might be the greatest split-screen ever broadcast.
They’ll play this in museums in future.
(🎥 LCI 🇫🇷)
So that’s that, right? We don’t have to put up with endless drivel about how expensive it is to save the planet abd ourselves ever again? Cool.
“We would be helping the Americans and Israelis in any way they saw appropriate”
“in ⚠️ANY⚠️ way ⚠️THEY⚠️ saw appropriate”
FFS. He wets his pants about an EU army and British sovereignty one minute. But would sign our troops up to god knows what, the next.
Tice is a weapons-grade moron.
Interesting!
FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?
morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/blm-announ... there's info on who to complain to to try to stop this at the end of the article, lets share this message and try our best to stop it.
Landscape ecological restoration. It can be done but we need to get a move on. This is Carrifran where the sheep were removed to allow this native woodland to take over.
Cartoon
