civilservant

is s/he still there? Time to curl up for winter!

There is nothing intrisically dangerous about eating human flesh. The main issue is about overcoming cultural taboos (which I share). Prions/CJD/kuru are only an issue if they are present in the cadaver to be eaten. However they are rare, and cadavers can always be screened for infection. Other (non-controversial) kinds of animal flesh present similar risks - for example, CJD transmission from cattle to humans.

Really sorry to hear about your misadventure, PG, glad to hear you are better now. I too love to forage for mushrooms, but a bit nervously... although I've never yet tried nettle soup However, natural foods rarely go to waste - fruit and nuts are the only source of food for birds and other fauna. They need to eat now to build up their winter fat reserves and what's left over must tide them over the winter months. I hear from the berry pickers that there isn't much fruit out there, as it's been a hard summer with extremes of sun and rain, so what we take means even less left for them.

this sort of thing could never happen on LL! or could it? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-20001098

snowboarder Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > He was in the friday night project with Alan Carr > yes? > > Scary. still none the wiser, sorry!

I give up! :0)

so sorry, AM, deadly serious, no joke - but then dry cleaning bills never are, are they? a joke, I mean

you could put a tunnel under the fence to help small critters get through, a bit like the Elephant and Castle underpasses, I suppose! ... unless your garden has solid walls, in which case it'd be quite a bit harder to do

I think they advise leaving crawl spaces under fences for hedgies, who can't climb over fences in the way that foxes can. I also hear that hedgehogs cover vast areas every evening when they hunt for food, so the chopping up of land into gardens and the building of roads is not helpful for them - a bit like how the Enclosure Act did for the British peasant, I suppose

ah, so you already did but beware the wrath of Huguenot - he doesn't like anyone criticising the Council! You will be tarred forevermore as a cynic!

PB, people make all sorts of polite (and not so polite) requests on EDF - I nearly didn't read this thread beacuse I thought it might be about asking people to confine their use of tomato sauce to their chips, or about not being able to buy things out of the charity shop window, or even asking people to drive more sensibly why don't you just re-post on the main drag with a title that alludes to driving down the middle of ED roads to straddle the speed bumps? also, why the humility i.e. 'proabbly pointless request'? With any luck, Admin (Peace be on him/her) will feel compassion for you and your post and let it be, you will stir up loads of EDF argy-bargy about the right to drive any damn way they please, whether it's on a fire-breathing unicorn, a 4X4, or just a 10-year old Corsa, and you might even have influenced a few people into driving on their side of the road...

EJTH, really sorry to see this shower add insult to your OH's injury! I'd like to see if any of them was quite as up for a laugh if it was them that got squirted.

lovely to see so many hedgehog pals. You might want to sign up here http://www.hedgehogstreet.org/pages/hedgehog-street.html "Through Hedgehog Street, we are asking people to become Hedgehog Champions to rally support from their neighbours and work together to create ideal hedgehog habitat throughout their street, estate or communal grounds. Please sign up to receive a pack which will help you get started. The pack contains hedgehog factsheets which can be handed out to neighbours, posters to help advertise the project, tips and hints on how to get neighbours involved and how to keep them interested and a pack of action cards which explain what people can do in their gardens. Sometimes people want to help wildlife but they either aren?t sure how to go about it or they think that doing something in their small patch won?t make a difference. This is why we are providing everything you need to do the project and explaining what you can do to make your whole street good for hedgehogs."

who IS Justin Lee Collins? I'd never heard about him before this trial, and no one else seems to know either

We are so envious that you have a hedgehog in your garden! Do please look after it! They are an endangered animal in this country, because they are such inoffensive and undemanding little creatures which suffer as a result of human impact on their habitat.

Dan Leno on Akerman Road near Myatt's Fields Holst was Director of Music at St Paul's Girls' School, as well as at JAGS - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Paul%27s_Suite ,

Fly, this is excellent news. I was told that there are almost no hedgehogs left in SE London, and they are a threatened species everywhere in the UK. You should get in touch with the BHPS http://www.britishhedgehogs.org.uk/carers.htm (They also say on their website: IMPORTANT: PLEASE NOTE IF YOU ARE EMAILING ABOUT A HEDGEHOG THAT MAY BE INJURED, ILL OR ORPHANED PLEASE CALL US ON 01584 890 801 INSTEAD AS EMAILS MAY NOT BE SEEN IN TIME). There is a bloke called Hugh Warwick who works with them who is really keen to find out about local hedgehog habitats - his blog http://www.urchin.info/ .

I suppose the water would be hot enough to cook the salmon if it were securely wrapped up en papillote. But did she do her dishes at the same time? Now that would be green!

ffs

Thanks for the clarification, James. I appreciate that M&S weren't to blame but surprised that they don't seem to have undertaken any due diligence activity on their side. Noone in ED would want such a prominent site empty for any length of time. I hope that a way can be found to keep it occupied.

Interesting that most of the terms quoted in your link are British slang rather than 'correct' usage, Saffron. Overall, I think that we are more influenced by them than they are by us and the impact is much more fundamental. I'm thinking of words like 'billion' - which is now accepted to mean a thousand million (originally US usage) rather than a million million (old UK usage) American English is influenced by much more than British usage, though - there is a lot of Italian, Spanish and Yiddish influence. I was told that their use of 'hopefully' is a literal translation from German usage. But many of their their strange spellings (losing the u in words such as "colour", for example) come from early attempts to rationalise English spelling, which succeeded in the States but failed to catch on here. Anyway, here's another of my pet hates - 'DISinterested' when one means 'UNinterested'. That's wrong both in the US and the UK!

We went into this in some depth when considering what to do with our trees. This is Royal Horticulatural Society advice on the subject http://apps.rhs.org.uk/advicesearch/Profile.aspx?pid=225 and here is advice on safe planting distances from another source (possibly a less disinterested one than the RHS) http://www.subsidencebureau.com/subsidence_trees.htm What both concur on is that "in all cases it is wise to consult a qualified expert." BEFORE planting. But has our Council done that? If it did, and I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that it might have, we'd all live happily ever after in my fairy tale!

Group hug!

Saffron Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > A good year for port wine, so I'm told. :0)

Ah! Even I wasn't around in 1896!