fl0wer

I will walk that way today and check. Winter flowering shrubs or certain trees at budburst, moved ahead suddenly by warmth & sunshine, may be the cause.

As counterbalance to the 2010 piece linked above, readers might enjoy this: http://www.energysavingwarehouse.co.uk/news/380/20/The-Bottle-Deposit-Scheme.html

Read here about volunteers who go round picking up the tins and bottles fly-tipped in their towns, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/feb/17/litter-vigilantes-clean-up-dirty-streets For me the interesting question is how we change peoples' habits of throwing stuff down on the ground instead of disposing of it appropriately. Get the verges & hedges and corners of woodland restored to beauty and the grass safe for small creatures again. How to teach children early on that this is their Earth to protect? It would be great if parents and schools ran drinks can & snack wrapper campaigns and enlisted the co-operation of youngsters. Manufacturers & retailers only listen when the profits dry up. A small returnable deposit per glass bottle,(system some of us remember well) has been shown to provide an incentive, works well elsewhere in Europe.

yes - have campaigned for a long time to get an Offender's Register set up where all can see the names of those who target vulnerable adults. Believe me I have met a few. Cowboy builders, befrienders, vulture "care" [NOT] agencies, religious nutters, people who'll sell you crappy hearing aids and special shoes....

Anyone who enjoys reading Polly Toynbee - fresh column inches here http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/lewisham-start-hospital-protests-to-come Sorry - can't say whether its newspaper comment thread is worth joining - see for yourselves.

What I don't like about this is that it generates paranoia. Instead of having a gentle exchange of conversation with fellow humans, trust breaks down and everyone becomes an object to be treated warily. City life is extraordinary, a truce, considering how small a personal space everyone's got to occupy. Being pleasant and polite at such close quarters makes all the difference between it being bearable, or becoming hellish. Why let criminals wreck the ordinary decency out there? Re: purses there is a useful secure kind on a belt, to wear under coat or jerkin.

What d'you have in mind exactly? Nice full salt/sand bin along our road where some residents have immaculately ice-free pavement just outside their houses, so I assume each person has helped themselves and already done their own, or paid a helper to.

I don't know Toddinator, as I am stuck indoors with a cold, but there are plenty of those house-agents' plastic sheets kicking around the place, waiting to become happy sleds....

In fairness, courteous letters were addressed to very local residents in last few days, about the coming resurfacing works.

The way I understand it, when something frightful is happening nearby to a mad-looking person - instinctively we say "Don't get involved" to ourselves, and the reaction normally to rough sleepers is to let them get their own difficulties sorted out by their own choice of help, to preserve their dignity etc but some who are genuinely vulnerable because of mental dysfunction, in the cold weather seem like more of a collective responsibility.

I saw a few weeks ago that someone was sleeping rough in that area, slumped against an apartment building's porch. More recently a very end-of-tether, thin lad was running round ED asking householders for casual work, saying the temporary homeless shelters were hell. As soon as it gets this cold, our common-law duty of care is to see that vulnerable adults get to shelter. Negotiation is iffy with someone who's probably brain-damaged or severely intoxicated; summon police, rather than risk getting attacked personally; and anyone reasonable enough to listen to you, might welcome help to contact an organisation called Emmaus. Their hostel over in W. Norwood does operate a 'dry' policy [no alcohol/other intoxicants].

marmora man wrote An aircraft flying into a high object is, if the > object was identified on relevant air maps, pilot > error in the same way that a ship running aground > on a charted hazard is a navigational error. > > Helos are more flexible about flight planning in > general than fixed wing aircraft but it remains > the pilot's responsibility to check for various > warnings and chart updates relevant to the flight > area before taking off. MM echoed more or less what they were telling us on the BBC News channel. An aviation expert said yes,1 duty of pilots = read the regular bulletins updating all the time, re hazards, [much as a vessel's captain is expected to listen to the Shipping Forecast] so it looks as if the crash may have happened because he asked to be diverted about where he'd land, being surrounded by fog, and therefore had no opportunity for reading about the hazardous crane. Time will tell, sure there's going to be an in-depth investigation. Sympathies to all involved, including families who have lost loved ones. Also those many bystanding people who will be in shock. A terrifying morning.

I think the above link only shows you a clip, if you have an hour please watch the whole film here http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/farm-for-the-future/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hs8zp

"Neither organic food nor locally grown food is by definition more environmentally friendly than their non-organic / imported counterparts." That statement is not quite clear. One part is about whether organic growing is less environmentally costly, and the other is about whether local growing is less environmetally costly. Then you have included another point about imports and this again falls into two aspects, one which concerns non-organic production (I think). All parts of your post merit support with references, please LondonMix.

What about grabbing the chance to raise the standard of debate in a national daily, by joining in and writing articulately about the things most important to us locally. Furthermore, extra ideas we 'sow' in the comment threads are taken up week by week as journalists trace the evolving story by reading our posts for inspiration.

If you make a switch to organic food can I add that unless you buy it as locally grown & distributed as possible, you'll be paying some extra percentage for air miles. Many supermarkets are just flogging you fancier stuff from far far away, at maximum profit to themselves and far costlier than necessary to local economies and the environment. The box schemes don't air freight produce. Their associate farms in Spain and France send us winter fresh stuff overland and sea. Another point worth making, it's hard being an organic grower, & to exist free of supermarket buyers. If households order a veg box, the company will have supported the grower right the way through with extra help when needed, e.g. to prepare the soil appropriately, choose disease-resistant varieties, predict within a fortnight when stuff's ready to pick, & pay ahead of time for an entire field,- all to help this method's sustainability.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/08/nhs-hospital-trusts-debt-dissolved-report

Can the articulate customer discourage a house agent from installing those non-biodegradable signboards at all? Waste's reached unacceptable levels. Sheets of bilious looking advertising plastic lurk behind every wall, garage and front garden shrub. The wooden posts are a recyclable item. Uses limited only to our imagination.

The Inland Revenue sends out instantly identifiable envelopes, some of which contain refund cheques which are getting stolen at the sorting-office stage. According to the police it's massive-scale & gang organised. A reminder, though, that everyone at the Post Office works in a position of trust. The fraudsters were successful because the Inland Revenue failed to let people know when they posted the refunds. But follow up all the missing letters you know about & insist on getting your post accurately addressed. Would it help, MediaBoy, to create a new house name/number to avoid confusion?

By the junction with Kelvington Road at teatime there were police cordons, someone lying bundled on a stretcher, an ambulance waiting, a motorbike on its side, some stationary parked cars. I think we can guess. People often speed along there way over 30mph.

"I am about to buy my first property and am buying it in ED. " Hope you've budgeted for a professional firm of cleaners, equipped with steam machines... some Estate Agents promise that a property will be left clean for you, and then jump ship. I am serious. In an era of triumph for contagious disease, antibiotics don't work on everything any more, - oh, and Sainsbury's sell those disinfectant wipes, OK

A fox dump often appears exactly the night after gardening has turned the soil, to re-state his/her trail across that territory. Alys Fowler recommends human urine sends a territorial message and foxes leave that bit of ground alone. I don't know if it would work against dogs though. Dog Instinct makes them do their stool as a deliberate territorial marker, especially if they can scent lots of other creatures. It's possible that the Culprit described above was driven by scent remaining after a cat's spray on that doormat, for example. The dominant dog chooses where to stake a claim, the subordinate one will go elsewhere. If you have many dominant dogs in a neighbourhood, there are usually poo-sites almost impossible to get cleared, even if the humans intervene with hygienic bins and scoopers the canine competitive marking and re-marking is always their goal. About shoes, yuk, the safest place to clean them up is over the loo, using the bog brush and eco-cleaner, and then clean the toilet pan afterwards. An hour or two of real strong sunshine effectively helps kill germs, might be worth knowing one day (not much use this time of year).

Have noticed a rash of chuck-out mattresses rotting in front yards lately. They can turn the feel of a whole street into a slum at once, can't they?

In case you're planning already for your festive tree, this =>http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/dec/05/how-buy-green-christmas-tree column had useful links & sound planet-friendly advice today.