It's Always More Complicated

Charity secures 1000 acres for Wales’ largest rewilding project:

The charity’s approach will include introducing hardy cattle and Welsh mountain ponies to the land, with ancient breeds of pigs to follow. Their grazing and roaming will support habitat restoration.
Peatland rewetting and natural water retention across the site over the next five to ten years means the project will contribute to increased biodiversity, cleaner water, healthier soils, improved carbon storage and reduced flood risk for downstream farmland.
It is hoped these actions will create conditions to boost various species, with the potential for red squirrels, pine martens, polecats, curlews and hen harriers to return.
The charity also aims for much of the work to be carried out by local tradespeople. Community participation will also help uncover and share stories of those who lived and worked across the site’s 55 historic stone landmarks, from Bronze Age cairns to traditional upland buildings.

Not sure if this can at all be mapped onto Cranford (based on Knutsford): Knutsford's Booths Hall granted special building status:

The house was built in 1745 for Peter Legh after he married heiress, Anne Wade.
The building was extended in 1845 by his grandson, Peter and remodelled in 1858 into an Italianate style by Edward Habershon for John Legh, a nephew of Mr Legh.
In 1917, the Legh family auctioned the hall and estate.
....
Historic England says it was listed for ‘demonstrating fine craftsmanship in the brickwork and stone detailing’ of each phase.
Special features include the unusual and well-preserved first floor conservatory with a curved glass roof.
The good survival of interior features and decoration from all three building phases using high quality materials and a high degree of craftsmanship.

Another kind of heritage: Green’s Dictionary of Slang: Five hundred years of the vulgar tongue, including the invaluable Timelines of Slang.

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Smutwalk: Mapping Nineteenth-Century Obscenity - though actually, not all of the physical places are still there. Still. I think one might manage a tribute to Pornographers of Ye Olde Tymes stroll.

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Queer love and friendship: 1920s Fitzroy Square:

In 1927, Bobby and his queer working-class friends gathered in his Fitzroy Square flat. Though surveillance documents, we can learn about these vibrant gatherings, the people involved and the passionate, intimate letters that survive. These records offer a rare insight into queer lives of the time.

How Not To Do Heritage, we feel (guy has quite rightly been getting crapped on on social media): History professor finds huge Iron Age hoard: 'The collection will be auctioned at Noonans in Mayfair on 4 March as part of a coins and historical medals, external sale.'. Observe the guy's creepy smirk in the photo.

So yesterday I had further converse with another person apropos giving a talk as part of a series of events in connection with an exhibition of archives at a local record office some months hence and they sound keen, and it is something I can do, and have a fair amount of material including visual stuff already. Plus, besides expenses, there will also be a modest honorarium - they actually asked what do I usually get paid - errrr.

So there's that.

And the long review essay is finally in production and while I had some rather confusing emails about this yesterday I think this is down to Academic Journals Having Really Confusing Systems, it is indeed going ahead, and I was obliged to compose a short biographical note, both to reflect current institutional state and also be pertinent to topics addressed in review (my last bio note leaned rather heavily on my relationship with Sid).

And I am beginning to get to grips with article for review, though slightly fearing I may be Interrogating From the Wrong Perspective (journal is Not My Disciplinary Field, though article certainly overlaps it).

Have had the very cheering news that a conference I thought I would never get to again because it would involve transatlantic travel, is coming to London next year, yay yay yay, I am already pondering a paper.

In other personal news, have booked dental checkup and hygienist appointment for next week.

And in other news, the National Trust has reached its target to buy the land around the Cerne Giant:

The money will be used to improve access to the 55-metre (180ft) figure and to link up a patchwork of habitats, improving conditions for species such as the rare Duke of Burgundy butterfly.
It will also enable further archaeological work to help solve the enduring mystery of whom the giant depicts, and when and why it was created.

Firstly:

So, farewell then, PSC, whose advice to the sexually-bothered (rather than the lovelorn) has so oft provided fodder to oursinial musings. Guardian G2 today includes 23 of the best Sexual Healing columns

Not sure if they are The Greatest Hits rather than molto tipico of the kind of thing she addressed: in particular we note (as she stresses in the interview about the lessons learnt over 10 years of agony-aunting):

The female orgasm is still a mystery to some people
I’m still getting questions that show me people continue to think that the only “correct” type of female orgasm is one that’s purely vaginal and doesn’t involve the clitoris. For people to still think that, or to have that as the ideal, is extraordinary, but there it is. They just haven’t had the education to understand otherwise.

We also note the recurrent MenZ B Terribly Poor Stuff theme, what with the one who appears to regard his wife's bisexuality as a USP meaning *3SOMES* and two or three where one feels she did not interrogate sufficiently whether the male querent was actually gratifying his female partner before offering reassurance/solution e.g. 'My stunning wife makes no effort with our sex life' where we should like to know precisely what effort he is putting in, ahem.

However, there are also some of the wilder shores there.

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Secondly, and could we have a big AWWWW for this: David Attenborough seeks out London’s hidden wildlife:

Filming the wildlife of London requires an intrepid, agile presenter, willing to lie on damp grass after dark to encounter hedgehogs, scale heights to hold a peregrine falcon chick, and stake out a Tottenham allotment to get within touching distance of wary wild foxes.
Step forward Sir David Attenborough, who spent his 100th summer seeking out the hidden nature of his home city for an unusually personal and intimate BBC documentary.

Had not been seeing these lately, but over the past few days have been spotting several out of the back windows.

Which is one cheering thing among various niggles and peeves -

Yesterday I was informed that my order from Boots was being delivered, and then got two texts saying they had tried to deliver it but no-one answered. WOT. There was somebody here all the time.

Also a text that my other package (fresh yeast via eBay) had been delivered (this comes through the letterbox) - no sign of this so presume it has gone to the wrong door, and so far nobody has come round to pop it through ours.*

However, at least the Boots parcel turned up today: address label had street number blurred so reasons for mistaking, usual postperson recognised name, possibly yesterday was a seasonal worker?

Other annoyance: Kobo ereader running very sluggish - though this does not seem to apply across all books, which is weird?? Anyway, I connected to wifi in order to update the software, as possibly bearing on the matter, and dash it, it synced a whole load of things I had already downloaded and I have been obliged to clean up the duplicates.

I am, though, grateful that Christmas grocery orders have been nothing missing and no substitutions except for 1 thing which was not at all critical. Also oops, the pudding I ordered was rather smaller than I anticipated, but I feel one can have too much Xmas pud, and there are mince pies, brandy butter, etc.

In further happy news, the Lincolnshire Wolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty has been saved from oil drilling.

^ETA: somebody from 2 doors down brought it round this evening. The address on the package was perfectly clear.

Trust's £330k appeal to buy Cerne Giant's 'lair' - if anyone is unaware of the existence of the Cerne Giant, I should issue a NSFW warning for the images - 'the ancient naked figure sculpted into the chalk in Dorset' with a gigantic todger.

The trust said purchasing the land would allow the charity to restore and care for sections of chalk grassland, plant new woodland, and create habitats to support species under threat.

The National Trust has looked after the Giant and the immediately surrounding sward since 1920. (I now want to poke about in the British Newspaper Archive to see what the reporting, if any, was like....)

And in related matters of burgeoning nature and the work of the National Trust, More than 300 seal pups have been born at a colony just a month into the breeding season:

Last year, 228 pups were born at Orford Ness in Suffolk, which is home to the county's first breeding colony of grey seals.
The breeding season began in November and already hundreds have been born with still about a month to go.
Matt Wilson, the trust's countryside manager, said the team believed the entire colony now consisted of more than 1,000 seals.

And another form of conservation: The Digital Future of Stained Glass: Data Standards and Interoperability – Why Recording Stained Glass is Important. (What this sounds like to me is a whole lot of people not talking to one another while doing very similar work and only now getting together....):

Existing data however is currently presented in wildly different formats across different databases, to varying degrees of detail and accuracy, and held on disparate websites managed by individuals. This means that the future of these resources collectively is highly insecure.

This is rather news to me - I think of people protesting the enclosure of commons as doing this a) a lot earlier and in more rural parts: Today in London’s parklife: 1000s destroy enclosure fences, Hackney Downs, 1875:

The 1870s were a high point of anti-enclosure struggles in the London area, following on from a decade of (mostly, though not exclusively) peaceful campaigns to prevent large open spaces being developed in the 1860s. Wanstead Flats in 1871, Chiselhurst Common in 1876, Eelbrook Common (Fulham) in 1878, all saw direct action against fences, as part of long-running resistance against the theft of common land.
....
Many of these struggles were characterised by the large-scale involvement of radical movements, as London radicals, secularists and elements who would later help to form socialist groups made open space and working class access to it a major part of their political focus. Radical land agitation, notably through the Land and Labour League, was beginning to revive the question of access to land as a social question, and within cities this manifested as both battles to defend green space, and propaganda around the theft of the land from the labouring classes.

Centuries of hard fought battles saved many beloved places from disappearing, and laws currently protect parks, greens and commons. But times change… Pressures change. Space in London is profitable like never before. For housing mainly, but also there are sharks ever-present looking to exploit space for ‘leisure’. And with the current onslaught on public spending in the name of balancing the books (ie cutting as much as possible in the interests of the wealthy), public money spent on public space is severely threatened.
Many are the pressures on open green spaces – the costs of upkeep, cleaning, maintenance,
improvement, looking after facilities… Local councils, who mainly look after open space, are struggling. Some local authorities are proposing to make cuts of 50 or 60 % to budgets for parks. As a result, there are the beginnings of changes, developments that look few and far between now, but could be the thin end of the wedge.
So you have councils looking to renting green space to businesses, charities, selling off bits, shutting off parks or parts of them for festivals and corporate events six times a year… Large parts of Hyde Park and Finsbury Park are regularly fenced off for paying festivals already; this could increase. Small developments now, but maybe signs of things to come. Now is the time to be on guard, if we want to preserve our free access to the green places that matter to us.

HEIR, the Historic Environment Image Resource:

HEIR’s mission is to rescue neglected and endangered photographic archives, unlock their research potential, and make them available to the public.
HEIR contains digitised historic photographic images from all over the world dating from the late nineteenth century onwards. HEIR’s core images come from lantern slide and glass plate negatives held in college, library, museum and departmental collections within the University of Oxford. New resources are being added all the time, including collections from outside the University.

Dragon’s teeth and elf garden among 2025 additions to English heritage list:

The heritage body publishes a roundup of unusual listings to draw attention to the diversity of places that join the national heritage list for England each year.
As well as the anti-tank defences, this year’s list of 19 places includes a revolutionary 1960s concrete university block, a model boat club boathouse built in 1933 by men who were long-term unemployed, and a magical suburban “elf garden”.

Art history is too important to be the preserve of the privileged:

The act of looking has become commodified as technology companies ‘mine and sell our attention like coal’, as Kee writes. Letting art history become endangered and drift further into elite status is not only unfair, it’s also perilous. ‘Art history gives you tools to interpret the visual world and makes you more of a critical viewer of political messages, advertising and a barrage of social media images,’ says Perry. ‘It’s dangerous if you can’t examine these things critically.’

Norfolk's first capybara café opening in Toftwood, Dereham

That's right. An area which has had FORM for escaping invasive large semi-aquatic mammals: see this article by a guy who dealt with the coypu menace in the Broads.

Animal rights and protection orgs are already up in arms:
FOUR PAWS strongly opposes the keeping of wild or non-domesticated animals, such as capybaras, in settings where their complex welfare needs cannot be properly met.
Freedom for Animals has united with our colleagues at Born Free Foundation, Animal Aid, OneKind, World Animal Protection, and RSPCA to strongly urge the operators, and the local authority, to halt these plans before they get underway. 
RSPCA criticises new ‘capybara cafes’

Apparently there is a whole thing of cafes where you can embrace cuddly animals in Asia: Cuddling capybaras and ogling otters: the problem with animal cafes in Asia: A boom in places offering petting sessions is linked to a rise in the illegal movement of exotic and endangered species, say experts:

Capybaras breed rapidly, can withstand a wide range of temperatures, and have a flexible diet of grasses and aquatic plants. “There is a high risk for them to be invasive,” Congdon says.

I will cop to have looked rather wistfully at a place in Australia which offered encounters with WOMBATTS, but a) that was in their native land and b) it looked like this was a sanctuary and they were rescue wombies, and thus one would be supporting the mission. (While interacting with ADORABLE WOMBATTS.)

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And because tradition: this is one that I haven't iterated overmuch:

Dept of, what will they think of next (some of this is, as I remarked elsewhere, resuscitating Ye Good Ol' Victorian Quackerie - though, as we concurred, VIBRATORS ARE NOT VICTORIAN!!!): With the menopause dildo, we've officially reached peak menopause bollocks.

(Declaration of interest: I once did a podcast with the author.)

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Dept of, well, on the topic of dildos, or at least, urgent phallicism: I spent a year dating conservative [frothingly alt-right] men:

Something about getting ready to go on these dates made me feel like I was 18 again — except now I had the ability to run professional-level background checks, which I did. Not because I was operating on preconceived notions but because the few peers I told about my mission encouraged me to. Given some of the vitriol against women in online alt-right groups, they felt I should treat every date as if it were a threat to my life. I came up with a routine: before a date, I’d tell at least three people in advance where I was going and what time they should expect to hear from me by. I enlisted a friend who’s a former Navy SEAL to be my unofficial security consultant.

And that's before getting to meet the actual doozies who are, apparently, not even the worst types on the dating apps.

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Dept of, let's have some better news, good news about snails (the snails that one thought had been mown down in the ONward March of Progress, or at least, building much needed housing):

the snails are OK. Nothing bad is going to happen to the poor little Whirlpool Ramshorn Snail, the endangered creature which our Chancellor unfairly blamed for stopping a housing development, causing me to get grumpy on social media. But in following up to try and see what actually happened, I found out a bunch of interesting – and in my view extremely heartening – stuff.
.... it was always a false dichotomy, it was always possible to have the houses and the snails too.

Dept of gilded snails in a very different space: From snails to street signs: Soho’s history revealed on a new digital map - the snails on the facade of L'Escargot Restaurant.

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Dept of, gosh I have met (many years ago) the curator of this exhibition: New York City celebrates the “Gay Harlem Renaissance”

Let's All Remember When We Saved The World:

Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer - signed 16th September 1987 and entering into force on January 1st 1989, [became] the first universally ratified treaty in the entire history of the United Nations....
Much smarter people than I have spent the last 2 decades trying to understand exactly why it was such a resounding success, and let’s be clear here, I am just an idiot with a newsletter. But a couple of details stand out:
The agreement didn’t wait for all the science to be completely firmed up before implementing regulation - which is a good job, because early conclusions about ozone depletion levels were significantly underestimated. Instead, it adopted a “Precautionary Principle” that was enshrined in the Rio Declaration in 1992 - acting on likely evidence to avoid consequences that may be catastrophic or even irreversible if any delay is sought. (This is markedly different from how some politicians seem to think science should work - if their words can be believed, of course.)
Negotiations took place in small, informal groups, to give everyone the best chance of being heard and being understood. More than anything else, this reminds me of Dorsa Brevia, and how utterly exhausting that conference was for all the characters involved. Who knows how many such talks led to Montreal being accepted? But every one of them counted.
There was a clear economic benefit for the industries using CFCs to move away from them - not just on principle or to avoid public backlash, but because CFCs were old tech and therefore out of patent, and shifting to new alternatives would allow companies to develop ozone-friendly chemicals they could stick a profitable patent on.
And so the world was saved - just in time for its next challenge.

“A remarkable discovery”: Rare fern found in Welsh valley 150 years after being wiped out by Victorians:

The plant's disappearance from Cwm Idwal is thought to have been driven by the Victorian fern-collecting craze known as 'Pteridomania', which stripped sites of rare species.
Its rediscovery suggests that the holly fern may be recolonising from spores carried within the national park, or that a hidden population survived undetected.
“This is a remarkable rediscovery," says Alastair Hotchkiss, the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland’s Wales Officer. "The cliffs around Cwm Idwal are seriously challenging terrain for botanists to explore, but the fact that this species remained undetected for over a century and a half is a powerful reminder of how much we still have to learn about our upland flora – and how much we still have to protect.”

Seem to have been seeing a cluster of things about litter, and picking it up, lately, what with this one Lake District: Family shouted at for picking up litter, and the thing I posted recently about the young woman who was snarking on the Canals and Rovers Trust about what she perceived as her singlehanded mission to declutter the local canal bank: "Elena might feel alone in tackling London's litter waste", and then this week's 'You Be The Judge' in the weekend Guardian is on a related theme:

Should my girlfriend stop picking up other people’s litter?

(She is at least throwing it away in a responsible fashion: I worry about the couple whose flat is being cluttered up with culinary appliances where one feels maybe the ones that aren't actually being used anymore could be rehomed via charity shops before they are buried under an avalanche of redundant ricecookers etc).

As far as litter and clutter goes, National Trust tears down Union flag from 180-year-old monument. Actually, carefully removed, and we think there are probably conservation issues involved: quote from NT 'We will assess whether any damage has been caused to the monument'. See also White horse checked for any damage caused by flag. We do not think respect and care for heritage is uppermost in the minds of people who do these jelly-bellied flagflapping gestures.