It’s later than you think

Oh right. So it’s been about 4 months since I was on this blog. Time goes quickly, huh? I’ve been busy instead doing the kind of writing that earns me an income. But I thought I’d just do a roundup of a few things that have been occupying my headspace recently.

Personal goals for 2014: be irascible and swear more. Why not? I’m old, or feel old anyway, and I don’t have the time to mess around.

At New Year I caught Jools Holland’s New Year TV thing and it wound up, as I think it usually does, with the Guy Lombardo song ‘It’s Later Than You Think’. If you want the full lyrics they’re on Metrolyrics.com, and the 2013 Jools performance is on Youtube (the elderly trombonist, incidentally, is Rico Rodriguez – one of the living legends of ska, if you don’t already know that. He’s a bit shaky on the performance but dammit, the guy deserves respect). The song’s a hurry-up call to do the things you want to do before you’re no longer in a state to do them. And for all I know it’s later than I think.

Apart from that, Christmas Eve was somewhat spoiled by this:

Poisoned meat

When I first saw it in our local woods, I wondered if it was the result of some occult rite. The woods local to me do have a few people from time to time who are prone to marking out pentagrams and such, and doing late-night ceremonies. On the other hand, as best I can gather from the cans they leave they’re mainly doing them while drunk on cheap lager and (probably) trying to emulate stuff they’re seen in horror films. They’re essentially harmless (because I, erm, know other people whose take on pagan beliefs is rather more effective).

When I got close, however, my dog wouldn’t touch the meat, which seemed to be ox or cow livers and hearts. Some other dog walkers came along and their dogs wouldn’t go near it either. Dogs have a sense of smell, you see, and they probably figured it smelled funny. Someone else who came along had a sniff and reckoned it smelled of arsenic. One of us who had a carrier bag gathered the stuff up and took it away to be disposed of. I keep a good lookout now in the woods for anything that looks like this, hidden under trees. We all have some suspicions about who might have done it, and also figure they’d thought no one would find or disturb the stuff over the Christmas period. But dogs need walking every day… And if they were after foxes, which have a sense of smell similar to dogs, they’d have been unsuccessful anyway. They’d probably have killed the local owls and some woodland birds, though. And, yes, poisoning wildlife is a serious offence in the UK. If you come across any suspected incident of an attempt to poison wildlife, Natural England has a dedicated helpline and and a Wildlife Incident Unit whose inspectors will investigate. To report the suspected poisoning of wildlife or pets call: FREEPHONE 0800 321 600. The RSPCA also has a useful website with contact details.

Oh, and dog walkers – you know the thing in murder mysteries about how dog walkers are often the people who find bodies and such? That’s because our dogs need to be walked and in a big chunk of countryside, dog walkers are the people who are out there from early morning to late evening. So the chances are, anything from dead bodies to poisoned meat or flytipping, it will be a dog walker who first finds it.

There are plenty of other things locally to get irascible about, and plenty in the national and international news that also make me want to puke, preferably over those responsible for various government stupidities. But there’s also this, which made me scratch my head. Under the headline ‘Destruction of ancient woodland “highly unlikely”‘ it turns out ancient woodlands probably won’t be destroyed by changes in planning and development laws. Or at least, lost trees could be replaced by planting more elsewhere in a process known as ‘biodiversity offsetting’. Don’t get me wrong – offsetting is a decent enough policy, but in relation to ancient woodland?

A spokesperson for the Department of the Environment is quoted as saying the idea of using offsetting to replace destroyed ancient woodland is ‘very hypothetical’. What does that mean, exactly? That ancient woodlands won’t be destroyed in the first place? Given local experience with the way developers seem to be able to get their way through threatening to bankrupt local councils due to the legal costs of fighting a planning appeal, I’d say ‘very hypothetical’ probably means no one is planning to build on ancient woodland for at least a couple of months.

And what part of ‘ancient’ woodland, and the biological significance of it, is not understood by government people who deal with offsetting policies? Using offsetting in this situation isn’t ‘very hypothetical’, it’s impossible.

I’ll find more to be irascible about shortly.