Madiba we love you

That wonderful elder statesman Nelson Mandela was honoured yesterday by the unveiling a statue yesterday in London's Parliament Square. There are many statues in our Nation's Capital, but this is, I think one of the most deserving to be remembered in this way.

Its creator, the British sculptor Ian Walters, did not live to see it being unveiled. He died last year.
Amid shouts of "we love you" from the crowd that thronged the road and hung from office block windows, the 89-year-old former South African president and his third wife, Graca Machel, made a dame for her own humanitarian work, were visibly moved at the reception.
Despite being supported by a cane, Mr Mandela took to the stage to address the crowd. He said: "We never dreamed we would all be here today. Though this statue is of one man, it should in actual fact symbolise all those who have resisted oppression, especially in my country."

[Daily Telegraph on line]

Mandela still has much to do, not least in trying to persuade his successor, President Thabo Mbeki who has been a scandalous failure to confront the scourge of HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa. And there are worrying signs that the situation is about to get worse. Last week, South Africa’s deputy health minister, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, was fired by President Mbeki.
Madlala-Routledge was one of the driving forces behind a plan to extend anti-retroviral treatment to 80 percent of those with AIDS by 2011. This focus is exactly what South Africa’s AIDS program had been lacking. But now Madlala-Routledge has gone, there is a serious danger that the momentum toward this goal will be lost.

Back again to Wales

Another trip to the land of Wales earlier this month and hundreds of photos taken at or around Lake Vyrnwy, the River Vyrnwy, Pontrobert and Llanfyllin. Pontrobert Watermill was the retirement home of my grandparents, Bob and Margaret Jones and my regular holiday destination for most if not all of my early years. Here is the long pool on the Vyrnwy about 200m below the mill house.

The link to my Picasa collection is here. - Sheryl - look at the pic of the tapestry in the church at Llanfyllin!

My Tango Photographs

The sound and the sight of the Tango is all over Buenos Aires but particularly around La Boca near the old port and in the heat of the sun.

Demise of the Yangtze River Dolphin

Sad news today from various sources confirming the first large mammal extinction for many years and the first cetacean extinction through human activity despite recent and high profile efforts to save it. The species is the Baiji or Yangtze River Dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer). See New Scientist link. Other river dolphin species from the Amazon and from the Ganges are also on threatened species lists.

Tom Russell

Another excellent musical evening at St Bonaventure’s last night. We went to see the incomparable American singer Tom Russell who was accompanied by the excellent Michael Martin as second guitar and mandolin. The hall was packed, with chairs for only about half of the appreciative audience. Those without, sat on the floor or stood for the whole performance in a very warm and sometimes airless room. No one seemed to mind and we were encouraged to join in lusty and fun choruses. There can be no other singer-songwriters to come up with the one word chorus “Criminologist!” which refers to Tom Russell’s own early career.

My Antarctic Photos of the Day

The British base at Port Lockroy.

Designated as Historic Site No 61 under the Antarctic Treaty, 19 May 1995. Restored 14 Jan 1996-18 Mar 1996. Since Nov 1996 the station has been run as an Historic Site and is open to tourists and visitors during austral summer seasons.

Bristol Harbour Festival

A really nice weekend for ship, boat and people watching here on Bristol's Harbourside. Lots of photos taken and cheeses bought at the French market in Queen's Square. We also visited St Mary Redcliffe Church, that which Queen Elizabeth 1st called "The goodliest, fairest and most famous parish church in England" A selection of photographs are here on Picasa. Please click on the link.

In the lead photo the "Matthew" the replica of the ship in which John Cabot sailed from Bristol to discover Newfoundland in 1497

The Royal Welsh Show 2007

The annual Royal Welsh Show at Builth Wells had always appealed but I had never been to it before and so I was pleased to have chosen a nice bright day with no rain for the 80 mile drive through the South Wales valleys to the venue on the banks of the River Wye. The countryside looked magnificent until we joined a long and tedious line of traffic moving very slowly the last few miles into the show ground car parks. I took with me my visitor from Hungary and my son Stephen and we all had a great time looking at the excellent livestock and other displays, We were entertained by a sheep-shearing competition, Ukrainian riders, pole climbing, canoeists, Shetland ponies, and a man with a sheepdog which has been specially trained to herd his flock of ducks.
Some of our photos are here on Picasa.

My Antarctic Photo of the Day

Fur Seal families, Cooper Bay, South Georgia
Arctocephalus gazella

The Jurassic Coast

Ladram Bay - East Devon

Another trip organised by WEGA - the West of England Geologists Association and other Geological societies took us last Saturday to Exmouth and onto a Stuart Line boat, Eastward along the coast as far as Lyme Regis and back. Our guide to the area, explaining the varied and fascinating geology enroute was Dr Richard Scrivener BSc, PhD, CGeol, FGSDistrict Geologist for the British Geological Survey and is head of the BGS station in Exeter. He had picked a particularly fine day with only slightly choppy watrer on the return trip and an excellent time was had by all. My photos of the trip are here on Picasa.

Weekend disappointment

This coming Sunday we had been looking forward to going to a Folk Festival at Saul, a little village on the canalside near Frampton on Severn. Sadly the torrential rain in the last few days has led to the event being cancelled. We are told that we can expect, as the century progesses, many more extreme weather events. I am sad the Saul festival has been put off until next year, but there many other things to do, though some may involve putting wellington boots into the boot of the car as a precaution! Today the sun is shining (rather weakly) after another night of heavy rain. At least the rain guarantees a green and pleasant England.

Bristol and its artistic legacy

I am saddened this week to hear of further problems for two of Bristol's much loved but under used and under funded venues: our two theatres offering serious drama. I have written before of the Theatre Royal, known as the "Bristol Old Vic", our wonderful but somewhat dilapidated 240 year old theatre. It still needs another £2 million to complete the programme of improvements and there is now talk of its possible permanent closure. I can remember going to the theatre as a child in the late 1940's when my father was in the Old Vic company and have noted with interest the fortunes of, and have seen some of the productions at the theatre in the years since. Artistic directors have come and gone over the years, have tried hard to bring challenging drama to our city with little support from the City Council and a Bristolian audience that seems to struggle with such challenges. Popular opinion seems to be saying a root and branch overhaul of the articitic policy is required, bringing whenever the renovations have been completed, a schedule of plays with much more public appeal than has been offered in the recent past.

It would be tragic to see the demise of the BOV, my father and many other actors and directors of his generation like Stuart Burge, Newton Blick, Nat Brenner and Paul Eddington, to name just five men I have known, would be turning in their graves to hear of the theatre's current parlous state.

As well as the Old Vic, our other "fringe" theatre The Tobacco Factory in Bedminster is also struggling. It is an intimite venue at the top of one of the former Wills factory buildings in Bedminster. It has put on plays from Shakespeare to "The Wills Girls" and has had great critical acclaim, but has not been commercially popular enough to ensure long term survival without additional funding and/or an injection of more successful marketing.

I do my best to support and urge others to do the same!

A Welsh Wedding!

On Saturday, I was in Wales again for the Wedding of my cousin David's daughter Gwen at Llangynyw and at Powis Castle. There had been torrential rain in the area on Friday but despite river flood warnings and maybe because of a lot of people keeping fingers crossed the weather for the ceremony and for the reception was exellent as was the occasion.

As usual I took many photos which can be seen here: -

Gwen & Will's wedding.

Very best wishes to the newlyweds.

One of the Great Tragedies of Our Time

One of the Great Tragedies of our Time

One of the great tragedies of our time is that in our desperate incapacity to cope with the complexities of our world, we oversimplify every issue and reduce it to a neat ideological formula. Doubtless we have to do something in order to grasp things quickly and effectively. But unfortunately this "quick and effective grasp" too often turns out to be no grasp at all, or only a grasp on a shadow. The ideological formulas for which we are willing to tolerate and even provoke the destruction of entire nations may one day reveal themselves to have been the most complete deceptions....The American conscience is troubled by a sense of tragic ambiguity in our professed motives for massive intervention. Yet in the name of such tenuous and questionable motives we continue to bomb, to burn, and to kill because we think we have no alternative, and because we are reduced to a despairing trust in the assurance of "experts" in whom we have no real confidence.

Thomas Merton

Celtic Tales

My Photos

Today I have been away over the water into the "Land of My Fathers" - the Pricipality of Wales on a coach trip organised by my old friend and colleague John Vivian. We had excellent weather for the visits to two excellent places.

First we went to Castell Coch - the Red Castle, not old but in a lovely wooded setting in the hills overlooking the City of Cardiff. There were twenty-five former colleagues of the Bristol & West Building Society on the coach and we spent an enjoyable time looking around the castle, approaching it over a drawbridge above the dry moat. Built in the late 19th Century for one of the richest men of the time, the Marquess of Bute at the height of Victorian fancy for the medieval. Inside, the rooms are decorated and furnished lavishly in the most eccentric style with many wall paintings depicting scenes from Aesop's Fables (see above) and fantastic furnishings.

Further to the West of Cardiff is the wonderful National History Museum of Wales at St Fagans. I had wanted to go there for years and this was my opportunity to see it and also to see what they had done with my mother's "Ghost Bottle" or Witch Bottle (see second photo above). Back in 1983 my then little cousin Mark was playing outside my parents' cottage on the Welsh border near Oswestry, when under the old Yew Tree he found this jar or bottle, very heavy, as it is filled to halfway with lead. The story goes that a ghost once inhabited the cottage and so in order to remove the ghost, a priest or perhaps more likely a white witch was summoned in to pray the ghost down, into the bottle and this done, it would be sealed into the bottle with molten lead! Then the bottle would have been buried under the tree as Yew trees do have special mystical significance. So, there the bottle is, in the main gallery at St Fagans where it had been sent by my mother back in the 1980's for investigation. I was glad to see it again, and for the first time, the many other exhibits and houses displayed on the open air site. Houses, churches, mills, shops and many other representative buildings from all over Wales have been dismantled and taken from their original sites then put back together at St Fagans, now a working museum where carvers, millers, blacksmiths, farmers and other craftsmen and craftswomen demonstrate their rural trades for the visiting public. My Picasa photos show some of the highlights of our day.

Bristol's Little Rivers

Another good walk yesterday, this time with about 50 assorted Bristol Living Rivers supporters from Sea Mills, where the River Trym joins the Avon. We hiked upstream into Westbury where the Trym is joined from the North by the Hazel Brook, sometimes known as the Hen Brook which we then followed as far as its emergence from drainage pipes near the huge shopping centre at Cribbs Causeway.
My photos on Picasa tell the tale - but just to explain the gravestone in Henbury Churchyard! The boy was one of many young african slaves who had not been sent to the sugar cane fields of the West Indies or the Cotton Fields of America but was chosen to be a servant in the household of Bristol nobility. It seems he was treated well, though he must have been the object of much curiosity and novelty at the time.

The Dragon flag flies on the top of the World

Congratulations to Tori James who has just climbed to the summit of Mount Everest 8,848 meters above sea level. She is a fellow member of the British Schools Exploring Society and is climbing with a team from the London School of Business. At 23 she is the youngest female Briton and first Welsh woman to have successfully made it to the top.

The Father of Taxonomy

He's more influential than ABBA, more famous than Bjorn Borg and Sweden is celebrating today the 300th birthday of its most illustrious son: Carl Linnaeus, also known as Carl von Linné or Carolus Linnaeus. He is often called the Father of Taxonomy. His system for naming, ranking, and classifying organisms is still in wide use today and his ideas on classification have influenced generations of biologists during and after his own lifetime. His signature plant the Twin Flower, Linnea Borealis is to be seen in paintings of him as shown above.

This year's Chelsea Flower Show in London has a Linnaeus feature garden and Sweden's University of Uppsala, his alma mater, is holding various celebrations.

How times have changed!

Sorry about the quality of this but it is a genuine extract from a British sex education textbook for girls printed in the 1960's. Click on it to enlarge so as to read it easier! In the last paragraph I am wondering what the girls who read this originally thought their future husbands might have suggested in the line of "unusual practices"! I reckon there would have been a few giggles in the classroom!

The Brislington Brook

Bristol like many British cities has grown over the centuries and many villages formerly outside the city walls have been subsumed into the whole and are now the kind of suburbs to be seen anywhere in the country. However on close inspection of the map there is parkland and wasteground between many of the built up areas. Often these "between" areas follow streams and are havens for both plants and animals.

Today's walk was through an area of Bristol that I do not know well and about 30 of us met near the southern edge of the city at Whitchurch to walk down the route of the Brislington Brook as far as St Anne's a Victorian parish church on the site of a much older monastic building and place of pilgrimage in times gone by.

As usual with these walks we were given full explanations of the history of the area and any buildings of note were pointed out and their names explained. For example a side street pub we passed called The Pilgrim Inn was named so, because it was on the regular route taken by pilgrims walking to St Anne's Well, including King Henry VII who visited twice.

Sometimes we were traipsing though quite long grass and plant cover, at other times on well used woodland paths but mostly we were oblivious to the busy roads beyond and to either side of the Brook. The second photograph shows a magnificent but weary old Plane tree, standing by the brook in Nightingale Valley.

Busy on the rocks

Saturday Night

I've been busy! This weekend I have three field trips planned. Two are complete and the third will start at 10am on Sunday morning.

The first which was organised by the West of England Geologists' Association, was to a huge, now disused limestone quarry on the English side of the River Wye in Gloucestershire. Our leader Nick Chidlaw chose a bright and breezy clear day to take us to see some spectacular scenery and interesting rock types and stratigraphy.

The trip finished for me at about 5:30pm though some soldiered on to one more terrace above that on the second photo. I drove back to Bristol to have a short break before field trip number 2.

This evening, I met fellow members of the Avon Bat Group and some public visitors for a "Bat Walk" in Leigh Woods to the west of the River Avon at Bristol. There was a good mix of people, adults and enthusiastic children, enjoying a sometimes led by torchlight walk through the woods. Several bats, mostly Common and Soprano Pipistrelles were seen and heard on Bat Detectors and there was a possible sighting of a Serotine Bat flying low in one of the clearings. It is still a bit early in the season for bats and this was the first organised walk, but the Bat Detectors where chirruping away with bat sound. By the time of the July walk there will be many more flying, though of course dusk will be much later. On our way back there were great views over Bristol by night and of the cresent moon, accompanied closely by the cresent planet Venus. Sadly no camer and tripod at the time!

Tomorrow - another trip - this time another Bristol Living Rivers Project walk this time down the Brislington Brook. - I will write on that after the event I hope!

Wine, women and song!

http://www.stgeorgesbristol.co.uk/event.php?pid=164

Yesterday I really enjoyed the concert at St George's Bristol where Gretchen Peters (above), Suzy Boggus and Matraca Berg were peforming their first booking of the latest UK tour. The wonderful accoustics of the former church, together with three wonderful singer-songwriters and an appreciative audience resulted in a great evening. These Nashville ladies were clearly enjoying themselves and recieved a well deserved standing ovation at the end.

My Antarctic Photo of the Day

The weather has been awful this weekend. Lots of rain, so the farmers will be happier but not so good for getting out into the countryside. So back to South Georgia! - King Penquins en garde!

Plea to Japan

I have said it before and no doubt I will need to say it again, but I would like to voice my concern about the future of whale conservation. In a few day's time Japan will once again try and get enough support from other members of the International Whaling Commission in order to rescind the 25 year old moratorium on commercial whaling. The IWC are meeting in Anchorage, Alaska this month and concern is mounting. The moratorium has been openly flouted as this photo shows only too graphically.

The whale meat trade in the far east is in my opinion totally indefensible, Japanese Kobe beef is wonderful, as is beef from many other countries including my own and like it or not, cattle are farmed sustainably for this purpose. But whales are still an unsustainable resource and though there has been some recovery, many species are still endangered and will be more so if commercial whaling resumes. I have been to watch whales, and have been privileged to see them enjoying the freedom of the oceans on several occasions. There is income to be derived from all the tourists who want to see the whales and I urge Japan and all the other whaling Nations to think about converting their whale catching and harpooning ships to scrap and concentrating on the world benefit of seeing and photographing whales for generations to come.

Benighted Benin

http://www.plan-uk.org/newsroom/latestnews/slavetrade/childslaves/

Here in Bristol this year we are celebrating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. There are fascinating exhibitions and linked events here, but in far away West Africa slavery still exists. Evil people are still carrying on exploiting children as young as five years old. Plan UK have just sent me their latest e-magazine and it makes chilling reading as nothing seems to be able to be done to stop the traffickers, such is the criminal power that they wield as soon as the authorities try to move in. Well done Plan for bringing it to my attention - I am powerless to do anything, but at least I can tell my friends. This little Benin slave girl Afi is just 9 years old.