As the evening shadows fall

On Tuesday, <3 and I returned from a week in Ireland with the inlaws, during which we were taken for a few days among the mountains and coastlines of County Donegal. I was definitely bitten by the breathtaking beauty of the area (not to mention the midges) and hope to return and spend a more leisurely time smelling the proverbial coffee.

One day's excursion, however, took us across the border to Northern Ireland, where we visited the Giant's Causeway (a spectacular place to simply sit and watch the sea) and the Bushmills distillery (with its fine guided tours and whiskey sampling). On the way back, the F-in-L took us for a walk around the city of (London)Derry.

According to F-in-L, the city is historically more correctly simply Derry, but the county could be correctly referred to as Londonderry, but he believes this is less of a sectarian issue than I had assumed. Our walk around the city included the still-intact walls, still containing watch towers left over from the euphemistically named "troubles". Just outside the walls lies the Fountain, a run-down loyalist area decorated with union flags and red, white and blue painted curbstones. Visible from the walls was a well-painted graffito, reading "LONDONDERRY WEST BANK LOYALISTS STILL UNDER SIEGE NO SURRENDER".

On the other side of the city centre lies the republican Bogside, where the gable end of a bombed out building has been tidied up and painted with the slogan, "YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY". This is the area where the Bloody Sunday shootings took place in 1972 and many of the beautifully painted murals on the houses in the area commemorate this and other incidents from the conflict through the 70's and 80's.

It is clear that there is still a lot of anger and hate remaining in Derry, a city sorely in need of reconciliation. But there is hope. One of the houses in Bogside is decorated with a mural showing a rainbow coloured chequer pattern, across which is flying a stylised white dove. That, above all else that I saw, makes me think that perhaps peace is on its way.

Twoiversary

Two years ago today I married <3. Life is good.

MP and ID

A week and a half ago I made use of WriteToThem.com to contact my MP, Ed Vaizey regarding my opposition to the government's identity card legislation currently going through parliament. To sum up: it's too expensive; the technology is not reliable enough; given the past record of large, public IT projects it will be massively over budget, very late and fail to deliver core functionality; it won't have any significant effect on benefits fraud, terrorism, etc. (in fact, it may make life easier for terrorists and organised criminals, who now have only one document to forge or otherwise work around), and there are massive civil liberties concerns. Vaizey already opposes the ID card bill on similar grounds, but I figured it was worth giving him some support in this.

I was pleased to receive a short email from Mr. Vaizey the next day, pledging to continue to oppose the bill and drawing my attention to a letter (which he had written) on the subject in that week's local paper.

I was even more pleased when Saturday's post brought me a proper letter, thanking me for my thoughts, talking about his position on ID cards and enclosing a copy of Hansard for the day of the ID Card Bill's second reading debate. Not bad.

Bastards

I was in a meeting in Cambridge yesterday when I heard. We had travelled by train, via London, to the meeting, so there was no chance of returning home by the same route. However, as is usual in such situations, people pull together and sort things out -- another group at the meeting had come by minibus and had enough spaces to give our group a lift for most of the distance. Many others were not so lucky. I am still awaiting news of a colleague who left the meeting early, and would have been due to reach London shortly after the explosions. His journey was probably not a good one.

Local Veg For Local People

Yesterday, <3 and I had the lowest food-mile meal we have had for a very long time (possibly ever) -- home grown spuds, carrots and courgettes, and chops from a farm about 5 miles down the road. The only bits of the main course that had come from further afield were the salt and pepper, and a knob of butter. Well chuffed.

Soft Fruit

Last night <3 and I had raspberries from our own garden. There were only enough for three each, and they were somewhat on the small side, but beautifully ripened by the recent sun and possibly the best raspberries I've had -- though that is obviously coloured by the romance of being home grown and shared with the one I love.

Desperately Seeking Cosmos

It's great when something interesting and innovative gets done, and the launch of Cosmos 1 yesterday fit that profile, in spades, being a solar sail powered spacecraft, launched from a Russian submarine in a converted ICBM. Neat. The problem was that something went wrong, and control lost contact with the craft shortly after launch.

Signals have since been picked up from the craft, but they are weak -- it sounds like Cosmos 1 is in orbit, but the wrong orbit, and the search is on to find it and see if the mission can be rescued. There's a BBC story, and the latest news can be had from the official Cosmos 1 blog.

Biological Warfare

We have a pair of young apple trees in our garden, planted by way of celebration the day after we received the keys to the house. I've wanted my own orchard for years, so this seemed a perfect time to do something about one of my ambitions.

So a few months later, we have baby apples growing and one of the trees had started to develop a bit of a blackfly problem. For the last week or so I have been doing battle with a spritzer full of washing up water, which is meant to be useful in such cases, though I have a feeling that our dolphin friendly, ozone-hole-repairing washing-up liquid might be a bit too mellow and herbal to do the job.

Anyway, yesterday evening I counted no less than five ladybirds on this tiny tree, happily chowing down on aphids. I think from here on I'll lay off on the detergent and let the predators do their thing. Go team!

Nine Go Mad In Wiltshire

For something like 20 years public access to Stonehenge, one of Britains most famous ancient monuments, has been severely restricted due to fears of erosion, vandalism, and the possibility that someone might accidentally discover its true purpose and open a portal to another dimension and allow Unspeakable Horrors (TM) to conquer Wiltshire. Some more enlightened souls believe this may have already happened. Anyway, public access is now limited to being able to wander around a footpath a respectful distance from the stones themselves and visits by appointment only for restricted numbers of people at dawn and dusk, which do in fact allow you full access (but no climbing). Permission to conduct rituals, play drums, or dance naked are by special arrangement only.

A friend had arranged for a group of us to go to the dawn session yesterday. Of course, this being June, dawn was somewhat early and we left home shortly after three in order to allow plenty of time for the trip.

The whole trip was, I think, well worthwhile although unfortunately the sky was fairly cloudy and a thick fog had set in and shrouded Salisbury Plain so that the horizon could not be seen. Hence no dawn could really be seen. Pity.

I would be remiss, however, if I failed to confess to my own little part in the procedings when I saw a glimmer of light emerging over the brow of a fog-blurred hill. I was looking at the light for some time before concluding that it was not, in fact, the sun: the actual horizon (initially hidden by the fog) was somewhat higher than the light, the light did not change in size or position, and a quick reality check revealed that the light was actually in the carpark and not anywhere near the "heel stone", which actually marks the point of sunrise as viewed from the centre of the stones at the summer solstice.

Ho hum.

Rhubarb Rhubarb!

I got into a little bit of trouble the other day when <3 arrived home with a big bag full of rhubarb, kindly provided by some friends who are having a bit of a glut at the moment. Based on the conveniently appropriate quantity of said vegetable and the news that "there's more where that came from" I used it up as the basis for a batch of wine.

Of course, <3 had in mind a rhubarb crumble with custard, so I got a bit of a stern look when she returned home.

Luckily, a couple of days later, my sister and her family came visiting, bearing their own rhubarb, so the crumble was a possibility once more -- and very nice it was too. Now I'm looking forward to the wine, though that'll take a few months before it is ready. Our own rhubarb crop is starting to look reasonably healthy too, though we don't want to crop it too heavily this year as it is still a very young plant.