Shouldn’t running be easy? Humans have long legs which are an adaptation to enable us to run to chase prey or escape danger, so shouldn’t running be easy? But although I have been a runner since childhood and somehow need to do it, distance running has always been hard work: in fact I think that running up hill is one of the hardest forms of exercise. I have long suspected that people who become long-distance runners are mostly bad at ball games: after all, if exercise
Read more →I have always run, but we tend to seek ways of avoiding physical work, so why bother with exercise? One of humanity’s instinctive behaviours is to not make unnecessary physical effort. This behaviour probably comes down from when we were nomadic hunters, living had to mouth and needing to conserve what energy we had for the hunt. But this is no longer the case and so we keep inventing new ways to get things done while we can remain more or less at ease. Even the
Read more →This is part two of the story of my parents who lived through the 20th century and which I’m relating to highlight how life in Western Europe’s so much easier than it was then. The World is a troubled place, and humanity seems to like creating conflict, but where peace reigns, for most people life is a breeze in 2020 when compared to any previous era. The break-out of World War II in France. As the thirties rolled by, political tensions were growing
Read more →The World is a troubled place, and humanity seems to like creating conflict, but where peace reigns, for most people life is a breeze in 2020 when compared to any previous era: take the 20th century: When friends complain about missing a holiday or the restrictions of COVID lockdowns, I tend to wonder at how lucky we are in our part of the World. I am a ‘Boomer’, and when I think about what my parents went through in the 20th century, I realise that we
Read more →A little lecture that might be helpful in these pandemic times. (Sorry about the lack of pictures – had a problem with the technology (surprise! not.) A bacterium is a single-celled organism, first seen through an early microscope in the 17th century. Viruses were first proven to exist in the 1920s, but were only seen with development of powerful electron microscopes in the 1970s. Viruses are not cells, but complex molecules that include some genetic material which only becomes active when the virus comes in
Read more →And there we were, all breezing along and assuming we could do anything we liked, that the Planet Earth was only there to exploit and provide for whatever humanity wanted, when along comes ‘global heating’ and then Coronavirus! https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2671/long-term-warming-trend-continued-in-2017-nasa-noaa/ Governments, and people, around the World mostly managed to ignore the ‘climate crisis’ problem, although it’s tough on people in the countries who are at the nub end of hot weather and lack of rain, and islanders whose homes are being inundated, and locally, those
Read more →An exploration of the chalk springs and streams around Princes Risborough, below the northern scarp of the Chiltern Hills. I think it was Einstein who said “The more I learn, the more I realise how much I don’t know.” and since becoming Chairman of the Chiltern Society Rivers & Wetlands Group, I have been amazed by the number of aspects of our English landscapes that I was completely unaware of; until I actually looked. This came home to me once more on Saturday when I took
Read more →This is part 2 of my description of an exploration of the River Chess in Buckinghamshire, from its confluence with the River Colne at Rickmansworth to its head waters in Chesham in the Chiltern Hills. The first part explored the river as far as Latimer, up to which point it is a continuous medium-sized chalk stream, interrupted by a number of small weirs. However, upstream from the road bridge below the village of Latimer, the Chess has been
Read more →I have recently been elected Chairman of the Chiltern Society Rivers and Wetlands Group having been approached for the post, although I was reluctant as I felt it would take over my life, and I was right. However, the Chiltern chalk streams are very special – there are only a few hundred chalk streams in the entire World, and most of them are in Southern England, but in spite of their special nature, they suffer from over-exploitation and need a lot of help. If the term
Read more →I’m amazed to find that nearly a year has passed since my last bulletin, which is not what I intended, but I have been spending most of my ‘spare’ moments working on my forthcoming book, ‘Pennine Wildlife Habitats’. This is a major project and one that is very difficult to keep within realistic bounds as the topic is enormous. It was inspired by meeting Dr Tim Melling who lives in the Pennines and is a brilliant naturalist and wildlife photographer with an encyclopaedic knowledge of
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