Sunday's snaps

A couple of spots of out-of-season jelly lichen have turned up on our back patio, presumably helped along by the mild, damp weather. So it is still there, lurking underground, despite a very poor showing this spring.

On the downside, an annoying change has crept into Powerpoint whereby the bottom third of this slide was given a transparent overlay which I could not get rid of while in edit mode. But at least it did not appear in the saved slide, which is what has been included above. In which the half banana like object lower left is actually a leaf.

Bubbles in one of our micro-ponds. One supposes fermentation of dead leaves, again encouraged by the mild weather. Not to be confused with frogs' and newts' spawn which can give similar effects.

A hire bike which has strayed from what I had thought was its natural habitat in central London. However, digging down to reference 2, it seems that these particular bikes work in and around Kingston (including Chessington, which is where this bike was) and Sutton, as well as in London proper, to the north. And the penalty for not leaving the bike in a designated parking area is only a modest £1.50. While with the Bullingdon bike system which I use, it is park on a stand or else. Hundreds of pounds. Maybe I will get around to digging deeper, although I am a bit put off by batteries. The idea is to get some serious exercise.

Captured in Cox Lane, opposite the public house which used to be called the 'Port of Call', then the 'Maverick and then became a convenience store in the OneStop family. Now a convenience store in the Tesco family. Neither Bing nor Google seem to have more to say about the place. Probably built in the 1950's or 1960's, just about at last orders for chimneys, to service the new housing estates round about, so it is unlikely to be in Pesvner either.

Slightly let down by the Scottish National Library's map service, in that I have been unable to work out the date of this map. Guessing, some time in the 1940's or 1950's. The orange spot gives the approximate location, with what is now playing fields to the southeast of the railway (above) and industrial estate (below), still fields. Or at least open land.

And last but not least, back home, a couple of mushrooms at the southern end of the big compost heap, the one that the foxes dug into earlier in the year. Mushrooms looked rather bigger this morning, certainly big enough to eat, but I don't suppose that we will.

PS: as one-time Government records man, and knowing something of the problems there, I was interested to read at reference 3 this afternoon that social scientists, archivists and others are worrying about the possible loss of the Twitter archive if Motormouth Musk pulls the plug on Twitter. A huge slice of social history in an entirely new form. A treasure trove for historians of the early years of the new century. Irreplaceable. Unthinkable to lose it. Maybe UNESCO should give it World Heritage Status.

References

Reference 1: https://www.humanforest.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://www.humanforest.co.uk/locations.

Reference 3: Twitter’s potential collapse could wipe out vast records of recent human history: What happens when the world’s knowledge is held in a quasi-public square owned by a private company that could soon go out of business? - Chris Stokel-Walker, MIT Technology Review - 2022.