Hedjogs do apparently have tails, but they are short and hidden under their spines, so they probably do not chase them.
This week has felt a lot like tail-chasing though, and that there are an awful lot of things I should be doing or would rather be doing instead of the things that I was obliged to be preoccupied with.
Still, at last it ringeth to evensong, more or less.
Polar bears are back in Britain, though, to be moderately reassuring, this is in wildlife parks and zoos. I still wonder a bit, given that polar bears, unlike European bison, have never, or not for many aeons, been native to this part of the world (though even the bison had been not around for several thousand years) even before getting on to 'world's largest land carnivore' aspect.
What are native to this land, and under threat, are a more modest and shy species: Hedgehogs ‘near threatened’ on red list after 30% decline over past decade:
There is still a chance to halt the decline of the western European hedgehog, and we must aim to prevent any further worsening of status.” The Mammal Society is calling for people to look after hedgehogs by gardening in a wildlife-friendly way. This includes leaving small gaps in fences to allow hedgehog movement between gardens, not using pesticides and creating shelter with log piles or hedgehog houses. One in four UK mammal species are threatened with extinction, and many others are in decline.
TIL that there are WOMBATTS in the UK - there is a Southern Hairy Nosed at Longleat Safari Park and a pair of what appear to be Common (Oy! Ooo are you callin' common?) Wombats at Hamerton Zoo Park in Cambridgeshire.
The hedgehog was actually found under a seat on a train going from Weybridge to Waterloo a fortnight before Christmas:
Hedgehog found on train taken in by rail employee as sanctuary full.
[T]here was "no room at the sanctuary inn this Christmas," South Western Railway said.
(I'm now trying to envisage how on earth a hedgehog would contrive to get into a train carriage in the first place.)
We note at the foot of that article links to further reports relating to animals + trains, but no mention of the Giant Tortoise who caused an accident on the Norwich to Stansted line a couple of years ago.
The weird taskbar thing that was happening on my desktop seems to have remedied itself yay.
Did I ever mention that my GP surgery notified me that they were scheduling the next round of boosters + flu shots? - admittedly it turned out that these were several weeks ahead, but I am now scheduled at least.
A young person solicited my advice on their research and came back to my response with effusive gratitude.
However -
Editor of volume to which I am contributing chapter I have already writ substantial portion of responded to my email saying that I was not going to make it by original deadline (which I was assured was not at all hard), but within a few weeks probably, with what I consider rather belated sending of editorial guidelines. Which include reference system I do not like at all and which means unpicking referencing I have already done, moan, groan.
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In other news: save the hedgehog by giving them additional Protected Wildlife Status.
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The people in Cheshire who will tell you they 'know' the Earth is flat: I had to play that video of Flat Earther singing in a different browser and honestly, it is not much improvement over the hymn of the real (rather than spoof) Flat Earthers in Kipling's 'The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat' - 'Flat, and Flat for ever more'.
We are delighted to see proposals for this new initiative: Birds, beavers and microparks: experts plan to rewild London: 'London will be “rewilded” with new nature reserves, pocket parks and a mass community movement to bring nature back to the capital, the Guardian can reveal'.
But even so, this is already the city in which hedgehogs are flourishing more than they do in rural parts, and where kestrels have long roosted in the vicinity of Oxford Circus and on various other high edifices about the metropolis.
It has long been a city interpenetrated by the countryside: okay, we no longer have cows driven to market and kept in town to supply the populace with milk, sheep grazing in Hyde Park, etc, and the drinking troughs erected for their benefit are now floral features.
Wildlife of London (mammalian) including the cetaceans which still (poor things) make their way into the polluted waters of the chartered Thames.
And the most common birds of London (includes those parakeets!) - note this does not include the various waterfowl (coot, heron, moorhens, etc) apart from mallards and gulls that one may find without any great effort.
There is something of a small, personal and perhaps entirely trivial pleasure in opening up the file of a review one is working on, thinking it needs a lot more work, and looking at it and realising that it's more nearly done than one supposed. Then tapping out a couple more paragraphs and deciding that, no, really, this is probably all that needs to be said, though I should leave it to marinate a bit before sending it off.
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I am not sure what this is - I am not sure there is not a certain schadenfreudey pleasure in seeing J Jones yet again revealing his id all over his art criticism (was a time when High Art even if it involved Nekkid Laydeez was at least supposed to invoke Highah Thortz and Feelingz than e.g. saucy postcards, but maybe that memo has been superceded?):
There’s nothing virginal about Hiffernan in Whistler’s 1862 icon Symphony in White, No 1. She stands above you confidently, and Whistler makes the supposedly modest dress suggest her nakedness underneath. That’s because she is standing on a bearskin rug whose soft fur leads your eyes to the rim of the dress, to picture her naked feet nestling in it – a traditional image of sensuality in sculpture that goes back to Renaissance images of the triumphant David with his foot in Goliath’s hair. The painting’s first audience may not have been prepared to imagine this[.]
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Possibly good news for hedgehogs, though not in the country, in the town: Survey reveals dramatic difference between state of urban and country populations, with rural numbers continuing to plummet:
the urban hedgehog seems to have stabilised and might even be starting to recover after having previously also been in freefall. So that’s a glimmer of hope.” The outlook for rural hedgehogs remains bleak, according to the report. While the east Midlands and east of England are home to some of the country’s largest population densities, they have also experienced significant declines, falling 74% and 35% respectively since 1994. In the last decade, the loss has been a third and a quarter of their respective hedgehog populations, according to the report. The mammals, which have been in Britain for at least half a million years, are primarily threatened by habitat loss and the accompanying lack of prey such as beetles and earthworms.***
Dept of AAARGH: point thahr, misst: 19 Things You Need If 'Read More' Is a Goal This Year: none of those things are books, and are using up budgetary resources that could, you know, be spent on BOOKS to read more.
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I was going here - ahem, WOT ABAHT THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN, EH? - What is ‘Gothic’? It’s more complicated than you think: Hidden in the architecture of some of the world’s most famous buildings is a cultural exchange between Europe and the Middle East. Was there no influence from Mogul monuments? - and, in a fascinating reverse act of cultural hybridisation, when I was traveling in those parts, I saw a significant number of public buildings in which Victorian Gothic and those roots had intertwined.
I am grateful for all of you, who light up my life.
I am also grateful for The Hedgehog Highway That Knits a Village Together:
Hedgehogs need space to create territories, forage and find mates. The compartmentalisation of land into private gardens is one of the causes of their disappearance from our landscape – they have declined by 90% since the second world war. More than 12,000 hedgehog holes have been created as part of the UK’s hedgehog highway network, and Kirtlington has one of the most creative routes on the map. Miniature ramps and staircases thread between gardens in this higgledy-piggledy place[.]
The story one usually encounters on these shores is that the hedgehog is a threatened and endangered native species: Hedgehogs are one of the nation’s favourite species, yet there’s been a worrying nationwide decline in hedgehog numbers over the last 25 years. The Regent’s Park is now the only central London Royal Park with a breeding population. Along with exhortations to link one's garden to the Hedgehog Highway.
However, it's a different story - as we might anticipate - for the hedgehogs introduced into New Zealand, which are a major eco-system problem:
New Zealand is a hedgehog paradise. Whereas in Europe they are hunted by pine martens, foxes and badgers, New Zealand’s hedgehogs have few predators. Unchecked by the food chain, they meander blissfully through forests and gardens, hoovering up an astonishing number of native creatures. With the exception of a few local bats, New Zealand has no native land-based mammals. Its bird population adapted to this state of affairs – some, like the Kiwi, are flightless, or nest on the ground. When stoats, cats, possums and rats were introduced, they wreaked havoc: crunching down rare insects, killing fresh-hatched chicks, and slurping the eggs of ground-nesting birds. Hedgehogs are also key culprits. “It’s increasingly coming to light how much damage they can do.”
....
They have long held a special place in the hearts of Pākehā New Zealanders, the ethnic group descended from European immigrants and colonists. Hedgehogs were introduced very deliberately, to remind settlers of the gardens of home. As imports ramped up, people began to lose track of their spiky charges – several escaped from a pigeon loft in Christchurch in the 1890s. They went forth, and multiplied. By 1916, historians write, the population in the wild was “extraordinarily abundant”.
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In the print edition of The Guardian, adjacent to that hedgehog story was another that struck me as something I would have expected to come across in the pages of Dorothy Dunnett, i.e., a saffron scam: Saffron gang accused of passing off Iranian spice as prized Spanish variety. Saffron is still srs bznz: 'selling for more than £5,000 a kilo'.
I see that 'feral hogs' are trending on Twitter, wtf, and am moved to link to the very tasty thing I did with wild boar that one time I found it in the local organic butchers.
Also the wild boar in the Forest of Dean - which it's argued are feral, rather than truly wild, being farm escapees.
But the hogs currently causing havoc in Europe are smaller, but VERY NOISY.
Yes, my dearios, literally, bonking hedgehogs.
Germans kept up at night by noisy igelsex (that’s hedgehog coupling)
[H]edgehogs are among the loudest nocturnal animals, competing with cicadas, frogs and the caridean snapping shrimp.
Hedgehogs are capable of making a range of sounds from a quiet snuffling to hissing, snarling, purring, whistling, clicking and even loud screaming, which is what sometimes gets them mistaken for excited or distressed humans.
According to a hedgehog expert at the veterinary faculty of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, “hedgehogs snarl loudly during the hours-long mating ritual and the males make the most noise”. To non-experts their noises are often indistinguishable from human ones.
The hedgehog mating ritual is a lengthy affair, known in German as Igelkarussell, or hedgehog carrousel, and takes place over an area of around 40 sq metres. Their most active period is between April and the beginning of September.
Dept of, Has Not Done the Reading: But far from bringing him godlike pleasure, his condition places him at a mournful distance from the rest of humanity, doomed to see everyone he loves age and die. Okay, I daresay the general tone of this is at some remove from Simone de Beauvoir's All Men Are Mortal, which, as I recall, it being some decades since I read it, for lo, it is a serious downer, ends with Our Immortal Protag alone with the Immortal Mouse upon which he first tested his alchemical preparation. Whereas this one seems to posit certain individuals Born That Way.
Also under this heading: David Garnett’s story “Lady into Fox” follows the same theme and was made into a film and a ballet, but we have the very strongest suspicion that the reviewer has not read the book, in which, as I recall, the lady turns into a real fox (but really, a ballet would have to present this anthropomorphically, no?), has a litter of cubs and does not turn back into a lady at the end. Beatrix Potter it ain't.
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Dept of, Let's just stop humming about bloody Lucy Jordan, shall we?
Now, at fortysomething, you have so many ideas about things you’d like to do. There is a yearning for a life not fully lived, a potential not realised.... you mourn a life wasted. At forty-something. Sigh.
Perhaps she should look at this: later (50s) life married woman: My message to other women is: you can start over in later life.
And this week's Blind Date couple - in their 40s - sound as if this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
***
Dept of, Following the Call of Wild:
Lynx could return to Britain this year after absence of 1,300 years
And are probably less dangerous than the harlequin ladybird: a ladybird nearly killed me.
It's those little things that'll get you: Untreatable gonorrhoea 'superbug' spreading around world, WHO warns.
A little feelgood for the end of this week:
A hedgehog's history of Britain
There are badgers in Kew Gardens!
Ginger says Let Yourself Go
Teenagers and social networking – it might actually be good for them:
New technologies always provoke generational panic, which usually has more to do with adult fears than with the lives of teenagers. In the 1930s, parents fretted that radio was gaining "an invincible hold of their children". In the 80s, the great danger was the Sony Walkman – producing the teenager who "throbs with orgasmic rhythms", as philosopher Allan Bloom claimed. When you look at today's digital activity, the facts are much more positive than you might expect.
Indeed, social scientists who study young people have found that their digital use can be inventive and even beneficial. This is true not just in terms of their social lives, but their education too. So if you use a ton of social media, do you become unable, or unwilling, to engage in face-to-face contact? The evidence suggests not. Research by Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Research Centre, a US thinktank, found that the most avid texters are also the kids most likely to spend time with friends in person. One form of socialising doesn't replace the other. It augments it.
Plus, it also indicates that 'social media' does not begin and end with FaceBook, which does not score highly in this research.
In other news:
Gladwell's manifesto for the underdog is flawed, argues David Runciman: in fact we note that some of his claims are open to the same objections as my perennial unfavourite, syphilis and genius. See also, claims that Dante had narcolepsy.
Was life really better in the good old days? asks Katharine Whitehorn:
I'm not saying that everything's marvellous these days, but as we struggle with all the new inconveniences we have, we can at least cheer ourselves up by remembering just how tiresome the olden days could be.
This is rather grim: There may be five million IVF success stories, but for many millions more women, the treatments have failed. So why do we never hear from them?: '77% of treatments fail.... a world of sleight of hand, massage and plain lying by omission in the world of fertility statistics.'
O, Country Diary, bless: A special delivery arrives beside our doorstep: a hedgehog dropping.
More rus in urbe: the wildlife of London (mammalian).
Okay, you have to trek out to Richmond to see stags at bay (there are deer in other London parks, but those tend to be in enclosures: at Richmond they roam free, which is why every year some nitwit sustains injury through trying to get a close-up of a rutting stag). There have also been sightings in some of the more wooded spots in outer boroughs
But the urban fox has been known to sun itself in my back garden.
Squirrels (grey) can be seen everywhere. So urban have they become that some years ago there were reports of their frantically digging up stashes of crack to feed their habit.
The town hedgehog, however, is reportedly in decline.
Watervoles (Ratty! How's Mole?) are to be found in some Wildlife Trust reserves.
Bats may be spotted in the Sydenham area.
Whales, however, are infrequent visitors. But dolphins, porpoises and seals are said to be moving further upriver, though still in the tidal portion.
However, no reports of feral wallabies in the metropolis.
Rus in urbe (I):
Regent's Park, or, as they apparently prefer to call it, The Regent's Park (hi, Prinny! how's Mrs Fitzherbert?): 'one of the few sites in central London where the Hedgehog is still found'.
(And not just in the London Zoo at the north end.)
It is lovely. I am not surprised a friend of mine who used to work at Bedford College, located actually within the park, was pissed off when the amalgamation with Royal Holloway meant a move to surburban Surrey however delightful its parkland.
I assume that it is at least partly because of its adjacence to Harley Street that it boasts two medical royal colleges, Physicians, and Obstetricians & Gynaecologists, but also perhaps due to its natural attractions.
I was once on a very boring training course in a building just off the Park, and went for a walk at lunchtime - I still remember the lift of the spirits turning off a dull hedge-lined gravel path into a walk of flowers, foliage, fountains, etc.
Two things of erinacine cuteness:
Cat mothering hedgehogs, awwwwwww.
Baby hedgehog trapped a crisp packet released after a three-and-a-half hour rescue involving six people. (We hedgehogs are embarrassed by fuss, and I think that is confirmed by wee 'Crispin''s expression.)
Henri, the existentialist cat, contemplates Halloween: None of these costumes are truly scary. No-one ever dresses as crippling self doubt.
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In other business. Apparently, word on the street, or at least in THE, is that with impending REF [research excellence framework] UK institutionz of Highah Learninz are going around madly poaching and headhunting top researchers.
Behold me in a state of considerable miff that no-one has ever offered me an attractive package of minimal hours and significant moolah to add my not inconsiderable research output to theirs.
(Yes, I know this Reeks of Rongness as a practice, but given my own somewhat peculiar relationship to academe, I feel my research record is a-going begging.)
Hedgehog jonesing for cilantro: simulataneously cute and disturbing:
Dept of Drumming Up Controversy:
J'Accuse! Elizabeth Gaskell's The Moorland Cottage (1850) Versus George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Get ready for academic feathers to fly! The former editor of The Gaskell Journal Jo Pryke has long suspected that one of
the greatest and most revered of nineteenth-century novelists
George Eliot may have - shock, horror - stolen the idea for her
celebrated semi-autobiographical novel The Mill on the Floss
(1860) from Elizabeth Gaskell's novella The Moorland Cottage (1850).
And now Jo is getting ready to set out her case: to an audience of Gaskell
and Eliot researchers, enthusiasts, students and academics.
....
Did Gaskell's 1850 tale of Maggie and Edward Browne's sibling woe provide the blueprint for Eliot's childhood epic of Maggie and Tom Tulliver
Plus, could you get away with this if the Gaskell story were not a fairly obscure piece? If someone riffs on a theme or plot that's in a well-known work it's influence or tribute or, possibly, band-wagoning: back in the Upper Palaeolithic when I was at university, was informed that the Esther Summerson narrative in Bleak House was Dickens capitalising on the recent popularity of first-person female narrators, like Jane Eyre.
Also, there is no property in plots, right? Taint wot u do, itz teh wai that u do it.
This is not the first instance I have encountered of someone not merely bigging up their own pet Victnovelist, but doing so by dissing Ms Evans. We think this is So Not On as a strategy.
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Dept of Academyk Hedjog: stopping in yesterday on account of Builderz, have now got a pretty solid draft of paper for the Berks done. Needs a fair amount of tweakery, and at the moment it's probably Too Long for a 20 minute panel slot, and I have to footnote. But I have something there that I can fiddle around with, yay.
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Dept of ToLToL incongruity: passing through Euston Square, there were a couple in wedding garb, handing out stuff. At first I thought this was some kind of Radical Protest, but as I got closer I saw they were wearing sashes saying Daily Mail. The WTF factor was ramped up as neither half of the couple was, shall we say, what one thinks of as DM demographic, neither being pinko-grey (hat-tip to E M Forster).
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Dept of Awww: hedgehog resists the papparazzi, go hedgehog!
From ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossedwires
1. COMMENT WITH A MYSTERIOUS COMMENT OF YOUR CHOICE.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Post the names of five fictional characters and your thoughts on each.
First up, Brush the Wandering Hedgehog from the Little Grey Rabbit books by Alison Uttley, about whom I have expatiated heretofore and whose likeness (by Margaret Tempest) features in my current default icon.
I couldn't choose between these two, because, really, they go together like going-together things: Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing, which is a (possibly pernicious) example of the 'they hate each other so really they're in lurrrve' trope that actually works. And how is awesome Beatrice in any way not awesome?
I did wonder about Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch, but since she changed her name once within the novel and is in prospect of changing it again (in both cases to names that Victorianists can spend many hours debating the correct pronunciation of), I decided to go with her uncle, Mr Brooke, who is a wonderful character study though, do admit, one would hate to live with him and he was hardly the man to provide adequate guardianship to his orphaned nieces. Brilliantly done by Robert Hardy in the TV version.
The entire Beetle family in Cold Comfort Farm: the patriarch Agony Beetle, his sensible and forthright wife (''Tes flying in the face of nature!' - 'All the same, it might be worth tryin'.') who is not from darkest Sussex, their daughter Merriam the hired girl at the farm, with her fatal habit of succumbing to seduction when the sukebind blooms, and her four offspring, who are being brought up to be a jazz-band in one o' they West End nightclubs.
And the very uncanonical Belinda in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (though Purcell clearly has a casual attitude to canonicity generally, with the witches in Dido and Aeneas and the numerous interpolations into A Midsummer Night's Dream, and let's just not go there with what he did with King Arthur). I was wondering: what happens to Belinda after Dido dies of grief following Aeneas's abandonment? She seems a sensible type (if perhaps failing to see what a bad idea Aeneas was as a lover for Dido), so I don't see her doing an Charmain-and-Iras act. Maybe she takes up the reigns of state in her competent hands? Maybe that was the plan? - Dido generally moping around was perhaps not the best thing for Carthage. I think there's a story there.
branchandroot