Biology in the 90s focused on concepts of organisms and competition for environmental resources. A better paradigm to understand ecosystems is as a community of organisms. Sometimes though, organisms are so inter-dependent it almost seems archaic to still view them as separate. Take yourself, for example, you’re made up of individual cells. Are you a community of organisms or are you one organism?
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Hedgehogs are adorable little creatures. I acknowledge that all of God’s creation deserves awe and respect and that it’s important to appreciate that every species has a valid role to play in our ecosystem. But hedgehogs, well, they’re lovely aren’t they? Sadly they’re endangered in the UK so I set about to help out some of these prickly little friends.
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Back in 2019, I needed a new bed. My requirements – cheap, simple, sturdy, solid wood and untreated: Research led me to the Heavy Duty bed frame from strictly beds. The untreated part was because I didn’t know what bedside tables I wanted at the time so I planned to treat the bed to match the bedside tables.
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After over a decade of owning a digital SLR camera and taking nearly a hundred thousand photos, I finally entered a photography competition for the first time.
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When I was twelve in secondary school, we had to draw fish in art class. I remember starting to draw the fish (below) and the art teacher, Mrs Johnson, got angry with me. “Do you call that a fish!” she shouted (she was quite a shouty teacher) and then held my pencil drawing up to the rest of the class and said “James Hatton thinks this is a fish – it looks nothing like a fish.”
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It’s been a couple of weeks since gathering the raw materials and constructing the wreath from Willow in part 1 of this two-part post. The completion of the wreath was a joint effort with the help of my Dad.
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I saw a few attractive Waitrose winter wreaths a couple of weeks back and decided to make one using, where possible, naturally scavanged materials. I’d wandered around a few places over the last forthnight but had not felt motivated to walk around with a shopping bag full of twigs. With a weekend staying in Godalming, I decided to go equipped on an afternoon walk with a friend, Jen, in search of the fundametal ingredient, willow.
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I grew up in Derbyshire before I left for University but it was only around my mid-twenties that I started to appreciate just how incredibly picturesque my home is. I must have driven past the brown signs directing visitors to Hardwick Hall thousands of times without thought of visiting. (Although my parents are convinced I had been before.) The recent gift of a National Trust membership, and having explored Surrey’s sites, motivated me to take a peek.
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Tonight’s thunder and lightning is awesome. I haven’t heard thunder like this since South America, five years ago. I recorded the the thunder on a Zoom H2N mic. I deleted chunks of inactivity to shorten the sequence to three minutes in the open source Audacity (a free audio editor).
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I made a really cool ‘photo mosaic’ – this is basically a large image made up of lots of other images. You have to decide on the master photo and then choose all the other photos. There’s a few software packages that will do this but I opted from AndreaMosaic (it’s free). The result is below – you may need to squint your eyes to see the overall image.
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