Glacial till

You'll find stones like this everywhere, ripped out of mountains by the ice sheets that covered this land, transported back and forth as they moved, and then deposited when they melted. Sometimes they are obviously very different than the stone around them -- granite in limestone country, for example. These are in Tuamgraney, County Clare.

Urban wildlife

In the shadow of London’s National Gallery and the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields lies Trafalgar Square, with bronze lions the size of our car. Now, moreover, they can be seen as intended; until a few years ago they were famously covered in pigeon poop. 

My college in Missouri had this problem when I went to school there; we students loved feeding the pigeons, but they had a tendency to exert the prerogative of flying animals. The college responded, as I recall, by setting out poisoned feed, killing not only the pigeons but, presumably, every other animal that ate the feed, and every animal that ate those animals. I don’t know what kind of poison they used, but I hope it was something that breaks down quickly in the soil once all those animals died. 

Londoners had a wiser solution, one that cut down on the pigeons and kept the remaining ones fit: hawks. When I passed by an excited crowd were gathered around a Mr. and Mrs. Hawk, who seemed to regard the human herd with nonchalance.

Away on business

 If anyone needs me, I'll be here for a few days.

Photo: Taken from across the River Thames.

Cards

I’ve been teaching The Girl card games, and was reminded how fundamental and commonplace cards were in our culture until the last few decades. For generations everyone played cards; men left the house to play poker with their mates, women played bridge with their neighbours, and workmen, sailors or train passengers played cards to pass the idle hours. 

A 1940 survey of residents in 24 American cities found that cards were Americans’ favourite pastime; 87 per cent of homes had a deck of cards, more than had radios or telephones. In his book Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam notes that trends in card playing followed other signs of social involvement – steady growth in the first three decades of the century, a slump during the Great Depression, and then explosive growth in the years after World War II. 

Perhaps the most amazing statistic: a 1961 survey found that one of every five adults was part of a regular bridge foursome. Just bridge, regularly.

My grandparents grew up playing cards around the kitchen table, with siblings in the evening and with cousins at family gatherings. The friendly competition smoothed the rough edges of family gatherings. I still see this in the pubs here, where locals gather in the pub in the evenings to play 42, but even here they are elderly; the young men are staring at the television. 

Today card games have become a rare and curious event; I know few games, and have trouble finding anyone who plays cards to teach me more. The decline has been even more precipitous because most games require multiple players, so once the number of able and willing players in an area declines past a certain critical mass, the game becomes effectively extinct. 

Still, I want to pass on what I know to The Girl, in the same way I want to pass on rhymes and folk songs, because they were popular for a reason, and we might return to a culture where people find them useful.  

Let’s say more of us lose our jobs, or see more power outages, or have less ability to drive around, or have to move in together. Let’s say more of us are cooped up together, with people we don’t know well, and need to pass the time. It will be a situation earlier generations would have taken in stride with a pocket deck.

Photo: Poker Game, courtesy of Wikicommons. 

Bluebells

Each spring here sees a remarkable sprouting of indigo across the woods: bluebells, which bloom profusely until the overhanging leaves grow back in full, and the forest floor grows dark again. Other places in the world see such an annual blossoming, but few have such uniformity.

As glaciers a mile deep retreated from Ireland and plants and animals migrated up the the exposed land -- tundra, then conifers, then the cold rainforest that remained until humans -- the sea flooded in, cutting off England from the continent and Ireland from England. So England wound up with fewer plants and animals than the continent, and Ireland even less. Surprising as it sounds, rabbits and fallow deer are not native to either island -- they were brought by Normans less than a millennia ago. Red deer and roe deer made it to England, but the latter never reached Ireland. Neither, of course, did snakes.

Plants did the same: only some of the Continent's variety worked its way across the warming land before an ocean rushed in. The bluebells were one of the ones that made it.