Don't let them kill buzzards

It's not often I'm so outraged at government policy that I'm compelled to write to my MP, but this week is one such time.
The government (DEFRA) is proposing to control the numbers of buzzards by destroying nests and removing the bird from shooting estates and has set aside £400,000 for the purpose.
The reason is that buzzards kill pheasants.
The government is pretty comfortable with the idea of killing pheasants, it just wants rich people with shotguns to do it rather than a native British raptor.
The fact that more pheasants are killed by cars than buzzards doesn't mean cars are to be banned, of course. I'd sooner ban pheasants as the stupid birds have twice thrown themselves in front of my car and the last time it cost me £75 in new plastic bits for my bumper.
Pheasants of course, are non-native birds. They were introduced for shooting and around 40 million are released into the countryside every year and people pay to kill them. As Times writer Simon Barnes says: "never has any living species prospered more because of its ability to die."
Well chickens probably have and cows, pigs ... but I take his point.
I was telling Margaret the story on the way back from Whittlesey this morning (a lovely sunny morning) and right on cue, we spotted a buzzard and then a second, circling above the fields.
I've only seen them in the fens in the last two or three years and I'm delighted that they've made a re-appearance. They are now quite common. I'll be furious to find out that their numbers are being restricted in order to sustain pheasant shooting.
I'm writing to my MP and I'd urge anyone else who reads this to do the same.
For more information see: http://www.rspb.org.uk/news/314516-rspb-stunned-by-defra-plan-to-imprison-buzzards
Footnote: I am pleased to say that the government has now abandoned plans to trap buzzards and destroy nests. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/30/buzzard-trapping-plan-abandoned-uturn.
However, there are still plans to study the effect that buzzards have on game birds, so I think there may still be plans to bring it back with some more "science" attached.

Welcome to the family

I have not had a good long session on my family history for quite a while, but I have been pottering and every now and then I get lucky.
One such occasion was an e-mail from a fellow researcher, who was looking into her mother's family in the Market Harborough area. She had rubbed up against my tree and she thought that I'd like to see some research she'd done a little while ago. She had thought that Margaret's grandfather Tye's family were related to her, but hadn't been able to discover a definite connection.
That was a shame, but her research did confirm that William Tye (Margaret's grandfather) had a sister and a brother. I had suspected as much from a workhouse record, but his brother had been listed there as 17 instead of seven.
I also have also discovered his parents names - William Tye and Abigail Wilson. William was a labourer, the son of a labourer, and Abigail's father, who came from Northamptonshire, was also a labourer. William married at 27 and Abigail was 20 (and five months pregnant - unless her first child was born at 16 weeks, and lived). It seems William may have died aged around 34 (or gone away) because the children were all in Market Harborough Union Workhouse at 7, 5 and 3. Abigail had another child later, although no marriage has been discovered and there is no father on the birth certificate.
It's interesting stuff and you get a flavour of how hard and different their lives would have been. Hard manual work, little money, no consumer demands except perhaps some new clothes from time to time. Their pleasures would have been more simple - sex (certainly, judging by the prolific number of children), alcohol, family, a sunset, flowers, a good meal.

William Tye - chin, brow and mouth
are seen in the family to this day

I have a couple of pictures of William and he interests me because he has a brow and mouth that is prominent in Margaret's family. Tom shares some of his features and Margaret's brother Graham does too. Family names are held in remembrance throughout the tree, and an example is William's sister Eleanor (also spelled Elinor in some documents) who died aged 18. William called his first child Eleanor (Margaret's Aunt Nellie and a favourite sister of her mother). Margaret's mum also has a sister Elizabeth, who died in 1946, and Margaret would have been called Elizabeth if she hadn't been born in Coronation year (her mother didn't want people to think she was being called after the new Queen). The honour went instead to her youngest sister.
Another few branches and twigs complete. It's amazing how much more we know than we did this time last year when Margaret could not name her grandparents. We've discovered Dilkes, Wilkes, Robinsons, Wilsons; a half-brother she didn't know she had, mine disasters and many sad stories. There's a lot more to do - yet another project for retirement.

Wet roads and little lean angles

I mentioned my motorcycle and the fact that since I got it, it has hardly stopped raining. I bought a BMW R1200ST, described as a sports tourer. It's a traditional BMW air-cooled flat twin and is pretty modern, being made in 2005 (at least 40 years more modern than any of my other machines). 
It has the usual BMW comforts, including heated grips and ABS, and it came with panniers which are big enough to take a full-face helmet pretty easily. The panniers on the GS I had wouldn't take very much at all as one was restricted to make room for the high-rise exhaust and the other would only just take a lid.
I have missed having a motorcycle and I only really sold my last one because I wasn't getting an opportunity to ride it - it was sitting in the garage for months on end without turning a wheel. Now I am working in London, I'm able to justify owning a modern bike because I can ride it to and from the station; it gives us an alternative to the car and it will save on transport (fuel) costs (it's doing about 48mpg, which isn't bad on fairly short runs from cold). In spite of the weather, it's been good to be back on two wheels and on the couple of occasions when the roads have been dry it's been good to get it cranked over a little.
There are a few small points. The rear tyre is a little squared off and I should get that replaced sometime, although I'm loathe to do so until I get the tread worn down a bit more. The biggest niggle has been that the gear sensor (sitting at the back of the engine, has been playing up in the wet, so the bike sometimes hasn't known which gear it is in. That doesn't affect you changing gears, but it does mean that the bike thinks it's in second gear when it's in neutral and the safety device won't let you start the engine. It's been solved by putting it into first gear, so the bike thinks it's in neutral, pulling the clutch in and starting.
If you go onto BMW internet forums, this is a common fault with the R1200 series. It seems that water gets into the sensor and throws it out. The solution is a new sensor. I took it to Balderston's and they checked it but couldn't find a fault. They cleaned the sensor and adjusted the gear linkage and, touch wood, it's been fine since.
As soon as the weather is nice enough, I'll be getting some photos taken and uploaded.

Hard work in the garden

It has been frantically busy at work these past few weeks, so much so that I have been bringing home my work laptop to catch up with e-mails on the train. My poor old diary, as a result, has been somewhat neglected. So here's a rare chance to catch up - what's been happening?
This year saw the wettest April for more than 100 years. The day after a drought was declared (and I bought a motorcycle), it started raining and pretty much didn't stop right through April and into May. The start of May was also quite cold.
In the garden, the grass is growing strongly and the lawn, which Sam and I spent some time repairing last autumn, is now looking pretty good. Only at the corners top and bottom where Holly charges on and off, are there a couple of bare patches. I might just leave those or, if they get worse, I'll put some wire netting across and re-seed them.
Apart from grass, other things have been struggling. I have germinated some seeds - sweet peas, nasturtiums and some others bits and pieces, but it has been hit and miss. Chinese lanterns didn't come up at all, radish only germinated at a rate of 25 per cent and those which did come through were gobbled up by slugs. My cosmos which I was delighted to see come through very quickly, then just sat there and turned yellow. I couldn't even blame Margaret for over-watering (my usual excuse if things don't turn out, because she's not watered anything all month.
The worse thing has been that I've not really been able to get into the garden for more than a few hours and I've been able to do virtually no weeding. What nice days we've had have been during the week when I've been sat in an office. I have got the hanging baskets done; I managed to repair the wicker baskets from last year and will get at least one more season from them. They've been stocked with fairly cheap plants from the florist in Whittlesey. The woman in charge is a right grump, but the plants are really cheap, so we've been buying them in dribs and drabs on a Saturday morning. I've probably managed to spend less than £50 on plants for pots and baskets, which is pretty good going.

White anemone - Pauline bought us these
for looking after Gremlin

This weekend is typical of how it's been. It was really cold both days with a brisk northerly wind and fine misty rain blowing across first thing. The ground is cold and wet and compacted where I've been unable to work it. I went out in the afternoon, but it was really hard to get going, so instead of weeding, I was pottering about without any great enthusiasm. I planted up a couple of pots and tidied up the border at the end of the patio near the house. I've put a couple of pots in the border to make a feature at the end where you enter the patio from the house. Gravel and Holly have destroyed every plant that's ever been there. It's a popular area for them to sniff under my sister's fence and try to spot cats, so hopefully this will deter them. It wasn't pleasant working and I soon got distracted, lit the chiminea and sat in front of it with a gin & tonic. 

Aquilegia from Chelsea - these have
been really spectacular

On Sunday, it was even worse. I did manage to sort out the border under the conifers, but there were loads of weeds (particularly young elderberry seedlings, which have obviously been carried by birds eating the berries then sitting in the conifers and taking a dump). When I started on the big border, it was miserable - lots of weeds, but the ground was hard and nothing was coming out easily. Crocus and narcissi leaves have not yet shrivelled and there were lots of slugs everywhere. There were also lots of small, prickly twigs from the small berberis atropurpurea nana, which I had trimmed in the autumn. I don't like to weed wearing gloves, but my fingers were getting pricked to death.
There have been some successes. This year, we have a policy of growing plants which will attract insects into the garden, in other words, those which provide nectar to pollinators. The idea is to fill the border with those and restrict the begonias and geraniums (which do provide amazing splashes of colour) into features by planting them in pots. That will enable us to have colour in patches around the garden all summer, but also some plants which, we hope, will encourage butterfies and bees (and all the other insects which depend upon nectar). The pots have been planted up and look good. In the borders, I have planted single dahlias, cosmos, nasturiums, cornflower, night-scented stock, anemones, lobelia, alyssum, rudbekia, delphiniums, hollyhock, lupins and (the success story of the spring) Margaret's aquilegia from last year's Chelsea flower show. Unfortunately, the mixed colours have turned out to be all the same - blue with a white centre - but they have been (and are at present) really spectacular.
This week, the weather is set to turn much warmer, so I'm hoping my seeds will pick up and some of the flowers (like the clematis and alliums) which have been in bud for a long time, will break out into colour.
You can see four photographs taken each month from four points in the garden in the blog posting: My Garden Through The Seasons. The pictures are also on Flickr in a folder of the same name.

Bidens Golden Flame - we have these in a few pots
and baskets this year.

Good old geum - we just have the common orange one
but they are very pretty

Aquilegia from Chelsea

On the eve of this year's Chelsea Flower Show, the aquilegia seeds that Margaret bought last year have grown into healthy plants and are now coming into flower. Here's a picture (from Margaret's phone) of the first bloom.

Cosy Dog

Gravel had a muddy walk across the fen to Knarr Fen Road. He was so dirty, he had to have a bath, but was shivering afterwards, so Margaret wrapped him up.

Kick starting the past

I know this is supposed to be a diary (and therefore current) but back in 2010, I went to a riding day in Arborfield near Reading with the Vintage Motorcycle Club. This is an adaptation of an article I wrote for PA Motoring. Tom (my son) came along and took the pictures. It was a very wet day!

Riding vintage bikes is a shock to the system for anyone used to modern machinery. My expectations were lowered by the fact I'd ridden 1960s British bikes, but it's amazining how things have come on and, yet, in other ways, a bike is a bike ...

My BMW GS has twin, 320mm ventilated front disc brakes with electronic ABS and power assistance. A finger on the lever is all you needed to trigger massive stopping power, yet the machine I’m sitting on at the start of the riding day has rubber brake blocks rubbing on the wheel rim. They are operated by rod and lever like the brakes on my first bicycle and ABS is meaningless – the chances of me locking the front wheel are not high.

That’s just one difference between a motorcycle made in 1914 and one built more than 90 years later. The Vintage Motor Cycle Club holds a number of  riding events where members bring along their cherished machines and let soft modern bikers like me ride them. This one's at Arborfield army base, near Reading, which is quite interesting as Margaret's youngest brother Norman was based here for basic training when he joined the army.

The events are important for the VMCC – there are around three a year – and they help to attract new blood to the club, younger bikers who might be tempted off their Yamahas and Hondas and onto an Ariel or an AJS. It's important that people stay interested in old bikes in order to keep them running and get them out on the road, even if it's just for a few days every year.

Some of the bikes at the day are worth big bucks, like the 1933 Brough Superior owned by Hugh Buttle from Malmsbury, Wilts. He says it’s valued around £35,000 (but I think he was being a little shy - they’ve gone for much more than that at auction recently) and those high prices, while good news for collectors, are not so welcome for enthusiasts like Hugh and VMCC official Vic Blake.

The Brough Superior club has had to take pretty drastic action and now operates a loan bike scheme for members who can’t afford one of their own. Vic agrees that many bikes are too expensive and out of reach of enthusiasts. “There are some crazy prices, but it is still possible to pick up a nice machine for around £4,000. That’s what we hope people here will do.”

Some of the bikes are absolutely pristine restoration projects, like the 1914 Wolf with the block brakes, and others look their age – all 80 years and more.

1912 Wolf - made in Wolverhampton

All of them are absolutely fascinating pieces of engineering – two strokes with hand-pumped oil injection, four-stroke singles with exposed valve gear, girder forks, hand gear-change, lever throttle, advance and retard levers, chokes, ticklers, valve-lifters and kick starts. 

I chose one of the less shiny ones for my first taste of vintage riding. It was a 1927 Sunbeam and my first job is to kick-start it. My BMW starts at the push of a button and I’m a bit put out if it doesn’t fire immediately. It’s very convenient, but there’s no skill required, no artistry.

Now I’m being introduced to ignition retard and valve lifters and working out where the piston is. Actually, it’s not that hard – on the compression stroke you could jump up and down on the kick start and not shift it. Get to that point; use the valve lifter to ease the piston past top dead centre and give it a good kick. Like my BMW, it starts first time.

A lever throttle is a new experience to me, as is the hand-operated gear change (to say nothing of the foot brake being on the left-hand side). After a few scary moments when I moved the lever throttle the wrong way, things settle into a logical pattern. I wouldn’t want to ride this bike through central London, but pottering around the countryside would be rather pleasant on a warm Sunday.

Having delivered the Sunbeam back intact, I wound the clock back 13 years to try that Wolf. This machine, although almost 100 years old, has seen little use. It was bought in 1914 and its owner was killed in the First World War after riding it for just a couple of months. When he went to war, he stored it in a cellar and it was forgotten, bricked up, the house demolished and the cellar and bike covered with tarmac for a car park. It was uncovered after almost 90 years only when the site was being redeveloped.

Top box and panniers 1912 style - this is the Wolf

No ABS on these Wolf brakes 

Wolf motorcycles were made in Wolverhampton and like many motorcycle factories, its bread and butter was making bicycles. That’s pretty obvious looking at the frame and brakes, but power comes from a hefty two-stroke engine and belt drive.

It was incredibly smooth. Not fast, but fast isn’t a word you want to hear with these brakes. It’s an amazing piece of engineering and craftwork (there’s a beautiful woven basket on the back) and it’s been game enough to finish the last four London to Brighton runs.

One thing these bikes do is touch the past in a manner that it’s impossible in other ways. When I got my first motorbike in 1969, my grandfather told me about his belt-drive Triumph. I'd never heard of a belt-driven motorcycle and when Grand-dad said it was leather, I thought he was going gaga. He said he'd ridden it to Liverpool and it had been raining and every time he came to a hill the belt was slipping so much he had to get off and push it. Now here I am riding a very similar machine (sorry for doubting your memory Grand-dad); and here's the thing, by getting onto a 1914 Wolf I'm able to have much the  same experience my grandfather had when he was a young man. He'd have been about the same age as the chap who bought the Wolf and was killed in the First World War. My grandfather was medically unfit due to high blood pressure - a potentially fatal condition which probably saved his life.

The last bike I rode was the R1 of its day. The Sunbeam Model 9 just about cleaned up in 1929. It won the Isle of Man TT setting a lap record of 74mph; won the French, German, Austrian and Hungarian GPs, the Italian TT and set a lap record of 94mph in the GP of nations at Monza. If Valentino Rossi had been around in 1929, this is what he’d have been riding.

The Sunbeam is a 500cc single that’s much more like modern bikes in that it has a twistgrip throttle and fuel tank that sits between your knees unlike the flat tanks slung under the frame of older machines. It still has a hand change and only three gears. But it sounds superb and pulls like a tractor.

:: Vintage motorcycles are those made between 1915 and 1930; bikes made up to 1914 are veterans and those made between 1930 and 1945 are post-vintage. After 1945, it’s less formal and all kinds of bikes are called classics. The VMCC is very relaxed about more “modern” machines – anything over 25 years old can join in their rallies and events.

:: The Vintage Motor Cycle Club has 16,500 members and you don’t need to own a vintage motorcycle, or any motorcycle come to that, to be a member. More details on www.vmcc.net

:: A Brough Superior SS100 was sold by Bonhams for £158,000 in April 2010. Alternatively, eBay has listed a 1927 Triumph Model W for £4,650 and a 1939 BSA M20 for £3,999 in the same month.

Getting instruction from an owner before
my ride. Grey beards are compulsory
in the VMCC

Too many levers! Clutch, valve
lifter, advance/retard

An unrestored, but cared for Sunbeam (above and
below). Wonderful pieces of simple engineering

Sunbeam girder forks

Hand change gears on 1920s Sunbeam

Hand gear change and exposed valve gear on 1920s Sunbeam

Wolf badge - looks more like an Alsation! It was made
in Wolverhampton

See other posts:

Ian Hutchinson - Closer to the Edge

I attend a speed-awareness course

How grand prix racing has changed

Mad Sunday T-shirts banned

Trip to the TT 2012

The joys of motorcycling

A rude awakening

Working in London, I shouldn't be shocked by rudeness, but the perceived anonymity of the internet does seem to bring out the worst in some people. Nowhere is rudeness more apparent than the good old internet forum or comment thread.


Look at any news website that allows readers to comment on articles and you'll find the threads full of bile and invective. Even an innocent comment can generate a massive negative response that could turn nasty very quickly.


Obviously questioning the singing talent of Justin Bieber on a fans' forum would generate angry responses quicker than you could read them, but they are rants that no-one is going to read. What's the point? It's like the sadistic nurse in the lunatic asylum rattling the bars and getting everyone to scream. The internet might have become a medium for screaming in cyberspace. Certainly no Bieber fan would offer a sensible argument in return, analysing the singer's vocal range, his appeal to a certain market or his skills in exploiting his talents.


Margaret read a story in the Peterborough Evening Telegraph on-line about the redevelopment of Peterborough station. Normally, she just complains to me about the stupid drivers, lazy parkers or the lack of short-term parking space, but the ET on-line gave her the opportunity to share her views with a much wider pool. They were waiting for her and were ready to savage her views like wolves dispatching a lame deer. Why didn't her husband get the bus, use a bicycle, why didn't she mind her own business, why didn't she fuck off?


It's so easy to be a cyber bully - you don't even have to wait to identify the weak one, you can have a go at anyone you like.


It's amazing the things that will turn people into trolls. Just imagine Mufadal Jiwaji sitting at home watching TV. He's watching Have I Got News For You, a comedy quiz show that showcases the sarcastic wit of Ian Hislop and off-the-wall humour of Paul Merton. Mufdal wants to join in the banter, I guess, because he posts a message on Twitter about one of the guests, a Guardian columnist called Grace Dent.

Grace Dent - called an abhorrent, ugly horse

He tweeted that Dent reminded him of "a girlfriend I once had. By girlfriend I mean that time I accidentally made love to an ugly abhorrent horse".


What an extraordinary thing to say. Why did he feel the need to be so rude to someone he'd never met and, in my view, perfectly all right to look at? He could have commented that she wasn't funny or that someone else would make a better guest, or anything that had shown some thought process, but he just went for the insult. Anyway, he doesn't look good, but I guess he thought he was shouting in the dark.


But it turns out that Grace Dent was clearly at a loose end that day. Not only was she reading tweets that mentioned her name, but she found time to be insulted and outraged enough to look up Mufdal's Twitter profile and discover that he worked in PR for Hill and Knowlton, by coincidence the same company that represents Dent for her writing work.


Dent tweeted him back saying: 


@Mufadal I'm wondering, as a public relations person for a firm I work with, what your thinking was in sending me this message?


Followed by:


@Mufadal You'll bear the brunt of your idiocy at 10am tomorrow morning when you're unemployed. Good luck.


Like the bully confronted, Mufdal was suitably contrite, tweeting: 


"Unreservedly withdraw my vulgar and puerile comment regarding @gracedent, especially in light of the bbc doc on internet trolls last week."


followed by:


@gracedent it was naive and ill-warranted. I won't delete it, as I ought to bare the full brunt of my idiocy.


... and:


"It's amazing how when you're at the centre of an entirely self-inflicted car-crash how everything moves in slow-motion."


The exchange caused its own Twitter storm, with many criticising Dent for threatening to get him sacked. There was even a conspiracy theory (there always is) that it was all a brilliant PR stunt to portray Dent as a woman with balls - a stallion indeed.


My sympathy is with her; I'm sure she can stick up for herself but why should people be able to make crass and insulting comments without fear of being challenged. Well done Dent!


A few days later, there was another nasty insult (or series of them) aimed at a woman on TV - this time it was in print by AA Gill, the Sunday Times TV Critic. There has been a programme on BBC2 about ancient Rome presented by Mary Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge University. I haven't seen any, but would have been interested to watch had I had the time.

Mary Beard - not good looking or polished enough for TV

Gill caused controversy by focusing his review not on the programme content, but by the appearance of Beard. It was a particularly cruel piece. Gill said that if she was inviting herself into the nation's living rooms at least she could have had her hair done; he talked about her tombstone teeth and suggested she might be better suited to a Channel 4 documentary about ugly people finding dates.


Gill has form of course. He called Clare Balding a ‘dyke on a bike’ when reviewing her travel programme Britain By Bike. Clare, who is a lesbian, complained to the Press Complaints Commission and it upheld her complaint. 


With Beard, his comments seemed worse because she's a woman of a certain age and ought to be respected, not insulted.


Gill wrote: "For someone who looks this closely at the past, it is strange she hasn’t had a closer look at herself before stepping in front of a camera. Beard coos over corpses’ teeth without apparently noticing she is wearing them.


"From behind she is 16; from the front, 60. The hair is a disaster, the outfit an embarrassment. This isn’t sexist or beside the point. If you’re going to invite yourself into the front rooms of the living, then you need to make an effort."


Beard hit back in a more restrained manner in the Daily Mail, writing: "He suggested that I should be kept away from the cameras altogether and, in a topical reference, went on to imply that I belonged on The Undateables, a recent Channel 4 programme charting the dating difficulties of the disabled and facially disfigured.


"It seems a straight case of pandering to the blokeish culture that loves to decry clever women, especially ones who don’t succumb to the masochism of Botox and have no interest in dyeing their hair. It’s a case of mistaking prejudice for being witty and provocative. And it’s very easy to find yourself thinking: ‘What an odious little twit!’


"In a sense, I suppose, I should be used to such crass remarks as his. After all, they dog most intelligent women, even today — particularly  if they dare to put their head  above the parapet by appearing on television.  


"Sure, I don’t wear make-up. I have nothing against those who do if it gives them pleasure, but actually I feel happy enough in my own skin not to feel I want to bother with it. I don’t dye my hair for the same reason. I ask myself: ‘If I did, what would I be covering up?’ And how do you stop doing it once you’ve started?


"To the charge of having big, tombstone teeth, I plead guilty. I inherited them from my mum, just as I did her uncompromising double chin. I’m every inch the 57-year-old wife, mum and academic, half-proud of her wrinkles, her crow’s feet, even her hunched shoulders from all those  years poring over a library desk. 


"I could even try a Socratic point here. Like the great Greek philosopher, I look a mess. But actually, if you took the trouble to listen to him, he had something valuable to impart. I’m nowhere near the towering intellect of Socrates, but at a lower level that analogy could apply to me.


"And what is beauty after all? Is it someone who is Botoxed to the eyeballs, or someone who feels beautiful under their own skin?"


Beard has tried to link Gill's comments to feminism and suggests that he is frightened of brainy women. I don't think that's the case, I just think he looked at her and thought she was fair game. His comments were just rude and cruel.


"I do wonder, if he met me face to face, would he be prepared to reiterate the insults he has heaped on me in print?" she said. "I am often asked to review books in newspapers and I always make it a rule never to write anything critical in a review that I would not be prepared to repeat to the author face-to-face."


I think that would be a good thing to remember for all bloggers, tweeters and comment writers. Let's try to raise the standard of debate and discussion on the internet, let's respect other people's opinions and let's not resort to rudeness or abuse.


You can read Mary Beard's full article here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2134146/Too-ugly-TV-No-Im-brainy-men-fear-clever-women.html#ixzz1sxhNFdjU