Peter Rhodes on dead horses, super-growing trees and keeping 'degenerative' English out of Wales
For safety reasons the Boeing Starliner spacecraft returned to Earth minus its crew of two. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams expected to be in orbit at the International Space Station for just a few days. Now it seems they can't be rescued until February. The world wishes them well during their five-month incarceration and everyone is far too polite to mention two little words. Loo paper?
I went to a public meeting about our local park which featured dozens of sketches and photos from 1830 to the present. The most striking change over nearly 200 years was the sheer luxuriance of the growth. Two centuries ago, the park's trees were few and spindly. Today, there are hundreds more, huge, thriving and in full leaf. If our ancestors had seen such verdant images, they would have assumed this was the Amazon basin, not an English municipal park. It's the same everywhere you look in England; things are growing like crazy. Warmer summers and wet, tepid winters are creating perfect growing conditions, spurred on by unprecedented levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. While we humans fret about climate catastrophe, Mother Nature is cheerfully gorging herself on warmth, water and CO2 and probably thinking: “Catastrophe? What catastrophe?.
Still on mega-growth, a few days ago I described our fig tree splitting in two under the weight of a massive crop of fruit. It grieves me to report that our old Lord Derby apple tree has done exactly the same.
