Watch birds, don't shoot them!!!

Sorry, I've been in Spain bird-watching without good internet connections, but then I return home to this from our birding guide:

We’re being asked to pay for the destruction of buzzard nests to subsidise the shooting industry. This is from DEFRA, whose Minister is a landowner and rejoices in game shooting, from a survey by the game and shooting industry.
They’ve already reduced Hen Harrier numbers to near zero in England and now want to do the same to Buzzards.
They even want the taxpayer to cough up over £300,000 for it.

Sign the petition at this URL; it even gives the US as its first country choice, so not only of interest to Brits...In fact, it is of interest to the entire world. 

Minister for Wildlife and Biodiversity, DEFRA: Stop the subsidy for Buzzard nest destruction.

www.change.org

The Buzzard is an indigenous protected bird of prey that is about to be persecuted by DEFRA subsidy. It is supposedly to protect a tiny fraction of...

I am the Vindo Viper

Did you ever play the telephone game when you were a kid, calling up someone unknown and saying (in your deepest bass voice): “I am the Vindo Viper. I come for you today.” Of course, the recipient is terrified and immediately hangs up. You call them again, and repeat your message, but then they hang up before you finish. Finally, you call again, saying “I come to vipe your vindos. I come today.”  Ha, ha, laughs all around.

No? Maybe it was just an American thing because we all had telephones in those days.* It certainly wouldn't be politically correct today.

But this scene on the CityPoint entrance, near Moorgate tube station, brought back those telephone memories. How many window wipers can you see? I count four. Just think what great transferrable skills these guys got mountain climbing, since they all seem to be on belay. The eight Singaporean house cleaners who recently died could have used some of these skills. They were forced to wash the outside of windows in skyscraper flats; I wouldn't like to fall off a building, would you? Apparently the Singapore government is reviewing the situation... 

CityPoint skyscraper entrance near Moorgate tube station, London

CityPoint, formerly the Britannic House, has enough accolades for listing in Skyscraper News. I guess this is a website for building spotters, kinda like train spotters except the spotters themselves have to move around to see fixed sites rather than stand still watching moving trains.


* Unlike in Britain, where only 35% of households had telephones even in 1970 (according to the only stats I could find) [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12058944]

Durham's venerable 'vennels'

What's a vennel, you might ask. Wikipedia defines it as a 'passageway' and explicitly says they are common to Scotland and Durham! Well, Durham was once contested land between England and Scotland, so it is no surprise that customs should be intertwined.

As the far northern outpost of the Norman conquest, Durham Castle was built by the command of William the Conquerer in 1072 on the peninsula formed by the River Wear (pronounced 'weir'). The castle was followed by the building of Durham Cathedral from 1093. Castle walls surrounded the castle and cathedral to the south, but those on the east have disappeared and been replaced by buildings in medieval times.

A covered vennel leading to Vennel's Cafe,
off Saddler Street in Durham

Vennels are narrow passageways that wind between the buildings crowded so close to the castle grounds. One vennel opens onto an inner courtyard, used as a patio for none other than Vennel's Cafe; another vennel leads out of the courtyard in another direction. Both of these vennels (but not the patio) are covered, as they form tunnels; but other passageways are open to the sky, notably Moatside Lane.

Vennel's Cafe is a very popular locus for lunch and tea – great sandwiches and cakes. I particularly like the brie and grapes sandwich, while their banoffee pie is to die for...

Moatside Lane, an open air vennel,
taking off opposite the Post Office
on Silver Street, Durham

Such vennels are great fun to follow, especially since on first try, you don't know where they lead. Moatside Lane in fact takes you up onto the western cliff of the castle, running just under the castle wall. From there you can reach the Archaeology Museum, Palace Green and the Almshouses coffee shop.

Russell Square tube station: another icon

Along with Edgware Road tube station on the Bakerloo Line, Russell Square tube station on the Piccadilly Line is another of the iconic products of Leslie Green. It still retains its red tile facade and cast iron lanterns of the Edwardian period. Inside the station you will find the original black, green, and white tiles complete with the exit instructions fired onto the ceramic tiles. The way tiles have been laid across the platform tunnel ceiling, contrasting with the keystone-framed train tunnel, is an excursion into exquisite design. Don't you think?

Platform tunnel at Russell Square tube station,
Piccadilly Line, London

The framed tile instructional signs recall the shapes of the ticket windows at Edgware Road station. But just in case you think that these signs circa 1906 might not still be accurate, the modern sign (in smaller font) reinforces the message.

Quilted piano covers

Quilting is a big thing in America: there are tons of women who pride themselves on carrying on the colonial tradition, with books documenting favoured patterns and stiches over time. The Shakers had a famous quilting tradition, in line with their use of natural materials and hand-worked items. My mother had a friend who collected swatches of cloth and embroidered signatures from all her adulthood friends and sewed them into a scrapbook quilt. But I wasn't prepared to encounter two quilted piano covers in quite different settings in England. I had never seen anything like them.

Upright piano quilt in Gainford Village Hall, County Durham

The first was a cover for an upright piano, standing in the Gainford village hall west of Darlington. It was an imaginative use of panels to replicate the music scores usually found standing on the piano as well as the keys. What fun!

The second was a cover for a baby grand piano in The Maltings, in Farnham, Surrey. This one had its origins embroidered onto the side, and music was represented in some of the patches.

Baby grand piano quilt in The Maltings, Farnham, Surrey

Cate Blanchett at the Barbican

This is the story of a woman with two vices: she is a slave to words – loves to talk but has no one to talk to, and she loves to help people – but no one wants her help. These cost her her marriage. We first meet her on a holiday in Marrakesh, alone, not joining in on any activities, only eavesdropping on the “amazing” voices she hears on the terrace. Back home, she is thrown out of her home to wander among people searching for a soul she can talk to and help, all in vain.

The story is a splendid vehicle for Cate Blanchett to showcase her talents: not only in her range of voice and vocal expression, her communicative facial expressions, but her body language which documents her increasing psychosis as she is rejected by one person after another – fellow tenants, primary school friend, pick-up lover and long-lost brother. But the interesting thing is that these people and others along the way (including an absolutely ingenious pup tent as a character) are equally weird in their own manner, making one reassess just who is normal in this psychological thriller.

The staging for this play was minimal, with one or two props per scene. Sitting in the upper circle gave an added perspective, for though one had to use binoculars to see Cate’s face, her body was projected against the black box of the stage as an insect under the microscope. It was like watching an ant in an increasingly frantic death dance, as Cate minced and flailed across the stage like Jack Black – a puppet on a string. (Ok, so you didn’t see the Orange ad for Black’s appearance in “Gulliver’s Travels”…)

One wonders about the title. A line from Cate’s character Lotte in the play may give a hint: she feels her husband is out to make her “small”, implying he is a “big” journalist. The Barbican press release casts her as an Alice in Wonderland, “sometimes Lotte is too big for her surroundings and sometimes too small to be noticed within them.” But I prefer to think of the details of life overwhelming Cate as the ‘small’, while the ‘large’ is the existential angst of us all trying to find our place in the world. To which Lotte would say, “Oh, what big words, Amazing!”.

The audience for this play on a Sunday afternoon was astonishingly male, probably 70-80%, all coming to see Cate on a off-work day. They gave her many ululations and a standing ovation for what was surely an outstanding performance. Well done, Cate!

“Gross und Klein” by Botho Strauss, in English translation by Martin Crimp, produced by the Sydney Theatre Company, directed by Luc Bondy. At the Barbican through April 29th.

Plutonic lunch: new understandings of Shap granite

Recently, we ate lunch at the Honest Lawyer pub outside Durham – an oxymoron for sure. Staring at me from the table was the belly of a possible volcano: a granite tabletop! It looked suspiciously like Shap granite from Cumbria, but unfortunately the quarry provenience was not known to the waitress.

As any volcanologist (but who else?) knows, granite is mainly formed in volcanic arcs where magma rises through the Earth's crust in 'diapirs';  most of these diapirs solidify as plutons 5 to 20km deep in the crust, but some make it to the surface where magma is extruded through volcanoes as lava or volcanic ash. The magma that doesn't make it out cools slowly in the chamber or pluton, allowing very large mineral crystals to grow. In this kind of pink granite, the large pink rectangular crystals are potassium (K-)feldspar, also known as orthoclase. Regular feldspar (plagioclase) forms the white crystals surrounding the large pink ones, while the grey bubble-like crystals are quartz, and the black grains may be biotite or amphibole.

Shap granite is featured as the Rock of the Month for December 2011 by the Open University. The Shap granite outcrop in the Lake District is intrusive into the Borrowdale Volcanic Group, which was once an island arc off the micro-continent of Avalonia in the Iapetus Ocean between 460 and 444 million years ago [1]. However, Shap dates later via processes quite different from the subduction zone granite emplacement described above. After Avalonia was accreted to Laurentia (North America), the area of the Iapetus suture in northern England (demarcated by the Solway tectonic line) was subject to magmatism on both north and south sides of the suture. It is thought that a period extensional tectonics, creating a pull-apart basin 21km wide, was able to generate higher temperatures that caused both mantle and crustal melts to rise into the upper crust [2]. These were emplaced in the subsequent period of Acadian Deformation between 400 and 390 million years ago. Shap granite, therefore, stands as the representative of a newly understood source of magma generation that is totally divorced from subduction tectonics.

Many buildings around England feature Shap granite floors or columns. So you can also walk on it  or bump into it as well as eat off it. Just keep those sharp eyes open for Shap and you will be rewarded by a trip to the center of the Earth (or at least 5 kilometers down where granite forms).

Oh yes, and the Honest Lawyer has great Eggs Benedict. Did I say lunch? Maybe it was brunch...

[1] Huff, WD; Bergström, & Kolata, DR (2010) "Ordovician explosive volcanism," pp. 13-28 in The Ordovician Earth System, ed. by FC Finney & WBM Berry. Geological Society of America Special Paper 466.

[2] Brown, PE; Ryan, PD; Soper, NJ & Woodcock, NH (2008) "The newer granite problem revisited: a trans-tensional origin for the early Devonian trans-suture suite". Geological Magazine 145.2:235-256.