There have, evidently, been a few of these in the past. Neither my personal phone nor my work one has ever received one though. Nor has my SO’s if it comes to it.

Edwards insisted that lessons had been learned and that in 2023 National Highways had carried out a full soil survey and a three-month tree analysis.

This revealed they had planted the wrong species in the wrong place, and provided valuable lessons about the most appropriate season in the year to plant a tree, he said.

As someone who has been involved in planting schemes, I can say that this is absolutely bog-standard basic stuff. There is no excuse for this at all. No-one employed as any kind of ecologist should have got this wrong. People should be sued for this at the very minimum.

Read, fiddle around on a ZX81, then a Cortex, read, cycle to and wander in a large local forest, read, sneak into and climb church towers, read, tabletop wargaming, read, sketching and painting. Did I mention reading?

Not specifically for the eyes or posture, but for overall approach and attitude to situations like this:

• Marcus Aurelius’ quote: Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. - and stoicism in general.
• Imagine them sitting on the toilet. You can’t take them too seriously like that.
• Take a longer perspective: consider whether this interaction will be of any significance at all in 10 years time?

Yes. This is one of his Culture novels. I’ve been enjoying them so far.

The run up to a fortnight of holiday for me, so the days were simultaneously dragging and full of stuff that I was trying to get finished or progressed as much as possible.

However, now I am dozing in the sun with the requisite amounts of clotted cream and cider and a stack of books (Banks’ Use of Weapons at the moment).

Once the BH crowds have thinned, I will probably get out for some coastal hikes too.

No. I’m not interested in interaction when I am buying or selling something. Nor playing games, or getting or giving social strokes or whatever. I will do that on separate occasions.

I will pay the price asked or I will look elsewhere.

A hornet has spent most of the week sizing up my shirt rail as a potential nest site. Persuasion hasn’t worked, so I have ordered a screen for the window.

I was only called in for one problem at work over the weekend, which was easily resolved,. Spent the rest of it sorting out the shed, pottering in the garden and reading.

In a week and two days I will be off on a regular holiday with friends for a fortnight. It always seems a long slog between Xmas and this one, so really looking forward to it.

From this strand of SF, Dennis E Taylor’s Bobiverse books are by far the most compelling. It has been a while since I found something that was as unputdownable. I don’t know that they are technically the ‘best’ in terms of literary merit or anything though. I’d say that Dan Simmons Hyperion probably wins on that front.

I’ve just started Iain M Banks’ Use of Weapons, it would be that. I’m catching up with some SF this year and am alternating the Culture novels with others at the moment.

I was working today because I had basically forgotten that it was a bank holiday. Anyway, no interruptions, so I got a lot done, AND I now have day of TOIL.

Tomorrow and Sunday will be gardening, sorting out the shed and stuff like that.

I will then probably stay under the duvet and read on Monday, unless the weather is good and I feel particularly enthusiastic, in which case there is a walk that I have been considering for most of the winter. That might be the day.

A satsuma. The penultimate element of my lunch.

The ultimate will be a banana, in a few minutes.

Current place: basically nothing. It’s an old house with thick joining walls. It’s great The only time we hear anything at all is when they poke the fire, since this is on the joining wall.

Previous place: we had a neighbour who clearly had some issues with noise on one side. We are naturally quiet people, with no kids or pets or anything, and we don’t have the TV on loud but she would start pounding on the wall when, for example, we were emptying the dish washer and putting stuff back in the cupboards at 9-10am, or a dozen other normal activities at normal times of the day. Meanwhile, we had someone on the other side who was working from home some of the time and we’d get him shouting down the phone most of the day at times (my wife got most of this, since she was at home most days) and watch loud sport stuff in the evenings.

The peak, though, was when Mr work-from-home was doing some renovation work in a bedroom. Either removing plaster or knocking a wall through or something involving hours of extremely loud hammering. Well, that came straight through to us and clearly Ms sensitive-to-noise could hear it as well, so that set her pounding on the wall, presumably thinking that it was us. There was a day when we were just sitting there listening to deafening hammering on one side and pounding on the other. At least my wife had some noise-cancelling headphones.

It was a nice place otherwise, but I’m very happy that we moved.

Butter and marmite or butter and honey. Preferably a couple of the former then a couple of the latter.

Overall pretty good, but inexplicably exhausting - but then, I’m getting older and everything is inexplicably exhausting half the time.

Meal out with friends, car washed and headlight fixed, went to see a Bach choral performance complete with theorbo and crumhorns - there’s posh. There is a haze of green on the branches now, and the blue-tits are definitely building in the nestbox.

Cornwall. Same group of friends as the last 30 or so years, in about 6 weeks time.

I’m in the UK. I worked at a couple of places in the '90s - sysadmin and IT trainer - where this was considered perfectly acceptable at the time, but I definitely wouldn’t now. I’m no longer in IT at all, but I don’t think that it is seen as acceptable very widely anywhere now.

Read using REadEra, play Forge of Empires - plus Lemmy via Voyager.

I had the usual lessons at primary school, but at the end of those myself and one other in the class still couldn’t swim. In the half century since then I have never found the need or the desire to try again.

We don’t do Christmas, but had friends over for solstice pizzas. My wife announced a ‘no politics’ rule at the outset - not because of likely arguments, but just because it can get very repetitive and depressing.

It was a cosy and enjoyable evening after that - as they usually are.

Back a long way when I was living with my family we didn’t talk about politics anyway: partly since it was widely understood that one didn’t, but mostly since none of them were consciously political anyway. Christmas meals were generally free of arguments in general. The only point of contention was the mysterious presents that appeared for the children that actually came from dad’s side of the family - with whom he had long-since fallen out and dropped all contact - and that consequently had to be disguised or kept under the radar one way or another. That didn’t always work.