Nick MacKinnon is a freelance teacher of Maths, English and Medieval History, and lives above Haworth, in the last inhabited house before Top Withens = Wuthering Heights. In 1992 he founded the successful Campaign to Save Radio 4 Long Wave while in plaster following a rock-climbing accident on Skye. His poem ‘The metric system’ won…
BLOG POSTS
A post about inefficient government
This is my Mum, who died two years ago today in her 98th year. But this blog post is about the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). I’ll be sending a copy of this blog post to my MP. When someone dies there is a fair amount of ‘sadmin’, sad administration, to do. There are…
Exhibition “The Birdman of Auschwitz: Science and the Failure of Conscience”
(Oświęcim, Poland) — A new exhibition, “The Birdman of Auschwitz: Science and the Failure of Conscience,” will open April 30 at the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization (ARCHER) at House 88, at the former home of Commandant Rudolf Höss. In partnership with British naturalist, historian and author of The Birdman of Auschwitz, Nicholas Milton, it explores…
Government to consult on changes to shooting seasons
Governments in Britain are to consult on shooting seasons for Woodcock, Snipe, Golden Plover, White-fronted Geese, Goldeneye, Pintail and Pochard (with different packages of proposals for each of Scotland, Wales and England) but it is proposed that Pochard should be removed from Schedule 2.1 across Britain. Consultation – click here. These proposals emanate from correspondence…
BSBI – Plant of ancient woodlands confirmed in northern Scotland
Plant of ancient woodlands confirmed in northern Scotland Herb-paris, a plant typical of ancient woodlands, has been confirmed growing in upland birch woodland on a ravine ledge in East Sutherland, in northern Scotland. The plant was originally spotted by James Rainey, a botanist and ecological consultant, seven years ago but wasn’t reported to the Botanical…
Sunday book review – The Ascent of Mammals by John Reilly
This book, like the author’s 2018 The Ascent of Birds – reviewed here, is a very clear and interesting explanation of a complicated and technical story. How did mammals evolve into species as different as the Duck-billed Platypus, Blue Whale, Vampire Bat and you and me? The answers are here and they appear to be…
Land Use Framework for England
I’ve read this document – click here – several times, and I’ll need to read it several times more to get the most out of it. But my initial rating of it is 6.5/10 which is quite a bit higher than I expected. I’d be very interested in others’ views on this document and I’d…
England Land Use Framework – a textual analysis
I read a lot of words (and I write quite a few too). I try to take care to understand what the writer intended me to think so I read the words, think about them, and put together in my head what the passages mean. I’m also long-practiced in reading words from government departments and…
BBC makes another mistake over More or Less nonsense
I wrote a blog about a gross factual error (of many orders of magnitude) which was perpetuated by the BBCR4 programme, More or Less, which embarrassingly is a programme about people and organisations using numbers correctly – click here. I complained to the BBC – as I said I would in the blog. On Friday,…
Wild Justice Dartmoor victory
I was pleased to see that Wild Justice has won a judicial review of the Dartmoor Commoners’ Council’s failure to manage the Dartmoor heaths properly – click here. This case started back in 2024 and I remember writing the witness statements which set out how Wild Justice saw the issues of overgrazing and lack of…