Spring miscellany

First stop yesterday was Nonsuch Park to see how the snowdrops in Herald Copse were getting along. Which was fine, although a little past their best now with the crocuses (in flower) and the daffodils (in bud) starting to push through.

To the café for tea and chelsea bun, this last rather good. Sugary but not too much so, plenty of currants and plenty of fluffy white bun, not soaked in sweet yellow goo.

And then to the stand of conifers to the east of the mansion to find no daffodils yet but two trees down, one large and one not so large, opening up a considerable gap in the canopy. There are a lot of old trees in this park, so it is just as well that someone has been on the case and there are a lot of younger ones coming on.

In the afternoon a Horton Clockwise to come across the pretty flower illustrated, but which has so far resisted identification by either book or computer: maybe one day I will find a decent flower identification tool on the internet; odd that despite there clearly being lots of interest out there no-one has yet managed such a thing, suited to the interested amateur, somewhere between the casual enquirer and the trained botanist. The same problem manifests itself with birds, despite there being a very well funded charity on the case (RSPB). On the up side, I have learned that a high proportion of wild flowers are either yellow or blue in colour, bracketing green on the left hand part of the spectrum, to the left of red. Maybe it is harder for plants to knock up red pigments.

I also inspected the site (google reference 51.336677, -0.290019), said to be under consideration for a camp site for travelers and their fellow travelers. It was once, I think, a recreation ground belonging to one of the mental hospitals, but has now been allowed to go to waste. My take is that while it is a pity to lose another bit of green space, it is probably as suitable a spot as one is going to find: on the fringe of the town and its surrounding estates, handy to the suburban dwellers from whom the travelers extract their living, but not so close as to spoil the view from the suburbans' bedroom windows. If the travelers wind up there, let's hope they are grateful and do not make themselves too much of a nuisance, visual or otherwise. Maybe one day they will grow out of their taste for booze, aggressive displays and punch ups.

And then woke this morning to ponder about the irony that while we have closed down all the mental hospitals on the grounds that we ought to care for people for special needs in the community, we have opened up all the prisons and stuffed them full to the gunnels with another bunch of people with special needs, many of whom, in the olden days, would have been in a mental hospital. And many of whom would not be there at all if we did not have such silly laws about drugs.

PS: talking of prison, I had occasion to look up pictures of West Point (military academy) the other day and was very struck at how much like a huge Victorian prison the place looked - which I suppose is roughly what it is.