Naturewatch

One of the roundabouts on the southern half of Horton Lane has been turfed with bark chippings and planted with a number of presently small shrubs, some azaleas. Today there was a fine show of autumn toadstools, clumps of them all over the place. Maybe they feed on the rotting bark chippings underneath,.

Then the day before yesterday we heard the first evening owl for a bit, quite an energetic specimen, most of the time doing the full 'terwit-terwhoo' business - unlike the ones we more usually get that only get as far as the 'terwit' bit. That said there were some 'terwit's the day before yesterday, which might easily have been mistaken for bats.

Home to be impressed by the MS Excel VB editor. I asked it to replace one string with another, forgetting to say only to do it in the current procedure. So it went through the whole project doing more than 9,000 replacements. Which could easily have been a disaster, at least to the extent of losing a couple of hours of undocumented work, but as luck would have it the 'undo' button did its business and all 9,000 edits were undone in a second or two. All very impressive.

I remember that when I first had access to computers, ICL had just invented George III which came with rather a sophisticated editor, sophisticated enough that one could almost write programs with it. A good deal more than can be done with the MS editor now, at least without recourse to moving one's text file into a spreadsheet and fiddling with it there, a wheeze not available to ICL as spreadsheets had not then been invented. And I am fairly that the 'undo' button hadn't been invented either, so I dare say I sometimes got into a bit of a pickle with their editor.