Alert!

Thought to take a stroll around the common yesterday morning, taking the all weather track which takes one wide around the large stew pond. Plenty of small birds along the northern fringe along the B280, but did not get close enough to anything except the odd robin to identify them. Path along the southern stretch, taking one across the top of the wells in a bit of a state, with chalk showing through at places.

And then, for the first time for a while, came across the chain saw volunteers, that is to say a gaggle of senior trustees playing woods, that is to say clearing and burning a section of the underbrush. At least they had left their chain saws at home, making doing with bush saws and pruners. Signs of attention to health and safety with the location of the fires clearly marked with slender posts. Once again, I ducked challenging them, which was perhaps just as well as one only gets one or two chances to make an impact before one gets written off as a bore. But I think the challenge ought to include something about the common being for all of us, not just those who like to chop things down and about how their time might be better spent patching up the all weather path. One might also point out in passing that some of the damage to said path is caused by their own support vehicles. Maybe a useful rule of self-denial would be that the volunteers are only allowed on the common with what they can carry. No support vehicles.

I might have ducked, but I was quite cross about them, only calming down when I came once again to consider the fencing along the railway track on the eastern portion of the walk. How is the stuff made? It rather looks as if it is somehow stamped out of a large sheet of 2mm galvanised steel, but one would need a very substantial stamper to do such a thing. It has been bothering me for some time, but how does one find out?

Then moved on to pondering the charge that our government for market forces is interfering with market forces to the extent of strongly suggesting to insurance companies that they do not raise the insurance premiums of people who live in houses liable to flooding, a suggestion which amounts to a covert tax as the premiums of the rest of us, living in sensible places, will have to rise up to make up. A pity that all these stretches of low lying pasture land outside our towns and villages are now such easy targets for builders. In the olden days one did not build on such places for good reason, with towns and villages perched on hills or hillsides, above neighbouring marshes, water meadows and flood plains - thinking here of Exminster in Devon and more especially of Brading on the Isle of Wight. A pity also that, collectively, we cannot bring ourselves to pay our taxes out in the open but would rather have them hidden away in this way.

Home to find that the DT had made up for the Monday dearth of news by printing a reproduction of a French skiing poster from the fifties which made Murdoch's photographic efforts on page 3 from the swinging sixties look positively coy. Second prize to a picture of a mature lady MP moonlighting as a wannabee celebrity in a swimming costume. The days when respectable employers used to have rules about second jobs look to be behind us.