Category Archives: UK

Fun Anagram Map of the London Tube (via Boing Boing).

We lived at ‘What Stampedes’ and ‘No Mother’ while worked near ‘Spicular Dicyclic’. Caroline usually walked to work from ‘Lob Horn’. (Ordinary tube map for comparison.)

In other British animal news, hedgehogs are vanishing.

Where have all our hedgehogs gone?: the British hedgehog population in the mid-90s was, very roughly, about two million. Today, that figure might be down to a million. As nobody has any idea of the population dynamics once the overall numbers are so radically depleted, there is no telling what will happen next.

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Does it matter? Of course it matters. The loss of the hedgehog would be more than just the loss of a small, prickly Mrs Tiggywinkle. Unlike any other animal in this country – except, perhaps, the mole, whose condition is, if anything, even more opaque, and just as likely to be following its own chute to oblivion – the hedgehog has always been a symbol and embodiment of something subtle and tender in the landscape. It is not a flamboyant showman of a creature, but quiet, nocturnal and discreet. Even though it has a great sense of smell – it can sniff a dog 35ft away – and can jump two feet to catch a beetle, and that a Russian hedgehog once found its way back home after it had been dropped 48 miles away across the tundra, the hedgehog is not, on the whole, a very clever creature. It has a very small brain and very conservative habits. It is no fox. One owner tried to teach his hedgehog a simple lesson – open the red door for lunch – 4,000 times. It looked the other way.

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It is a widely treasured creature. The British Hedgehog Preservation Society has more than 600 “carers” on its list, the stars of which are probably Ken and Sue Lewis of Rochdale, who take in up to 2,000 injured, poisoned, orphaned or burned hedgehogs a year (157 there this week). Why? “I suppose because they have adorable faces,” Mrs Lewis says. Fay Vass, chief executive of the BHPS, thinks: ‘He’s just a useful chap to have around. And if what we are doing is damaging hedgehogs, people need to buckle down and start to think of other animals apart from ourselves.” Only in England would the conservation of wild mammals be discussed in these terms, but “a useful chap to have around” sounds strangely like what a hedgehog’s rather modest description of itself might be.

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This is, straightforwardly, a question of knowledge. The hedgehogs are dying because we don’t know what we are doing to them. Without that knowledge, quite silently, an unobtrusive world is being mauled and, because it is largely invisible, nothing much is being said about it. Unless that knowledge is acquired – and acted on – the hedgehog, in our lifetimes, will end up as little more than a memory.

There’s lots more lyrical stuff there I didn’t quote — including ties to a Philip Larkin poem.

I forget: Is hedgehogs vanishing one of the signs of global warming or of the Apocalypse? Or just routine ecological disaster?

In the USA we worry about the NSA tapping our calls, faxes and emails. In the UK, it seems the new thing to fear is … talking parrots.

Talking parrot gives away girlfriend’s secret lover: At first, 30-year-old Mr Taylor was amused when Ziggy started screeching “Hiya, Gary” everytime it heard Miss Collins’s mobile phone ring.

He even saw the funny side when the parrot began making kissing noises when the same name was mentioned on television or radio.

But the truth finally dawned as the couple snuggled alongside one another on the sofa and Ziggy blurted out, “I love you, Gary” in her voice.

What I wonder, assuming this isn’t another one of those great British journalistic hoaxes, is how the Telegraph got the story.

My friend David Howarth, MP for Cambridge City, is getting a good press:

Sofa, so good for MP who is winning battles large and small:THE best moment of David Howarth’s six months as Cambridge MP came on Wednesday when the opposition parties and Labour rebels came within one vote of defeating the Government over their Anti Terror Bill.

Only David Blunkett marching through the “aye” lobby just hours after quitting the Cabinet saved Tony Blair’s bacon over a new offence of glorifying terrorism.

Mr Howarth told me: “That was undoubtedly the best moment of my time at Westminster. I was very surprised.

“When I came here I thought voting would just be a way of registering a protest and a challenge to the Government. I never thought we could get the majority down to one.

“In the previous two parliaments the lowest it got was three, over tuition fees.

“But now we appear to have got the Government to change its mind about aspects of the Terrorism Bill. We’ve got to keep up the pressure.”

The strangest thing that has happened is the attempts of the House of Commons’ authorities to claim back the sofa in his office. Perhaps they think that the offending pieces of furniture encourage unwanted intimacy in Westminster offices.

But Mr Howarth is having none of it: “I share an office with Cheltenham MP Martin Hallwood. We have a desk at either end and two armchairs and a sofa in the middle.

“They keep coming round to try to get the sofa but we just sit on it until they go away. They’re not having our sofa.”

Isn't this just charming: the UK is considering establishing Secret courts for terror cases. That's “Special anti-terror courts sitting in secret to determine how long suspects should be detained without charge.”

We had to kill liberty and justice in order to save it?