Two Tales of One Tree

On Saturday I took this photo of the rather bare looking tree on Abbey Gardens.

Then I went by on Monday only to find the tree surgeons had cut the tree in to small pieces so it could be removed from the site more easily. Turns out it had been blow down some time in the early hours of Monday morning, fortunately the elderly couple weren't still walking by.

Torquay United won again on Saturday and won the midweek game. That's 2 games won out of the last 8. Plymouth Argyle aren't doing too well, still stuck at the bottom of the Table. At least the saga of administration is over now that local business man James Brent has taken over the club. Well done Mr Brent.

Clocks going back

So Whitehall is considering running on Summer time in the winter and double summer time in the summer. For us south of the border it will mean longer brighter evenings but slightly darker mornings. It wont increase the actual daylight hours just move the time it gets light in the morning and dark in the evening. Problem is up in Scotland it will mean for a couple of months it will be dark till well after 8 am but it will still be light well beyond 4 pm. Anyway the Scots are objecting to this idea but it would seem that most people down here in the south are in favour of the idea. Well if the Scots don't like the idea they don't have to put up with it. They don't like our bank notes so they print their own, which incidentally aren't even legal tender in Scotland never mind down here in the rest of the UK. So have your own time, we don't mind.

Beautiful sunny day today here in Torquay.

Want to know what time the next bus is from somewhere in Torbay then try this new website out mystop.torbaybusroutes.co.uk

Click on the link even if you don't live in Devon just to see how good it is.

A couple of photos

If you look carefully you can see the marks on the window where a seagull flew in to it. Made a bit of a bang and the poor thing didn't know what had hit him. He was still in juvenile plumage so has a lot to learn about windows. After a few seconds looking very bewildered he flew off somewhere safer. Also in the same photo, which was taken on Sunday, you can see the vegetation on the cliff. At the top there is a big sycamore tree. One of it's branches got blown off during the gale on Monday afternoon. I watched it fall at about 4 o clock when the wind was at it's most blustery. Then at 4:15 the wind died away and it stopped raining and the sun came out. Shame the branch couldn't have hung on a few more minutes.

A little comment about the swiping of bus passes, I was talking to a bus driver and he said people had got used to the idea fairly quickly and better still, he hadn't changed a ticket roll in weeks.

Basil's Visit to the Vet

A few months ago our elderly cat, Ginger, went out one night and didn't come back. We put the usual notice up and asked neighbours to keep a look out for him. After a week we decided he wasn't going to ever scramble in through the cat flap again. So we went on the internet and looked for a new cat. The first one we made enquires about had just gone to a new home. The next phone number on the list of cats seeking a good home turned out to be an answering machine that didn't do what the voice said it would do, i.e. ring back. So we tried the next number and we got this handsome cat. He was called Ginger, for obvious reasons, but we decided to rename him as we had just lost a cat called Ginger. Basil was decided on because he has a permanently bushy tail. Just like the fox of the same name.
Anyway today I took him to the vet for his inoculation. The vet took one look at him and declared that he was a Maine Coon cat. I'd never heard of the breed so when I got home I had a look on the www. He may not be a pure Maine Coon cat but a lot of his ancestry is. So it looks like we have an American living with us.
A couple of days after we got Basil, a neighbour a few doors down knocked on the door. Between our back gardens and the cliff face there is a 15 foot wide stretch of wild ground. He’d been looking over his garden wall and noticed a ginger cat lying in the weeds. At first he thought it was asleep but some realised he wasn’t. He came round and told us so we were able collect Ginger and bury him in his favourite corner of the garden.

111 Say Yes but 485 say No; So No Referendum.

So we aren't going to get a referendum on Europe but what David Cameron has got is about a third of his MPs giving him the finger (pardon my french). It will be interesting to see what he has got to say about that.

What we will get some time next week is a baby being born who will be, in a way, special. No star will rise above his/her place of birth, three wise men are unlikely to arrive with gifts for the new born child, the Pope isn't likely to make a big announcement about the second coming. So why is this child going to be special? He or she will bring the population of the planet up to 7 000 000 000. That's seven billion in case you can't work out what all the noughts mean. Because it is difficult to conceive exactly what a billion is this should give you an idea. Imagine a clock which ticks every second, in 11 days 13 hours and 18 minutes it will click a million times, your heart will beat a million times in about same amount of time. We can work that out in time because we can have a good guess at what we will be doing in 11 and a half days. But the clock keeps ticking for an other 31 years 251 days before it has ticked a billion times. That is a long time to sit next to the clock and count the ticks so take my word for it. It's a long time. 7 billion ticks will take 210 years by which time we have no idea what the population will be, that's if there is any human population left.

When I was born the population was just over 2 billion, so it's gone up by 350% in just under 70 years. That's an awfully big increase. Can the planet continue to support this seemingly ever increasing population explosion or will it all end badly?