> Hibernia, the classical Latin name for Ireland, can be loosely translated as the Land of Winter. More poetically, it has been rendered as the island of the eternal winter. And anyone who has stood in a face of a driving Atlantic storm in the far west of the island will understand that description. Hibernia is a geographical term that is today consigned to the […]
Uncategorized
> The President and Chancellor of a unified Germany and the Mayor of a unified Berlin today marked the 50th anniversary of the building the Berlin Wall. The 87 miles of the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall (or Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart in the official GDR terminology) split east and west Berlin for 28 years and became one of the most potent symbols of both the Cold War and, with […]
>The walls that divide us
> Popbitch is not my usual source for this blog, but this week it had a little gem of a fact: “The west of cities in the Northern Hemisphere are posher than the east because the winds blow west to east – i.e. back in the Industrial Revolution pollution drifted eastwards.” The theory was set out in more detail on the Januarist blog. Prevailing winds would […]
>An ill wind blows east
> Today marks the 144th day of the military intervention in Libya. The operation has been led by British and French forces, and has so far seen no allied combat casualties. It has been conducted entirely from the air and sea with no land deployments currently envisaged. It is not the first Anglo-French military operation in north Africa. Operation Torch saw British and American troops fighting […]
>Crossing the Mediterranean
Sirens wail as police vans scream down Green Lanes and the sky hums with the throb of helicopters. As darkness falls over the city, the people wait to see what the fourth consecutive night of rioting will bring. The flames of fear have been fanned by a media frenzy, politicians desperate to be seen getting a grip and rumours that spread almost instantly through workplaces and […]
Panic on the streets of London
Most people know that carrots have not always been orange. The original cultivars were purple, with some white and yellow mutations. So why is the modern carrot ubiquitously orange? The orange strain was finally developed and stabilised by Dutch growers in the 16 – 17th centuries. A nice story has it that they were bred in the appropriately patriotic hue to honour William of Orange, the stadtholder of the […]
Patriotic carrots
This week the Japanese nuclear authorities announced that the partial meltdowns at four of Fukushima I’s reactors would be raised to a ‘category 5’ incident. I had never come across this scale before and, whilst it clearly relates to the seriousness of the incident, I didn’t know what it was out of, or what the criteria were. The scale is the International Nuclear and Radiological Event […]