When I was leaving work yesterday I noticed the crescent moon, low in the sky and looking large.  I thought at the time that it looked unusually good, with a really bright star right next to it.  Had I known it was a once-in-a-lifetime grouping of the moon, Venus & Jupiter I would have got out the binoculars when I got home. Or the telephoto lens.

The thing is, that even without knowing what was going on, having no real interest for stargazing, and even with the amount of light pollution (and air pollution), I was drawn to the moon and felt there was something special about it.  I can see how the ancient civilisations came up with all those myths and theories: imagine how it was then with perfectly clear skies and no streetlights and the moon, which does exactly the same thing on a strict 28-day cycle for as long as anyone can remember suddenly doing something different.  And of course, people looked at the stars, sun and moon a lot more then.  They had to in order to navigate or tell the time.

Little wonder that the really spectacular stufff like comets and eclipses generated fear, awe, and religious panic.

Any more astronomical events to look forward to soon?

Even more dramatic is my hibiscus bush by the front door.  When I left the house Tuesday it was a forlorn-looking bunch of twigs.  When I got home Wednesday evening it was a mass of green: proper bush .

The grass verges around here are now like meadows with tall daisies, buttercups and other splashes of colour – either evidence of a slack grass-cutting regime by the council, the extreme fecundity of nature, or a bit of both.

At times like this its hard to be anything other than happy with life, and extremely easy to see how simpler, more rural society could be affected so much by spring as to start all those fertility rituals and myths.

The TV show itself was magnificent, with the sort of stunning camera work which we would expect from the BBC’s natural history unit, but now with the added dimension of heat imaging cameras.  The technique was used a lot, staying only just this side of too much, but the results were extremely illuminating.

I suppose I knew it on some level, but never really thought much about how the life of reptiles and amphibians is so dominated by the issue of heat.  A few clips of Predator-cam footage and it was made clearer than a whole pile of books could make it.   Surely this is popular science at its very best – attractive visuals leading the viewer into some quite profound insights.

The fact that the programme has, so far, been less obsessed with spurious superlatives than Planet Earth is a good thing too.

Almost as remarkable as the cold-blooded animals on show, was the token mammal – Dave himself.   He is now 81 but appears as lively as ever and if anything he is more prolific now than before.  Some of these series must take 5 years to make but another one comes to the screen just about every year – he must have a Tardis at his disposal or something.

I do appreciate that on series like Blue Planet and Planet Earth Attenborough didn’t have to do all the globe-trotting himself and just came in to add a voice-over to the results of everyone else’s labours, but even so the man is just a legend.¹

As if all that is not good enough, after the programme finished we were told about a new series on the way by the makers of Equator, called Tropic of Capricorn.   Even more good news is that its a four-parter – Equator really was far too short.  I’m greatly looking forward to seeing Simon Reeve in action again, and keeping my fingers crossed that the other series gets a repeat on the back of the new one.

1. As our kids would say

Some days only a couple of rabbits are to be seen, but on other days there are too many bunnies to count and I started to wonder how much space is needed to support a single rabbit because it struck me as a very small area to sustain such a large number.

Eventually my curiosity got the better of me and I tried doing some rough calculations, and the results were quite surprising – at least to me.

First of all I had to measure the roundabout. I wasn’t going to do anything as dangerous as trying to cross onto it to actually measure it, and was going to try estimating it but then hit on the idea of using the Google Maps aerial photographs to measure it. According to the scale on there, the roundabout is about 150 feet across, which was the first surprise. I’m so glad I didn’t try estimating as I would never have thought it was that large – although I am assuming the scale is correct. Looking at the aerial photos the roundabout by Astral Towers has a diameter roughly 70% that of the Tushmore roundabout if I had previously had to guess I would have said the Tushmore was twice the size at least.

Next I tried to remember the maths for working out the area of the roundabout and came up with 17,671 square feet. (Is that right?) Maths can be so counter-intuitive can’t it? The bit of land enclosed by the road there seems like a tiny scrap really, but its actually 17,671 square feet (unless I cocked up with the calculator) which sounds huge.

Now to divide that area by the rabbit population, and here I really did have to guess. The most rabbits I have managed to count at one time is 18, but the buggers do move about a bit and the roundabout has trees and bushes on it so you can’t see all the open bits at once. I assumed that there had to be more than I could count and rounded it up a little to 20. The population could be even larger than that, but will not be smaller.

That gave me a figure of 884 square feet per rabbit, which is the same as an area almost 30 ft by 30ft. I started off thinking that the rabbits were crowded together in a tiny space, but actually they have the equivalent of a couple of decent-sized one-bedroom flats each.

Now I am convinced I must have gone wrong somewhere… but if I haven’t, please don’t tell any of the rapacious developers around here that you could squeeze 40+ one-bedroom flats onto a roundabout because they would probably go ahead and try it if they thought they could squeeze £6m worth of apartments onto one little roundabout. And then where would the bunnies live?

Now perhaps some clever clogs can tell me where I have gone wrong. Any scientifically-minded brothers-in-law out there who fancy showing me up?

A new series of Planet Earth started this week and as you would expect it is compelling viewing and a remarkable acheivement: a nearly perfect collision of the wonder and majesty of nature and the technology and perseverance of the programme makers.

But there was one tiny thing which irked me.

In a segment about penguins Attenborough was talking about how the male penguins incubate the eggs and said how the male carefully positions himself over the egg and hides it in a special pouch to protect it from the elements.  That wording ('special pouch') just grated as it seemed to imply some sort of direction or purpose to evolution. In a word (or two) it seemed to imply some sort of intelligent design.

Now as we all know, or should do, evolution is a random, hit-and-miss process with far more misses than hits and the use of such phrases is like the thin end of the wedge of creationism.  I am totally sure that Attenborough does not agree with creationism in any form, but such forms of words creep into the subconscious and inadvertantly give some credibility to the creationist theories.  Sometimes you will hear a presenter or scientist talking about some amazing creature or plant and say that such-and-such a feature evolved 'in order to' perform some function and that is the same sort of slip.

OK, it is easier and quicker to say than "a random mutation turned out to give some small survival advantage and got passed on to future generations and eventually it evolved into this feature which turned out to be ideal for this purpose" and its a habit a lot of people have slipped into. I think it is similar to the anthropomorphism which often creeps into nature programmes.

Maybe I am a bit sensitive on the topic but I think the pouch should have been called 'convenient' or 'fortuitous' instead of 'special'.  However its a small criticism – the other 99.9% of the programme was brilliant.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Don’t we all sometimes look fondly back to simpler times?

A lot of this feeling was artificially induced by living in a tent without any modern conveniences, and heightened by having steam trains passing the campsite a couple of times an hour, but was re-inforced by visits to the nearest town, Swanage.

Walk the streets of Swanage and you will see unfamilar shops. The whole deplorable phenomenon of ‘clone high streets’ has missed out Swanage. There are two supermarkets but they are small Somerfields and Co-ops in the centre of town instead of huge out-of-town Tescos. Otherwise the only familiar names I saw were Woolworths (a tiny one in the old style), Wimpy (old-style again), Theshers, Boots, New Look and the main banks and building societies. And these were all spread out across the whole town. Otherwise it was all independent privately owned shops. There was even a proper butchers shop and in the absence of a Blockbusters the local newsagent had a sideline in video rentals like every newsagent had in 1980 but very few still do.

It would not have surprised me if the shop actually rented tapes instead of DVDs and I didn’t go inside to have my illusions shattered.

Of course, the total lack of Macdonalds, Pizza Hut, KFC and other fast food outlets which was so charming to me was greeted with slightly less enthusiasm by the boy…

In four days we covered a lot of ground and saw a lot of places but hardly scratched the surface. I spent a few childhood holidays in the area and returned on a school geography field trip in 1976 so I dimly remembered a lot of the places. The surprise was how little some of them had changed. Now I have got the initial buzz of re-visiting old haunts out of my system we can take it a bit easier when we go back – and we will go back.

On our return to home I delved into Wikipedia to look up a lot of the places we went to, and found out so much that I had missed, that I now want to go back and see them again in a new light. (How I wish I had access to Wikipedia when I was at school!).

In a few short days we visited Swanage, walked the coastal path up to Durlston Castle, went to the tank museum at Bovington (and saw a ‘tanks in action’ display), went to the Isle of Portland to see the views of Chesil Beach and the rocks at Portland Bill (where we failed to get our kite to fly properly), visited Lulworth Cove, saw the giant at Cerne Abbas, went into Corfe Castle, travelled on the steam railway and passed through Dorchester, Weymouth, Poole and countless villages. In most cases we were woefully under-equipped and next time we will know what to take with us.

I regret not having made it to Kimmeridge Bay to hunt for fossils and to the ghost village of Tynham. That is something for next time, if the army ranges are not in use then. Most importantly we also know now where to find the best place for a cream tea.

We were extremely fortunate with the weather as well. At times it was easy to feel we were back in Greece as the sky and sea were so unexpectedly blue. Standing at the top of the cliffs on the South Coast path, seeing dolphins breaking the water near a passing two-masted sailing ship we did not feel as if we were in 21st Century England at all.

Driving back home and hearing the news on the radio about airport closures and chaos felt like the signal that we had returned to the present.

I think this is because my father is interested in animals and one of my party tricks when I was a precocious child was to identify all sorts of animals from books and those sets of plastic zoo animals, therefore I have always known about them. When I have been to zoos I have always seen them alongside the giraffes and never really became aware that they are an obscure animal.

I checked with a colleague at work today, and he had never even heard of okapis before. I just assumed that they were as familiar to every one as gnus or antelope or whatever, but it turns out that they were unknown, except to the local tribes, until 1901. No wonder the family were impressed when I could identify it before I even went to school.

I snapped this while dodging the rain on the way back from the shops yesterday.

Much has been said about our current water supply situation, and the word ‘drought’ keeps being used. Looking at the online Chambers dictionary I see that the definition of drought is “a prolonged lack of rainfall” and that does not seem to be very appropriate at the moment.

Its not a drought – its a water shortage, although its plentiful in my back garden: just look at the photo of one of my paving stones. Its there somewhere under all the water. The only drought is here on this blog, where the posts have been drying up a bit lately.

I know a little bit of science. I have heard of aquifers and the like, so I can understand how it can piss down for days on end in a relentless drizzle, broken only by total downpours and yet still the reservoirs can be empty. I also know that it does not help when the water companies lose half of it while it is on the way to us so that we can waste most of what is left.

As anyone can see from the photo above, I can’t really understand all the references in the newspapers to lawns going brown. Mine has had water laying on it for the whole year. After a week or two without rain I was able to get the mower out but still left footprints in the boggier parts.

The amazing thing about this is that our garden is not level. It dips away from the house. Just on the other side of the back fence the land drops away almost vertically towards a stream. I had a walk round there this afternoon and saw the stream was flowing very fast, taking the run-off from all the houses. How my garden can retain so much water, given the local topography is totally beyond me.

What really gets me – apart from the ever-increasing water bills – is the prospect of having water restrictions and the possibility of seeing everyone queuing up for standpipes with a bucket in one hand and an umbrella in the other. Am I going to regret giving up my old house in Southgate which had an artesian well in the back garden?

I am no sun-worshipper, but I do like it when its not pouring with rain all the time. I like to be able to go for walks in the woods without a high probability of sliding down every slope.

Back in the mid-70′s everyone seemed to put up with the water shortages as it seemed like it was the price to pay for a hot summer. Now it looks like we are going to pay the price and get nothing in return.

It is particularly hard on those of us who have an almost pathological dislike of umbrellas.