Diary: garden surgery + Burrington Combe

The jet stream's looping to the south of the UK giving cool weather and endless rain, broken today by a rare ridge of high pressure and sunshine.

Taking advantage, the tree surgeons arrived this morning to sort things out.

Dense foliage almost hides the gardeners' truck

While the garden rang with the buzz of the chain saw, I ran my two mile route into the lower Mendips in a new best time .. and without knee-joint failure. So I was pleased.

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Just a small aside: Clare arranged all this - I'm not a garden person - and they were actually booked in for tomorrow (Friday). At 8.30 this morning the doorbell rang which I answered.

A young man dressed in casual clothes smiled winningly at me, said "Good Morning" and put out his hand to shake mine. I glared at him (we have our share of door-to-door scammers) and said coldly, "Who are you?".

He looked quite nonplussed. Explained he was the gardener,  they'd had a cancellation and as the weather was good today they'd decided to do us. Mumbled something about voicemail (we'd received no voicemail).

That being cleared up, I offered them tea, which they declined, and they went about their business.

Clare tells me she went out a little while later to check progress and confided, "My husband mistook you for Jehovah's Witnesses."

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This afternoon we drove to nearby Burrington Combe for an hour's stroll. There's a good view of the Severn south of Portishead and occasionally the landscape faintly echoed with the rumble of jet turbines - we saw an airliner lifting off from Bristol's Lulsgate airport a good five miles away.

Clare at our terminus - on the rocks

Your author in his favourite ninja attire

We mixed up the walk by debating the most likely scenarios for war between America and North Korea. It must be real because the markets are in free fall. I read lots of vaguely reassuring commentary in the newspapers, explaining how conflict is unlikely as it's in no one's interest.

Yep.

If it gets hot, the first logical step for the US military is to sterilise the NK artillery lines abutting the DMZ. They could do it in a non-nuclear way. Think Daenerys's dragon amplified a millionfold.

I think Seoul is safer than the pundits imagine but the casualty rate for the North would be horrendous.

God's Asteroid

One of the best descriptions of what you would see ... and the effects of ... a large asteroid hitting the earth.

"A three mile wide, billion ton asteroid hits Europe. This unimaginable catastrophe actually happened five thousand years ago, and astonishingly, there is an ancient eyewitness account, as well as the aftermath described in The Bible.

The “Planisphere” tablet was discovered in the ruined library of the Assyrian royal palace at Nineveh (Iraq). It’s a copy of the night diary of a Sumerian astronomer containing drawings of the night sky. But stars were not the only thing the ancient astronomer observed in that pre-sunrise of 29th June in the year 3,123 BC.

Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell analyzed the Planisphere a sector at a time, decoding the star signs and Sumerian commentary by matching constellations and planets against state-of-the-art programs which can reproduce the night sky from any location and at any time in the last few thousands of years..."

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.

The biblical reference is a bit populist but seems to work with the predominantly American audience on the site.

This morning we shopped at Glastonbury and Street as drizzle infiltrated everywhere from a bland, gray sky. Morrisons were selling octopus: ("quite popular, we had a chinese lady in who makes a sauce from their ink. I'm more of a cod and chips man myself"). We followed his lead.

This evening I went with Clare to the Mass for All Saints. This is the Catholic version of Halloween and we left a big bowl of chocolate bars on the house step with the legend "Help Yourself - One Each". On our return it seemed undisturbed: (last year we had two or three troupes visiting - some quite large). We had carefully chosen confectionary we would be quite happy with ... probably we're good now through to Christmas!

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We had the tree surgeons around this morning. They trimmed stuff in the back garden and in the front, and had to cut down the big tree to the left of our driveway entrance, down by the road, as it was completely rotten with fungal infestation. Their work coincided with next door replacing the fence they have in common with us: the tree surgeons were originally contracted to trim undergrowth next door by our neighbours prior to the fence replacement.