The Bloggler

  Tandle Hill, Oldham Today was a good day!   For the first time since lockdown started, my wife and I were able to see our daughter who lives 28 miles away.   (It would have been a perfect day if we could have also seen our grandchildren and son-in-law but hopefully we will be allowed to do that soon.)   She came to meet up with us for a walk to Tandle Hill Country Park – one of her and our favourite local haunts. The park is a 48 hectare expanse of mixed woodland and grassland in Royton, Lancashire - just 5 minutes walk from our house away along a very pleasant country track. The weather was glorious: ultra bright sunshine and deep blue skies which only served to make the greenery even greener.     At the summit of Tandle Hill we gazed out over the Pennines uplands at towards the Yorkshire boundary, and over Rochdale, Oldham and the Manchester plain.   In the distance we could see Jordrell Bank radio telescope in 25 miles away to the south in Cheshire and the Welsh mountains

  I choose not to be on Facebook or Instagram, but I am nevertheless inundated on my phone, computer, and TV with images and videos posted by celebrities or people who think they are celebrities.   In this Coronavirus era we are all looking for good news and support wherever we can find it on social media, but the efforts of some celebrities’ to inform and entertain us are certainly wasted on me. It irritates me when celebrities give me scientific advice, based on a clear misunderstanding or generalisation of the facts.   Some feel they have to remind us to stay indoors and some feel they are so special they can swan off to their second homes in Cornwall or wherever.    I heard about fantasy author Neil Gaiman, who flew 11,000 miles from New Zealand to London, via Los Angeles, then borrowed a friend’s car and drove 500 miles north to the Hebrides. And guess why.... to “give his wife (musician Amanda Palmer) some space”. I see models and film stars posing in face masks, or

Whilst relaxing in our garden the other day, enjoying the fine spring weather, Lesley commented that how clean the air was, how blue the sky and how the quiet it was other than the sounds of the many varieties of birds that were visiting to taunt us with their freedom.   We also noticed how many bees there seemed to be buzzing around all parts of the garden.   At first this seems encouraging because in February, I read an article headed “Bumblebees’ decline points to mass extinction”.   The study it referred to stated that in Europe, bees are 17 percent less plentiful than they were in the early 20th century – this being due to global warming, over-farming, over-maintenance and the use of insecticides.   But thanks to the local Council not maintaining our local parks and road verges, our garden is bee central. I didn’t know but there are 24 species of bumblebees in the UK, the most common of which are the tree bumblebee, the red tailed bumblebee, the white tailed bumblebee, the

"Which country has the longest coastline?” “Which television characters are associated with Wimbledon?” “ Sniffled Rotten is an anagram of which famous cartoon character?” Oh no, you say, not another Quiz!  But be honest – you can’t resist having a guess You want to be right and you would like to discuss these questions in the pub, preferably with friends and with a drink in hand.    As the playwright James Graham said, "pub quizzes combine our two great loves: drinking and being right”. But, for the foreseeable, the pub quiz is out of bounds. Trapped at home by the plague, able to communicate only by a videoconferencing app, it seems the British public has quizzes on the brain. In fact I read it is now a global phenomenon and it’s easy to see why in the current covid lockdown era. It encourages us to talk to relatives and friends and interact over a bit of competitive fun without discussing that bloody virus and turning each other suicidal.   Also we usually