Time slips by

Time slips by me, wearing a disguise
I don't notice him stuffing my youth into a pocket as he passes.
Time slips by me and covers my eyes with magical glasses
So I don't notice the lines arriving on my face, only on the faces of others.

Time slips by and takes with it my friends' children, suddenly tall
Suddenly adult, suddenly married with children of their own.
Time slips and the hours turn to days turn to weeks turn into months and it is suddenly eight months since I touched you, since I kissed you, since we said goodbye.

Time went past and suddenly I am old,
Peering into misty autumn days, worrying about pensions and arthritis.
Time and tide wait for no one and the truth is that there has only ever been this moment... this now...
That even as I grasp hold of it, time snatched back into the past.
Remember when your grandmother told you time flies...tempus fugit... yesterday?
Time flies, it was forty, no forty-five years ago and seven seemed like an age to aspire to.

Living in the moment as we all have to do has dragged you to this place, and whether all your moments spill out of time's pocket at the moment of your death and parade past you in their toe-curling glory, or whether they simply fade into the winds of eternity at your passing, remember to live before you die, experience the moments that you have to come and breathe in the pleasure of living.

Tomorrow and tomorrow are unravelling from the tapestry of time, all you can do as they pass you by and snatch your moments away is to be alert to their passing and kiss the ones you love.

Nightmare

For the second morning running, I have ended my dreams with a nightmare of children hanging from trees.  It wakes me immediately, although I know that impressions of time are distorted in dreams.  It's unusual for me to have nightmares and doubly unusual for them to be recurring, the same images.  It makes an impression.

Some years ago I had a series of prophetic dreams which seemed to foretell ridiculous things, like the forthcoming television programmes and newspaper articles I would read.  If it was a superpower, it seemed like a pretty useless one.

This has a different atmosphere altogether, but it is equally useless.  I don't know if the children are real, I don't know where they are, or in what time period.  The shock wakes me, and so I don't stay tuned into the image for long enough to find anything useful out.

From time to time I have had lucid dreams... perhaps I can invoke one and find out what's going on....  The images stay with me after I wake up.

The light invisible

For years I stayed up to watch the Perseids, Leonids, Geminids, the meteor showers which regularly fall on the earth, and nearly always we found that the clouds obscured our view.

I was excited when it looked as though the forecast for last night's Perseids favoured the meteor-watcher: clear skies at 1am, perfect.

At around 11pm I went outside to see what I could see.  Unfortunately, my neighbour across the road seems to have installed bright, white lights in both her upstairs landing and her porch.  I didn't know that sort of incandescent light was still legal.  Certainly she seemed to have got hold of some old fashioned strontium searchlights which seared my eyes and blinded me to anything less bright.

By judicious positioning of my garden chair so that our back gate obscured the lights, I was able to see into the sky, but the light pollution from the general glow of the city, along with the bright light from my neighbour, faded the Perseids into the background for all but the brightest of the meteors.

People who live in the countryside have no clue how little can be seen in the night sky over London.  Actually, it makes stargazing considerably easier in one respect: only the main constellations can be seen from my back garden, and so Ursa Major and Minor, Cassiopeia and the Pleiades are easily spotted.  The last time I stood in a darkened back garden in the back of beyond, I not only felt terribly exposed, but I couldn't identify the constellations I know so well because they were cluttered up with stars I have no hope of seeing from Uxbridge.

My sons got cold and bored very quickly, and went back inside.  After another 15 minutes of straining to see something!  Anything!  I went inside, disappointed to learn that over all these years, it wouldn't have been possible to watch the light show even in favourable conditions. I saw about four, in over an hour, and one of those may have been a plane.

Brain dead comedy

Maybe I am missing some essential part of my funny bone, but I watched the first episode of Roger and Val have just got in, and hated it.  I didn't find it funny, or entertaining or enjoyable.  It was like watching two intellectually-challenged children play house...badly.

How is it that people who are paid to watch television and commission programmes, couldn't see that Sherlock was brilliant and this is dross?  How can Life of Riley have been commissioned for a second series when it was so bad that I wouldn't watch it if it was the last thing on television, and I was duct-taped to a wall?

I began to wonder if Roger and Val was maybe brilliant in a Pinter-esque way... but no, it was as bad as it seemed, and that's very very bad indeed. On a scale from one to ten, where Sherlock scores 10 and Life of Riley scores 1, Roger and Val score 1.5.  And that's only because I like Dawn French.

My favourite for a sequel?  Roger and Val have just fallen under a bus, taking the cast of Life of Riley with them.

Deep think

I have been thinking deep thoughts recently, about life and death and the nature of karma and whether I can make sense of the way people say it is. 

I have a dilemma, and it is a dilemma I have faced before, where the collective wisdom of the establishment is pitted against my spiritual beliefs.  Is it ok, and healthier, to demand your rights, do your thing, and ignore the effect upon others, because they are adults too?  Is it ok to care about yourself first and put everything else second, or is it better to care about everyone else first and put yourself last?

I believe in reincarnation as a possibility, and I know that at this point many people would wash their hands of me as being too stupid or ethereally hypnotized to be worth reading (or talking to).  But I have had a spontaneous memory of a past life, and so I believe it may be a possibility.  In any case, if one believes in an eternal soul,it seems to me to be no great step to believe in reincarnation.  If the soul outlives the body it doesn't seem that hard to imagine the soul might find another.

I have always had an interest in the spiritual side of life, have always been aware that there is more to it than the three dimensional world we can observe and touch with our hands and feelings.  I have never restricted myself to conventional religion, having quite an aversion to rules and rituals, which is probably why I found myself a Quaker at 37.

I believe in experiential faith, and it was quite a relief once I found that Quakers do not have a dogma or anything that they expect others to believe, feeling it is right for people to believe what they believe, whatever that is. Strangely a lot of the Quakers I have met have been very similar in belief, very open to new things, open to other people, open to new light, wherever they may find it. 

But over the past ten or twenty years, I have realised that the proportion of people I have known who are involved in non-mainstream beliefs - the wiccans, the pagans, the druids, the people of no particular spiritual home, the new agers, the hippy trailers, the people who follow their hearts to ashrams and eastern practices...the proporion of people I have known has grown and grown, till they are the largest group and far outnumber the Catholics, the Church of England-goers and the Quakers, Jews, Muslims and Sikhs.

And something has been changing over that time, which coincides with the gradual growth of the internet, and the online thing... some conventions and rules have sprung up and been adopted by the community so that people talk about them as though they were somehow written in stone, a constitution for the floopy majority who talk about people having chosen their current lot in life, having incarnated with a soul group, having come into the world at this time, with these parents, in order to learn something significant to their spiritual life, their soul's imprint and future.

It fascinates me because I like to wonder "how would that work, in practice?"  If it is true that we incarnate many times, with the same group of people, working out our differences, how would that work, actually?

The convention that people may have birth marks which relate to the way they died in the past life has become widely known and part of what I think of as reincarnation mythology, for even though I believe in reincarnation, I still don't know that it works this way.  Do we always look like our previous incarnation? For that also has become the norm, to the point where someone will claim that one person is the reincarnation of another, even if one was born before the other died.  There's faith for you. 

The problem I see in looking at things this way, in thinking about reincarnation, is that the person I am now, the person typing this out, thinking these thoughts, this person is me and I can define who I am because I love the people I love, the things I love, have experiences and memories which go with those things and those people, and I care about them in an absolute and non-judgemental way.  If I drift out of this body, and happily leaving them behind, I won't be the same person any more, even if I live on. 

If that's the truth, what can I learn here as a soul, which still makes any sense once you have stripped my identity away from me?  And if my aim is eventually to live as part of God, always happy, loving, helpful with no darkness allowed at all... how is a lesson learned down here among the fallible, grumpy, impatient, dishonest, faulty humans going to help with that?

Plan or party?

The photograph above was taken in 2006 by Flickr user Nick_Russill and I am using that rather than one of the spectacular pictures captured in the last 10 days, because it can be published under a creative commons attribution licence. 

Well the pictures may be pretty, but the news isn't good.  A sheet of ice 100 square metres has broken off the Peterman glacier in Greenland, leading one of the experts giving evidence to the House of Representatives in the US to say that we may reach a tipping point within the next 10 years, in which the loss of the ice sheet in Greenland becomes inevitable and we will be looking at increases of up to 7 m in sea level.  That would put London underwater.

Of course, there's no consensus on what may happen.  Other scientists are saying that the Atlantic Conveyor, which is part of the earth's system of sea currents, and brings the Gulf Stream across the Atlantic to warm our shores, is faltering and may stop.  If that happens, we will be plunged into a mini ice age,with conditions such as those we experienced last winter seeming like the tip of the ice sheet... if you'll forgive the expression.

Meanwhile, Pakistan is under water in a disaster which affects more people than the Haiti earthquake, Asian Tsunami and Katrina combined, while Russia suffocates under a pall of smoke cause by high temperatures and forest fires across the country.

It is hard to know whether to move to higher ground, stock up on logs, face masks, wellingtons, buy a boat or build an ark... or sell up and blow the money on a few months of hedonism before the void.

Life is uncertain.  I spent my teenage years worrying that someone in the US or the USSR was going to push the button and condemn us all to an incandescent future.  My mother spent the 1960s in fear, worrying about the Cuban missile crisis, the death of Kennedy and the death of Winston Churchill, who was synonymous with safety in her mind.

My grandmother worried about the Nazis, and spent many nights tucking her children up to sleep under the stairs at home, worrying that bombs would drop and flatten the house and her family.  She kept chickens and bees and goats, and grew vegetables to supplement the ration, worrying about food shortages and the possibility that the fascists would invade.

My great-grandmother worrried about her menfolk off to die in the first World War trenches, a long way from home, but also about revolution and the overthrow of the government, which seemed like a possibility at the end of the war.

All that worry, turmoil and disaster.  It seems to me that we need to plan what we can plan, as individuals, as countries, and accept what we cannot know.  Is 2012 going to be the end of the world as we know it?  Is it a coincidence that all the planets of the solar system are apparently undergoing changes in weather and seismic activity at the moment?  I don't honestly know.

Should we plan for disaster, and what would the shape of those plans be?  What is the shape of the disaster we may be facing?  Is it flooding or ice age, tsunami or freezing?  Or will life continue to be a mix of pleasure and disaster, plenty and famine, drought and flood?

It seems to me that all we can do is to live well and die well.  Whether that means building an ark now, or just having one big party till the end of the world, I can't say.  Meanwhile, nature is providing some spectacular sideshows to watch.

Sherlock Episode 3 review

It seems odd that the only online review I can find for Sherlock episode three is the Guardian review... and that even then Sam Wollaston wasn't paying attention.  I fear that the revered Caitlin Moran may have written a stunning review of the series behind the chargeable wall of the Times this week.  I shan't be seeing that, then.  I loved the series... if a set of three counts as a series. It wasn't perfect, and as Sam and several of his commentees mention, the biggest mistake in the last episode was the inclusion of a scattering of stars in the alleyways of London - I should think the last time that sort of sky was seen over London was during the blackouts of the Blitz.

There were a lot of loose ends left untied, not least, supposedly, the fate of the protagonists, although that was assured after the popularity of the first episode, I should have thought. Maybe the papers exhausted their stock of superlatives after the universal acclaim for the first episode, which was widely reported, and declared a triumph.  There was a little bit of grumbling about the updating to present day, and the messing around with the plots of the stories, but even the Conan Doyle geeks on the Guardian review comments had to admit that the spirit of Sherlock is something recognisable to anyone who is familiar with the stories.

The least convincing part is still the relationship with the police. While the admirable LeStrade must necessarily struggle with his work in order to allow some room for Sherlock to appear and leave him standing, the CSI approach (with Holmes having better equipment, more time,  and newer technology than the police in the UK would be likely to have or be able to afford), especially in the fast moving world of forensic science, might have been a better way in?  Whether he has some sort of humdrum job he only ocasionally does, in the laboratories of Barts, or simply squats in an unused room at his own convenience and waits to be kicked out, was never explained unless I blinked and missed it.  However, these are minor quibbles.  The plots are meant to be tosh of the highest order and rely on a parallel universe where criminal gangs use grafitti instead of texting and send messages via hapless bomb-laden members of the public rather than the traditional letters cut from newspapers.

It was exciting, and though one might have to disable the critical toshometer in one's brain in much the same way that generations of children have done for Dr Who, rather like Dr Who it had me on the edge of my seat half tempted to flee behind the sofa while the hanging on cliffs was afoot.  I enjoyed it.  I liked the length of the episodes, I liked the pace, I liked the actors, I liked the way in which London was, starry skies excepted, mostly a recognisable place which felt like London (even if, as one viewer claimed, it was mostly Cardiff).

I profoundly hope that more episodes will be written and made, and hope that they manage to do this quickly without sacrificing the hunger that was evident in the first three.  I enjoyed Benedict Cumberbatch enormously, and thought Martin Freeman was a perfect Watson to Cumberbatch's Holmes... though he isn't the first actor that would have sprung to mind had I been in charge of the casting, I think it was inspired. He manages to be extraordinary in an ordinary way, and to be the public in a way that has turned previous Watsons into shambling old fools, without succumbing to that at all.  Of course, his presence was a device that Conan Doyle wrote in to enable someone to ask the damn fool questions or feed Holmes a bit of commonsense when cleverness failed to make an obvious connection, and of course to give Holmes someone to show off to, when he had solved some part of the puzzle in hand.

I enjoyed the background characters , the chases, the settings and styling.  Well done, BBC.  More please, as soon as possible.

Stumbled over this beautiful recording of a collaborative project. People all over the place recording their voices for a piece of music. It's gorgeous.

Try to work out where to go, what to do. I've reached the end of the road with John, and it's been that way for several years. While Ali was ill and the children were younger felt like the wrong time to try to do something about it, but it has become more and more urgent, as things have deteriorated.

There's still the problem of what will happen: he seems to be drinking more and more, and is less in control of things the more time goes on. I worry about what will hapen if I leave... but things are getting worse even though I am not leaving, as a friend pointed out to me.

I have family around the country, in Devon, Scotland, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire. I really need to go somewhere which is cheap, where I will be close to communication links. I'm at a loss really, I feel I am no good at this. How do people do it? How do they manage to break up families/homes and move on?

I read something which said that if you had put up with a partner's substance abuse for more than two years, it made you a codependent, and possibly enabler. It seems a very black and white, no room for love sort of view of the world. An autistic, no room for caring for anyone who is damaged or in need of help, sort of view of the world.

As a person who believes that we are all the children of God, I wonder at this hard line. Are thy the only options? I have put up with it for 25 years. The trouble is, that I love the person he is sober... hate the one he is drunk.

Sherlock wins

I don't watch much television any more. Who do you think you are? can generally be guaranteed to have me watching, and the odd documentary, but mostly I stick to the radio and the internet.

Thus I didn't watch the first episode of Sherlock on July 25... I left it to cause a furore because it beat Tom Cruise's Top Gear appearance into second place, and then eventually watched it on the BBC iplayer.

I feared the worst really. I am a big fan of Sherlock Holmes, but so much of what makes Holmes, Holmes is stuck in the 19th century - or at least the turn of the century. The familiar "ripper" London of Hansom cabs, dark allies and undeserving poor, the gaslight and of course the poor old plods trailing along behind Holmes, nearly always as much in the dark as the poor reader.

It seemed unlikely that any writers would have been able to translate Conan Doyle's Holmes into a workable 21st-century character, and there are some places where one has to suspend one's disbelief. Benedict Cumberbatch's Holmes is an apparent security expert who can't work out how to disguise his identity in text except by borrowing other people's phones, a genius who has subsumed a huge amount of knowledge and yet is someone who takes longer than the viewer to understand the role of the cabbie in the opening episode. That, more than anything, was the flaw in the first episode... Conan Doyle's Sherlock always gets there first.

He has a slightly other-worldly look, which may partly have been the result of pneumonia, where his skin was porcelain white for a proportion of the episode... but then that might have been deliberate, to indicate the hours he spends in laboratories, microwaving eyeballs or flaying dead bodies.

The role of the police, and their relationship with Sherlock Holmes was ambiguous in the books, and is ambiguous here too, although it is a lot less believable nowadays that any policeman worth his salt would allow a member of the public to go tramping over a crime scene, tampering with evidence. Forensic science has come a long way since Holmes's day, and in some cases has replaced the painstaking analysis which was the only option then. It was refreshing to see that the writers met that head on, in the hostility of LeStrade's sidekick.

However, those small quibbles aside, I thought the writers had done a good job in bringing the stories up to date, and directors and actors did a superb one in bringing them to life. Despite his self-diagnosed sociopathy, Holmes was intriguing and clever and it was a pleasure to watch how cleverly the writers had adapted the stories to fit.

I was initially wary about Martin Freeman as Dr Watson...I have always imagined someone much bigger and older in the role, but he won me over almost immediately. I see it now.

I watched the second episode with baited breath, with my daughter, and we were both on the edge of our seats. Of course we know the main protagonists are in no real danger... but you never know when a subsidiary character might be sacrificed to plot, especially in a series which is a paltry three episodes long.

More! More! We enjoyed every minute of it, and long for more of the same. We profoundly hope they manage to make a Christmas special, even if the newspaper reports are right and the next proper series is unlikely to be out before next year.

Corexit warnings

Passionate Sea Turtle action group member talks about the effects of using Corexit in the Gulf.

Time for another email to BP.

Write letters/email about Niger

International Oil companies have devastated regions of Africa in the course of extracting oil from the Niger Delta. Instead of enriching the people, it has impoverished them, with environmental impact of the scale now being seen in the Gulf of Mexico, quietly ravaging the environment for many years.

Two companies stand out. Why not write to them and demand to know what they are doing about it, and how they are helping with famine in the region? More information here.


Royal Dutch Shell plc
Carel van Bylandtlaan 30
2596 HR DEN HAAG
The Netherlands

Postbus 162
2501 AN DEN HAAG

Tel. +31 70 377 9111

Exxon Mobil
ExxonMobil House
Ermyn Way
Leatherhead
Surrey, KT22 8UX

Tel: +44 1372 222000
Email: General Enquiries

Facing Africa

Went in to wish my son goodnight, at a very late hour last night, and found him watching a documentary on Facing Africa, a charity which rebuilds the faces of children afflicted with a variety of diseases that ravage the face. Last nights (this morning's) programme focussed on children who have suffered from Noma.

It seems that a combination of malnutrition and infection, eats away at the structure of the face. Some children die, but others survive with the most horrific injuries to their faces. They are not easy to look at, because it is unexpected and incongruous to see a child with half a face. It is heartbreaking to see a child living under a scarf because people shy away from them.

I didn't think I had heard of Noma, but I had, there was a documentary years about about the boy David, a boy from the jungles of Peru who was adopted by a facial surgeon, who built him a new face and adopted him as his son. I think I assumed it was a jungle disease, and rare... I had no idea that there were hundreds of children in Africa, dealing with the aftereffects of the disease.

The documentary was completely gripping, and difficult to keep watching. I don't do operations really, choosing to look away.

I felt so sorry for the children who didn't get to be assessed and operated on - and the one whose case was so complex she only had the first of a series of operations. Her case was the worst they had seen, and the poor child had the additional problem of an infection after the surgery.

The Facing Africa website says that malnutrition in children is the biggest cause of Noma... and that eradicating hunger is for governments. In a way that's true, but I do believe that we could be doing more individually to help draw attention to areas where people are in crises. It seems that there are any number of children starving in Niger, for example.

How about demanding that the International Oil Companies who have sucked so much out of Niger, should put something back again? Reparation along the lines of that being demanded in the Gulf would go a long way towards helping those people: and writing a couple of emails to demand it costs nothing.

It's shocking to realise that this technique is being used in the UK. I think we need to know where and why people are using hydraulic fracturing, which seems to be a method which causes environmental destruction and has the potential to cause health problems for people in areas where it is used - particularly in a small, population-rich area like the UK.

Disgruntled of Uxbridge

I complained to the BBC the other day. In the past I have usually sent a comment or suggestion, rather than a formal complaint. But I was so enraged by the lack of coverage of the Gulf Oil Spill, that I decided to write and complain that the online website news team seem to have got their global priorities in a mix, reporting on Glastonbury and the World Cup in such detail, and only posting a few short (less than a minute) films on the Gulf Oil spill, and those just a few of the residents moaning about not being able to swim.

Reading websites from around the world, watching videos posted on youtube, I felt that the picture I was receiving from those things was of a continuing catastrophe, affecting millions of people, and possible destroying irretrievably a unique environment and the associated wildlife. That wasn't the picture I had from the BBC, who appeared to think the story was no longer newsworthy. That little they had was buried in the Americas section of the website.

I was hoping it would prompt them to devote more time and space to the story, what I hadn't expected was that they would come up with this.

Of all the angles in the world they could have chosen, they've set out to find the only people with a good word to say about BP, and to report it. I have now made a second complaint to the BBC, this time about bias. If they had been reporting fully and fairly the situation in the Gulf of Mexico and had then added this report, then fair enough. But to publish this with no balancing information about what the majority of Americans feel... and an update on the actual impact of the oil spill at the moment, and more especially the environmental impact of the widespread use of Corexit in the Gulf... I think that is about the most extreme case of biassed reporting ever. Where is the balance? It's mad... they have rules about putting forward balance view in the most ridiculous cases... and then don't with something as important and potentially world-changing as this.

BP ignored safety concerns

Shocking article over at ProPublica, about BP's cavalier approach to safety and safety concerns. They should be ashamed of themselves.

For some years I have watched people defend capitalism, on the grounds that it is the "best" system, as though market forces would do whatever was necessary in the way of controlling the companies. I think one only has to look at Dow Chemicals (took over the company responsible for the Bhopal disaster; still hasn't cleaned up or revealed which chemicals caused the illness and deaths) Shell Oil (responsible for terrible destruction in the Niger delta, and now BP, to see that market forces in our capitalistic system are mainly concerned with profit, and not people, environmental responsibility or the future of the planet.

For years people have assumed that the alternative to capitalism is some sort of communism, but I think there is a middle way, which most people would support: a way of being ethical, people and environmentally friendly, and putting the planet first and profit second.

Many of the companies who have grown into successes recently have had good credentials for this... maybe it is time we as consumers demanded that the big old lumbering corporations should catch up.

If we used the free market to influence the companies who have been behaving so badly, we could collectively have a beneficial effect. I only hope that the doomsday scenarios are overstated, and that we still have time to put this into action.

Gulf Emergency Summit speeches

After hearing the speech made by Kindra Arnesen, I was moved to watch the other speeches at the summit. I don't care about governments, I don't care about big businesses, I don't care about the motives or the guilt for the accident. We have to live with what has happened and respond to it.

I DO care, passionately about people - they matter to me, whether in the US or India or Africa... I don't care, people are more important than things, than profit, than politics.

I do care, passionately, about our planet, and how we are looking after it for the future.

For me, it's a very practical thing... we need the people who have the expertise to cope with this problem, to be dealing with it. We need the American government and BP to be opening up their response to allow whoever has the expertise to solve the problem, to solve it... and if they can't solve it, to look practically at what needs to be done to protect the people and the environment to the best of their ability.

In each case, I have only linked the first part - on youtube the second or subsequent parts will be linked from there:

Kindra Arnesen's speech.


Raymond Lotta's speech.

Cindy Sheehan's speech.

John Clark's speech.

If you have other links please send them to me.

Real news from real people

Kindra Arnesen gives a speech about the things she has witnessed during her observation of the clean up in the gulf. It is amazing to me that this information seems not to be of interest to mainstream media.

Understanding gravity



I saw this story on the BBC website, read it and felt like someone had plunged my brain into fog. I can only assume that the journalist either doesn't understand the subject very clearly himself, or was in a hurry. It isn't often I feel that understanding has been sucked out of me and replaced with confusion.

So, I went searching for a better explanation, and found it on the ESA site. There is a PDF to download which was produced in advance of the mission to map the earth's gravity, and which has good and simple explanations within it. Also a great illustration showing the lumpy nature of earth.

It came as a surprise to me to realise that gravity wasn't uniform across the whole world. I remember my geography master at school treating with derision a book which suggested it wasn't, and that high mountains might have less gravitational pull than the plains. However, that's exactly what the article on the ESA site says.

There are a number of things which affect the strength of gravity. Apparently we weigh less at the equator than at the poles, because the shape of the earth is not truly spherical and bulges out in the middle, around the equator. As gravity weakens the further out from the middle of the earth you are, this makes gravitational force weaker where you are further from the centre.

There are other things which influence the gravitational force, including the composition of the earth's crust. Learning about the variations caused by those factors may help with tracking changes due to volcanic and earthquake activity.

Mapping the earth's geodesy, or shape, will allow scientists to calculate relative heights more easily, and to work out what influence the tides and currents are having on the shape of the oceans. It will allow more accurate measurement of relative heights, and provide much more accurate information about mountains and natural features.

It's very clever. As measurement of gravity gets more difficult at a distance, the Goce satellite has been travelling at the low level (for a satellite) of 250 km.

Crops destroyed

A report on US tv of crops in the Mississippi delta area being destroyed by a mystery disease is being propagated around the web.

Various articles are linking this to the use of Corexit in the Gulf, to disperse the oil. Apparently, despite being banned from using Corexit in the North Sea and any of the seas around the UK, BP has seen fit to use it in the Gulf of Mexico.

I am appalled that they think this is appropriate. It seems that it was already known before they used it that use of Corexit may actually cause the water to lose oxygenation and prevent some of the biological solutions from being used.

There is a report which I have not confirmed independently thus far, that Russian scientists are reporting to their government that this is the biggest environmental catastrophe ever to have faced our planet, much worse than is being reported here or in the US, and that fractures in the sea bed are leaking oil more quickly that the blown-out rig.

I can't decide at present whether the naturally doomladen media are under reporting in the UK or over reporting in the US, but in these internet-enabled times, it is hardly likely that reports in Russia, the US or the UK can be kept local.

I feared that war was going to end the world twenty years ago. I fear that greed and stupidity may do it now. Is the sky falling? I do not know whether I am overreacting or underreacting myself, but it is hard to know how I can muster an appropriate response to this... or how I can prepare for the worst if it should happen.