In the many news reports I've browsed through lately, I spotted one modest story that Britain is drying up. All this good weather comes at a price which means the lack of rainfall is going to cause the hosepipe bans and frantic questions in the Houses of Parliament. Curiously enough a recent television report showed a reservoir with dwindling water levels. Time to panic? Apparently not. Despite expert advice and lessons of the past, no-one seems particularly interested that our summer might prove as much of a trial as our last winter was.

A couple of days ago I strolled through the park as I sometimes do. The water level is indeed very low, lower than I remember it ever being. A flock of confused geese swim slowly back and forth as their former places to launch begging raids on passing human beings are no longer low enough for them to clamber out of the lake.

Mind you, the couple of days of rain we had lately have had an astonishing result. The foliage along the yard and the alleyway beyond has veritably exploded into growth. The trees are in full blossom and now overhang the fence, never mind sprouting along the bottom edge, and pushing roots through the tarmac. Thornbushes are sending branches out like Pinocchio's nose under police questioning.

Today? Yet another fine day, abeit a bit blustery. The weather map every evening shoes bands of blue assaulting the country in waves. So where is it?

The Big Cosmetic Issue

Among other reports is an article about which make-up men hate most in their partners. My choice is make-up you notice. Sublety, ladies, sublety.... Please... I promise to close the toilet seat...

From The Past - In Colour

Like many people I tend to think of former times as essentially black and white, because photographs of those times are invariably without colour. Lately though I stumbled across a collection of colour photo's taken in America during the forties. Interesting stuff. There's a general shabbiness about rural towns with all sorts of stuff piled here and there. Seeing people caught in everyday life makes the period more alive than the sanitised Hollywood version I'm used to.

Which brings me to a darker side of that period. Not the war, though the evidence of that period is noticeable by the pictures of training aricraft and posters displaying the latest news from around the world, written in a style that would seem laughable today. No, it was the realisation that some of the pictures depicted the everyday lives of negroes of the time. Free, as citizens, but still very much second class. I looked at the front of a tin shack used as a bar for non-whites, without windows, or indeed without any obvious sign that it was a bar at all apart from a couple of drinks adverts (one of which featured a happy negro waiter I notice).

I have no gripe about this period. It was all before my time and America sorts it's own social issues, but nonetheless the oddly third-world squalor was in no doubt.