Symbolic Forest

Ah, snow. You can’t beat it for sending people a bit mad and panicked. Yesterday the roads were gridlocked for half an hour at lunch time, because of the number of people who rushed home at the fall of the first flake. Last night, the news was full of dire warnings. Don’t travel if you don’t have to. Stock up your car. Make sure you take a shovel, blankets, a flask of tea, a flask of soup, sandwiches, cakes, a propane stove, three woolly jumpers and the complete works of Proust, because you never know when you might get stuck. Make sure you have a propane stove and not a butane one because, as all hardy campers know, the boiling point of butane at standard pressure is only around freezing, so in cold weather butane stoves get sluggish, give up and go to sleep.

Read more...

Keyword noise: cold, driving, frost, frozen, ice, police, snow, weather, winter.

As we got back home at half-three in the morning, I noticed a man sitting on the other side of the street, sitting on a front-yard wall. I’m always wary of people loitering in the small hours. We got out of the car, and I could hear him mumbling, his hand to his head. I assume he was talking on the phone. I couldn’t make much of it out.

Read more...

Keyword noise: arrest, drunk, Hull, lost, overheard, police, Yorkshire.

Today’s big news item: the National Wildlife Crime Unit has been launched. Based in North Berwick, a small village on the coast east of Edinburgh, it’s the first specialist police unit devoted solely to wildlife crime. I can’t wait until the police dramas start…

Read more...

Keyword noise: crime, drama, police, wildlife.