Rural Relaxation: Swans, Ducks and Gulls at College Lake

The snow has gone - and most of the ice covering the marsh at College Lake has melted. These swans has gathered at the edge of the ice sheet to feed, accompanied by a number of pochards, a few tufted ducks, and a host of black-headed gulls.

And I am back online - at least as far as this blog is concerned. I have been continuing my country walks, taking more photographs than I have time to sort out - and I have been working harder than ever on the local history & genealogy side - with more that 50 posts on www.hertfordshire-genealogy.blogspot.com in January. 

In fact I have been moved to consider posting here on several occasions - about various ways in which we are trapped by the democratic system we have. This ends up electing people whose actions show they are more interested in building a career that depends on short-term sound-byte packaged policies that look good on TV or from the platform of the conference hall. We end up with a government in which rank amateurs (as far as having practical experience how to manage long term changes involving large numbers of people) end up proposing idealistically attractive changes without adequate proper assessment of the alternatives. There is an almost total inability to give proper priority to long term problems such as global warming, where doing nothing till it becomes a crisis is not a vilid solution. If, like me, you are interested in evolution - and how life on this planet evolved - you are automatically worried about what happens next - in the long term as well as the short term - and the future seems gloomy. However I have decided I should not allow depression about the future stop me from speaking out honestly about the present. So expect to hear from me more often in future.