Ground control to Major Tim

Time to put your helmet on … Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare.

Tm Kopra on the left and Tim Peake on the left. ISSin the background.

Colonel Tim Kopra (US) on the left and Major Tim Peake (UK) on the right in the ISS.

The UK’s Major Tim Peake is, as I write, enjoying his first space walk outside the International Space Station. He has today become the first Briton to undertake a space walk under the British flag. Woop woop.

I heard at the end of BBC Radio 4’s World at 1 a lovely exchange as Tim stepped out of the ISS:

Tim Peake: Okay, I’m coming out.

Tim Kopra: Okay.

TP: Beautiful sunset.

TK: Oh, I know.

Reid Wiseman: Tim, it’s really cool seeing that Union Jack go outside, since it’s explored all over the world, now it’s explored space.

TP: It’s great to be wearing it, a huge privilege. A proud moment.

That was a really nice touch by Reid Wiseman, the astronaut guiding Tim Peake and Tim Kopra from mission control at NASA.

The 6-hour long space walk is being live blogged by the BBC, but even better, you can watch it live on NASA Television.

And just because:

David Bowie

Jan11

Such sad news this morning. David Bowie was a big part of my growing up.

Sunny days in Devon

Jan8

When the weather is gloomy and wet and miserable, I like to look through my photos to be reminded of sunnier days. Here are some I took of a garden in Salcombe in Devon, designed by fab garden and landscape designer Jo Stopher:

My poor photography skills don’t do justice to this fab rooftop garden. Yes! Really! The garden is planted on the flat roof of a modern house: the last photo shows a hint of the garden ‘up top’, seen from below. It’s so clever in the way the garden borrows the landscape beyond, seemlessly merging the rooftop planting with the surrounding trees and plants and scenery.

Jo is a stunning designer, with a particular expertise in seaside planting. I met Jo when I was writing a feature for The English Garden on a garden she had designed; I was very lucky to be shown round a few of her creations in the gorgeous South Hams of Devon, including the one in the photos here, and will post some more photos of her creations soon.

Everyday sexism at the BBC

Jan7

Are things ever going to change? We’ve known about sexism for centuries; we’ve agreed something should be done about it for decades, and yet it continues. 51% of the population of the UK is female, not that you’d know it from the BBC’s output.

The sausagefest that is the BBC. They’ve got ethnic minorities sorted; how about tackling the biggest, most under-represented minority of all – women?

I was looking for something to listen to today as I worked, so went to the BBC iPlayer for radio. I chose documentaries, because I can always find something new and quirky and interesting there.

After scrolling through a few pages of offerings, and listening to one on Ian Fleming and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, on page 3 I was struck by something that starkly illustrates the BBC’s problem with sexism. Each programme has a thumbnail picture accompanying it. It might represent the subject matter, or it might represent the presenter. Here’s what I noticed.

37 men in photos, including one of the back of a man’s head

1 photo of an all-boys choir, with 32 boys

7 women in photos, including one photo of a female mouth and one of a female belly dancer in silhouette

1 drawing of a female head

1 drawing showing signage for male and female figures

3 photos showing figures or body parts whose sex couldn’t be discerned (1 Anthony Gormley figure, 2 photos of a hand. They all look male to me, but I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.)

So we see a total of 70 representations of males, and 9 of females of women. That’s 88.6% males, 11.4% females. Even taking the boy’s choir out of the equation, we are left with 37 men to 9 women. That’s a ratio of less than 1 in 5 of women to men: 19.6% women and 80.4% men.

I know this is just a snapshot and is highly unscientific, but if you try it over and over again across the BBC, it is a pattern that is repeated: male presenters, male writers, male subjects, male viewpoints dominate.

Where are the women?

Tuesday stroll: Glastonbury Tor

Dec29

Today we went for a walk up Glastonbury Tor: it seemed like half of Somerset had the same idea as it was such a beautifully sunny day compared to the mostly soggy grey ones we’ve been having recently. (Click on all photos to embiggen/bigify/largeificate).

Glastonbury Tor in the distance with the ruins of the church of St Michael’s Church on top, the tor rising prominently out of the Somerset Levels that surround it.

Glastonbury Tor is a small, isolated hill which stands out from the flat expanse of the Somerset Levels around it. It is formed from layers dating from the Jurassic period: the tor itself is Bridport Sandstone, overlying Blue Lias and clay. Only the tower of the church of St Michael that formerly stood there now remains. This dates from the 14th century. Local lore says that Glastonbury Tor is the Isle of Avalon of legend, and is reputedly the burial place of King Arthur.

The tower of the Church of St Michael on top of Glastonbury Tor.

South-west face of the tower.

South-east face of the tower.

Lovely graffiti on the tower by J H Burgess, who visited on 21 May 1864, and revisited in 1869 and 1874.

Panorama from the tor, looking from the north-east (in the first photo) clockwise round to the south-west (sixth photo). The village at the foot of the hill in the middle distance in the second photo is Pilton, and nearby is Worthy Farm, of the famed Glastonbury Festival.

On the top of the hill is a lovely engraved plaque showing directions and distances to other notable places and features in the area.

The tor cast a wonderful shadow over the surrounding lower land (view looking north).

The low-lying Somerset Levels are very prone to flooding and drainage is a very important part of the land management there, with many straight drainage ditches (rhynes, pronounced reens) cutting across the landscape.

Waterlogged fields after the heavy rains of the past few weeks.

The countryside is looking unnaturally green for the time of year, a result of the very mild and wet weather we have been having. We’ve barely had a frost this winter, let alone a prolonged cold spell: compare with photos I took on 16 January 2015 on a walk in Wiltshire, almost exactly a year ago.

Rings that remind me of things: Part 5

Dec28

Part five of an occasional series about rings in my Etsy shop that remind me of things, and one that seems grimly appropriate given the near-Biblical amounts of rain the northern UK has seen recently.

Ring:

N E From modernist Baltic amber and sterling silver ring. For sale in my Etsy shop: click on photo for details.

Thing:

Mosaic of Noah’s Ark, Kykkos Monastery, Cyprus.

Part 1 was a ring that reminded me of an Iron Age hillfort, Part 2 was a ring that reminded me of an alien spaceship, Part 3 was a ring that reminded me of a cream horn, and Part 4 was a ring that reminded me of a radio telescope.

19 May 2016 UPDATE: The ring has now sold. Sorry!

Fascination with fasciation

Dec21

Every now and then in our garden, we get a flower that has ‘gone wrong’. Sometimes it has way more petals than it should, or the stem is thickened or flattened; it doesn’t look right.

This snakeshead fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris) should have one flower per stem. This one growing in our garden had four, and you can see the flattened stem quite clearly:

Snakeshead fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris) with fasciation.

Snakeshead fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris) with fasciation. The flattened stem is clearly visible.

We’ve also had snakeshead fritillaries with double or more the number of petals they should have.

What has happened is a condition called fasciation. The causes aren’t clear – they may be a combination of genetic, hormonal, environmental, fungal, bacterial, and viral factors. According to Wikipedia

is a relatively rare condition of abnormal growth in vascular plants in which the apical meristem (growing tip), which normally is concentrated around a single point and produces approximately cylindrical tissue, instead becomes elongated perpendicularly to the direction of growth, thus, producing flattened, ribbon-like, crested, or elaborately contorted tissue.

The plants in our garden in which we see the condition the most are euphorbias and fritillaries. We’ve also had our white foxgloves affected by it more than once. It doesn’t happen every year – probably every three or four years – but it’s so noticeable when it does happen, and as I like curiosities and oddities, I’m very happy to see it.

A great space day

Dec15

So excited this morning to watch live the launch of the Soyuz rocket, Soyuz TMA-19M, carrying three astronauts, including the UK’s Tim Peake, to the International Space Station. In a few hours, Tim will become the first British astronaut to serve on the ISS.

Soyuz TMA-19M taking off, 15 December 2015. Photo by Reuters.

The launch was covered by the BBC’s Stargazing Live, a 45 minute programme hosted by Professor Brian Cox and Dara Ó Briain. They were covering the event from the Science Museum in London, with ISS stalwart Commander Chris Hadfield joining them to talk them through the technicalities, and with live coverage from Kazakhstan.

I hadn’t realised how historic the Baikonur Cosmodrome is: it was from this launch pad that the first Sputnik – the first ever object to orbit the earth – was sent up in October 1957, and a few years later the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, and the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova.

Lift off!

The launch was exciting – nailbiting, as these events always are, but all went well, and Tim even had time to do a few thumbs ups to the on-board camera while suffering from the g-forces of the launch.

Thumbs up from Tim. Earth and space out of the window. What a view.

There’s another Stargazing Live at 7.00 this evening on BBC2 which will cover the docking and Tim’s entry in to the space station, along with Russian Yuri Malenchenko and American Tim Kopra. Can’t wait – I love a good space day!

Stargazing Live launch programme on the BBC iplayer

The official website dedicated to Tim’s mission

Tim Peake’s twitter feed

Rings that remind me of things: Part 4

Dec6

Part four of an occasional series about rings in my Etsy shop that remind me of things.

Ring:

Sterling silver and turquoise paste modernist ring, for sale in my Etsy shop. Click on photo for details.

Thing:

A radio telescope at SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute’s Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a set of 42 radio dishes in Northern California designed to pick up extraterrestrial signals. Photo by David Schlom.

Part 1 was a ring that reminded me of an Iron Age hillfort, Part 2 was a ring that reminded me of an alien spaceship, and Part 3 was a ring that reminded me of a cream horn.

UPDATE: The ring has now sold. Sorry!

Thank you, tree

Dec4

This is a beautiful Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) that grew in the garden of my older sister and her husband.

Scot’s pine (Pinus sylvestris).

It had had quite a few boughs cut off over the years, and I always thought it looked like it could be from a Japanese or Chinese painting, with its beautiful shape.

Sadly, they had to have it cut down a few years after I took this photo, as it was diseased. As pine is a very resiny wood, and they live in a thatched cottage, the terms of their home insurance don’t allow them to burn pine, and so … we have been given lots of the wood from the tree, which we are gradually burning in our wood-burning stove. So thank you, tree. (And thank you R, for chopping up all the wood!)

Inglenookery

West Country witterings