Reading and exploring with Hugh in 2024, part 2

Yesterday I had an SOS from a friend who edits her local genealogical society's newsletter, among other things. She was (still is, for all I know) having difficulties with two committee members who objected to parting with money to buy books for the society's library. So could I please write a two-page (A5, which doesn't allow much space for waffle) note on the value of paper books? She got nearly three pages almost by return. But what would the GD brains trust have said?

I then paid attention while reading Travel and Holiday: a guide to the Cape Province of South Africa (1960), which has been lurking on a shelf for ages but which I've only ever dipped in to up to now. It's relevant to family history in that it contains an ad for a great-uncle's estate agency (US: realtor); maybe I should mention it to Natalie's committee as an example of the obscure documents a good genealogy library should have. Something that struck me for the first time late yesterday evening is how old guides like this unconsciously document historic changes in what people do with their lives in general, and leisure in particular. The example in point: Botanists have known "since always" that the diversity and display of wildflowers in Namaqualand in spring (August to October) is spectacular if unpredictable. These days there are bus tours to go and see them, and all accommodation in Namaqualand is full to overflowing for the duration. And what does our trusty guide have to say on the subject? Nothing. Not a word. The north-western Cape Province (i.e. Namaqualand) might as well be on another planet.

Happy new thread, Hugh!

>3 haydninvienna: Thank you, Richard!

It's time for a picture, so following on from #2, here's a plant you might get to see in Namaqualand in spring:



It's a mesem, one of a large group of rather similar-looking species. This one is called Leipoldtia jacobseniana (no common name). The generic name honours C. Louis Leipoldt, the Afrikaans poet, medic, botanist and cordon-bleu chef; the specific part commemorates Hermann Jacobsen, a German horticulturist who wrote a number of very good succulent-plant guides.

And while I think of it, a Happy Canada Day to all Canadian Dragoneers.

>5 hfglen: Happy New Thread, Hugh.
What a lovely plant!

Happy New Thread!

And thank you for the beautiful flower :)

>1 hfglen: Perhaps those board members should look up the definition of "library?" I mean if they already have a library, why would you not want to keep it alive? That is a somewhat trite answer to the question, but I know you gave a comprehensive one.

>5 hfglen: Pretty one! I saw one very like in color of petals up in Lassen Park last Friday. But of course it was really nothing like your plant. Mine was more like a daisy in foliage and had a yellow center. It was a Tundra Aster, Oreostemma alpigenum.

>1 hfglen: Happy New Thread!

I would have mentioned the value of actually holding the paper book, the enhanced cover and any illustrations, plus the enhanced availability for those who do not have or use e-readers.

>1 hfglen:. You ask a good question and the fact that you sent back three pages worth of response speaks well w/r/t your understanding of the issue.

I would note print's longevity with better hope of long-term preservation (far longer than any digital file format, even the decades-old PDF). I would have noted the value of having a reliable, fixed version of content in an age when so much may be cut and pasted and added to the likely flow misinformation. Credibility counts. I'd also hope that you'd reminded the Board or Trustees of the value of paper when digital content may be kidnapped and held for ransom as occurred at the British Library within the past 12 months. They're back but the printed resources were the only things that were accessible when the digital was being held captive. There is also the research that shows that reading print enhances the focus of the reader / researcher. I would also point out that there's a general understanding of how to navigate the printed volume whereas the navigation in place with various interfaces on various platforms can be annoying.

Print has its flaws of course, but I am absolutely of the opinion that you can't go all print or all digital in the current age. There are different affordances of the two formats -- some things you do with one. you can't do nearly as easily with the other and vice versa.

Oh, and happy new thread!!!! Where's the cheese and wine?

>7 clamairy: >8 Alexandra_book_life: >9 MrsLee: Thank you, all, for the encouragement.

>9 MrsLee: >10 Karlstar: >11 jillmwo: Thank you, all, for those insights. I managed to miss them all in the piece I wrote. I concentrated on elderly but relevant publications that don't exist in digital format, such as privately-published local histories that nonetheless contain information that family historians need.

>11 jillmwo: Your wish is my command!

Cheese:

More cheese and eatables:

Wine:

Sweet wine for afters:

>14 hfglen: Yum!!!

>14 hfglen: Oh, nice!

>13 hfglen: Those are good insights.

Happy July 4th to all USAnian Dragoneers. Enjoy the fireworks and all!

>18 hfglen: Many thanks, Hugh.

>18 hfglen: The fireworks are admittedly kind of a thing for us. All too frequently, they're overdone to some extent, but it would be disappointing to have a Fourth without them. (You have to wait all day for the sun to go down and be really dark before they start and then the show is over in just half an hour.)

>20 jillmwo:
I hope you are not experiencing any events at this holiday like the ones in West Heart Kill.
Happy Independence Day!

>18 hfglen: Thank you!

Here is a plant I hope you find interesting



I saw it in the high-security diamond area at Alexander Bay, just south of the Orange (Gariep) River mouth, almost within sight of the sea.

Another one in the same area, with the sand blown off



The darker bits are anatomically flattened leaf tips, transformed into transparent "windows". The sunlight (which is fierce most of every day) strikes the "windows" and diffuses through the water-storage tissue to the photosynthetic cells, which line the sides of the leaf. The plants get most of their water from the fog that rolls in every night, condenses on the sand and triclkes down to the roots.

>24 hfglen: That's extraordinary! I've never heard or seen of this. What are they called?

And here's one flowering in the Stellenbosch Uni. Botanical Garden in 2006.

>25 jillmwo: They are indeed strange, which is why I thought of showing them here.

They're Fenestraria aurantiaca; I think I've seen them called "window plants", which is a fair translation of the genus name.

WOW! That is very interesting; almost alien.

>23 hfglen:, >24 hfglen: & >26 hfglen: Life continues to amaze me. Thank you for sharing.

Very cool. I love the weird and unexpected stuff nature does.

This was really interesting! Thank you :)

>23 hfglen: >24 hfglen: >26 hfglen: Very unusual, I've never seen anything like it. What >30 Bookmarque: said! Thank you.

>25 jillmwo: >28 pgmcc: -- >32 Karlstar: Thank you all! The environment in this "mad and sunny land" (a long-ago quote from Molly Reinhardt IIRC) is endlessly fascinating; the people not so much.

At Daybreak for the Isles. DNF. The guano islands off the Namibian coast are a good approximation to hell on earth. Not even Lawrence G. Green's storytelling can save them.

Travel and Holiday: a guide to the Cape Province of South Africa. Heaven alone knows what thrift shop / church sale produced this nostalgic read. In #2 above I noted the total absence of even a single word on the wild flowers of Namaqualand. But most of the rest of the then-Cape Province is there, even the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park (now the very fashionable Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park), then almost totally inaccessible. I was reminded of the generally awful roads and worse hotels of the time, balanced out by large areas of unspoiled scenery outside the reserves.

ETA: The Transkei Wild Coast and southern Drakensberg are also entirely absent; these areas became fashionable a few years after the book was published. One might also add that the ads are often at least as informative as the text -- usually unintentionally.

A Holiday History of France. The author, Ronald Hamilton, states in the introduction is to remind, not necessarily to inform. It would be so if one's school history included a significant amount about France. For those whose French history is limited to one lesson on the effects of the French Revolution, this one is very informative. There are plenty of pictures, and I find his habit of dividing history (here, in his Britain and Scotland books) into architectural styles interesting; it makes the kings easier to remember for next time.

A Holiday History of Scotland. Picked up (in Internet Archive) in the hope of gaining some background to the family tree, which contains numerous Glens, Sandersons, MacFarlanes and other Scots (most of whom did not, despite the Latter Day Saints' database, emigrate to America!). Not wholly successful in that, which is due at least as much to the reader as the text, but I now know that the Gaelic Mormaer is roughly equivalent to a Sassenach Earl; the title occurs in the names of two alleged early MacFarlanes. The format is the same as the author's other two Holiday Histories, which is no bad thing.

>36 hfglen: As to histories of other countries, I too like to read them because the one paragraph in our high school history texts didn't do much to inform.

In reading my current book, I finally got it straight in my head that "Bloody" Mary was not the same person as Mary, Queen of Scotts, although so far as I can tell, they both had a lot of blood on their hands as did every other Monarch of that age.

>38 MrsLee: That confused me too, but they were at best cousins. Mary Queen of Scots suffered enough trauma before moving to England to be driven completely off her head.

And on to another picture, this one to show that strange plants are not necessarily restricted to inaccessible mining areas. This one is a bit of a puzzle for Dragoneers.



This is Frithia pulchra, which someone has christened "Fairy Elephants Feet" at the top of Breedt's Nek, about 80 km north-west of Johannesburg. The road has not been maintained for years, and is almost impassable. However there are several weekend resorts nearby.

The plant itself is just to the left of the blade of the screwdriver. Now see how many other plants are in the picture! (I found 4.)

>40 hfglen: The tiny lavender shapes?

>41 Karlstar: That's them. Leaf tips; the plants are hidden in the gravel.

>40 hfglen: You've launched a new version of Where's Waldo. Teeny tiny little plants in gravel, but none of them are wearing a striped shirt.

>43 jillmwo: Hahaha! All I see are rocks, with some grass-like blades across them. And a screwdriver, whether it is sonic or not I cannot tell.

OK, you-all have earned a clue. Here's a flowering individual at the same locality.



Looking at its purported common name, I couldn't help thinking pf Pete, and wondering what a fairy elephant would look like.

>44 MrsLee: The "grass-like blades" are indeed blades of dead grass. I never said plant hunting in Africa was easy ;-)

Re-read of Sherry by Julian Jeffs. The copy I have, acquired secondhand long ago, is now 42 years old, but seems to have aged remarkably gracefully. It is (on the whole) interesting, well written and almost free from obvious typos. It looks from LT's search page as if there are at least two more recent editions, and I wonder in passing if there are any major differences.

I really want to see some artwork of fairy elephants now.

Isn't it amazing the show these well camouflaged plants put on when they want to make babies? lol

>45 hfglen:
There is always an elephant, fairy or otherwise.

The plant is beautiful.

Here it's winter, currently 15°C (59°F), and cold for here. I gather that is not true for all Dragoneers.

So here is a picture of snow on the southern Drakensberg:



Near Underberg, KZN, winter 2010. The dark mountain in the foreground is called Garden Castle.

Cutlass and Yardarm (1954), reread. The inscription tells me that my copy was given to me by a dear old lady I knew in Cape Town, about 50 years ago. Eric Rosenthal is remembered by South Africans of "a certain age" as being the Cape town member of the broadcasting team known as "the Three Wise Men", back when the SABC was worth listening to (the Johannesburg Wise Man was Prof. Arthur Bleksley, arguably one of the few applied mathematicians to be capable of an intelligible sentence; his other claim to fame was as founding Director of the Johannesburg Planetarium).

Anyway, this book is Rosenthal's take on pirates, mostly 19th century, who operated in or near South African waters. His stories are strongly reminiscent of Lawrence G. Green's, but somewhat more logically arranged. Worth a read if you run into a copy.

>49 hfglen: Oh, glorious! Thank you.

>49 hfglen: Oh, I'd visit that area in a heartbeat! Beautiful mountains and a nice, cool-ish temperature.

>49 hfglen: Fantastic picture.

>50 hfglen: Interesting book! I am highly unlikely to run into it though.

>49 hfglen: What a glorious landscape.

>52 jillmwo: Deciding to go only takes a heartbeat; getting there takes a bit longer. From Philly you'd presumably fly to Dubai, then direct to Durban. That flight arrives (or used to before Covid) at 4:30 pm, so it would be sensible to stay overnight in one of the innumerable hotels/B&Bs/whatever in the Durban area that will fetch you from the airport. Pick up a hire car the next morning, and it's about 3 hours to where the picture was taken (N2, N3, R617), where there's lots of accommodation. But you might be well advised to continue up the N3, and head for the Champagne Valley; the scenery is more dramatic, there's more choice of accommodation and the Drakensberg Boys Choir (our answer to the Vienna Boys Choir). Either way, there's no closed season.

>49 hfglen: That's a glorious photo of a stunning landscape!

>49 hfglen: What beautiful mountains! Kind of reminds me of the Rockies in Glacier National Park, Montana.

By the way. BBC Radio 3 often broadcast musical works by one R. Nathaniel Dett. Whenever I see this name in a program listing I can't help thinking of Isaac Asimov's Robot stories, and reading that name as "Robot Nathaniel Dett", which is neither true nor fair. Does anyone else have the same persistent mental error?

Edited to remove a superfluous space.

Thank you, all, for the kind comment on my picture in #49.

>57 catzteach: After that happy thought, what could I show you this week if not the same mountains in summer?



Taken some 18 months earlier (so the summer of the year before) from a place only a few km from the other vantage point.

Family's been watching a YouTube series called Tread the Globe, in which an English couple are driving around the world in an elderly campervan. A few episodes ago they were in Borneo, where they visited an Orang-utang rehabilitation centre. Sadly, it didn't look as if any of the inmates were being taught even the rudiments of librarianship ;-)

>59 hfglen: Love the photo with the different season showing. So restful.

>60 hfglen: Now you make me want to ask my 3 year old grandson to say "orang-utang." He loves the color orange, but says it, "Ojinje." I'm wondering what he would do with the primate name. :D

Odd Aspects of England (1968) would have been tremendous fun to have read when I was based at Kew. It is a compendium of curious features that one could have visited on a weekend expedition from London, and that do not occur in younger countries.

Was I inspired to do anything? Yes.
What? I was delighted to identify the author's car, which appears in several of the many illustrations in this book -- it is a Renault Caravelle from the early 1960s. It is a rear-engined sports car, which is surely an accident looking for a place to happen.

>59 hfglen: that photo is beautiful. I so love your photos. They have helped me envision a different kind of Africa. It’s not all hot desert and Savannah.

What >63 catzteach: said. It's true for me as well in terms of my impressions of Africa. But I confess that I am also tickled by the fact that you were moved to take the time to identify a specific car appearing in Odd Aspects of England.

>63 catzteach:, >64 jillmwo: Thank you both! Tomorrow I'll post one of a particularly lovely forest for you, in that case.

>64 jillmwo: The car in his pictures, always the same one so it must surely be his, looks distinctively strange, and I'm sure I saw a couple (I can imagine why they weren't wildly popular) in Johannesburg back in the day "when Oi wur a lad".

>65 hfglen: I remember the occasional one in Australia too. As to being an accident looking for a place to happen: it had swing-axle rear suspension, like the earliest VW Beetles and the celebrated Chevrolet Corvair, and probably had the same handling issues.

>66 haydninvienna: IIRC early Beetles and the Chev Corvair had the disconcerting habit of flipping front-over-back if driven too fast without a load in the front "boot" (US: trunk). The shape of the front of the Renault looks ideally shaped to have the same problem.

A picture specially for catzteach and jillmwo this week.



It's a young bushbuck on the edge of a patch of forest fringing the shallow Lake ku-Shange in Ndumo Game Reserve. The lake is on the other side of the reeds behind the antelope, and the southern border of Mozambique is a few yards beyond the lake. The eastern border of eSwatini (Swaziland to you and me) is about 10 km off to the left of the picture.

>68 hfglen: so cool! That deer looks like one I would see walking through my neighborhood. :)

>69 catzteach: Not a deer but an antelope; they also live in the nature reserve next to our suburb, and not long after we moved here I saw one grazing on an unkempt patch of the sports club across the street from home. Spoilt, hey?!

>68 hfglen: A perfect shot, with the antelope framed between the trees!

>70 hfglen: ah. Antelope makes more sense. Are there deer in Africa?

No.

>70 hfglen: Teenage boys will eat anything. I assume that's true of young male bushbucks, as well.

>74 jillmwo: In this case, he was being pretty bright. The grass in that corner isn't mowed, and so is long, green, rich and nutritious. Just what a YA bushbuck needs.

Inns and Villages of England (1966). Each entry -- there are 77 of them, slightly more inns than villages -- consists of a scant page of text on the verso and a full-page illustration on the recto. Interestingly, only about a quarter of Mr Hogg's chosen inns are also in the (1981) Egon Ronay Pub Guide. (There may, of course be one or two in the main hotel guide -- my copy is in a box somewhere.) I think this has more to do with the number of picturesque pubs in England than the lifespan of the pubs.

The Shell Book of Exploring England (1971). In some ways this is a most infuriating book, and should certainly not be the only one read before planning an expedition. For a start, on principle he omits all main places and the sights to be seen there. Then, his maps, though decorative, are cropped so as to waste space, and in more than a few places the sites mentioned are outside the frame of the map. Too-often omitted road numbers add to the toxic mixture. Possibly the worst offender is his map of East Anglia, in which a chunk of Norfolk is cropped out to leave an L-shaped map and a quantity of blank space. Why, for pity's sake?! I'm left wondering why my normally perceptive aunt parted with money for this one.

>77 hfglen: Sounds terrible. :)

>77 hfglen: I don't think I would use a travel guide which is over 50 years old to plan a trip. I'll bet a lot of people who tried to use that one were disappointed.

>79 MrsLee: My aunt and uncle visited UK in the 70s, when the book was still in print. Even then, it was less than adequate. In 1980-82, when Better Half and I were living at Kew, we used a mixture of the then-current Egon Ronay, the National Trust Properties Open guide, an archaeology guide and a collection of Ordnance Survey maps -- much better!

>80 hfglen: I like the way you tour!

Just to show that at least some of the country is green at least some of the time.



Songimvelo Nature Reserve, Mpumalanga, between Barberton and the eSwatini (Swaziland to you and me) border. The turnoff from the main road into the reserve is only a few hundred metres from the Josefsdal border post. pgmcc would be interested to know that the mountains are some of the oldest on Earth, about 3500 million years.

>81 MrsLee: On this trip we had three Kruger Park map books, at least two tree and other botanical guides, two animal guides and a box of books for reading matter!

>82 hfglen: Gorgeous! What a scenic view.

>82 hfglen: Beautiful! What a great photo!

>82 hfglen: That is a breathtaking view. Frankly, I am always a bit taken aback when I see that kind of green in an African landscape. I always think of the continent as being hot and dry. I have to wonder if that's what I was actually taught back in my elementary school days or if that misconception arises more from seeing movies.

>82 hfglen:
Beautiful shot.

>85 jillmwo: Possibly both. Much of Africa does have a permanent water shortage, but by no means all of it. Wildlife documentaries tend to be filmed at the end of the dry season, when the game congregates round the relatively few permanent waterholes and the film crews therefore know where to look. But birders tend to go to the wild places in summer, when the migratory birds are there and the veld is green.

Seen in the blurb for a science program on BBC Sounds / Radio4:
"As beaver kits arrive in London ..."
which caused somewhat of a double-take.
Turns out there are adult beavers resident in London, and they're breeding.

It's yonks since we had a picture, and Pete mentioned he'd seen three elephants (or pictures thereof) in Glasgow. So here are four.



Addo Elephant National Park, Eastern Cape, 10 October 2016.

#thereisalwaysanelephant -- or about 400 (and counting) of them here.

>89 hfglen:
Excellent. I continue to be impressed by your Elephant Awareness.

Of course, you are one of the people in The Green Dragon who lives in a place where elephants are part of the native fauna.

Back in a previous thread I mentioned two favourite poems, and quoted Emperor Hadrian's epitaph as one. A picture in the local newspaper over the weekend and the other one provide uncomfortable evidence of global warming and climate change. Why? The picture was a news item about spring flowers in the Western Cape, which are always dramatic. This is the end of August, and the poem is Oktobermaand byC. Louis Leipoldt. In other words, spring there has advanced by about six weeks since the 1930s! AFAIK there is no decent verse translation from Leipoldt's Afrikaans, so I shall quote two verses with my dull, literal one.

Dit is die maand Oktober, die mooiste, mooiste maand!
Dan is die dag so helder, so groen is elke aand,
So blou en sonder wolke die hemel heerlik bo,
So blomtuin-vol van kleure die asvaal ou Karoo.

...

Dit is die maand Oktober! Ek dink die mense vier
Vir ewig in die hemel Oktobermaand soos hier!
Wat wens jy meer as blomme, as helder dag en nag?
Wat kan jy beter, mooier of heerliker verwag?

...

No doubt Dutch Dragoneers will be able to enjoy that directly, and Scots and Germans to guess their way through some of it. For the rest of us, here is a terminally unpoetic rendering:

It's the month of October, the loveliest, most beautiful month! Then the days are so bright, each evening so green, so blue and cloudless the heavens delightful above, So flower-garden-full of colours the ash-grey old Karoo.

...

It's the month of October! I think the people in heaven celebrate for ever, October just like here! What could you wish for more than flowers, than clear days and nights? What can you expect better, more beautiful or pleasanter?

>91 hfglen:
My northern hemisphere upbringing had me somewhat disconcerted reading about the garden full of flowers in October. I my mind I had the image of trees with autumn leaves and low sunshine slanting through the branches when I suddenly read about "flower-garden-full of colours".

Not related to climate change, but one thing I noticed in Ireland was the difference in barley harvest time for county Donegal in the north west and Wexford in the south east, a mere 150-200 miles apart. I was used to the harvest starting in August in Donegal and running into September. I was driving through Wexford in mid-July and was very surprised to find the barley harvest already ramping up. You are probably aware from your time in Ireland that Wexford is known as The Sunny Southeast, a reputation that is supported by the great weather it always seems to have. It is easy to see how the harvest is so much earlier in Wexford than in Donegal where the county receives the unfettered force of the North Atlantic Ocean.

>92 pgmcc: You set me thinking for a whole week. Here it's often altitude that does the same thing. Most temperate / cool-temperate plants simply won't grow in the older part of Durban, at sea level and warmed by the Indian Ocean, but they can grow cashews and cocoa (just). In the suburb where I live (30 km inland, 540 m asl) neither will grow, but to my surprise I can grow a maple and a sweet chestnut (but the monkeys steal the whole crop). Even here it's too warm for a horse chestnut, one of the loveliest of all trees IMHO. At Nottingham Road, 200 km inland and 1450 m and up, they get snow in winter, and spring comes at Christmas, when the rest of us are baking in midsummer.

I wondered whether grapes in the Cape would show the variation you saw in Irish barley. According to John Platter's guide, they don't. But the hot, dry lower Olifants River* valley does specialise in robust reds**, while 200 km south the somewhat cooler, higher-altitude vineyards on top of Helshoogte Pass and around Grabouw-Elgin (where the "other" crop is apples) go in for ethereal whites.

*The name means what you think it does. There were elephants there when Simon van der Stel's exploring expedition came through at the end of the 17th century.

** With exceptions, of course. Fryer's Cove, a short distance south of the Olifants River mouth, has vineyards a short stone's throw from the beach. They are cooled by the icy Benguela Current and so are one of the few places here to make a success of Pinot Noir. The winery is in a disused fish cannery, and has a restaurant on the jetty. That is famous for FRESH fish and chips: when an order comes in, the chef leans out of the kitchen window, whistles up a boat in the bay and signals how many portions. A few minutes later observant dinerss will observe a boy hot-footing up the path with the requisite nimber of fishes, still flapping. And despite what I said above, the highest-altitude vineyard in the Cape is in the Cedarberg (1100 m), half an hour south of Leipoldt's home in Clanwilliam.

Following on from #89, another picture from Addo Elephant National Park



Warthog, seen on 10 October 2016.

>94 hfglen: This is a gorgeous warthog :) (Truly!)

>95 Alexandra_book_life: Thank you! No doubt he would agree with you.

BBC Radio 3 quite often broadcast music by one R. Nathaniel Dett. Every time I see the name part of my mind does an illicit edit and suggests that the name should be R. Daneel Olivaw, from Isaac Asimov's Robot stories. Is anyone else similarly afflicted.

>93 hfglen: I thought of you while reading The Ra Expeditions. The Pasha's wife in Safi, where they launched their boat from, gave them a a parting gift; a monkey. I wondered if she was trying to put a spanner in the works and make their trip a failure. Actually, the monkey did them little to no damage and provided good distraction for men in a long sea voyage.

>94 hfglen: That is an excellent photo of an elegant creature.

>94 hfglen: Honestly, I had no idea what one looked like (beyond the animator's work in The Lion King). Quite a remarkable set of horns there. Do I count correctly -- there are four horns? Two big ones and then two slightly smaller ones further up the snout?

>99 jillmwo: The big ones are tusks; the smaller ones give the animal its name.

The Stories of English. Considerably more academic than the two previous books by David Crystal that I've read, and proportionately heavier going. In fact, I lost interest 3/4 way through (it was out-competed by new data for the family tree), and it took much longer and more endurance to finish than I thought it would. But there is much of interest here; the effect is more that of a long Edwardian meal as appears from the menus in an edition of Mrs Beeton from the period, rather than active distaste.

Many thanks to pgmcc and others for the BB marked The Hymn tune Mystery. My curiosity was satisfied online, and I found this a very satisfying, if all-too-quick read. Thinking of jillmwo's question about one's preferred kind of victim in a book of this genre, in this most satisfactory book the victim is what Sybil-the-Dean's-daughter would doubtless describe as "no better than he should be", with one great skill. No doubt his loss was a considerable misfortune to his community. Inspector Smallwood's resolution and Rev. Dennis's response were a delight. The humour is never far from the surface, but always of the understated, feel-good kind rather than laugh-out-loud absurd.

>102 hfglen: So you tend to favor the unlikable victim, then. And a lyric from The Mikado is running through my brain -- "They'll none of them be missed". I agree with your assessment of The Hymn Tune Mystery. It's enjoyable. But out of curiosity, were you able to read it in ebook form there or did you (like me) have to read it in hardcover? I'm really kind of curious about the territorial access rights.

>103 jillmwo: Ebook, through Internet Archive. I don't think I've ever seen a paper copy. I'm not sure that "favour" is the right word for the victim; I suspect that in person I'd have found him marginally less revolting than the Archdeacon and the Dean's daughter. I'd like to meet Precentor Dennis and maybe Inspector Smallwood. Hodson was a pain of a species with which I have long been too familiar for comfort -- I went to a Nonconformist primary school. With the exception of the Inspector and the Precentor, I'll agree with you that "They'll none of them be missed".

>102 hfglen:
I am glad you liked it. The Simpkins Plot may also be to your liking.

>94 hfglen: I have to agree with >99 jillmwo:, if I've ever seen a photo or video of a warthog in real life I did not store it in my brain. Great photo, and I love the elephants also!

This morning BBC News (on the Web) has a disturbing CCTV clip of a flood on 19 August that severely damaged a library on Long Island. It seems that mopping-up operations are continuing, but the mess in the pictures is more than serious. One can only hope that Dragoneers in general and clamairy in particular are not affected.

>107 hfglen: I was not, thankfully. There were several locations on Long Island, the Bronx and Connecticut that were devastated. I believe two people in Connecticut lost their lives after being trapped in their cars. Some areas got 10 inches of rain in just a few hours.

>108 clamairy: That's a relief as far as you're concerned, but still a sadness for the destruction and loss of life.

>108 clamairy: Glad to hear you weren't affected.

In honour of Alexandra's Elephant Awareness:



Addo Elephant National Park, Eastern Cape, South Africa, 10 October 2016.
#thereisalwaysanelephant (in fact, there are at least 400 of them here.)

>111 hfglen: Oh,this is a beautiful photo! :)))))

>111 hfglen:
Fantastic picture.
I am proud of you, Hugh. The work you do for Elephant Awareness is legend. You have a high EA Index.
#thereisalwaysanelephant

>111 hfglen: That's a great photo! I love how you've cropped it.

>113 pgmcc: Hugh gets bonus points for living in a place where you can see elephants in the wild!

>114 Sakerfalcon:
He deserves extra credit as, while living where one can see elephants in the wild, he has not taken them for granted. Given the texture of the skin on the elephants in Hugh's picture one could easily take them for granite.

Keep up the good work, Hugh!

>112 Alexandra_book_life: >113 pgmcc: >114 Sakerfalcon: Thank you, all!
>115 pgmcc: A bonus point for an awful pun!

Seeing you're all so kind, here's another picture.



Addo is very protective of its Flightless Dung Beetles, which are apparently rare and endangered. You get one guess as to the source of the ball these two are rolling across the road. (Same day and almost exactly the same place as #111.)

>117 hfglen:
My daughter did a master’s degree in animal welfare. Her dissertation was a study of elephant dung from the elephants in Dublin and Belfast zoos.

>117 hfglen: It's nice that you are being kind back :)

The photo is pretty cool!

>117 hfglen: A dung beetle walks into a bar and asks, "Is this stool taken?"   (Jim53 in Bad Joke of the Day thread)

>120 ScoLgo:
I love the way you told that joke and then immediately distanced yourself from it. :-) Skilfully done.

>121 pgmcc: 🤣

>117 hfglen: One thing I never anticipated in joining LT was the amount I would learn about animals in other parts of the world.

>117 hfglen: So you have elephants both coming and going.

Our perhaps I should say you have covered elephants from front to rear.

Stray question for the GD Brains Trust (who, as we know, cover all knowledge between them).

I've been reading The National Trust Book of English Architecture as suitably soporific bedside-reading, and reached the 18th century when the great London squares were being laid out. This triggered a memory, namely of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, where the Order's HQ is at 12 Grimmauld Place. This was evidently in a somewhat downmarket version of one of these squares that had gone a long way down since being built, and was evidently most of the way to becoming a slum. So the question: does such a place exist outside Ms Rowling's imagination (and possibly Naples)? I don't recall seeing or hearing of such a place while in London some 40 years ago.

Many thanks for any enlightenment.

And this week's picture:



Because rhinos are so heavily poached in this country, I offer neither locality nor date, simply in order to give some protection to the subject. Note the oxpeckers catching ticks on this one.

>126 hfglen:
Brilliant picture. Thank you!

>126 hfglen: Wonderful photo! I am always happy to see your pictures :)

>126 hfglen: I see great beauty in the rhino, wish humans could enjoy the beauty and not have to kill everything around them.

>129 MrsLee: I agree in every way.

>126 hfglen: I love it. And agree with >129 MrsLee:!

>129 MrsLee: -- >131 Narilka: This morning I got behind an SUV with a bumper sticker I think we can all relate to. It read:

Save a Rhino -- shoot a poacher

>132 hfglen: I appreciate the sentiment certainly.

>132 hfglen: It must be an on-going temptation that you face. :>)

Love the photos, as always. Thank you. I even appreciate the 💩 beetles!

>129 MrsLee: -- >131 Narilka:, >133 MrsLee:, >134 jillmwo: Today's "good" news is a report from a reserve with a relatively large population of both black and white rhinos, that since they started a mass de-horning program a year ago, poaching has fallen by 80%. But as the conservationist says, that shouldn't be necessary, and rhinos presumably need their horns for a reason.

>135 clamairy: Thank you!

Somehow Marabou Storks always seem to look like elderly, pedantic and disapproving Dickensian lawyers.



Hlane Game Reserve, Swaziland (now Eswatini), 11 September 2015.

>138 hfglen: Definitely chortling, because I can see where you get that impression!

>138 hfglen: This is a perfect Dickensian lawyer! Wow :)

>136 hfglen: That is good news, but sad that it is necessary.

>138 hfglen: Nice picture, I see the resemblance.

>138 hfglen:
Definitely.

>139 jillmwo:->142 pgmcc: Unfortunately, my mother's uncle could be and often was just such a lawyer, with a side order of "My mind is made up; don't confuse me with facts".

>143 hfglen:
:-(

Catching up on threads. I’m with >123 jillmwo:, I never anticipated learning more about the animals and cultures in other parts of the world when I joined LT. I’ve loved it!

As to the dehorning program, so they take the horns of the rhinos and then let them go and heal? What do they do with the horns?

>145 catzteach: "heal" may not be quite the right word. The horns are composed of keratin, just like our fingernails, and just like our fingernails they grow back. So there's little difference, other than that the tool the rangers use on the rhinos is a chainsaw, not a nail clipper.

ETA: Oops! missed your second question. I gather the horns are kept in a safe place for some time, then either burned or treated with bug-killer, microchipped and auctioned off. There's been more than a little debate on that.

For a long time I've enjoyed Walton's Façade suite, with or without Dame Edith Sitwell's words. So when, many years ago, I chanced upon a secondhand copy of her book on Victoria of England, I succumbed and gave it a home. Where it's gathered dust for years, until I read it this week. Oy vay. Her lyrics are strange, imaginative and fun. But the book rarely stops being a tedious string of quotations of what others have said of "our late dear Queen and Empress", and (possibly more forgivably) from Victoria's own published letters. The spark of life in Façade is almost wholly lacking, and it was a relief to reach the end of this one.

Was I inspired to do anything? Only to flag the book for rehousing on next year's church fete, sadly eleven long months away at least.

Next week Durban Botanic Garden is having a do to celebrate its 175th anniversary, and both Better Half and I are due to give papers. So we went there today to take some pictures for hers, even though it was almost-raining and little light made it through the cloud cover.



Saw this heron, who let me get close enough almost to brush against his wing (the picture is taken with a standard lens!). This was the more remarkable as the sports club next door was having a party with a band loud enough to make the walls of the gardens' cafe shake.

>148 hfglen: What a great experience, and photo.

>148 hfglen: Amazing photo, Hugh. Thank you for sharing.

>148 hfglen: This is a wonderful photo! Thank you :)

>148 hfglen:
That is a super picture.

>148 hfglen:. What fun and what a great photo! But you neglected to tell us what you and your wife are specifically speaking about. What aspects of the Durban Botanic Gardens are you covering?

>153 jillmwo:
That had crossed my mind too. Thank you for asking.

>148 hfglen: The bird appears to be too interested in dinner to worry about you, Hugh (or the racket from the band). Great picture.

>153 jillmwo: >154 pgmcc: Her title is "The Secret Life of Aquatic Plants (in DBG)", and has to do with breeding strategies of water plants. Mine is "Know your (useful) Trees", and isn't confined to DBG.

>156 hfglen:
Thank you. I am glad to see you are not letting yourself be confined within the boundary fences of the DBG.

>156 hfglen: I would like to learn more about "(useful) Trees". What might be a brief sampling of trees I should be aware of when visiting that part of the world? And while the phrasing here might not make it clear, I'm quite definitely curious.

>158 jillmwo: You asked for it!
Medicinal: Willow, bay-rum (cosmetic -- Brylcreem -- but leads on to next); DBG hasn't tried Cinchona, though one feels it should be possible here.
Edible: Monkey-puzzle was once dispersed by dinosaurs eating the cones. Avocadoes, mangoes, peaches; indigenous: marula, stamvrug, wild-apricot, all in the Magaliesberg rather than Durban; other: breadfruit, cinnamon, bay-laurel.
Furniture: Stinkwood, Yellowwood (these 2 indigenous), Australian Blackwood, Kauri, Mahogany (the last 2 in DBG).
Structural: Teak, Iroko (in DBG); Ironwood, Red-alder, White-pear, Tamboti (all indigenous).
Barbecue-firewood: Mopane, Camel Thorn, Rooikrans, Port Jackson Willow, Kreupelhout.

That should fill half an hour!

>159 hfglen: I am seriously intrigued by your reference to Monkey-puzzle trees as edible. You note that dinosaurs found them to be tasty. Do human taste buds find them so? (I am guessing not, but I'm not particularly well-versed in this area.)

>160 jillmwo: Apparently the seeds are tasty to humans, which I find plausible. Dinos ate the cones whole, I gather.

I was equally intrigued to read, some years ago, the theory that before people arrived in the Americas avocado pears were dispersed by a now-extinct large herbivore.

>161 hfglen: I read on the internet (meaning I do not have sources and do not know their quality) that that theory about avocadoes has been disproved. They think now it was humans doing the dispersing.

>160 jillmwo: >161 hfglen: As to the edibility of the fruit of the monkey-puzzle tree: the tree is an Araucaria, and the fruit of another one, A. bidwillii, the bunya pine, was a significant food for the indigenous people of Australia. I vaguely remember once having seen the nuts for sale at a market in Canberra.

>159 hfglen: Fascinating stuff, thank you. The pictures are great too.

Just like Clam, I think today is an ideal time to start a new thread. See y'all there!

>165 hfglen: Yes! The 4th quarter of the year began.