Magpies can see the future. I just saw one briefly investigating the known site of a pigeon nest, outside my windows. 30 minutes later, a pigeon turns up to do its first reconnoitre of the same site. For some reason the site of a tall hedge is liked for nesting, even though exposed to the north-west wind. But as yet the hedge has no eggy nest for the magpie to raid, and it won’t have for some six weeks. Spring only just started late Friday afternoon, in that glorious pink-sky 5pm stillness, and ‘spring proper’ is still weeks away in the lowland valleys of North Staffordshire.

Yet the intelligent and bold magpie is both remembering where the pigeon nest was last year, and also anticipating a clutch of pigeon-eggs to scoff. At that time the magpies will then fit the slot nature has allotted them, that of population control. Because it wasn’t for the intelligent nest-raiding magpies, we’d be even more overrun with dozy and pestiferous pigeons than we already are.

Our bankrupt city council has new contacts available for subsidised bus services across Stoke-on-Trent. Across being the operative word. Looking at the list, I see that everything goes to the city centre, i.e. Hanley. But who wants to go up to Hanley these days? (I don’t count the popular Festival Park as Hanley).

This is the key problem with the Potteries bus services. It’s an ungainly two part spoke-and-hub system, everything going via the bus stations in either Hanley or Newcastle-under-Lyme.

What we need to at least try for six months is an ‘inner circle’ and ‘outer circle’ bus, akin to Birmingham’s famous No. 11. Neither such service would go anywhere near the bus stations, but would just circle.

Incidentally, none of the Council’s new proposals are to restore the No. 101 Sunday service (recently cut completely). The 101 is the supposed ‘flagship’ showcase route for the Potteries.

“Roman Britain in Colour”, a new article on using digital projection techniques to ‘re-paint’ Roman artefacts in situ in museums, giving them more of their original appearance.

A solo “exhibition of 70s sci-fi art” runs for three days only (16th, 17th & 18th February 2024). Part of the Open Studios event in the town of Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire.

He did the cover for the British editions of Poul Anderson’s classic British fantasy.

Up for sale on eBay (not from me), a local 16mm documentary film by Bob Boote apparently titled “The Pacemakers”. The BFI reveals what it is…

“1969 – 1971. The Pacemakers was a series of twenty-six colour film programmes produced by the Central Office of Information. #18: Bob Boote, chairman of the European Conservation Committee and Deputy Director of the Nature Conservancy, discusses the measures taken to combat pollution in Stoke-on-Trent. Each programme was around thirteen minutes and often presented by the subject themselves, as with the pioneering conservationist Bob Boote.”

The BFI has a copy, so it’s not the only one. But for a tenner someone may want it. There may be potential for remaking as a new “before and after” film, if there are many on-site shots of the polluted landscapes without the presenter present. Showing first the ravaged landscape, and then the current restored landscape. That might make a nice student project at the university, potentially. Apparently the film was later edited and re-released in 1970 under the title Black Spot to Beauty Spot. So there may be later footage there.

Only snippets can be found for Boote, though the Telegraph has an obituary behind a paywall. But enough to assemble at least a partial outline of the man. Boote served in the Second World War, rising to the rank of Major and leaving the Army in 1948. He was appointed “principal of Nature Conservancy”, apparently since its formation in 1949. This body had responsibility for all British fauna and flora. By all accounts he was something of a ‘force of nature’ himself, and was very active and outspoken and seems to have had the ear of Prince Phillip. He was instrumental in setting up an early research project to determine the exact adverse effects of the over-use of pesticides. He was later the first director-general of the Nature Conservancy Council, at the time of Dutch elm disease and rabies. Forward thinking, he saw that most “air and water pollution could be eliminated in 10 or 15 years” given the will, along with new methods and new technologies. He seems to have seen Stoke as a tough test-bed for speedy land reclamation for nature, and he brought The Civic Trust conference to Stoke-on-Trent in April 1970, “which took as its theme ‘Derelict land'”. The Garden Festival site later bore out his theories magnificently.

As “Robert Arvill” he penned the 1967 Penguin/Pelican mass-market paperback Man and Environment, which set out his ideas on conservation and restoration.

It appears he was from Stoke himself, though I can’t discover which town he grew up in. A New York Times profile had…

Robert Edward Boote was born on Feb. 6 1920 in Stoke-on-Trent

The New York Times ($ paywall) has a snippet which reveals he attended school at Hanley High School, Stoke-on-Trent.

All this suggests that the remaking of the above as a new “before and after” film might also be extended into being a bit of a film biography of a pioneering British conservationist.

An experiment in postcard scenes.

Take an unpromising old snap of a b&w postcard card showing a snowy lane near Thorncliffe, Leek…

Run it through an AI and two Controlnets…

Not great, but not bad. However it suggests that, with a crisper and more hi-res source, much more could be done.

The AI has also picked out that there’s probably a church in the distance, seen side-on through the bare trees, something I would not otherwise have noticed.

Here’s my latest annual ‘updated and expanded’ version of The Folk-lore of North Staffordshire: An Annotated Bibliography. Now at 58 pages, so it won’t print so easily as before as a booklet (should be 64 pages, for booklet pagination). Please replace any older editions you were previously holding or using.

Download: staffordshire_folklore-19.pdf

The journal Arthurania reviews the new The Historical Arthur and The Gawain Poet: Studies on Arthurian and Other Traditions, with a focus on the longer Gawain section. The whole review is paywalled on Project Muse, but the opening chunk is available for free. However if you’re cunning, you can also find the review’s conclusion topping another review in its page-image.

I can’t believe the headlines that Stoke-On-Trent is the most air polluted place in the UK. Apparently the reading was made in “Parliament Street”, taken “over a two-week period”. It measured PM2.5 particulates in the air.

The first problem is… there is no Parliament Street. I assume they mean Parliament Row in Hanley, since Google Maps knows nothing of any Parliament Street in Hanley or indeed in Staffordshire. I hope we’re not being confused with the busy Parliament Street, in the centre of Nottingham?

The study was by some organisation called GRIDSERVE. No, I’ve never heard of them either. Apparently they want to sell you so-called ‘zero carbon’ solar energy. They’re not exactly official, and I can’t discover if their research-design and methods were peer-reviewed for validity. Looks like a headline grabbing exercise to me, aiming to build up a contacts list for their sales force?

Anyway… our Parliament Row is pedestrianised. It’s where the Stanley Matthew statue is, and Waterstones. A fair distance away from the new bus station, and the roads used by buses hauling themselves up to it. And it’s elevated, on top of a hill. Meaning that most often, it’s as windswept as only Hanley can be, with nothing between it and the Cheshire Plain.

How then can it possibly give the highest road-pollution reading for PM2.5 particles in the UK? If measured in the high summer, were the Hanley druggies perhaps smoking right next to the sensor… and blowing their smoke at it? It’s the only thing I can think of.

Several new research findings, as noted in the latest New Scientist. Most people think that thick wet…

“blankets of fallen leaves can choke plants beneath them, especially shorter species like lawn grass […]. The surprising thing is, this received wisdom has only recently been scientifically scrutinised, with a range of studies all pointing to the exact opposite conclusion.”

So long as the lawn isn’t heavily swamped, meaning less than 20 percent coverage, then…

“the fertility benefits of this light leaf coverage far outweigh the drawbacks – the leaves will quickly break down and help next year’s lawn grow far better than if you had raked them”.

If the grass has 50% leaf-wad coverage and it’s thick, it’s said it’s best wait for a dry spell (easier said than done, in the British Isles), then shred the dry leaves with a good lawnmower. Probably a lightweight hover-mower, I’d guess. Then just leave the shreds for the spring rains/winds and the worms to deal with.

All of which saves time, bin-bags, bin-men hassle (“we’re not taking that…”), smoky bonfires and roasted hedgehogs, the tiring use of hand-rakes or the hire of neighbour-annoyingly leaf-blower machines.

Of course, paths are different. I know from experience there that it’s best to let them get wet and wadded if you can. Then take them off via slicing and lifting with a shovel as if they were peat sods. Then brush and let the rain do the rest.

Offa’s Dyke Journal has reached volume 5. This latest is free in PDF, and includes one article of local interest… “Treaties, Frontiers and Borderlands: The Making and Unmaking of Mercian Border Traditions”. In this it’s interesting to learn that Staffordshire pottery appears to have bank-rolled the defence against the Vikings…

Working at pace on multiple fronts, [Queen] Aethelflaed frequently used the Mercian royal tradition of ‘common burdens’ [to raise funds] for military works [which were raised from centres] such as Stafford, known for its ninth-century kilns.

Slow Ways aims to map the best ways to walk from place to place across the UK. Their Stoke to Newcastle-under-Lyme suggestions are awful and don’t inspire any confidence. One would have you trudging alongside traffic and buses all the way on the Hartshill Road. The other is a strange steep dog’s leg to get through to… the Hartshill Road again.

I’ve marked in blue the actual good walker’s route from Stoke Station to the Ironmarket, alongside their two suggestions (purple and green). Almost no main roads required for my route, only one steep short climb, and you also avoid landing up in the grotty end of Newcastle-under-Lyme town centre…

Admittedly in weather like this there will be just a few patches of mud to negotiate on one path, and in extremely wet weather the route would best be varied by going via Lock 38. But better that, than breathing traffic fumes all the way through Hartshill and being puddle-splashed by passing cars and buses.

Not suitable for cyclists, who might do better to continue on the canal near Stoke Station (rather than forking off along the old Market Drayton Line) past Hanley Cemetery, then cut through Lock 38 and thus get onto the dedicated traffic-separated bike lane on the Shelton New Road. The latter road has recently had quite a bit of taxpayer cash spent on making it better for cyclists.