Status-Q

I do like firing up my RSS reader from time to time. Reading articles and blog posts, which may, in turn, be carefully-considered responses to other articles and blog posts.

It’s like Facebook, but for grown-ups.

Oh wow! A wonderful thought has just occurred to me…

If we leave the EU, does that mean we don’t have to see those notices about cookies on every website?

Getting rid of those surely outweighs any benefits we might get by staying in. Where do I sign up?

Got a quick snap of a DVLA van in our street the other day…

The things on the roof are cameras, looking out for the registration numbers of untaxed vehicles. Now that we no longer have tax discs, the traffic wardens can’t easily do it.

One of my neighbours had let theirs lapse accidentally, and got a big sticker on their window…

Here’s something that could do with a standards body. I don’t even know what these are called. Quick-release webbing buckle? Something like that.

But wouldn’t it be handy if you could clip any two (of approximately the same size) together? Buy extension straps and know that they’d work? Clip your camera case onto your rucksack and your dog lead onto your pushchair?

You know it makes sense. All you have to do is boycott manufacturers who aren’t paying members of QIQRWBSC (Quentin’s International Quick-Release Webbing Buckle Standards Committee).

This Guardian piece by Julia O’Malley gives a rather different viewpoint on Sarah Palin from the one we usually hear.

There was a time when Sarah Palin was normal by Alaska standards. Way back before the hoopla, and way before she endorsed Donald Trump, she made sense as a politician here. That’s not the case any more. I’m told she lives in Alaska most of the time, but she’s invisible in public life.

But back in the day, I liked her – and so did many in my community. I’m not conservative, but she grew on me when I worked as a reporter in Anchorage in the mid-2000s, and the reason had nothing to do with politics. She was a kind of regular person I recognized as of this place. Tough, funny, pragmatic. She loved Alaska like I did. If you didn’t know her then, it’s hard to explain or believe.

Worth a read. Especially for anyone thinking of going into politics…

Thanks to Hamid Farzaneh for the link.

I needed some staples.

I went to my stationery cupboard.

I discover that, in the past, I used to get everything from the same bricks and mortar stationery store, so everything in there is labelled ‘Staples’.

Most confusing.

Jessamy Caulkin interviewed David Attenborough for the Telegraph Magazine.

At one point, he talks about scuba diving, which has long a favourite hobby of mine, but Attenborough, of course, explains its appeal much better than I can.

‘People say, “What was the most magical moment in your career as a naturalist?” and I always reply, “The first time I put on a mask and went below the surface and moved in three dimensions with just the flick of a fin, and suddenly saw all these amazing multi-coloured things living in communities right there.”‘

His initiation into scuba diving, he tells me, is indelibly printed on his mind. ‘You suddenly realise you can move in any direction. You’re not harnessed by gravity any more. You’re free. It’s bliss. An extraordinary experience, like going into space. There’s no equivalent anywhere else in the natural world of such splendour: all of these things moving through an architecture of coral.’ ‘You never know what you’re going to see when you turn the corner – it’s far more obviously exciting and visually thrilling than, say, the tropical rainforest, which is the nearest biological parallel. In the rainforest they’re all hiding, so you have to be quite a good naturalist to really see what splendours are there. But on the reef they’re all on display. It’s like the Christmas windows at Harrods.’

Some years ago, by a happy coincidence of flight timings, I spent my 40th birthday on the Barrier Reef. I didn’t have quite the same photographic capabilities with me as Sir David, alas!

An early Land Rover in Singapore

Jaguar Land Rover have announced that production of the Defender, first produced in 1948, will be ceasing next year. This is not surprising and makes perfect sense. What Car? magazine are quoted in this Guardian article:

“Off-road, very little can touch it. On-road, there’s very little to recommend it.”

Still, after nearly 60 years, it’s hard not to think of it as the sad demise of a classic British icon.

I have a soft spot for them, even though I’ve very seldom been in one in the last few decades, and I’ve never owned one, despite trying to think of a good excuse! At the time I was born, though, my parents were working in northern Kenya, and I apparently spent much of my time, both before and after my birth, riding around in one, so perhaps I have early imprinted memories. They certainly tend to feature in lots of family photographs.

Land Rover estimate that about two-thirds of all the Land Rover Defenders ever built are still in operation.