Nigel Hey's Blog

This is something we take a great pride in.
Duns has been an enthusiastic sponsor of
the Canterbury West Coast Air Rescue Trust
since 2006

This is something we take a great pride in.
Duns has been an enthusiastic sponsor of
the Canterbury West Coast Air Rescue Trust
since 2006

This is something we take a great pride in.
Duns has been an enthusiastic sponsor of
the Canterbury West Coast Air Rescue Trust
since 2006

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Soon after results were received for the 2016 US general election, Will Rahn of CBS News Digital offered an excellent internet essay that could be classified as a sort of mea culpa, about the Trump election victory and the campaign coverage provided by newspapers, television and radio:

The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so. It shouldn’t come as a surprise...

Social, economic and political threats as great as those that made headlines inthe just-concluded 2016 presidential campaigns would almost surely have started a bloody revolution if they hadcrashed into the public consciousness a century and a half ago. So much verbal vitriol was thrown by Donald Trump that I was much relieved when, in his acceptance speech as president-elect, he emphasized the need for reconciliation and national unity. I sincerelyhope that he can put asidethe poisonous pers...

Todaywas anotherof those too-rare days that I attack the worsening jumble ofmy desk in aneffort to restore it to a more reasonable state of disorder. As usual while shuffling through the papers I saw two fire-engine-red, polka-dotted mushrooms looking up at me appealingly from a photograph in a magazinearticle. This time they stopped me. Tempted by thatbrightphoto of fly agaric,Amanita muscaria, I took the pages to my desk and began what became aheady plunge intothe inner storyof mushrooms, f...

“Oh yes, I’m helping to build a scale model of London, the way it was in 1840!”

What??Sane people were building a three-dimensional model of ALL of London, which in 1840 was the largest city in Europe, twice the size of Paris?

Can you imagine hearing a 21st century man you admire and respect, saying this in a perfectly serious and even casual tone of voice? The scale of the undertaking was so great that at the time it sounded daft to me, but my good friend David Armitage was dead serious.

Sec...

In a visit to the English country parish of Kelvedon Hatch early last month, in woodlands overlooked by a pretty little farmhouse, I found scores of schoolchildren celebrating the last days of their academicyear. For them it was a special day outon an idyllic high-summer day in Essex. In retrospect it seems odd and a somewhat sinister that thefriendly-looking nearby building ispart ofwhat has been called “the bunker at the end of th...

Delicate Arch, Arches National Park. (Photo: National Park Service)

Soon after I settled in New Mexico I would drive the 600-mile journey to visit my parents in Salt Lake City, once every year. It was a long way, especially when I was driving alone. But I relishedthe dry forested highlands and the 360-degreelandscapes with their wind-sculpted sandstone outcroppings, mesas, and buttes. Let me share with you the time when, while returning to Albuquerque, I turned off at the signpost to Arches...