Julie > Recent Status Updates

Joseph Hooker, who ran the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew for much of the 19th Century…had pursued a policy of ‘botanical imperialism’ . Hooker acquired rubber-tree seeds from the Amazon, germinated them at Kew and exported them to Britains Far Eastern colonies. Within two or three decades the Brazilian rubber industry was dead and the British rubber industry was flourishing.

“We’re not pessimists exactly, but in late middle age, when you envision your life ten years down the line, you’re more likely to see a bedpan than a Tony Award”

Increasingly at Southern Airports, instead of a “goodbye” or “thank you”, cashiers are apt to say “Have a blessed day”. This can make you feel like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne. “Get it off me!” I always want to scream. “Quick, before I start wearing ties with short sleeved shirts!”

“Diana was given an award for Humanitarian of the Year at a glitzy ceremony in New York at the end of 1995 among a who’s who of selfless lovers of humanity, including Henry Kissinger and Donald Trump”

From the ignition point onwards, the protagonist has been in a battle to reimpose control over the external world. If the story has a happy ending the process will be successful. Their brains model of the external world, and its theory of control, will have been updated and improved. They’ll finally be able to tame the chaos.

Our sense of self is organised by an unreliable narrator. We’re led to believe we are in complete control of ourselves but we’re not

“Identifying and accepting our flaws, and then changing who we are, means breaking down the very structure of our reality before rebuilding it in a new and improved form.This is not easy. It’s painful and disturbing. We’ll often fight with all we have to resist this kind of profound change. This is why we call those who manage it’heroes’ “

Talking about good metaphors and similes at the moment “Libertines are hideous spiders, that often catch pretty butterflies” Denis Diderot

the lies, the dodgy deals, the sleaze and the wasteful extravagance.. it’s depressing

Great Mullein was the herb that Ulysses used as a protection against Circes enchantment. The flowers were used by the Romans to dye hair yellow. Dipped in wax it was used as a taper.
It was called Clowns lungwort

I am really enjoying this book about the wonder of plants and the natural world. However he does keep quoting Pliny at me.. Whicker is a little over my head
‘Narcissum dictum non a fabuloso puero’

So much drama!

“They were ironic about liking what they liked, for fear of liking what they were not supposed to like”
I think I’m going to love this book

I’m not warming to Stuart Maconie and his sneery condescension.
he says this about Greggs
“And there’s that difficult reputation as caterer in chief to Chav Britain, the staple diet of the hoody hordes and the Trisha tribes”

Written by a middle aged man, for middle aged men - see below (he’s talking about place names such as Ramsbottom)
“Others appeal to the eternal schoolboy who sleeps within every one of us”
Not to me..

Sometimes, market values crowd out non market values worth caring about”

There is a theory that at every moment, all possibilities in our lives are followed, and that an almost infinite multiplicity of universes extend out from us eternally”.
Maybe I died and my family had to go on without me…there is a parallel reality - the one I’m in right now- where we are all still together”

Heisenbergs theory proposed that an electron is not a particle that exists at one place at one time the way a person or a chair does; rather it occupies all positions at once as a statistical probability. When you pin it down by observing it with a detector, the electron freezes in place, and you lose all information about its momentum”

“Nothing in the observable world could be in two places at once - it made no sense - and yet at the subatomic level, that’s exactly what seemed to be happening” 🤯

“Randomly finding a specific grain of sand on the first try among all the grains on earth would be millions of millions times more likely than the universe existing. And yet here we are. 🤯

In 1927 Weber Heisenberg demonstrated that subatomic particles change behaviour when observed..

“Everyone spoke in calm, deliberate voices - as though everything was unspeakably bad but they had faced up to it”

A man walking on stilts among giants..

It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living as they did in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; thats where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle but it’s crucible”

Loving it already

I’m so glad the miserable daughter finally invited her Mum to visit her flat

She is delivering a brutal takedown of her Dad, you could almost feel sorry for him. I’m sure he’s not the only man of that generation who thinks that being rude and irritating is the same as being an entertaining “king of the castle”

Laurie Lee is taking me through the seasons. I’m halfway through Spring

I stormed out of the building. And like any proper addict or alcoholic, I embraced my resentment to stole my addiction.
That, in a nutshell, is addict think”