… in a certain W1 dead-end mews on Sunday night.

It really isn’t a good idea to be exchanging several small foil-wrapped packages for a roll of 20s in full view.

‘Cause if you do, the Green Party leafletter who comes around the blind corner and nearly falls over the two of you will have to engage in an elaborate display of semaphoring body language to indicate – YES, I AM VERY CONCERNED WITH DOORS AND I’M REALLY NOT SEEING ANYTHING ELSE GOING ON AROUND ME.

I don’t play charades often enough to need the practice…

The good news:

The contraceptive pill substantially reduces women’s risk of ovarian cancer and continues to protect them for at least 30 years after they stop taking it…The pill has prevented about 200,000 cases of ovarian cancer and 100,000 deaths around the world – mostly in the developed countries – over the last 50 years, they say. Because women get ovarian cancer later in life, often around 55 and onwards, those numbers will rise as the preventive effect kicks in for women who took the pill years ago.

The curious – which sees the Telegraph, paper of the Tory establishment, getting upset about the super-rich. (While Labour still appears to love them – it is a funny political world just now.)

The useful – well in case you want to make your own complete set of tailored chain mail, here are the instructions. (Probably particularly useful should you be a female shape…)

I’m planning on planting a (thornless) blackberry and a pear or plum tree in big pots on my porch (south facing, pretty sheltered, quite hot in summer). Should I do it now or leave it until March or so?

On the advice of Investigations of a Dog I’ve just downloaded what looks like a very good way of storing Net records – everything from Jstor articles to Flickr photos! I’ve been thinking for some time that someone really needed to sort out the vast amounts of information that we’re all handling, and Zotero looks like a promising way to do it.

* Some good news: in South Korea, the preference for boy children over girls appears to be breaking down.

South Korea is the first of several Asian countries with large sex imbalances at birth to reverse the trend, moving toward greater parity between the sexes. Last year, the ratio was 107.4 boys born for every 100 girls, still above what is considered normal, but down from a peak of 116.5 boys born for every 100 girls in 1990…..
The most important factor in changing attitudes toward girls was the radical shift in the country’s economy that opened the doors to women in the work force as never before and dismantled long-held traditions, which so devalued daughters that mothers would often apologize for giving birth to a girl.

The hope is that just as South Korea was ahead of China and India in development, they might also follow it in this.

* An attempt to calculate if Britain could feed and clothe itself – the answer being probably yes, just (PDF). But what sort of agriculture?

… organic livestock-based agriculture, practised by orthodox methods and without supplementary measures, has the most difficulty sustaining the full UK population on the land available, while other management systems can do so with a more or less comfortable margin.
However organic livestock agriculture becomes more ef- ficient and sustainable when it is carried out in conjunction with other traditional and permacultural management practices which are integral to a natural fertility cycle. These include: feeding livestock upon food wastes and residues; returning human sewage to productive land; dispersal of animals on mixed farms and smallholdings, rather than concentration in large farms; local slaughter and food distribution; managing animals to ensure optimum recuperation of manure; and selecting and managing livestock, especially dairy cows, to be nitrogen providers rather than nitrogen stealers.
These measures demand more human labour, and more even dispersal of both livestock and humans around the country than chemical or vegan options. Effective pursuit of livestock-based organic agriculture of this kind requires a localized economy, and some degree of agrarian resettlement. Other management systems based on synthetic fertilizers or vegan principles lend themselves more easily to the levels of urbanization currently favoured by the dominant (and mostly urban) policy makers.

(But, I’d add into this equation the fact that city-dwellers are generally more energy-efficient than those living in the country.)

* Reading – if it is in long-term decline what does this mean for society? The New Yorker asks the question in an interesting survey of anthropological and brain scanning research, but one, I’d suggest, that hasn’t really caught up with the shift from television to the internet.

The “Somers Town Coffee House” is not a favourite phrase in the traditional working class community in which I live. There was, I’ve been told, quite a stink when the licence was granted to the current owner, since it was not planning to – and doesn’t – open on weekends.

And quite a few of the locals have apparently been barred from it, as not fitting in with the “suits” who often spill out of its doors.

So the pub (which I believe it has been for a long time) that should be at the centre, the heart of the community, mostly has its doors closed.

There’s been a few too many suits for my taste, so I’ve never been in there, but tonight, late, tired, coming home, and thinking that the new Japanese sushi place – although excellent in its way – wasn’t quite what the weather ordered, I thought “a good pub feed”, that’s what I need. And I happened to have noticed signs offering food service to 10.

But no, the man told me, not only no food now, but no food at all today “since we’re celebrating the fact we’re on holiday until January 2”.

Nice for him, no doubt, but not so nice for anyone in the community who might happen to want a drink, or a feed, until then.

I won’t be trying again.

Given the centrality of the pub to English life, are there not rules about providing a service? Just wondering (and waiting for dinner to cook).