Winter Solstice। Sirius was bright in the sky as I came home late the other night. It was very blue in colour, bluer than I've ever seen it before. In ancient Egyptian times this star was a timer for the annual inundation. To its right was the great body of Orion towering over everything. Orion is such a dominant winter constellation (in northern climes) the way it actually looks like a man striding across the winter sky, it must surely have been important to prehistoric people? Interestingly, the plane of the ecliptic passes through Orion's belt and divides the sky into northern and southern hemispheres.

There have been some interesting and odd thoughts about breaking the bonds with earth; Cyrano de Bergerac contemplated strapping small bottles of dew to his waist and waiting for morning.... while someone else had great hopes for a system based on strapping oneself to a flock of wild geese....It's a shame that the dew propulsion system didn't work; how wonderful it would be to drift slowly up to the moon and arrive in time for tea and English crumpets!

The eighteenth century seems to have been a great time for speculation that was just short of being scientific। People were beginning to realise the vastness of space but this was something that others could not accept on the grounds that God would not waste so much space! One guy claimed that stones sometimes fell down from the sky and was howled down as a crank. The question everyone asked was How did the stones get up there in the first place?I've been watching passion fruits develop on a friend's city hedge - from the beautiful, big complicated flowers with their five loaves into big orange plum shaped fruits filled with dense red tasty pips. I had another reason for watching - the flowers in particular; they took took me all the way back to my childhood. We had our own passion fruit plant then which wound its way through the structure of our hedge. And when granny visited, she would tell us bible stories based on the way the flower was constructed. This association with the bible must be the reason it is called passion flower. In general much wild growing fruit is wasted in London though there has been a movement recently devoted to gather much of the bounty and distributing it to the needy. We have large numbers of fruit trees of all sorts - apples, pears wild plums etc and of course roses which produce large amounts of rosehips which are packed with vitamin C. There is an apple tree near me which in winter looks rather beautiful. The apples are red and when the tree has lost all of its leaves they stand out spectacularly, almost eerily! A local resident I hear had had some success in growing kiwi fruits in her garden! The urban foxes are becoming bolder. My daughter and I saw a fox near the main road which had no fear of us whatsoever and had probably just been raiding bins.

Wainwright the fell walker and writer of guides to walking in the English Lake district died in 1991 and his ashes were scattered on the Haystacks fell, his favourite fell. In his last book he wrote for future walkers "..if you get a piece of grit in your boot (while walking on Haystacks) be kind, it might be me"!

An Israeli friend friend is making a record of people lost during the Nazi destruction of Vilkavisis in modern Lithuania. He has about two thousand names but knows that the total figure is around 5000