MOSTLY WOOLGATHERING

Where do theories, ideas and thought processes originate?   We like to think of each and every word uttered as being of the now. Our thoughts are pertinent and specific to the narrative of the now. But history tells us that nothing is new.  I, like one third of the Globe, find myself in a Government guidance lock-down. Technically speaking I could suggest I am in a semi lock-down as I am in the office a couple of times a week, yet for the majority of my time I am at home, working. That working from home releases two hours from the commute to the office. Time to think. Time to kill. Days merge into other days and over the last five weeks I like many others have lost track of real time, my world has shrunk to the intimate, the indoors, the familiar, the outside world now radiates only via the internet or from the media. It was the media which began my thinking, but in reality like many things it was actually something else. This morning I heard Professor...

Jethro Tull Agricultural Pioneer [1] Oil on canvas mural by Alfred Reginald Thomson, RA, 1955, commisioned by the Science Museum, London, showing the agricultural pioneer, Jethro Tull (1674-1741), demonstrating his most significant invention, the seed-drill. © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library As we begin a new decade maybe it is time to reflect once more. I sense a change in the agricultural field, if you pardon the pun.  For three centuries or more agricultural improvements have been driven by ‘Productivity and Output’ – the world needed feeding, land is finite, improved output was the way forward.  In a new paper by  Klerkx, L., Rose, D. [2]  their abstract outlines this change “Previous agricultural revolutions were, of course, radical at the time – the first seeing hunter-gatherers move towards settled agriculture (Agriculture 1.0), the second characterised by innovation as part of the British Agricultural Revolution which saw...

In the archives at Halifax is a fascinating little known manuscript. In the early part of the 20th Century Muriel M. Green, the daughter of the then archivist there wrote up many of Anne Listers letters from the Shibden Archive. She never published the manuscript thesis but a selection of letters were later published in a now very rare book "Miss Lister of Shibden Hall" Copyright West Yorkshire Archive Service In 1813 Anne Lister then residing in Bath wrote to her brother Sam. Anne and Sam were very close as siblings and from everything so far unearthed it very likely that his untimely and early death later that year had a profound influence on her future character. I find it profoundly moving to have transcribed and therefore read the entire letter from a sister to her brother, knowing that months later Sam would drown in a bathing accident while on active service with the army in Fermpy, Eire. Her longing to know how he was after months of not hearing from him i...