An amazing tree

I came across this amazing tree when visiting the church at Birdham, south of Chichester. It was more interesting than the church - it's like a living sculpture.

It is a Macrocarpa, native to California, for anyone interested. Or an Ent, if you are a fan of 'Lord of the Rings'...

Nearly fledged

Well, with England's current performance at the World Cup a spectacle too painful to view, it's been back to watching the seagulls nesting instead. The two surviving chicks are now distinctly larger, and walking around.

Only a matter of a few weeks before they try their hand at flying, no doubt.

What a difference a week makes...

...to the seagull chicks. They've gone from very small balls of fluff to more independently minded chicks, and are already beginning to wander around the chimney top. This, of course, makes them more vulnerable on their exposed home to the rooks, magpies and other birds (not to mention other seagulls), so we'll have to wait and see what happens next.

In the meantime, I'm keeping a wary eye out for the mother when I leave our front door.

The seagulls are nesting...

...on top of the chimney of the house opposite.

There are two chicks that I can see, both being fed at frequent intervals by their parents.

For those interested in the technical details they are the ubiquitous Herring gulls, Larus argentatus.

Anyone walking along the street needs to watch out, as gulls can be very protective of their chicks - as I found out to my cost last year.

The best cities to live in?

Wednesday saw the publication of Mercer's 2010 Quality of Living survey, reported by many news sites as 'the best cities in which to live'.

The annual survey is prepared by Mercer Consulting in New York and ranks cities by a range of criteria, such as access to work, the availability of housing and services, the cost of living, the level of crime, and so on.

The results are very interesting, not to say controversial. Vienna retains the top spot from 2009 as the city with the world’s best quality of living, with Zurich and Geneva following in second and third position, while Vancouver and Auckland remain joint fourth in the rankings. Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Munich, Bern and Sydney make the up the remaining top 10.

Read the message boards across the media and there is a hot debate as to how places like Bern and Luxembourg manage to rate more highly than Barcelona or Paris, or why no city from the USA features in the top 30 and - even more controversially - only two Asian cities feature in the top 40. The preponderance of European and German-speaking cities has led to accusations of Eurocentricism, and a preference for the 'clean but dull' over the 'messy but interesting'. In the UK, London is the highest-ranking city at 39, followed by newcomer to the list Aberdeen (53), Birmingham (55), Glasgow (57) and Belfast (63), but many will be surprised at the absence of Edinburgh or Bristol.

The great difficulty of such surveys is that different people would use different criteria for what constitutes 'Quality of Life'. Although Mercer have gone to great lengths to try to be objective (and claim that it is objective), the very choice and weighting of criteria is, of itself, a very subjective business.

Perhaps the Mercer project might equally be entitled 'the best governed cities', since items like public services, crime and public transportation rank so highly. Had 'governance' been chosen in the title, I suspect many commentators would have been less worried. Issues such as the ethnic diversity of the city and the climate are critical factors for many people's quality of life (for good or bad), but the former doesn't feature at all, and the latter is but part of the 'natural environment' criterion. And if you are a soccer fan or a water-sports enthusiast, access to a UEFA league club or the coast might be completely essential.

Of course, the Index is designed to be used by global organisations and governments posting people around the world. Even so, the idea that the average person would prefer to be posted to Bern or Dusseldorf over Paris, New York, Hong Kong or London, will seem to many as a little odd.

And, alas, Brighton doesn't even get a mention...

Getting the message across on civic responsibility

No, this is not an April fool.

We came across this wonderful leaflet recently while in Catalonia, just south of Barcelona. It's all about keeping your neighbourhood clean. It actually covers all forms of litter and rubbish, but I loved the direct but humorous approach adopted in the picture, which shows a group of happily dancing dog turds!

You couldn't imagine that approach being adopted in the UK...

Do you know what you are wearing?

Escaping the cold of the UK for a little warmth (relatively speaking) in off-season Spain, we came across several examples of a rather puzzling Spanish phenomenon which you don’t normally see in busy resorts: clothing with bizarrely inappropriate English phrases on them.

In a rather cosmopolitan bar, the owner had a T-shirt proudly suggesting, “Kill the yuppie bastards”; in a busy shopping street, a rather conservative-looking middle-aged man proudly sports a pullover emblazoned, “Doggy Style”; and, most bizarrely of all, a handsome father, young son in hand, who walked towards us on the beach wearing a sweat-shirt boldly proclaiming, “I take it up the bum”.

Now, said father may or may not indulge in this particular practice, but it strikes me as bizarre that it wouldn’t cross his mind to check the meaning of the words proclaimed across his torso to the world. Perplexed, we asked a Spanish friend to explain what we had observed, and he confirmed what we suspected: that English of any kind on clothing is regarded by some as fashionable; that they trust the manufacturers not to play games at their expense; and that they don't have a clue what the words on the garment actually mean.

Which prompts us to consider the motives of those who design such products? Do they really intend to humiliate their customers, or do they regard it as some sort of huge sartorial joke? Is it the revenge of a slighted designer upon a monolingual wholesaler, or a bored youth in the Far East wondering what he can get away with? Whatever the answer, some of the said customers are going to get a nasty shock one day but, until then, are hopefully walking around in contented, ignorant bliss.

Which reminds me: some years back, I brought my other half a gift from Japan in the form of a light cotton day-kimono, or yakuta. It is emblazoned with Japanese characters, the meaning of which, of course, I am ignorant. Perhaps I should check them out…