Anybody see the BBC 4 prog. last week on arthropods ? 'More big words to follow. Spot the glaring 'deliberate mistake' ? Most of you can drift off to another blog now; here comes the boring ex-biology teacher bit. The voice-over 'droned' on (very bad pun that I couldn't resist) about how we couldn't possibly get enough food without bees then, by way of illustration, we were treated to a shot of acres of wheat. Wheat, of course, is anemophilous. If you don't know what that means, you should have been listening in the biol. class.

I'm presuming here that our friends 'isolated' on the mainland do watch some of our TV. Little doth it profit them. However, my experience of German TV is that it is worse than ours. Hardly possible, you'd think.

No matter how many books we pull out of the reserve stock on the top floor it never lessens. Forget the big bang or continuous creationthe material universe comes into being in our store room, as discrete self-informative bits, as books. David Icke started with dafter ideas than that --- perhaps

A few days ago the family watched -- comforted by lots of tea and big sticks of sweet liquorice -- a promising programme on Pompeii and Herculaneum. The Radio Times magazine hadn't marked it as a "repeat." Now here's the cheat: within the whole bloody hour-long bore the same half-dozen already familiar facts were repeated ad nauseam. True, the presenter was filmed walking amongst the same objects but in varying directions and we were treated to a whole Roget's Thesaurus of pointless synonyms. Do you really need a Ph.D. or professorial chair to present such reception class drivel?

Two days ago we watched -- expecting something better -- the Worsthorne prog. on the royals and their medical problems. We should have noticed the crap was coming in the first five minute: "heading off" instead of "going"/ "I'm going to explain why"/ "explore"/"secrets of" and so on. Then we get the 'Hammer Horror Films' tudors. Professors from leading universities get their few quid from the BBC to tell us what we know already. No real medical stuff at all. Not a word about fat Henry's gammy leg, his paranoia and possible syphilis. Bloody Mary gets the usual stuff and on the almost equally bloody Elizabeth we get the usual whitewash job. No nuanced history, as ever. History on the telly -- from the Beeb even -- tends to be simplistic garbage. I'm giving it up -- except for Lent!

The language section is now heaped up with oodles of foreign language versions of English novels. Theology is overflowing with evangelical paperbacks. Bargain books -- at 50p or 5 for �2 -- are falling off the shelves in the yard -- even blowing off in the recent winds.

This site is well worth your time.

All lancastrians will find it delightful.

I'm told the site is doing well. Lancastrian expatriates are visiting in fair numbers.