iblog

Anna: We’ve all been wearing t-shirts for weeks, and now it’s official - this month is set to become the warmest April since records began in 1659. The Central England Temperature (CET) record stretches back an incredible 348 years and is the longest running temperature series in the world. The CET’s provisional mean temperature for April 2007 is 11.1 °C, 3.2 °C above the long term average. You may remember that last July was the warmest month ever recorded. So are we heating up?

The CET has been monitoring an upward trend in UK temperatures since the 1980’s, something that concerns environmentalists and climate change researchers. Despite the near-constant TV documentaries, newspaper articles and initiatives which inform us of the threat, I’m not sure we’re taking the prospect of drought, flooding, reduced crop yields and their human impacts seriously. As usual, it seems that the regions already vulnerable to environmental stress, often among the world’s poorest, will be worst hit. You may enjoy wearing your t-shirt now, but the Sahelian farmer who cropped the cotton from which it was made, may already be suffering the consequences of our Western profligacy.

Virgil: We all know why shops price things with 99 pences at the end. It’s certainly not to make the price £1 more whilst appearing £1 less - oh no - I’m sure they do it purposely so that we get an annoying amount of change: 1p. What on earth do you do with a penny? When’s the last time you used anything copper anyway? It’s almost bad etiquette…

Personally, when I’m at home, I store up all my small change in a little pot - it’s quite fun counting it all out at the end and adding about £26 to your bank - because that’s the amount it tends to total to once it’s all gathered up.

Had this same principle been applied nationally, it has been revealed, no less than £26 million would have been saved since 1971. Or to put it another way, the streets of Britain have seen enough discarded pennies to total that amount of cash. So next time you sneer at your little coppers, just remember that there’s a fortune spread out beneath your feet.

Anna: If you’re planning a weekend away to celebrate an anniversary, escape from exam stress or impress your other half, it can be a difficult task to pick the right destination. With so many European destinations now ont eh budget airline network or accessible by high-speed train, the choice is slightly overwhelming. The internet is full of travel agents, tour operators, trip advisors and travel fora - how on earth can you make sense of it all. Well, I think a good way is to close your eyes and stick a pin in the map. Then again, if your arms are a little on the short side, you could wind up in Skegness rather than Sardinia… So maybe it would be better to get some inspiration from an easy-to-digest A-Z list of alternative breaks. Handily, the Guardian Travel section prepared just such a list a couple of months ago! Check out The A-Z of alternative breaks and pick your fave. You’ll be sure to avoid the cliche of a romantic weekend in Paris, and you might just discover your own personal paradise.

Virgil: The Italian Academy of Cooking, a committee that was founded in the 50’s to maintain the traditions and reputation of Italian cuisine (how cute), has recently grumbled rather a lot about how Italian restaurants abroad (i.e. not Italy) are terrible. In fact, abysmal. Out of 220 reviewed, 200 were said to be underpar. Original recipes were betrayed with even simple ingredients wrong, pizzas were being defaced with pineapples, speghetti was a stringy gloop. It just wasn’t how Mama used to make it.

As the son of an Italian myself, I for one know the distinction between Papa’s special recipe and the stuff you get in Caffè Uno (although the latter is still admittedly tasty), and much as I find it fondly amusing how these gastronomic experts are upset over the recipes being done all wrong, I have to say that it sounds a little like elitism. Why? The reasons for the poor cooking were evaluated as being:

• The restaurant is not owned by an Italian person.
• The second chef is usually not Italian.
• They don’t use mainly Italian produce.
• They don’t serve Italian wines.

Cute, but I thought they were worried about the recipes, not the chefs?

Rushda: A new report from the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) has revealed that graduates’ degree classes are not comparable between universities or subjects. It is not possible, it says, to be able to judge how much two students have worked for a degree and how comparatively able they really are. I think it’s an interesting finding and demonstrates what many undergraduates have always been confused about. Being a philosophy undergraduate at Cambridge, I have always wondered how my job prospects will fare against students from other disciplines, from other universities, or simply those who have achieved a different class to me. Gone are the days they say, when a Cambridge degree could walk you into anything, and yet I can’t help thinking it must surely put me to some advantage. I wish I knew where and how much though, and whether a 2.1 from my university will really compare to a first elsewhere.

Rushda: There are a lot of stories about accidents, but they are even more terrible when they happen to oblivious little children. One particular story which gripped me just now is that of two year old Oliver Ladwa from London, who was crushed to death by a rolling ambulance, even though the nursery assistant started shouting at him to move out of the way. The heartbreaking thing is that the little boy thought she was just having fun with him and instead of moving he started smiling at her. One of the worst things about such incidents is that it’s difficult knowing who is to blame, especially if the reason for the ambulance rolling is mysterious. But surely there must be some justice somewhere to account for the loss of a such a happy little life.

Matthew: Prince Harry should not be sent to front line service in Iraq. His presence there would endanger not only his regiment but the whole of the British presence. Moqtada al’Sadr’s Mehdi Army would place such a premium on his capture that not only the insurgents, but even the civilian population must be treated as possible kidnappers, attracted by the unthinkable ransoms organizations like Al-Qadir would be willing to pay. Should the Prince be captured, Britain would frantically deploy special forces and launch any number of perilous rescue attempts. Perilous not only to the forces involved, but to the Prince himself. If he was in the hands of panicked fundamentalists there would be a risk of his being executed. From an objective, tactical point of view his deployment is a non-starter.

This begs the question, what is the point of commissioning a Prince you can’t send into active service? Harry is understandably outraged at talk of his being kept behind. As a professional soldier, the idea of sitting at home while his men are sent into combat is nightmarish. So should we continue to require our royals to be trained in the military if we aren’t prepared to send them to front line?

Alex: Faced with the inconvenience of introducing real falcons into the eco-system to battle their pigeon problem, Liverpool City Council have opted to purchase Robotic Falcons to keep the numbers down. Splashing out £20,000 on 10 ‘Robops’, the ersatz birds of prey will bravely protect the European City of Culture against the rats of the air by flapping their robotic wings and no doubt emitting their robotic squawks before eating the pigeons in a robo-orgy of unadulterated robo-violence. The menace posed by our filthy feathered friends actually makes this a worthwhile if bizarre investment: cleaning buildings and monuments of bird poop costs the council £160,000 a year.

“When we get the full force up, they won’t know what hit them”, council spokeswoman Sarah Langworthy chuckled sadistically, whilst mentally calculating pigeon death to council saving ratios. Robo-cats to catch largely non-robotic rats are said to be not currently under consideration.

Alex: The Scotsman reports that one in ten relationships are held together by Post-it notes. The ubiquitous yellow helper ensures your other half is aware of their milk collection or bin removal duties, relieving you on the inconvenience of face-to-face contact, particularly when said face is cracking the clean-the-bathroom whip. “I suspect men would possibly be more likely to write notes that are matter of fact, where the best a woman could expect to get in terms of endearment is ‘hope you’re ok’. But I think a woman would be more inclined to be chattier and attempt more intimacy” muses Dr Cynthia McVey, in a vaguely misandrist mode. Perhaps, good doctor, that is because Post-it notes are not a discourse open to labyrinthine digressions into the myriad complexities of how one is feeling, but are better suited to “Pick kids up from pool”.

Carrie Bradshaw, of vacuous consumerist fable Sex and The City, was once chucked by her boyfriend via the graceful medium of the Post-it. New York, New York so good they Post-Ited it once, scrawled a follow-up message, scribbled down an angry phone number, installed another Post-it in a different colour roughly on top and added a snarky message written in four-foot thick blue biro. I couldn’t help but wonder: are journalists careers saved by browsing through the day to day hubbub of spurious scientific research (yes, me too)? I couldn’t help but wonder: is Sex and the The City seriously scientifically flawed? (I did write this post over a steaming powerbook, glancing whistfully out of my window at a moonlit central park, Marlboro Light in hand)

When not saving your relationships from wallowing in an distinctly unsexy chore pit or discretely disposing of your sex columnist girlfriend, Post-it notes can eek out an existence performing more mundane tasks. As well as giving students a helping hand, allowing you to zip through library books, you can also attach them securely to your arm in Robocop-gone-Staples ‘task nagger’. Well, actually, I’d rather while away my work hours constructing a meticulously implemented Post-it mosaic of Elvis Aaron Presley. Or drawing crude and likely semi-obscene cartoons on big stacks and flicking them past, pretending I am Walt ‘freakin'’ Disney. I’m fine…..Okay?

Anna: The UK’s Millennium Seed Bank Project (MSBP), based at the fabulous Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, has banked its billionth seed! The initiative came about as a result of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, some fifteen years ago. The MSBP holds more wild seeds than any other collection in the world, and has created a global network of partners who contribute seeds. By banking the seeds, partners can insure themselves against the loss of a species in its natural environments. It’s a brilliant idea, combining ecological safekeeping with global co-operation.

The billionth seed, from an African bamboo collected in Mali, was presented to the Gordon Brown yesterday ahead of the official banking ceremony at the Millennium Seed Bank set to take place on 22nd May.

(Image copyright RBG Kew)