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... to buy a fat pig, Home again, home again, jiggety jig” is one of the more ancient English nursery rhymes, dating at least from the time of Elizabeth I.  Unlike many of those old songs it does not have a hidden meaning – unless our readers know otherwise – such as “Ring-a-ring of roses” which is about the 1665 plague year; we sneeze and all fall down because we are dead!

YouGov’s latest Multilevel Regressive Post-stratification (MRP) poll of the likely result should there be a general election in the UK now is bad news for both of the country’s main political parties....

When I started my tree project 20 years ago it was almost unheard of that an indigenous Kenyan would come and buy native trees. The combination of knowledge, increasing wealth and concern about the environment has meant that in recent years, more and more Kenyans come and buy seedlings of East African trees. A couple of months ago a man appeared looking for unusual tree species. His name was Michael Mwangi Muthee and he invited my assistant and me to visit his shamba in Karen

“I’m off to Bulgaria.” So said Nick, the man who had helped boost our Sky broadband download speed at our house in Bath from a piffling 3 to 5 Mbps to a hardly less piffling 12 Mbps (compared to a download speed of 37 Mbps in our house in deepest rural France). Nick had come because we had decided to try again to up the speed by contracting with a provider who could give us full-fibre connection. Again? Yes, we had signed up with True Speed, a Bath-based full-fibre broadband

Readers will think this is yet another howl of discontent about the planning system, and so it is. Some may also detect a roar of rage about the sheer incompetence and utter lack of imagination of our new(ish) government, and it is that as well. And the majority...