Beehive under threat

Sad to hear that The Beehive pub, on the Honeywall near my old allotment, is under threat.

Slavering feral packs of dogs roam Stoke?

Has anyone seen the slavering feral packs of dogs which The Sentinel newspaper would like us to think are roaming the city? No, me neither...

Figures obtained by The Sentinel reveal more than 2,700 dogs have been found abandoned in Stoke-on-Trent or seen wandering the city’s streets since January 2012. [...] 2,000 of the dogs were rescued from the streets and taken to kennels. A further 700 animals were reported to be 'roaming' the city.

The Sentinel is sensationally conflating dogs merely reported as "seen wandering" with actually "abandoned" dogs. Despite the Council's growing budget for stray dog catching services — running at £63,000 a year in 2014/15 (the amount is from an FOI request) — there were reportedly 700 uncatchable roaming dogs reported over the last two years. That appears to equal less than one report of a stray dog per day anywhere in the city: of the 'the Council located it and tried to catch it, it wasn't friendly and ran away' type, perhaps indicating it was a hardened stray. But possibly these "700" dogs were actually multiple public reports of the same dogs — The Sentinel gives no estimate of the total for 'identified dogs known to have been on the loose for more than x amount of time'. I'd expect it's no more than a dozen genuine 'one-month abandoned' starving dogs across the whole city, even in the summer.

There is of course a potential impact on wildlife from a build-up of stray dogs, since even normal dog-walking has been proven to scare away around a third of all the birds from parks and conservation areas. So the threat of a build up of stray dogs would need to be dealt with, if it were to happen. It doesn't appear to be happening. Although the City Council has reportedly cut the weekend and evening working hours for its dog wardens, the overall dog-catching budget has actually gone up for 2015, and the cuts to overtime hours don't appear to have made things worse.

I've done a lot of walking and cycling through the city during the last few years, and I don't think I've ever seen a genuine rough-looking stray dog once. The real menace to pedestrians and cyclists is the deranged smaller yappy dog that gets let off the lead in a park by their owner, which then comes hurtling toward you over the grass and either leaps up and/or tries to bite your ankles.

"No legislation has been passed to outlaw traditional units for allotments"

It seems that Whitehall bullies are trying to get allotment committees to switch to metric measurements. Presumably they're doing this at the behest of the EU. But the British Weights and Measures Association is writing to local newspapers to inform people that...

"We want to assure councils and allotment holders that Mr Johnson is wrong. No legislation has been passed to outlaw traditional units for allotments. When drafting metric regulations in the mid-1990s, the government exempted ‘transactions by specification’, of which allotment contracts are an example. Rods, poles, perches, yards and lugs have existed for hundreds of years in Britain, and we hope that councils and allotment holders continue to use them for centuries to come." — JOHN GARDNER Director, British Weights and Measures Association.

Gone to pot

Well well... Hartshill is in the news today for 'allotment' gardening, although of a very dodgy kind: "Police seize more than £20k worth of cannabis after raiding Hartshill business". I quite often walk up through Hartshill Park to flex the hip, do a bit of shopping at the Tesco mini-store there and post some letters, and I'd noticed the partial re-emergence of the very dodgy looking spare-tires and supposed car-repair place, which looked rather out-of-place. As I walked past it I once or twice got some hard stares from the guys who seemed to be running it, though usually there was no-one to be seen out at the front of the car entrance. Now I see the possible reason for their wariness.

Penkhull Wassail 2015: two new photo galleries

Andy White followed the procession and performances for the inaugural Penkhull Wassail 2015 thoughout, with his camera, and now has two excellent sets of photos (one and two) online at Facebook.

Wassail at the Honeywall: video

My little video of last night's Wassail, at the Honeywall and Beehive pub section of the procession, very near the allotments...

Penkhull New Year Wassail

Pictures from the Penkhull New Year Wassail, with the Domesday Morris processing a crowd down from Penkhull to the Beehive and the White Lion pubs, on the Honeywall, where they performed in the pub yards...

Fun-guys

Added the Staffordshire Fungus Group to the sidebar links list. If you have some particularly bizzare mushrooms or toadstools on your patch, they might be the people to email with a picture.

Penkhull Wassail 2015

Penkhull is reviving its New Year Wassail tradition, with a Domesday Morris Penkhull 2015 Wassail on 3rd January. Until now, the Wassail procession tradition had only survived at Barlaston, in the south of the city.

Picture: the Barlaston Wassail, from the Sentinel.

Charles Tomlinson reads "The Allotment"

I found an audio-recording of Charles Tomlinson reading the full version of his poem about allotments and his father. His father and he lived on Hartshill, and so the poem's setting may have been my old allotment on the hillside above Stoke town. The rest of his Stoke Poems can be heard here (scroll down to get to the Stoke section).

Picture doesn't show Stoke, and probably somewhere in northern England. But it certainly has a similar feel.