Volunteering: soup kitchen, wildlife conservation, hospital driver, train restoration, old folks home or whatever is going on near you that takes your fancy.

I have lived in 7+ rural places. All of them have had some combination of nature reserves, forestry commission woodland, recreation grounds, open access land, walkable riverbanks and, of course, the usual footpaths and bridleway network within 15 mins walk.

I really don’t know how common that is but it has always been my experience.

I have done toad patrolling for quite a few years. You are on an open road surface, you have a torch, probably a head torch too, and you are specifically looking for toads.

I have certainly never stood on one.

I have heard this explained as being due to truck company rules that the driver can’t leave the vehicle unless at a truckstop - presumably for insurance reasons. So, when they pull into a layby overnight, since they don’t want a puddle of piss next to the truck, they do this.

They use laybys instead of truck stops because they have to pay for the truckstops themselves.

How accurate any of this is, I don’t know, and clearly none of it should be an excuse even if it is the actual reason.

Usually it is just individuals or people from small businesses that tip rubbish somewhere they are not allowed to and then ‘fly’ from the scene: just leave it and run. This is usually so that they don’t have to pay to dispose of it - but sometimes just because they can’t be arsed to go to the actual waste disposal site.

Increasingly, criminal organisations are finding that they can make money from this: charging businesses for the disposal but then just dumping it, sometimes in enormous quantities.

It is only very recently that I realised that fly-tipping is not a widely used term outside the UK. I know that this also occurs in other countries, but I don’t know what it is called elsewhere.

According to this, the entire road project is costing £500 million, so I doubt that this figure is for the bridge alone.

It depends on the species. Some tend to follow hedgerows or lines of trees etc. They would find a motorway to be a barrier, but would cross using something like this.

Why don’t we celebrate this day?

As the wiki page lists, the UK has had one since 2020. But we’ve also had National Tree Week for 50+ years anyway.

I have my driving licence, work ID, a first aid quick reference, postage stamps and one of those Swiss army knife credit card sized things as well as cash and bank cards.

Starmer said he had ‘full confidence’ in McSweeney a couple of days back. That phrase always used to be the knell of doom. Nice to see that some things remain constant in the current political world.

These days just surveying for the national bat and dormouse monitoring programmes, but I have done quite a range of other things in the past including: starting and running a Green Drinks group, pagan prison chaplain for the Pagan Fed, direct action with Greenpeace, local wildlife group committee member, starting and running a toad patrol group, helping at an old folks day centre, running a tea stall and car-parking at a few green festivals, crash and bash conservation work with various groups etc.

I wonder if Irish/Scottish/Gaelic speakers can pick out anything

Those are from the Q-celtic branch. Cornish, Breton and Welsh are P-celtic. They are pretty different.

Thanks. I was just going to add one myself.

I’d imagine that whereas you can guess at confusing cursive letters in words from the others around them, you can’t do that with digits.

The year has never been the problem.

Now, if there are plans to rename the months Thirtyseconduary, Fortyfirstember and so on, we might be getting somewhere.

• Losing a fight in the sandpit
• Crying because there were no more trains in the trainset for me to have one. But then being given another whole set to play with
• Farting extremely loudly in the middle of storytime
• Miss not being able to tell me what dates Robin Hood lived in
• Having a lesson on how to use a dictionary - which surprised me, since I already could, and didn’t realise that anyone couldn’t.

Neither am I but my friend circle uses this, having heard it, not because it is German but because it is inherently silly, and we are silly. I would expect that the same may apply here.

Ends. ‘Alles hat ein Ende nur die Wurst hat zwei’. A popular German phrase.

A lot of brands do use bags containing plastic - which probably isn’t great in terms of you actually ingesting microplastic as you drink, let alone composting - but some do not. The trick is to find the brands that don’t and use them. They fully compost.

I see that Jason Haigh-Ellery is involved, which - given his involvement with Big Finish - does give me some hope for the quality if it does go ahead, but that is a very big IF.