Winter

Today was symbolic of winter. Snow and heating oil both delivered on the same day.

I appreciate that parts of the UK are under a foot of snow, have schools closed, trucks stranded and are standing by for the TV cameras to arrive and film their misery or snowball fights. We are in the Vale of Evesham, however, and it hardly ever snows here.

We have about one inch of snow. Yesterday the temperature got down to minus 10 Centigrade, again rather unusual and we spent the day putting fleece around the fig trees in the hope that the poor things will survive the winter rather better. Last year we had a long cold spell that actually killed off the ends of some branches and we had no figs at all. The trees did try hard and started making figs towards the end of summer, but they didn’t make it to being ripe before the leaves started falling off. I don’t know if wrapping the trees for the winter will help, we will no doubt find out over the year. Actually the snow has warmed things up, it’s only zero outside now.

The other amusing ‘event’ of the day was a comment on here that I decided must be spam. The comment included what looked like a phone number. I put the number into Google and found a number of similar comments attributed to the same name on a range of different sites. When I searched on the name I found other sites with similar comments including one where this name contributed 85 comments, actually all the comments on that particular post. Some of them have proper text and some are repeats of the sort of thing I got.

Up until now I have pretty much been pleased to get any comments at all, and although I have the moderating box ticked, I have published all the comments that have come my way. It now seems that I will have to have a comment approval policy. Heady stuff. I actually went on a course on blogging where this was discussed, the lecturer has a five-point policy that she published on her site.

So here is my policy, at least for the moment.

My inclination is to publish all comments unless they are offensive, libellous, or look like robots have sent them. I might even publish those if they are amusing.