Alliances Do Not Last Forever

 

Although one might have been critical of America from time to time, succumbing to the usual British semi-sneer about the frequent vulgarity of public life in America and the inexplicable way its population embraces much of the extraordinarily dumb pronouncements and behaviour of its decision-makers,  STILL, America was always there; big; wealthy, taking the lead in world affairs and speaking its own version of easily understood English [so comforting to the linguistically lazy Brits]; different from us but sort of descended from us and with many ways and customs comfortingly familiar to us. It did not occur to me not to send my eldest, when she was just 12 to stay with American friends in a swap with their daughter of similar age. Now I would hesitate.  

 

Trump wins a second term; a stunning victory

When the last political decision anyone here wanted, was made and Trump managed to be voted in for a second term as President, disbelief was high. Although it was not the huge majority consistently claimed by the President’s men, he won, in part thanks to the over-large ego of Joe Biden who clung on too long to his intention to run again despite the real handicap of his obvious ageing.  But Trump won and we feared the worst. But the imagined worst was nowhere bad enough! Trump’s frantic avalanche of legislation and sweeping anti-Constitutional decisions made since, his election a few months ago have frightened and outraged many Americans and appalled much of the Western world. He is deliberately targeting agencies and individuals that might constrain the freedom of action of this administration. Universities, think tanks, the media, regulators are all in his sights. Trump is fracturing the American system of checks and balances and it seems that no one dares stop him.

 .   

J.D.Vance in the centre, with an impressive life story
built on high intelligence, ruthlessness and audacity

He has two loyal  lieutenants; J.D. Vance [Vice-President] and Elon Musk, unelected but Trump-selected, as Chief Trouble-shooter and these two have leapt into action; Vance has directed clumsy ignorant insults masquerading as advice to Europe’s leaders, America's allies for 80 years, advising that the greatest threat to Western democracies comes from within its liberal democracies. All this plus his outrageous meddling in the recent German national elections when he openly supported the neo-Nazi AfD.
While Musk, Head of the Trump-appointed DOGE [Dept. of Government Efficiency] has recruited bright young

Elon Musk
A.I. entrepreneur and designer extraordinaire;
world's richest man.
Worryingly, now Vice-President of the U.S.A.

men to run around extracting nationally sensitive statistics on population and policy to use one knows not how, and generally degrading formerly trusted American national systems. Incomes to national bodies have been slashed, many thousands of workers in ‘industries’ such as the F.B.I. Education, Health, have been summarily sacked without any apparent understanding of the overall necessity or effects of these wide-ranging removals; all in the trumpeted drive to cut Government expenditure.  In
addition, Trump has been enraged apparently by D.E.I. initiatives which have been summarily cancelled; he has pardoned Jan 6 rioters [remember: protesting against the results of a perfectly legal Presidential election] including those who seriously injured policemen; and banned biological men from women’s sports. This welter of changes has amounted to what aide Bannon calls, ‘flooding the zone’. The idea is that, by promoting a dizzying array of initiatives and announcements, your opponents are wrong-footed, not knowing what to take seriously. It is interesting to note the terminology; not ‘fellow Americans’ but ‘opponents.’

Trump in full, misinformed flow

 In the meantime, Donald is trying to create a global trade war through widespread use of tariffs [tariffs being one of his ‘favourite’ words.] Outrage is only now starting in America as Trump’s approval ratings begin to plummet in what one hopes will be a landslide. One tariff example will suffice: Sterling Heights, outside of Detroit, is ‘an auto-industry-dominated city’ that could see massive numbers of jobs lost if the President makes good on his tariff threats to Canada and Mexico. There are no other local employment possibilities of scale available and most of the population is in some capacity, ‘in 

the auto industry’. This will be a disaster for ordinary workers and certainly, not a good look for Trump!

Negotiating to end the Russo-Ukrainian war

Meanwhile, Trump has followed up his suspected admiration for Putin with a reportedly productive conversation with Vladimir on February 12 resulting in the proclamation that negotiations to end the war in Ukraine would start ‘immediately’. Ukrainian membership of NATO was ruled out and Ukraine itself accused of starting the war while Zelinsky was labelled a dictator for avoiding national elections, [suspended because of the Russian invasion and continuing war]. Neither the Ukrainians nor Nato allies had been consulted prior to these decisions and were evidently not considered to be essential to subsequent
discussions. Eventually it was conceded that the Ukrainians should be present in discussions about their existential future, though Russia was 'not keen' on a European presence.

Self-explanatory graph

A recent YouGov poll showed that 73% of the British population overall sees Trump 'unfavourably'. They see him as a criminal, misogynist, egotist with a hugely inflated self-belief; someone who sees national and international life as a business in which he is engaged in a constant search to profit from losers. There is no special relationship with the Donald only a small opportunity for the other person to persuade him that another's suggestion might be in Trump’s own interest. Generally, in Trump-world, if one wins, the other loses. Zero sum game.

All of the above is actually an explanation of why the long, long alliance of the U.K. with the U.S.A. since WW2, beneficial to both, comfortable mostly, constant and reliably familiar, has changed. We can no longer think of America as a trusted friend; only an occasional co-conspirator and slightly dodgy 

An emaciated, already-imprisoned Alexei Navalny,
June 23rd 2023, being sentenced to life in a prison camp
 north of the Arctic Circle.
He died on February 16th 2024, murdered by Putin's men..
His crime had been to criticise and challenge Putin
and his huge popularity among the Russian people had
in effect, ensured his death.

neighbour which has unsavoury alliances and relationships with gangster states like Russia where opposing political contenders are pursued and murdered. Aka Alexei Navalny among many. But this changed relationship is not merely with the UK; it is almost universal. As the editorial board of the Financial Times noted on February 24th "in the past ten days, Trump has all but incinerated 80 years of postwar American leadership. Instead, it has become an unabashed predator, allied with Russia and other countries the U.S. formerly saw as adversaries."  As Friedrich Merz, the newly-elected Chancellor of Germany has opined, Musk's blatant  interference in German national elections and the description of his general behaviour, is "what Russia does" and he adds that there is an urgent need now for complete security independence from the U.S.

Macron's brave attempt to establish a good relationship 
with Trump while defending Europe and Ukraine.
Feb 23rd.2025

Post Script

Just a month into Trump's second presidency, the American delegation to the United Nations voted against a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. It voted with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Belarus and fourteen other Russia-friendly countries against the measure, which passed overwhelmingly; China and India abstained. It is worth noting that the statement 'nation must not invade nation', is one of the founding principles of the United Nations and one of its original signatories was America. That was when the U.S. displayed its character as global leader and one among many moments which defined the world's idea of America.

  

 Idealogical harmony shattered.

Stop Press

To add the absolute latest news just caught on CNN online. Donald Trump is offering a path to citizenshiip. In around two weeks' time, the U.S. will start selling 'gold cards' to wealthy foreigners, giving them the right to live and work in the U.S. in exchange for a $5million fee. That boy never disappoints!

  

 

                                              If Music Be the Food of Love, Play On.

                                              Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

                                              The appetite may sicken, and so die

Anita Lasker-Walfisch
Born 1925

 I wrote and published a blog on Auschwitz-Birkenau and Anita Lasker-Walfisch on August 11^th, 2024 prompted after seeing Zone of Interest, but I have just seen The Musician of Auschwitz, again with Lasker-Walfisch as a heroine among others, issued to mark the 80^th anniversary of the camp’s liberation on January 25th 1945, and it has set me thinking specifically about music and the Holocaust. Lasker-Walfisch was the daughter of a lawyer, whose mother was a fine violinist; theirs was a prosperous Jewish middle class family well-integrated into German society. The best place to live for Jews in the 1930s was Germany until in 1933 it began to be less safe. That was when the Nazis were voted in and they worked incrementally over the next few years, to debase the Jews with the so-called 'mysterious stigma' pushing them to the edges of society, moving from debarring Jews from sitting on public benches, using libraries and theatres, to the eventual stigmata of the compulsory yellow star to be worn by all Jews, with all property-owning rights and most freedom of movement removed.

Anti-Jewish agitation on a German street,
1930s

From 1938, the Nazis rounded up Jews, stripped them of their dignity and possessions, imprisoned them in specially built concentration camps, starved and over-worked them to lead inexorably to widespread deaths; over 6 million Jews died between 1939 and 1945 plus numerous European Sinta, Roma and homosexuals, their numbers magnified after 1943 by the gas ovens which operated day and night for years.  And after the gassing came the incineration. These huge non-Aryan groups were seen as polluting the master German race. And yet the Germans were arguably the most cultured nation in Europe before WW2 and their national musicians and composers like Mahler, Mendelsohn and Schumann were worshipped and hugely celebrated by their fellow citizens, as were international musicians like Bizet, Gounod, Saint-Saens, Berlioz. So, the Nazis’ desire to have classical music provided for their officers was almost understandable if one overlooked the striking paradox of the wartime context. The desire to provide music for their myriad doomed prisoners was less clear; perhaps it was mere celebration as the Nazis proceeded to achieve their murderous aim.

 Among the inmates of concentration camps were some of Europe’s most talented musicians. Perhaps 600 shaven headed, emaciated Jewish prisoners would be sent out each day from a typical camp to work, on starvation rations, with as few as 300 slave labourers surviving to return each evening. But as they left and returned, one of the 15 orchestras in Auschwitz would be there, doomed to spend the long day outside in all conditions, to play out the workers and welcome them back, often with joyful,

The notorious Mauthausen concentration camp.
Orchestra forced to play
while leading fellow prisoner to his execution. 1943

rhythmic marches. Anita Lasker-Walfisch commented in the film, that on arrival, when stripped naked with shaven head and tattooed arm, among the crowd of similarly bereft prisoners, she happened to comment that she was a musician. One of the guards asked what instrument she played. “A cellist?! Who did you study with?” She enjoyed the incongruity of the conversation despite the context.

Women's small orchestra in one of the camps.
The women's shaven heads are covered; the conductor
with hair is a 'trusty'; not a guard but a reliable prisoner

 But to be a musician in Auschwitz with its 15 orchestras meant that there was a better chance of survival, at least for longer, rather more than the ‘normal’ three-month duration of Jewish prisoner life. The Nazis enjoyed the music, irrefutable proof of their cultural superiority and the orchestras provided endless concerts for the S.S. as well as for the daily work marches for the Jews, and to accompany the floggings, but the music served also for the Nazis, to celebrate the Jewish path to death. For some prisoners, at the beginning and end of each punishing day, the orchestra might give a few moments of escapism, or of solidarity as they hummed together or sang almost mutely in the forbidden Yiddish. For others the music equalled sadism, they needed food, not entertainment. Unofficial use of music was enjoyed during lockdown in the camps at night. Drunken SS officers would awake the musicians in the resident orchestra to play during the night, while more alcohol was consumed by the Nazis as they searched for sleeping prisoners to rape.

[Internationally-acknowledged large firms like I.G. Farben were persuaded to build bigger factories in Germany and Poland to take advantage of the limitless free slave labour available to propel this economic expansion of the Third Reich. The two main aims of WW2 for the Germans were the wholesale elimination of the Jews and the elevation of the Third Reich [projected to last for 1000 years] to the status of an economic super-power.]

Szymon Laks 1901-1983

Other musicians featured in the film; Adam Kopycinski, a Polish composer-pianist, played one of his own lullabies, optimistic and soothing, while Szymon Laks wrote concertos based on his heritage; some of his music when performed, resulted in the most plaintive and evocative singing. One day, when Laks was rehearsing the first movement of his Third String Quartet, which was based on Polish folk tunes, an SS guard came in, demanding to know the composer.  Carefully and erroneously, Laks gave the name of an obscure Austrian composer. “A beautiful quartet” the guard sighed. “One could tell it was German right away.”

Josep Mengele

Jewish child prisoners photographed specifically for Mengele

 There was mention of the notorious Dr. Mengele and his sadistic experiments on children, twins particularly, some tortured alive; on one occasion, he walked, the tragic irony unacknowledged, into Lasker-Walfisch’s barracks demanding Traumerei [Dreams] from Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen [Scenes from Childhood] but in the same film, a Jewish woman looking after a group of children all doomed to die, spoke approvingly of the Nazi guard who advised her to keep them calm and sing with them.” This will speed up their dying as they take deep breaths of gas and reduce their suffering.” Nazism was a mass killing machine but with an occasional almost human face.

Auschwitz was liberated on January 27^th, 1945, and after the Holocaust, the whole Jewish European world had effectively vanished. Language, culture, families and Shtetl, had vanished with few left to mourn the vibrant world that was lost. Indeed, all that was often left were the survivors and their music.   

Undated photo of a Jewish store in Vienna with anti-Semitic slogans
daubed on walls and windows; taken during the Thirties. Post-war,
Austrian authorities took more than 40 years to launch serious efforts
at returning Jewish property plundered by the Nazis

Pre-war street scene in an East European shtetl


Non-musical Holocaust post-script

Holocaust survivor, Margot Friedlaender.  Born November 1921. Now aged 103.
She warns of growing threats to democracy from the rise of far tight
parties in Europe.

How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count The Ways.

Snoopy enjoying Valentine's Day in true teenage fashion

 February 14 arrives again with the unlimited commercial opportunities for Valentine cards, roses and romantic candlelit tetes-a-tetes!! Plus, universal teenage anticipation and expectation and hope. I have been wondering how and why Valentine’s Day was born and discover Lupercalia, a pagan festival to celebrate fertility which seems to be the forerunner.  There were several Christian martyrs named Valentine though Valentine’s Day itself may have taken its name from the priest who was martyred about 270 CE by the Roman Emperor Claudius 11.

"When every fowl comes there to 
choose a mate."

 

Chaucer's Parlement of Foules 1381/2

When Lupercalia
progressed through Europe properly, the Roman Catholic Church eventually stepped in to enforce a more sober approach to celebrating amorous encounters.  In the English-speaking world, over the centuries, the romantic aspects of St Valentine’s Day have been celebrated by eloquent leading poets and playwrights like Chaucer and Shakespeare and this popularised the name, the emotional aspects and the date. The first known written reference to Saint Valentine’s Day as a day for lovers was in Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules in 1381when he wrote: ’When every fowl comes there to choose a mate’

I now see that in some form or other, a celebration of love and romance appears in most calendars world-wide.  Although I spent a lot of time in Wales when my children were young, I had never heard of St Dwynwen’s Day, a day of romance celebrated on January 25th and in addition to the Valentine exchange of cards, gifts and romantic meals, it also involves ‘love spoons’.  For the young woman, a wooden spoon is presented as a love token; it was, originally carved by the besotted young man for his intended often with symbols important to the couple carved or embossed on it. It was a significant signal of his interest.

Dia dos Namorados, the Day of the Enamoured, is celebrated in Brazil on June 12th with lots of noise from large dances, music, food and epic parties attended by family and friends, plus, of course, the exchange of gifts by the happy couple.  The Day of St Anthony, the patron saint of marriage, is on June 13th hence the appetiser known as the Dia dos Namorados on June 12th.  It is also traditional for the happy couple to send loving messages to each other throughout the day.

La Dia de Sant Jordi
Extraordinary Jordification of an
apartment building

Catalonia, much like the U.K. celebrates St George’s Day [La Dia de Sant Jordi] on April 23rd to honour their patron saint. This is also the National Day of Catalonia and the traditional time for lovers to exchange gifts, normally, books.  The suggestion I have read for featuring the date for lovers, and the traditional book-as-gift, is because William Shakespeare died on April 23rd and Cervantes, Spain’s most famous writer, died the day before on April 22nd, both in the year 1616! This sounds to me extraordinarily literary and worthy. Can it be true?

Book market in Catalonia on La Dia de
Sant Jordi.
A civilised way to celebrate romance!

Tu B'Av

The Hebrew or Jewish St Valentine’s Day , Tu B’Av  [the 15th day of Av when Av is the 11th month of the civil year and the fifth month of the ecclesiastical year.] like many Jewish festivals, actually begins on the evening before, on the 14th as that is the night of a full moon in the Hebrew lunar calendar  In fact, it went out of style for Jewish people to celebrate this festival for almost two millennia, but it has been resurrected in modern Israel. The old version of Tu B’Av took place during a full moon following ancient practice though there seems to be a dispute about the date; the festival itself, is not mentioned in any Hebraic texts until the second century. The modern version, [sunset on Friday 8th August/sundown, Saturday 9th] is not a religious event, and the relatively recent revival is more secular with singing and dancing and celebration. It is generally thought to be an auspicious day for weddings to take place.  

Feast of Qixi: Remembering the star-crossed lovers.
Traditionally, the day to drink red bean tea to ensure
future satisfactory personal romance

Qixi Festival known also as the Chinese Valentine’s Day, happens on the 7th day of the 7th month of the Chinese lunar calendar. In 2025 it will fall on August 29th. Previously known as the Qi Qiao, or the Girls’ Festival, Qixi has a long tradition stretching back to the Han Dynasty [approximately 206 BC-220AD] Although traditional Qixi Festival activities would have included a girl placing a needle in a bowl of water overnight to determine if she was good at embroidery, many people nowadays, present gifts and greeting cards in much the same way as Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the West.

Silver jewellery of the Miao people celebrating the festival

 IIn the Guizhou Province in China there lives a minority ethnic group, the Miao and their celebration of love and Spring, the Sisters’ Meal Festival happens between 30th April and 2nd of May. The event presents a spectacle with bright traditional costumes, ostentatious displays of jewellery, singing and dancing with a question-and-answer format between single men and women as well as bullfighting and horse racing. The origins of the festival go back in folklore telling of two childhood friends who grow up and fall in love but are forbidden to marry. In the tale, the girl brings the boy a hidden meal of specially flavoured rice to display her affection in their secret meetings. The term, gad liangi or hidden meal has entered the Miao language as a term meaning ‘secret admirer’

                                                                   

                                                                   And as a postscript!

I have been reading ‘God’s Own Gentlewoman’ a lovely life of the fifteenth century Margaret Paston, chiefly through her letters and family memoirs.**  Margaret became deeply involved in the protracted marriage negotiations between the Paston and the Brews families, the principals of which were John Paston 111 (Margaret’s son) and Margery Brews, a distant cousin. The difficulties were over the lack of generosity in the proposed Brews’ marriage settlement but there are two letters, written by the bride-to-be, Margery, to John 111 which show the mutual love between the couple and her longing for the marriage to take place.   The author of the book, Diane Watt, suggests that the two letters can lay claim to having been the first Valentine missives in English. The first is partly written in rhyming couplets: ‘My heart commands me evermore to love you /Truly above all earthly thing.’

Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: God's Own Gentlewoman

In her second letter, also written in February 1477, Margery expresses the hope that her ‘good, faithful and loving Valentine’ will accept her poor person, and insists she will accept his decision (of whether to marry her or not) ‘on condition that I may be your faithful lover and petitioner for the duration of my life.’   The decision to marry was his alone but Margery is surprisingly open about her feelings for John and her desire for the marriage to take place.

Six centuries later, these two earliest Valentines do illustrate the profound social differences exemplified in  the commercially choreographed celebrations of today and their implied gender egality. The mediaeval English also often charms: "The fairest flower in our garland."

**This collecton of state papers and other important documents including the correspondence of an important Norfolk gentry family, are a noted primary source for information about life in England  during the Wars of the Roses and the early Tudor period.   

  

Herculaneum Scrolls

 

One rather battered scroll; an introduction to the
enormity of the Herculaneum research task

Exciting news on the Vesuvius front. The molten lava and mud which rained down on Herculaneum and Pompeii in A.D.79, changed perceptions of that world forever. One thrilling legacy has been the Herculaneum Scrolls, hundreds of papyri that survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The scrolls are from a cache of more than 1,800 charred and carbonized papyri discovered in 1752 in an archaeological dig which revealed much of a library at a villa in Herculaneum thought to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. Buried and protected by volcanic ash for two thousand years, the Herculaneum scrolls represent the only large-scale library from the ancient world that has survived almost entire, and its rich exceptionality makes it a unique cultural treasure.

Ink Detection in research

In their charred state, the ancient documents had proved impenetrable as attempts to unroll any had resulted in the material crumbling and any writing on surviving small pieces thereby lost. Scientists have researched and analysed for years in the attempt to cut the Gordian knot but in 2024 by using computer technology and advanced artificial intelligence, progress has gradually occurred. Researchers can now analyse the Herculaneum scrolls without unrolling and risking damage to the extremely fragile documents. More than 2,000 characters — the first full passages — have been deciphered from a scroll, according to an announcement this month by computer scientists who launched the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition designed to accelerate the discoveries made on the scrolls. “It’s incredibly gratifying to know that these things are available, and we have now a mechanism to read them — and that reading them is going to create an entire field of study and scholarship for classicists,” said Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky  and co-creator of the Vesuvius Challenge. Seales has worked for over 20 years with a research team to develop non-invasive techniques to unlock the message of the precious scrolls and it was Seales who developed the virtual 'unwrapping' procedure, described below, with his team which estimated the scrolls, if unwound, would be between 36 and 49 feet long. This is merely one indication of the enormity of the task to unlock the coiled, concealed text.

The first word to be read from an unopened scroll was found separately by both Luke Farritor and Youssef Nader — a computer science student at the University of Nebraska and a graduate student in bio-robotics at Freie University, Berlin, respectively — in October 2024. This year, joined by Julian Schilliger, a robotics student at ETH Zürich, the three have won the Victoria Challenge’s $700,000 grand prize for being the first team to decipher more than 85% of characters from four continuous passages within the same scroll.

The trio uncovered the text by applying a technique known as “virtual unwrapping” to the rolled-up scroll — one of several owned by the Institut de France — which was released on the website. The process involved using computer tomography, *** an X-ray procedure to scan the coiled-up, warped papyrus, allowing the researchers to virtually flatten the scrolls and detect the ink on the page through advanced AI. They developed machine-learning algorithms to successfully detect and decipher the first complete passages of texts from scans of the charred scrolls. Seales said that there are grains of sand sprinkled all the way through the scrolls; "You can see them twinkling in the scans and that constellation is fixed." Using the sand grains like guide stars, the finished software should be able to orient the letters on more of the curled pages and line up multiple scans to verify the imagery.

After the virtual unwrapping
some of the Herculaneum library 
was disclosed.

When the trio of research students had identified the letters as Ancient Greek, experts from England, France and Italy, were brought in to assess the text.  The language uncovered is sophisticated, nuanced, intellectual and appears to have been written by the Epicurean philosopher, Philodemus, the Greek philosopher-in-residence working in the library on the site where the scrolls were subsequently unearthed. Philodemus was born in the first century B.C. in what is now Jordan and studied at the Epicurean school in Athens, becoming a prominent teacher and interpreter of the philosopher's ideas. Epicurus, his lodestar, was a Greek philosopher who developed a school of thought in the third century B.C. that promoted pleasure as the main goal in life though in the form of living modestly, foregoing fear of the afterlife and learning about the natural world.

In the first passages translated from the scrolls, Philodemus is advocating his audience to relax, find good friendships, live in the moment and enjoy pleasures and life. The first sentence deciphered, reads, “As too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce, to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant.” Philodemus is basically passing on the Epicurean message suggesting that fulfilment can be found through the pleasure of everyday things. A message which still resonates down the ages! Both the essential message and the means of delivering it via ancient artefacts deciphered through the use of ultra modern Artificial Intelligence, demonstrate a most illuminating fusion of the old and the new. This a thrilling development.

 

Remains of the Villa dei Papyri where the scrolls were 
discovered. Situated on the shore and thus eluding the
worst of the Vesuvius eruption

Intact mosaic floor from the upper storey
of the villa.

***Computer tomography (CT) is a noninvasive medical imaging technique that uses X-rays to create cross-sectional images of the body. These images are call 'tomographic images or slices.' 

                

Hedgehog Hope

The original distressed 
hedgehog which could 
not be rescued

 My daughter-in-law recently tried to rescue a distressed hedgehog which someone had found. In spite of her best efforts, wrapping him in a cloth to help warm him; giving him water etc, the hedgehog died, his well-being no doubt further undermined by being handled by well-intentioned humans. She ‘What’s App’ ed a photo of the little animal to family and friends, with his story and eventually, she painted ten hedgehog pictures [she is an artist] and sold each for £60 to raise money for the hedgehog protection society in Ibiza where the little drama had occurred.  I loved this little interaction and my interest in hedgehog protection was stimulated.

Kim-the-artist's portrait of a healthy hedgehog

Hedgehogs are not easy to see or find they are nocturnal animals which hibernate and are rightly protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981. This means that it is illegal to harm or disturb hedgehogs, their nests or their young. Despite which they have recently appeared on the IUCN Red List as ‘near threatened’ after the discovery that their numbers had decreased by around 30% in the past decade.  This decline is chiefly the unintended result of the loss of their natural habitat such as large gardens, parks, farmland and woodland with the use of green spaces increasingly allowed for construction. In response to these man-made interventions, hedgehogs have been forced to expand their territory with a subsequent increase in physical risk for them.

An appealing interpretation

Hedgehogs are omnivores, happy to eat a wide variety of food such as insects, worms, slugs, berries but the increased use of pesticides and land management practices, has impacted these sources and their essential food supply has decreased. Climate change with its consequent impact on temperatures and weather patterns has become an increasing threat to these hibernating animals. During hibernation, hedgehogs shut down all non-essential bodily functions to conserve as much energy as possible and they are increasingly emerging later than formerly when their wider search for food, which is often no longer immediately available, increases the risk of starvation and death.

Mike, the children's author,
and builder of hedgehog shelters

An interesting coincidence then occurred; my son, visiting me in Bury St Edmunds, went to the Saturday market and was amazed and delighted to find Mike Doughty, a local man with a passion for hedgehogs and their conservation. Mike, from Haverhill, has had more than his fair share of difficulties in life, including cancer involving a hospital period and loneliness when separated from his roots, an experience exacerbated by Covid and Lockdown.  He had always been interested in wildlife, and he used this interest as self-help at first though his eventual posts on Facebook stimulated many expressions of appreciation and admiration for his positive take on his own situation and his growing interest in hedgehogs. In 2023 he wrote a children’s book, Robo Hog: A New Superhero for Nature and in 2013 he launched his own organisation: www.soshedghehog.org. He is currently raising funds for local hedgehog rescue centres across the U.K. and aiming to raise awareness of how people can help them in their own gardens and local parks.  My son’s chance encounter with Mike, the hedgehog man, coinciding with my daughter-in-law's paintings of hedgehogs after her unsuccessful rescue attempt, seemed astonishing and certainly led to this blog and my current interest in those little spiky creatures!

Example of currently hedgehog-aware
family which now owns a shelter
placed in a large garden
almost designed to offer hedgehog
sanctuary

Hope is obviously not lost for the Hedgehog Brotherhood. Efforts are clearly being made to help their survival by raising awareness of the threats facing them and publicising measures to help protect their habitats and food sources. A keyway for individuals to contribute is to fashion hedgehog-friendly gardens, pesticide-free and with access to food and water; sheltered areas for nesting and hibernation and space for tiny highways through the jungle. Mike, our local hedgehog man, has fashioned little hedgehog houses for suitable garden placement, which he sells on Bury St Edmunds market, with any proceeds going to hedgehog projects nationwide. To my astonishment, when looking online for a photo or three to illustrate this blog, I discovered there are several charities specifically established to care for and rescue, hedgehogs. All of them seem to offer versions of hedgehog shelters and there are several schemes to attract financial donations towards the recovery effort. Gathering together this unexpected bonus  I discovered a number of biographical facts, the most unnerving of which was that perhaps 50% of hedgehogs die while in the nest or in hibernation, unnoticed by lawnmowers, strimmers, scythes, shears and, of course, humans.

Hedgehog shelters available
from 
soshedgehog.com
or Bury St Edmunds' Saturday market

A hoglet; his tiny size emphasises his vulnerability

Woodside offers this log shelter for £19.99
suitable for hedgehogs and guinea pigs.
Often these sanctuaries are labelled as
habitat or hibernation shelters

 

 

Memento of the unsuccessful attempt
to save this dear little heyhoge.


An Etymological Postscript 
First use of the word, 'heyhoge' was in 1450
from Middle English.
A 'heyg' was a hedge; 
'hoge' described the pig-like snout.
Other popular mediaeval names were
'hedge pig';
'furze pig' [furze=gorse];
urchin.
The Romany word for hedgehog is
hotchi-witchi
often abbreviated to 'hotchi'