Photo: the view from Codden Hill looking North East over the Taw Estuary
Trump makes the news again with his ever more bizarre and insulting pronouncements. Is he showing signs of the disinhibition that signals dementia? Is he trying desperately to take attention away from the Epstein files? Can a sitting president be charged for historical criminality? It was a tonic to read Stewart Lee’s diatribe in The Nerve: ‘Trump’s Davos speech is beyond parody. It is full of easily disproven lies, petty personal grudges, ignorant insults, disgraceful historical revisionism, basic geographical and geological errors, random substitutions of apparently indistinguishable Scandinavian island nations, facile self-aggrandisement, barely codified racism, bizarre disparagement of ice, nonsensical misunderstandings of the mutable nature of physical matter and the differences between land and water, ferocious hostility to wind, endless irrelevant details of domestic US policy, clattering collisions of incoherently crunched numbers, and the spirit-crushing conflation of wealth with happiness’. If you don’t, please do subscribe to The Nerve (online), founded by redoubtable former Observer staff.
At the last PSC Vigil I took part in a passerby shouted ‘Antisemites’ over his shoulder as he walked past. That seems a good excuse to post this link to a necessary reminder of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the West Bank: https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/life-and-death-under-trumps-ceasefire/utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_source_platform=mailpoet&utm_campaign=today-on-the-jvl-blog-newsletter-total-articles-for-you_1
I pity the students and others who have to use overcrowded Tarka Line trains. I’m also sorry for the guards who have to manage the trains. One said this at Exeter Central last week: ‘I know it’s crap, I know it’s shit, we should have three carriages but we only got two so could you please squeeze up inside?’
I attended a webinar on changes to the National Planning Policy Framework - if you are interested, there’s a consultation going on (as above). I asked one question. This was about finding new uses for listed buildings, something the new document aims to help happen: as converting historic buildings to meet our needs, eg for housing, costs more than private developers or Local Authorities can afford, will there by government money to further this policy? The Chief Planning Officer at the MHCLG gave no answer.
A petition with 1000 signatories triggers a debate at North Devon Council. NDC’s chief executive Ken Miles received a petition from Olly Seymour (owner of Braunton’s SQ Bar and Restaurant) seeking continuation of our Trade Waste service. Reaching 1000 signatures took only 24 hours. An Extraordinary full council will discuss this, with several speeches from users of the service, next Thursday evening. There’s good info on Devon Live.
This shows Dr Alice Mills describing her exciting plans for a version of the Exeter Science Centre to be established in the Green Lanes shopping centre in Barnstaple. Alice was one of many excellent speakers at a meeting of the North Devon & Torridge Maritime Network in Ilfracombe. I also attended a lively meeting of biodiversity / environmental bodies arranged by Earth Action at the Braunton Countryside Centre: we feel we need to organise a central diary to prevent diary clashes. The larger setting in which we are all working was dramatically expressed in a report in the Guardian on Wednesday. We are facing water bankruptcy: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/20/era-of-global-water-bankruptcy-is-here-un-report-says
It does not feel like drought conditions in North Devon just now, of course - it feels more like the temperate rainforest that Guy Shrubsole writes about so eloquently. The photo above is of a Devon hedge bank in our lane, with Navelwort and ferns. Thank you for reading.