From giant oaks...

There was a piece in the Eastern Daily Press yesterday about a giant oak that has been dredged from the fens near Feltwell in Norfolk.

It is believed to be 12,000 years old and from the Neolithic era when swamp and forest covered much of the fens. The Ice Age came and caused many of the trees to be knocked over and buried. Now part fossilised, had it remained in the ground it would eventually have turned into coal.

I know Feltwell well. When we first moved back to East Anglia my wife started a branch of the Samara Ballet School there on Saturday mornings. This is where our eldest son first developed his love of dance, to go with the music that is his life now.

The tractors in the field beyond where we lived were often dredging old oak trees out of the ground though none, I suspect, as old as this. This was a real reminder to me of an ancient landscape and a personal memory map from more recent times.

Should young children join the army?

I was driving down Mill Road in Cambridge the other evening and waiting at the junction with the ring road when I looked in the mirror to see two children walking down the path beside me.

As they passed my car I saw that they were holding hands and the younger boy was looking up at the taller girl, who I assume was his sister, with a look of sheer unadulterated love in his eyes. She must have been about twelve and him nine or ten?

This would have been a nice enough scene after a day of office politics and transport problems but the thing I remember more now is that they were both dressed in army fatigues. Either they were casual clothes or, more likely because they had the berets as well, they were going to some kind of army cadets evening.

I know we need to have armed forces and I know these courageous men and women protect us and others less vulnerable than ourselves against enemies both visible and invisible. I know that office politics send them to the most dangerous places in the world and transport and logistics problems due to poor management and lack of funds often contribute to their deaths more than bullets or bombs.

However, should we be encouraging children as young as this to be part of a military operation or is this their choice and nobody else's?

I drove down the ring road, glad to be escaping but with 'Two Little Boys' in my head all the way home.

Has the Tydd turned?

It was good to read on the EDP24 site this morning about a new leisure complex to be built around Tydd St Giles Golf Club, near Wisbech.

I firmly beileve that the media has a great role to play in raising confidence and heightening expectations of growth and recovery however small those green shoots may be. Spring will follow winter as it always does and this terrible economic situation will improve.

As soon as Robert Peston at the BBC and his journalist colleagues stop pursuing the maxim of 'bad news sells' then positive thinking by people who think rather than sensationalise may return.

In the meantime, great to see 50 new jobs being created in The Fens.

Snow, snow, quick, quick...

I got up at my normal weekday time of 5.25 this morning and immediately noticed the quiet. I'm not aware of a lot of traffic at that time of day but the silence spoke volumes. The snowfall wasn't massive but I could see that it had snowed, frozen and then snowed again. Much too treacherous to travel so I sent my apologetic e-mails. Shortly afterwards, on my sterling meteorological advice, it was decided that all company employees should work from home today wherever possible.

The snow has been coming down heavily since then and this part of Cambridgeshire is fast disappearing below a vast white blanket. Trains and boats and planes may be struggling but we're not even trying to speed up; no need to try to stay ahead or even on level terms today because the natural weather conditions have stolen a march on all of us