Thursday 7th April

So it is Thursday and I have not written much.  Woke up early saw a rabbit eating I think the daffodils in the graveyard and listened to a curlew in the fields behind.  The weather has been miserably wet, showers and sun intermittently.  Yesterday hailstorms beat down, the chickens who were out had a terrible time.  Firstly R came out of the church in the afternoon with her young grandson, and she came over to talk, he was ADHD she said, and as he lowered himself over the wall, I thought what a lovely child. Then he chased the chickens at least three times round the house before R came through the gate to rescue me.  The chickens were terrified, and spent the next hour or so huddled up behind the garage.  Till forced out from there by bullet like hail stones and made for their coop, much to the amusement of two men standing in the shelter of the porch of the church.  Their runs need to be moved the ground is a sodden muddy mess.

'The Vikings Uncovered'  Dan Snow and Dr.Sarah Parcak

"Dan Snow uncovers the lost Vikings in America with space archaeologist Dr Sarah Parcak. Sarah uses satellites 383 miles above the earth to spot ruins as small as 30cm buried beneath the surface. As Sarah searches for Viking sites from Britain to America, Dan explores how they voyaged thousands of miles when most ships never left the shoreline. He also tracks their expansion west, first as raiders and then as settlers and traders throughout Britain and beyond to Iceland and Greenland. In North America they excavate what could be the most westerly Viking settlement ever discovered."

Somehow tales to be told need a lot of believing, and their two week excavation in St. Lawrence Bay for a second Viking settlement did not ring true on the evidence they found there.  There are times when the producer's need to formulate a programme gets in the way of truth and that was my first thought. Till there is direct evidence either by radio-carbon dating or an actual artefact my mind says that scepticism is the only way to read this hour and a half programme.  And was it in this programme that someone  told Snow whilst they were taking tea at Betty's in York that below them in the surface of the earth was three metres of Viking faeces.  Bet the famous Betty tea shop was not too happy about that!

What else has happened, off-shore tax havens, does not the news run a pretty dire message for us all, one rule for the rich, the poor if they do not pay taxes face prison.  But like a vast book the pages fall open on the corruption that is scattered round our world.  Assange, Snowden and now the Panama Papers reveal all,  the internet is a blessing in disguise for some, though not for others.  Cameron squirms on the end of a hook like a worm, questions about his father's legacy must be answered.