
Wiltshire in Pictures: Blossom, giraffes and Easter celebrations
Blooming marvellous: Visitors at Lydiard Park's Walled Garden have been greeted with an array of spring colours following a donation by the park's friends' group.Along with a vibrant crop of daffodils, the money has also gone into planting tulips, hyacinths and narcissi.
Picture perfect: It's not just daffodils and tulips that are in bloom. Magnolias are out across the county including in Lacock, as captured by our weather watcher Robin.
Inflatable fun: Easter is still a week away but that has not stopped this Swindon resident from putting up a massive inflatable display in their front garden.The playful display is not merely for show as it is also raising money for Sands, the infant loss charity.
Proper Brew: The Wyndham Arms in Salisbury has been voted Salisbury City Pub of the Year by the local branch of Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) .Cellarman Dave Barton (left of centre) and pub manager Lisa Saberton (right of centre) were presented with their certificate by local Camra representatives Keith Foster (left) and Chris White (right).
New sheriff in town: Martin Nye has been sworn in as the county's new High Sheriff, taking over from Dr Olivia Chapple.He has chosen food as his theme for the year and lives on a farm in Foxham near Chippenham with his wife Victoria, who breeds shorthorn cattle.
Heads above the rest: The warmer temperatures mean it is not just flowers that are coming out to play.Longleat's giraffes have been released into the site's East African Reserve after spending the winter indoors for their own safety, joining the estate's resident zebra and ostrich herds outdoors.
Off to the races: Wiltshire and Bath Air Ambulance had announced a new partnership with Bath racecourse.The tie-up reflects the charity's rebranding last year to include the city, with a charity race day due to be held on 16 July.
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The Guardian
26-06-2025
- The Guardian
Country diary: Listen closely, as the breeze scrolls through June's playlist
'Listen!' said nobody, probably the breeze, but it felt like the right thing to do. There's a pile of branches cut from fallen horse chestnut boughs next to a storm‑blown beech tree, a still life from carnage that makes a good place to sit. 'Sometimes I sits and thinks, sometimes I just sits,' (an old Shropshire saying), and the breeze strengthens with thoughts it has gathered and shunts through the sky. From somewhere south, clouds lumber over the horizon at a snail's pace, in a daydream of rippling air, eating these country miles. The chime of a cuckoo, or the memory of one, haunts the breeze. It brings a rare clarity, as if elsewheres that are usually smudgy and far have been drawn into the same nostalgic field. Blown in by deja vu, distant hills of the Wrekin, Caer Caradoc, Long Mynd and Stiperstones loiter on the margin. Close by, a blackbird sings into the clear airflow, and another improvises a reply from further trees. Oaks sigh on their outer surfaces but inside their leaves patter like rain. Birches dance as if submerged. Earthmovers at the waterworks groan and a grime track is sucked from a cab and lost to the breeze. Two wasps hover around a burrow, their buzzing dispatches from the world to the hidden colony stifled. A robin shuffles feet at a gatepost. Along the lane, the frequencies of pink campion, white bramble and yellow buttercup are picked up as the breeze scrolls through a June playlist; their beautiful flies, fading. Down by the brook, the breeze and the meadow grass are having the same idea: silver dogs racing down the valley, chasing the myth of a creature shaken from shadows. Sawn logs on the horse chestnut pile hold their own recordings of summer's joy and strife in annual rings. The beech tree, although downed and with most of its roots in the air, has a couple of branches full of irrepressible leaves. Listen, the ruins of these trees have their own stories to tell of a lost garden. All these things and their thoughts are winnowed out, to be whispered into the future on a breeze. Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount


The Guardian
23-06-2025
- The Guardian
Why do we pretend heatwaves are fun – and ignore the brutal, burning reality?
I think I must be on someone's Rolodex of killjoys, because whenever something good happens – schools break up, summer holidays start, the weather's nice, it's Christmas, it's Easter – I get a call from a talk radio show asking if I'll come on and explain why that's bad, actually. Usually I say, in the nicest possible way, that I don't want to: sure, kids are much more annoying when they're not at school; yes, it's irresponsible to fly; no, Christmas isn't magic, it's an orgy of overconsumption; yes, Easter was pillaged from pagans (probably?), and Christianity itself is the imperialist template (arguably?) – in which case, the last way we should mark it is with a Creme Egg. But I just don't want to be that person. Let someone else ruin everything for a change. On Friday, however, I agreed to make the argument the next morning on LBC that heatwaves aren't a treat, they're a problem. We have to do more than just ready our infrastructure for the more intense temperatures to come: we have to bring our narrative a bit closer to reality. The climate crisis isn't tomorrow's problem, it's today's, and its impacts aren't better conditions for vineyards in Kent, they are a broad-spectrum enshittification, in which everything, from bus journeys to growing dahlias, becomes harder, and takes longer, and is worse. It was, in other words, exactly the kind of true, unlovely thing that I don't like being the person to say, and I don't know why I said yes – it's possible that I was just too hot. Once the thought was implanted, though, I couldn't help but notice the heatwave media formula, and how extravagantly weird it is. It starts a few days before, as soon as the Met Office gives us all a heads-up, and is illustrated with either a stock photo of an ice-cream, or a chart of graphics in which the sun is always smiling and sometimes has his hat on. As the heat begins, images pour in as they happen: kids splashing in a fountain, heaving beaches. It's like illustrating a war with a photo of a soldier coming home and kissing his sweetheart: sure, that must happen to some people, eventually, but it is not most people's lived reality of war. More evocative photos would be: your pet, or anyone's pet, lying beached on the floor, with that baleful, all-species expression: 'How are you doing this to me, human, and why?'; people on the tube looking as if they're all about to faint; office workers fighting over a fan; tourists overwhelmed by the merciless sun on their shelterless day trip to hell. I went on a tour of the Arctic Circle once, years ago, and we all moaned constantly about the cold, until the gruff Swedish guide said: 'Listen, you marshmallows,' (he really did call us that; I kind of liked it), 'At least you can protect yourself against the cold. How do you protect yourself against the heat?' A woman in the group said: 'That's easy – factor 50 and a piña colada,' and everyone laughed, and it's taken me 25 years to realise that even though she was funny, he was still right. An estimated 600 people will die as a result of this one heatwave. Those kinds of numbers from a virus would spark at least a localised lockdown, and in a plane crash, a national day of mourning. But it's hard to respond to climate fatalities proportionately without confronting global heating and taking on the underlying inequalities that make some people more vulnerable than others. High temperatures are much more dangerous when you're disabled, when you're homeless, when you're incarcerated, when you're old. It would be pretty rum to be squeezing disability benefits at the same time as worrying about whether disabled people are at greater risk from the weather, and need more care – better to imagine this an act of God, in which the deaths cannot possibly be prevented. In the end, I got benched by the radio show. I think they might have also given a bit of thought to what an anti-heat argument would sound like, and decided I'd be too depressing. But I wasn't depressed at all. I was relieved – the collective effort of kidding ourselves that it's too hot to move but that's awesome takes more effort than you'd think. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.


The Herald Scotland
29-05-2025
- The Herald Scotland
Warm weather knocks Hollywood Bowl sales
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