drplokta

Am amused by the list of Roman remains in Chester on wikitravel.org:

• Chester Amphitheatre
  
• Chester Walls
  
• Roman Gardens
  
• Spud-u-Like

The most amusing thing is that it's entirely correct.

Apparently, the UK has now overtaken the US and has the highest nominal GDP per head of any major economy. We're now exceeded only by a few fairly small countries in north-west Europe (largest: the Netherlands; richest: Luxembourg) and by Qatar.

Of course, a fair amount of this is that the pound is rather over-valued, and you can still buy more for the average per capita GDP in the US than in the UK.

Hmm, this might have become compulsive. Spotted yesterday: Kingfisher, mallard, tufted duck, coot, moorhen, mute swan, black-headed gull, goldfinch, chaffinch, long-tailed tit, blue tit, great tit, great spotted woodpecker, grey heron, blackbird, carrion crow, magpie, feral pigeon, woodpigeon, great crested grebe, canada goose, greylag goose, cormorant, house sparrow, robin, starling, grey squirrel (total of 27).

( Long and full of photos )

So the final score is 51 birds, 11 butterflies, 5 mammals, 2 amphibians and 2 reptiles, for a grand total of 71 species. The winner of this poll is thus, ahem, drplokta.

Cities stayed in for at least one night in 2007:

Marrakech, Chester, Glasgow, Leicester, Reading, Cambridge, Tokyo, Kyoto, Yokohama.

No new species, but here are a few new photos.

( Behind the cut tag. )

Woke up yesterday morning with a fever, but fortified by Lem-Sip I managed to get to Euston to meet my mother. And when we got home we were greeted by the news that her mother, my grandmother, had died. Not exactly unexpected or premature, given that she'd just passed 102, but it's still bad timing for Christmas.

I'm feeling better today, which is good news for flickgc who does not want to have to phone her mother for instructions on how to cook the Christmas dinner.

Birds: 54 Redwing. No photo, as it was a bit shy.

It appears that I'm not going to be getting an iPhone in the near future. I could live with the lack of 3G, MMS, voice dialling, memory card support and GPS, but its Bluetooth is crippled and doesn't support dial-up networking for other Bluetooth devices, which means my Tomtom wouldn't be able to receive traffic updates. It looks like a Nokia N95 and/or N810 for me.