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The charity Plantlife wants everyone in Britain to vote on the flower that should represent their home county. For Essex, the front runner is apparently the Oxlip.

It’s a sea holly.

What a sea holly is, I don’t know.

The idea is that to commemorate the Queen’s golden jubilee year we should put them on stamps so you can tell which county the letter has come from (after all, postmarks are so difficult to use) and on number plates, rather like in America where they have daft pictures representing the different states.

It’s this last idea that sounds the most ludicrous. Not only do we have the European Flag, of which I am very much in favour, but we also now have two letters at the start of the plate to denote the town in which it was registered, two digits then three further letters. With a bunch of flowers stuck in the middle we’re surely going to have to start mounting number plates on the side of the car rather than the back just so there’s enough room to fit them on.

Then what will the speed cameras do?

I’m proud of myself for getting to the gym this morning and running a loooong way before work, and I’m proud that I got the whole of a 16-page section edited.

I also had a long online chat with someone I’ve not seen in six years. It’s strange how in these last few days I seem to have been having lots of people incidents. Learning the names of my neighbours after so much time. Sitting in a seat on the tube just after someone I went to school with got up from it. Chatting with someone I used to know who’s now a Fellow at Yale University. Perhaps this is what starts to happen when you reach your late twenties. A bit like hair loss, only in reverse.

A very interesting coffee-shop meeting with Dr Damian from the New Scientist this afternoon to chat about the show. We’re introducing a popular science slot to each show to broaden out our coverage of all things technical and he had some great stories. He used to be a geologist, apparently, so has been to the South Pole, and as a journalist has spent time at Cape Canaveral and the Arianne launch site in French Guina, both time observing launches. It all sounds very exciting and quite envy-inducing.

Anyhow, those things aside, we ran through the stories they’ll be featuring in the next issue, out tomorrow, and picked four that we thought would make good discussion pieces for the last fifteen minutes of the show, including one on the American military’s latest invention: a sandwich that will not go stale for three years.

I think I had one of them for lunch.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 10th, 2002 at 11:33 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.