Not easy to clean (Photo by Steven Lilley from Wikimedia ) The other day on the radio, some government person or other was berating the poor old householder. He was asked by the interviewer why it was that a surprisingly high percentage of plastic sent for recycling ends up in landfill. He pointed out that the lazy old taxpayer often doesn't wash out their sauce bottles properly, so they can't be recycled. This made me think - I have never seen a proper environmental cost/benefit on recycling. I do recycle - I'm all in favour - but, for example, in the case of the sauce bottle, I generally send it straight to landfill. This is because there is a considerable energy use in washing out a sauce bottle - it usually takes a fair amount of hot water and quite possibly some washing up liquid. It also takes up some of my time, which also has a cost (I assume the reason the recycling companies don't themselves wash out sauce bottles is that the cost outweighs the benefit.)...

Lady Lane is a rather spooky back road in Swindon, which has been closed to traffic for a number of years and is being gradually taken over by nature. I recently discovered there what appears to be the very large mark of a horseshoe (see photo - size 9 foot for scale). There is something odd about this horseshoe print. The mark is at 90 degrees to the roadway. It has to be a rear hoof, as it's too close to the edge of the road behind it to be a front one. But one step forward would take a cart horse into the high hedge in front of it. But what if it's something very different? The other side of the hedge, straight in the direction in which the horse appears to have been heading, is the ruin of Blunsdon Abbey. The old house burned down around the end of the nineteenth century. So a picture starts to emerge. Back when an abbey that was later converted into a house was still a religious site, chances are they would have had some heavy horses for agricultural work. Could...