2 Forms of Growth, by Léon Krier (1946-2025).

This is absolutely brilliant. Thank God some women are finally getting it.

One Medjool date - approximately 18 grams of carb and 70 calories. Absolutely delicious but they’ve got more sugar than toffee so that’s not surprising!

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Gerald is standing in green grass this August, and the field across the lane has gone the colour of a paper bag, and the only difference between the two of them is a plough. You can see the line from the gateway. It runs along the hedge like somebody drew it with a ruler. One side is pale and cracked wide enough to put a finger in and it crunches when you walk on it. The other side gives underfoot, and it is green, and there is a nine hundred kilogram Hereford working across the middle of it at the speed of a man reading a newspaper he has already read. The lane field was ploughed and reseeded four years ago. New ley, high yield, drilled for a heavy first cut, and it gave one, and it has given less every year since, because the roots on it stop about four inches down where the drill left them. Four inches of soil in a dry August holds nothing. The man who owns it has had the bowser out twice this week and is buying feed in the middle of summer, which is the thing no farmer wants a neighbour to watch him do. Gerald's forty acres have not had a plough on them since some time in the eighteenth century. Nobody planted that sward. It arrived over two hundred years of being grazed and dunged and rained on and otherwise left alone, and it is about forty different things growing in among each other, half of which have no commercial name, several of which have gone down after water past two metres. There is no dry spell in the recorded history of this country that reaches two metres. So the grass keeps coming in the worst month of the year, and the bull keeps eating it, and what he leaves behind goes back in and the beetles have it buried inside a week and the roots go down after it again. He came down a ramp there at five months old, looked at the whole forty acres for about ninety seconds, and walked to the south corner. He has never revisited the decision. Not in a drought, not in a hailstorm, not in the eleven days of horizontal rain, not at minus six with the trough iced solid. Same corner, same hour, same pace, for four years, in a country where everything else has an opinion about the weather. The south corner has seven wildflower species in it now, and a bumblebee count, and a dung beetle population, and none of that was anybody's project. It is just what happens to ground that has one animal standing on it who has never once been talked out of anything. There is no scheme paying for any of this. No contractor, no invoice, no line in the paperwork, because in the paperwork this field is classified as unimproved land, which is the official term for ground nobody has got round to wrecking yet. The hedge is thick. The wall stands because the bottom of it is grazed. The swallows are over the middle of the field at seven every evening working the flies that follow him about, and they are not over the lane field, because there is nothing over there to work. Half the country is being told the animal in that field is the reason the weather has gone wrong. The animal in that field is the reason it is still green. Gerald has not been informed that he is unimproved. Gerald is in the south corner. The south corner is fine.

I mentioned that my garage door was making a sound. An American immediately said, "I got a guy." He did not ask what the sound was. He did not ask what kind of door. He produced a guy on the basis of the word garage. I asked who the guy was. He said, "Just a guy." He did not have a company name. He had a first name and a phone number in his phone saved as "Mike Garage." That is the contact name. Mike Garage. As though Garage is his surname. As though there is a family. I asked how he found this guy. "My brother-in-law used him." I asked if the brother-in-law was satisfied. He thought about it. Then he said, "He's still standing." The house is still standing. That is the entire review. Inside I said: THEY DO NOT KEEP RECORDS. THEY KEEP LOYALTIES. I called Mike Garage. He answered from inside a vehicle. There was wind. He said he could come Tuesday between eleven and four. Between eleven and four. A window of five hours. In my country this would be a scandal. Here it is generous. He gave me a window at all. Some guys do not give you a window. Some guys say "Tuesday" and that is the whole appointment. He came at 1:40. He fixed it in twenty minutes. He charged me less than I expected and he did not take a card, only cash or an app I had never heard of. Before leaving he looked at my water heater, which I had not mentioned, and said, "That's gonna go." I asked when. "Couple years." I asked what I should do. He said, "I'll give you a guy." He gave me a guy. Mike Garage has a guy. The guy has a guy. There is a network beneath this country made entirely of men named after their function, and none of them advertise, and all of them are busy. Inside I said: THERE IS A SECOND NATION HERE. IT HAS NO SIGNS. IT IS ENTERED ONLY BY INTRODUCTION. I have been given four guys since. I have a guy for trees. I did not know I needed a guy for trees. I have trees now, apparently. They are my responsibility. A man named Rick told me so and then left.

Bohlale Mphahlele invented the Alerting Earpiece prototype as a 16-year-old in Limpopo, winning a bronze medal at the 2020 Eskom Expo for Young Scientists. She is now around 22 and has formed Mphahlele Alerts (Pty) Ltd to commercialize it, but the product remains an early-stage prototype still seeking funding and partners for production.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ The top senior scientist, winning a laptop, was Hritik Mitha, a grade 11 learner at Bryanston High School in Johannesburg, Gauteng for the project called “Non-invasive Blood Glucose Level Monitoring”.  The project is aimed at mitigating the drawbacks of the invasive glucometer test, which led Mitha to develop prototypes that proved to be practical and effective in measuring glucose levels to a clinical standard. Mitha was also awarded a partial scholarship by Wits University’s Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment for his project, and selected to attend a virtual innovation and entrepreneurship boot camp in 2021 with 18 other young scientists by the Technology Innovation Agency (TIA). The top junior scientist, winning a laptop, was Thea-Mari Roos, a grade 9 learner at Hoërmeisieskool Bloemhof in Stellenbosch, Western Cape whose project was aimed at addressing the practical concepts of a digital calculator. Roos investigated how a number on a keyboard is translated on an electronic circuit, and developed a model that imitated the electronic calculations successfully.

The Highland cow was built, deliberately, for a landscape that has no interest in being farmed. That long shaggy coat is actually two coats: an oily outer layer that sheds horizontal Scottish rain and a woolly inner one against the cold, which is how it stands out quite happily in weather that sends every other breed running for the shed. The wide, hard hooves are made for bog and peat. The gut handles rough, heathery, acidic upland grazing that a pampered continental dairy cow would take one look at before lying down in protest. Consider what it's working with. Parts of the western Highlands take as much as three thousand millimetres of rain a year. The ground is thin acidic peat over rock. The growing season runs to about four months, if it's feeling generous. You will not grow wheat on that. You will not grow quinoa, or oats in any quantity worth mentioning, or much of anything a person could actually live on. What you can do is graze a Highland cow, and watch it turn that wind-blasted, biblically damp hillside into beef. Slowly. Calmly. Under a magnificent fringe, with no outward sign that it finds any of this remarkable. It has been quietly converting that hillside into supper for generations, and would, on the whole, rather you didn't try to help.