Busy streets

In a town of 17,000 people the arrival of 10,000 students can't be missed.  The university precincts are suddenly thronged with young faces. The golf course end of town , which has been swamped with visitors through the summer, now looks positively deserted in comparison. Does any other college town see its resident numbers swell by such a huge percentage ? Posters are appearing for live 'gigs'. These tend to start at 23:00 and finish at 04:00 - hours when students come to life and residents are safely tucked up in bed.

On the radio Russian drones in Poland , events in Qatar and 'Bloquouns Tout' day in France. Here, things are rather more peaceful. The farmer has pretty much finished with his harvest and the gulls , who spent much of yesterday happily searching the freshly tilled earth for worms, are happily bobbing up and down on the high tide. When the tide brings them too close to the rocky shore they literally flap their wings and fly backwards. Whoever knew birds had a reverse gear ?

We're in town in time for the morning school walk. A steady procession of mothers, children and dogs heading towards the primary school and the first class of the morning. Some children seem keener to get to school than others.  You can be pretty sure the parents around here take a keen interest in the syllabus. This may, or may not be, something the local teaching staff appreciate.

By the church the landscape gardeners are replacing the old turf. They've driven their truck and trailer onto the pavement to take away the old sub-soil . A gentleman on a motability scooter insists they find somewhere else to park. They do so without complaining - which is a surprise. Perhaps they've been told to moderate their language while working on 'holy ground ?'

Further down the road workmen are building an extension behind Brewdog. Concrete is about to be poured. Concrete is being transported to the site on a mechanical wheel barrow. The gentleman with the motability scooter makes his views plain but decides to detour into the cheese shop until things free up again.

The bakers already busy. Life around here is settling down into its winter routine.

Noise pollution. It's not just humans that suffer :https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/five-dramatic-ways-animals-respond-to-human-noise-from-mimicking-car-alarms-while-wooing-mates-to-calling-higher-over-the-din-of-traffic-180987190/

A brief breakfast convesration revolves around this. In fact it's a super brief breakfast conversation. This is a fact that might well never surface again :https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/harvestment-daddy-long-legs-new-eyes-rep/

The cause of a recent Italian health scare :https://theconversation.com/why-preserved-vegetables-can-turn-deadly-and-how-to-stay-safe-263161

How Singapore sees the world:https://www.aei.org/op-eds/singapore-thrived-in-a-us-led-world-now-what/

Nothing new under the sun :https://bigthinkmedia.substack.com/p/the-futuristic-inventions-of-the