As my previous post was rather long, here is a nice short one to compensate 🙂

As mentioned in last Friday’s post, we usually treat ourselves to dinner out on Friday evenings.

The Banana Tree

This is where we went today, a restaurant at the Angel called The Banana Tree. I think the bill of fare is mainly Thai though they seem rather vague about this. Anyway, I had Pad Thai with tofu, if that’s any indication.

The food was quite good though I found it prudent to remove the slices of raw red chilli placed on top of my serving. I have been caught out by chilli before and preferred not to take any risks!

As you know, if you have read my introductory post or the page About the blog in the side bar, I compose and publish my blog posts mainly on my iPhone. This has the advantage of immediacy but to do so I need an editor that is comfortable to use and is completely reliable. By “reliable”, I mean that it always works as I expect it to and doesn’t lose my work if I close it down or switch it out to do something else. Another requirement is that it must provide a reasonably easy way for me to send or transfer the finished post to WordPress. I have left till last one essential requirement: the editor must be able to accept images and then transfer these with the text to WordPress when I am ready to publish.

A surprisingly large number of editors, notes apps and word processors fall at the very first fence: they do accept images. I find it unbelievable that anyone would create an editor or notes app for the iPhone that cannot insert images. The iPhone, after all, was designed around its ability to display graphics. Any editor that cannot fo that should be relegated to the Stone Age.

The hours I have spent seeking and trying editors, if joined together as a single time span, would probably amount to several days. I will admit that it has become something of an obsession.

In my post A better blog editor, I concuded that the best app I could find for the job was one that was already on board, Notes. I still think it has a lot going for it though it is not perfect. Its virtues:

1. It saves as I work and therefore never loses an edit, even when I swap it out to do something else or even close down the iPhone;

2. It accepts images and treats them sensibly, i.e. sizes them to fit the display;

3. It allows me to put texts in italics and bold and transfers these styles to WordPress;

4. It allows me to post the article to WordPress, using copy and paste;

5. I can then save the edit to iCloud Drive and later transfer it to my PC for safe-keeping.

It has one fault, though this is annoying rather than serious. Once my draft reaches a certain length, every time I swap Notes out and then return to it, it has placed the pointer at the top of the text, so that I have to scroll all the way down before continuing the edit.

A minor problem is that it has no facilities for editing the image, by which I mean setting the alignment and perhaps caption. I therefore have to go through the post in the WordPress editor to deal with each image in turn.

In the above mentioned post, I reported that I had tried the editor in the WordPress app and that it had lost my edit. When I had calmed down, I realized that there was a way to avoid that but by then I had given up on that editor. Today, I decided to give it another try.

To avoid loss, I wrote a few words of my test post and then saved it as a draft. The app does not save automatically, as far as I can see, and so it is necessary to explicitly save the text before leaving the editor. You do this by clicking on Update.

Before continuing, I should make one thing clear. WordPress has not one but two editors. There is the Classic Editor that we have been happily using for years and the spanking new, all bells and whistles editor, known both as the Block Editor and as the Gutenberg Editor. Many people do not like the Block Editor. I am one of them. It is unnecessarily complicated for my purposes. I am sticking with the Classic Editor until they stop supporting it in, I think, 2022. In what follows, therefore, “the editor” is taken to be the Classic Editor.

Actually writing the text in the WordPress editor is much like writing it in Notes. There are buttons for italics, bold, underline and strike-through. You press the button to switch the style on and press it again to switch it off. All very simple and straight forward.

There is a plus sign in a circle which you press in order to insert an image into the text. Pressing it opens a menu allowing you to choose from several sources including the obvious ones of camera and image library. Once chosen the image appears in the text properly sized.

One advantage of working in the WordPress editor is that as soon as you have inserted the image, you can immediately edit it, e.g. centre it, set the alt definition and, if you wish, a caption.

It was when looking at image editing that I made a serendiptious discovery. There is a certain button in the functions bar above the keyboard to which I had hitherto given no attention. It is out of sight on the right hand side and you have to swipe the bar left to reach it. It looks like this: </>

I pressed it and – guess what? – yes, it switched me to the HTMLeditor! If I put an exclamation mark at the end of the last sentence, it is not because there is anything particularly surprising about this. Rather it is a reflection of my joy on finding it. There is another way to access the HTML editor from the menu but being able to click a button means you can easily switch it on just to do one thing and then switch it off again.

Why did this make me joyful? Well, because it means that I can enfold an image in HTML code of my own confection in order to set how it appears. Here is an example:

Coffee at Jusaka
(Photo by Tigger)

I have mentioned before that if you use WordPress’s caption function it produces and ugly result. For an example, look at the pictures in my post A little more about wasps. Having quick and easy access to HTML means I can add enough code to centre the image and centre a caption underneath it. No dull grey frame and no off-centre caption.

So am I going to write all my posts from now on in the WordPress editor? To be honest, I don’t know. I think I will give it a try now that I know it will not lose my work as long as I remember to save before quitting or swapping out. One disadvantage is that there is no backup copy left after posting. So far I have not needed the backup but who knows what the future may hold?

On September 28th, I put up a couple of posts mentioning wasps, one of which received a comment. It seems that people generally dislike and fear wasps – as I did myself when young – and I therefore thought I would like to try to redress the balance by finding some online pages that present a more positive view of this much maligned creature. That turned out to be far more difficult than I expected. Most pages are produced by pest control businesses and even those by organizations that study insects tend to adopt a cautionary attitude. I found it all rather discouraging.

Photo from Pixabay

I would like to recount three incidents with wasps that led to me revising my negative attitude towards our stripey friends. Each sparked my curiosity and increased my interest in them.

The first was once when, on holiday in France, we were eating our evening meal outside on a terrace. A wasp came down to investigate my plate. Instead of shooing it away, I waited to see what it would do. It descended very slowly like a little helicopter and very gently seized a tiny morself of food and then flew off with it! I imagine it was going to feed its catch to hatchlings in the nest as adult wasps can only consume liquids, not solid food.

The second incident was in the same house. On the balcony there were deckchairs with wooden frames and I noticed that each frame bore marks: straight lines 2 or 3 cm long and about a couple of millimetres wide. I vaguely wondered what caused them. Then one day I found out. I watched a wasp land on a deckchair and begin to walk slowly along, obviously intent on something. I looked more closely: the wasp was cutting a thin shaving of wood off the surface of the frame and rolling it up as she went. When she had a large enough roll, she flew off with it, leaving behind a damp line in the wood. I concluded that as wasps make their nests of paper, she was collecting building material.

The third incident was when we were sitting out on a pub terrace in summer. I had finished my fizzy fruit drink and the empty glass had patches of foam inside it. I watched as a wasp came down, flew into the glass, settled on the surface and began “hoovering up” patches of foam! I was enchanted by this, so much so that I went off to buy a folding magnifying glass to carry with me in order to get a better view of any siimilar encounters in future! (I still carry it and it has served well on many occasions.)

Photo Egor Kamelev

We know how important bees are to the environment and to our food production but wasps are important too. They also have a role to play in the pollination of plants and they are essential in controlling the numbers of other creatures that we consider pests, such as caterpillars that infest food plants. Without wasps, our environment would become unbalanced.

I accept that wasps can be harmful to humans. I have been stung myself several times, happily with no further consequences, though I know that there are people who are allergic to wasp stings and can become gravely ill as a result of being stung. A sting to your mouth or throat can be particularly serious.

If you do enounter a wasp, don’t panic. Don’t start flailing your arms about as this is likely to alarm the wasp and cause it to do exactly what you are trying to prevent: to sting you! Stay calm, usher the wasp away from your face with gentle movements, and the wasp will probably lose interest in you and fly away.

In autumn, when all work in the nest has come to an end, the wasps are left needing to find food in the environment. Hungry wasps can be aggressive. (Do you blame them? I don’t!) They will be attracted to food, especially to sweet sugary concoctions. If you eat outisde, particularly in autumn, don’t be surprised if wasps think they are invited to the feast. Many clashes between humans and wasps can be avoided by the humans behaving sensibly.

If you firmly dislike wasps, or are afraid of them, then I don’t expect this brief account to change your outlook. Or perhaps it will. Wasps are not your enemy. They are necessary to the environment and, as I discovered, can be fascinating to watch, as can all creatures on the planet.

This Natural History Museum page offers a reasonably balanced account of wasps and their importance.

This afternoon, as is my wont, I travelled into the City to meet Tigger from work. Before setting out, I checked the two weather forecast apps on my phone and what I saw there had me rummaging in the wardrobe for my winter coat.

On the way home, we had two waits for buses during which I was duly glad for my wise decision to wear a warm coat. On reaching home, I screen-grabbed the display of one of the weather apps.

As you can see, the thermometer is down to 11°C (that’s about 52°F) which I consider distinctly chilly. Admittedly, it was a couple of degrees warmer during the day but that’s hardly a consolation.

Over the last few days we have been lashed by the tail-end of Hurricane Lorenzo which has brought heavy rain leading to flooding in some parts. Winter, it seems, is taking revenge for the unusual heat waves we were experiencing just a few weeks ago.

During the heat, I found myself almost wishing for colder weather though I knew that really I hate the cold and do not react well to it. I sometimes wish I were a bear so as to be able to sleep through it till spring returns.

We have noticed that the trees and shrubs have produced abundant crops of berries this year which, according to some, presages a harsh winter. I do not know whether this is right but we shall see soon enough, I expect.

Entirely unrelated to this, I was intrigued to hear that astronomers who have been trying to determine the nature of the mysterious ninth planet that is thought to circle the sun in the distant suburbs of the solar system now suspect that it may in fact not be a planet but a black hole.

If they are right then I sincerely hope it is in a stable orbit because if it were to stray inwards towards the sun it could gobble up a planet like ours and still be ready for seconds.

Something to take our minds off Brexit if only for a moment or two…

Here is a short video by Tigger of the wasps we saw earlier.

Wasp
Video by Tigger

Not everyone likes, or even tolerates, wasps and as a child I was taught to smash them with a rolled-up newspaper.

I have been stung by wasps several times in my life but with age comes, if not wisdom, then at least a better understanding of our companions on the planet. I am now a fan of wasps and enjoy – if cautiously – their company.