Down by the riverside

We were entrusted with sole charge of the baby for an hour or so. We loved it; he slept through it. Nevertheless, we took him out to sample city life, like this. Not quite the image Birmingham normally projects. The river Rea ("ray") is flanked along much of its length by parks, green spaces, reclaimed scrub where volunteers are planting fruit trees. In this moment when spring is reaching maximum acceleration, it is a delight of flowering trees and shrubs, insects and birdsong. Sometimes there are kingfishers on the river - not today, or we might have woken him

The extra is a small commercial enclave, surrounded by both the greenery and the Edwardian residential streets. It exists because this was the site of medieval mills, powered by the river - more detail here

There is a flurry of stories about the privatisation of outer space - Musk, Branson and Bezos dreaming of ruling the solar system, refeuling stations on the moon, terraforming Mars for human colonisation, mining asteroids. Right-wing think tanks dream up legal justifications for a free-for-all land grab, a new theft of the commons, a modern enclosures. Some people are becoming alarmed at the thought of humanity's future in the hands of these midwives

Musk has already shown the dangers of having critical technological infrastructure in the hands of one fickle individual - threatening to cut off Starlink access in Ukraine and damage their defence capability

Somewhat in the same vein, there is a story about the risks posed by extreme solar storms - disruption of power supplies, damage to nuclear infrastructure, risk of widespread radioactive contamination. The vulnerability we have created by reliance on electrical power and communications technology is hitting home, underlined by today's events in Spain and Portugal

With all these ideas spinning round my head, the title on the van raised a smile