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All in the month of December The coming of St Columba Remembering Dorothy Wordsworth Steve Biko – speaking out on behalf of blacks The day Mikhail Gorbachev resigned Dwindling wildlife in Britain Beware raw sewage Plastic spending ** Editor:  We continue our column that looks at memorable dates in the month (this time, DECEMBER) down...

It was: 1500 years ago, on 7th December 521 that St Columba, Irish missionary who spread Christianity in Scotland, was born. He was one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland. 250 years ago, on 25th December 1771 that Dorothy Wordsworth, writer, poet, and diarist, was born. She was sister to the poet William Wordsworth. 175...

It was 1500 years ago, on 7th December 521, that St Columba, an Irish missionary who spread Christianity in Scotland and the North of England, was born in what is now County Donegal. Columba – also known as Columcille – was one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland, who studied under St Finnian in his...

Two hundred and fifty years ago, on 25th December 1771, Dorothy Wordsworth – writer, poet and diarist – was born. She was sister to the poet William Wordsworth. She had no ambitions to be a published author herself, but her diaries – particularly the Grasmere Journal, eventually published in 1897 – reveal her to be a...

Steve Biko, the South Africa anti-apartheid activist, was born 75 years ago, on 18th December 1946, in King William’s Town. He was a founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, and he was beaten and left for dead by state security officers in 1977, aged 30. He was raised in his family’s Anglican Christian faith, though...

  Just 30 years ago, on 25th December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as President of the Soviet Union, and the next day the Soviet Union was officially dissolved. The remaining Soviet republics became independent states. Mr Gorbachev had wanted to keep the Soviet Union together, and his policies of glasnost and perestroika had been part...

Be kind to the wildlife in your garden – what little of it remains. The UK is one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries, and it may not even have enough biodiversity – variety of plant and animal life – to prevent an ecological meltdown. That is the finding of new data by the Natural...

If you are thinking of doing any wild swimming dips over the Christmas break, bear this in mind: more than half of England’s major rivers are polluted with raw or partially treated sewage. This is partly because water companies have been allowed to release raw sewage into rivers and seas as part of a ‘combined...

We spent more than £4 in every £5 by using plastic last year, according to the British Retail Consortium. Debit and credit card transactions accounted for 81 per cent of all our spending, up from 78 per cent in 2019. For the first time, we used our debit cards for more than half (54 per...

All in the month of NOVEMBER Love your trees:  27th November – 5th December 100 years of red poppies War memorials In memory of a great Russian novelist Doctor Livingstone, I presume? Our affection for Premium Bonds The beloved Stone of Scone ** Editor:  We continue our column that looks at memorable dates in the...

It was: 200 years ago, on 11th Nov 1821 that Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist, short story writer and journalist was born. Best known for his novel Crime and Punishment. 150 years ago, on 10th Nov 1871 that Welsh journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley located the missing missionary and explorer Dr David Livingstone near...

Amid the mud, blood and carnage of trench warfare in World War 1, tens of thousands of bright red poppies grew, marking the graves of the fallen.  This led John McCrae, a Canadian army physician who had lost a colleague, to write “In Flanders Fields”, In Flanders fields, the poppies blow Between the crosses, row...