NICE ONE MATTY

We just got an email from Matt Osborne. Apparently this map appeared alongside a BBC headline "Wildcats seen Nationwide". As he wrote, `it is a very cryptozoological headline for a very political story`.

The wildcats referred to are wildcat strikes which have shown once agin how our present government has misjudged the mood of the people. The story reads: "Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said wildcat strikes in protest at the employment of foreign workers were "not defensible". Hundreds of workers staged unofficial walkouts on Friday over the use of foreign staff at Lincolnshire refinery"

I wish that the wildcats seen nationwide were actually Felis sylvestris because it would mean that the indigenous Englsih wildcat would not have been persecuted to extinction in the 19th Century, and the riddle over its precise taxonomic status might then have been resolved.

But that is another story.....