How not to mix up fake with the true in a world full of casual brushes with the truth – uncaring as to what is real and what is not. In principle it has always been the same for some of the population. Now, however, we have reached critical mass.

Each uncaring and unthinking person has access to weapons of war. A tweet ricochets off another tweet and spins off into another social media platform. Like a pinball machine full of pinballs, the machine gets hot and melts down.

Anger, frustration, good old-fashioned annoyance – they have nowhere they want to go except deeper into the furnace.

And the furnace spits them out. It doesn’t need them except as examples of persons.

It doesn’t care about them except for whatever trace they leave behind in the social weave.

If they all disappeared tomorrow, their loss would be calculated in loss of engagement, followers, likes, and shares.

Snowdrops (Galanthus) are a member of the Amaryllis plant family (Amaryllidacede), which also includes daffodils (Narcissus), Agapanthus, onions and chives (Allium).

I photographed these snowdrops at the Botanic Gardens in Cambridge. To get the exposure right so that the snowdrops weren’t blown out, I set the exposure compensation to minus one stop, and it seems to have worked.

Around a couple of the beds – and there were thousands of snowdrops in bloom at the Botanic Garden when I photographed these – are explanations and stories about snowdrops. One notice mentions that the stories are taken from A Monograph of Cultivated Galanthus (published by Bishop, Davis & Grimshaw in 2001). And the rest of this post is taken from highlights in the display notices, including how snowdrops defeat what icy weather throws at them.

In cold spells you will often see snowdrops collapse to the ground, only to resurrect themselves once the temperature rises.

Plant tissue is often damaged or killed by ice crystals forming in the cells during freezing. However, many plants, including snowdrops, have ‘anti-freeze’ proteins that help inhibit ice crystals forming and limit their growth, protecting the plant cells from damage.

Snowdrop leaves have specially hardened tips to help them break through frozen soil. These are essential qualities for plants that grow and flower at the end of winter. The outer segments of snowdrops move In response to changes in temperature. When air temperatures are above 10°C, pollinating insects such as bees are likely to be flying, and the petals move upwards and outwards, opening the flower for them.

The alkaloid Galantamine, used to treat Alzheimer’s disease, was first isolated from the snowdrop Galanthus woronowii. Galantamine is also found in other members of the Amaryllis plant family (Amaryllidacede), such as Narcissus and Leucojum. Today, Galantamine is mainly produced from plants: chemical synthesis is possible, but it is difficult and expensive.

If it were a blackbird like nearly all other blackbirds, then it would be all black, with a yellow beak. It is leucistic, which means an animal that has whitish fur, plumage, or skin due to a lack of pigment. Its shape and its beak says that it is a blackbird, but it is about ten percent bigger than a blackbird – unless the white areas are throwing of my sense of size. The last time I saw and photographed a leucistic blackbird – not far from here and a smaller bird – I wrote the following:

it is said that the reduction of pigment in leucistic birds causes their feathers to weaken and be more prone to wear. Leucistic birds are usually more conspicuous, which puts them more at risk from predators. There is also evidence that leucistic birds might be less acceptable to potential mates.

Well, yes and no. Being an hereditary deficiency, if the problem were that serious you would have thought that leucistic birds would have died out with no one to carry the defective genes.