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Hi elle
Yes, she was the original cause of my wife's fern interest - she stayed with us for a meeting with 2 dogs and couldn't cope, so Alison went to wrangle one of the dogs. She liked the people she met, and starting going to meetings - often dragging me along too!

Hi, Rusty!
Yes, I shall talk to M & S in due course, as I feel they should be made aware of what is potentially happening to more than just me.
I am not holding my breath......but feel I should make the gesture?
I didn't know "ariosa" and "ecarte", either ...... nor of course "hawfinch " and halfinch"!
I am surprised that you knew "halfinch" ?
I have never come across it!
And I live nearer to Cockney land than you do!
I didn't find anything amiss with "tern " sounding like "turn"?
To me they are both said alike.
I hope your winds don't reach such a pace that the Bridge has to be closed.



Hello, Jigjag!
As I see it "critic" = " judge" (def)
with IT for Wine and Cric(k) = molecular biologist (briefly)
Francis Crick being the said molecular biologist , neuroscientist, and biophysicist.

@jigjag re IT
noun - informal dated

Italian vermouth.
"he poured a gin and it"

Hello, Elle!
I entirely agree with your first sentence!
It is M&S who should sort it out for you.
I have "ariosO", Elle, "thus" is "so".
I did not know "hawfinch", but Anne Bradford did!
Now, I have known "half inch"/steal for a long time.
Rhyming slang is often used in Glasgow, and I have pals in Glasgow, which may be where I heard it.
Anne Bradford has "half-inch" for "steal", too.
"Tern" and "turn" sound very different in my neck of the woods, I assure you!
I knew the name "Crick". Was that one of the folk involved in DNA?
And Frankland?
I have a wee bell ringing!
No double deck buses on the bridge, just now.
The bridge is a lot more often closed because of some poor soul in distress, unfortunately.

Jigjag, Elle agreed with my earlier parsing of Critic - and she added more information about Crick. I haven't heard of many scientists, but Crick and Watson are two. I've seen It/IT in crosswords so often that I tend to switch off. It (!) stands for Italian Vermouth - wine, I assume ( I don't drink and know very little there too.)

@jigjag see my post also

Update, Elle!
I was wrong again!
Franklin it is, not Frankland.

It's a point that's brought up time and time again that really irritates me - why did Watson, Crick and Wilkins get Nobel Prizes for discovering the structure of DNA when Franklin did most of the work? Was it because she was a woman?


No! It was because she had died prematurely, and Nobel Prizes are never awarded psothumously.

I have a biography of Rosalind Franklin, she does seem to have had problems because she was a woman in a largely male world, and was Jewish. She was also quite prickly. Rosalind died of ovarian cancer aged only 38 and, as chris says, deceased people could not be nominated for a Nobel prize. She was a quite brilliant crystallographer.
Crick and Watkins needed the photo she took, the famous Photo 51, to make their breakthrough. Without that, Linus Pauling in America would have won the race to discover the structure of DNA. How they got the photo, and whether it was done fairly or not, is a matter for conjecture.

I was once at an international biophysics conference attended by Sir Francis Crick. We were all having sherry (!)- he had his back to us-when someone remarked to be careful what we said about our research in his presence. I have no idea if the inference is true or not.

It is ironic that here is a Wilkins-Franklin Building (part of the University of London) because they did not like each other, at all.

Francis Crick had been an Honorary Fellow at my college (Churchill, Cambridge) but resigned in disgust when money was donated for a chapel to be built. I think that he returned much later when it was renamed from "Churchill College Chapel" to "The Chapel at Churchill College".

Sadly, however, this meant that we didn't overlap!