We read the newspapers every morning at the breakfast table, a ritual to ensure that anything of note that occurs we'll be aware of. Old habit. Sometimes enjoyable, more often there's an absence of enjoyment in a crucible of bad news. There's no issue of any newspaper and hasn't been for a year and a half that doesn't include a barrage of articles featuring the SARS-CoV-2 virus. And of those there's not much good to report other than the rising numbers of people vaccinated against COVID-19.

Today there was other news as well, a long energy pipeline the victim of a cyberattack causing great consternation, as such it should for these events will affect everyone. Another symptom of governments accessorizing themselves with clever Internet computer specialists to design software capable of infiltrating other governments' security efforts with destructive malware. There is no government department, no civil infrastructure, from universities to hospitals immune from these malignant attacks.

The plight of India, one of the two world's most populous countries, in trying to regain some control over their second wave of the pandemic is beyond alarming. The statistics just boggle the mind. The circumstances of a virus with the capacity to spread widely and efficiently and while it's doing that also mutating into more threatening variants is beyond worrying. Beijing has much to answer for, in its delaying of the responsibility to alert other countries, while it was busy enacting internal lockdowns and accusing other countries of racism for wanting to close their borders to potential carriers of the virus. Its malice evident in the way an official CCP tweet ridiculed India's plight while celebrating China's success in sending a space module into orbit.

On these occasions there's balm for the soul in looking out the front door at the flowering trees in the garden. The glory of the magnificent blossoms of the magnolia bearing hundreds of exotic flowers each spring is now accompanied by the blossoming of two Sargentii flowering crabs planted close to the magnolia. The flowers bursting all over those three trees in a blaze of identical pink.

We've had another day of sun, wind and cloud, but it's slightly milder in temperature. Once again the forecast warned of afternoon rain, so we went off for our usual afternoon walk in late morning. All the rain we've been exposed to, and the forest still hasn't fully absorbed has incited ferns to pop through the forest floor. Some of them unfurl as they begin to take shape, looking like the traditional 'fiddlehead'.

I had been wondering where all the red baneberry were this year, amongst the bracken coming up here and there in the forest, and today found some fine specimens in bloom. The floral head comprising a dozen and more tiny flowers will in months to come turn into glossy bright-red berry clusters. There are also white baneberries and in their case, the berries are ivory in colour, not nearly as attractive as the more numerous red, while both, I'm sure, are equally poisonous.

At one juncture while we were trekking alone an upper trail, there was a sound that couldn't be ignored. And there, beside us virtually, was a small hairy woodpecker industriously pecking at the bark of a tree, moving steadily up and down, flitting to another tree to assess its prospects. No red cap, so it was obviously a female, and quite undisturbed by our close presence and rapt attention.