Several of the exhibits at the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, when we visited in February featured circles of different sorts, mostly of natural origin, but some not:-

Thios one has a depiction of Copernicus’s heliocentric solar system in the book at the centre:-

This was on the wall. It looks like the trace of an eccentically orbiting comet or something of that kind:-

Liesegang Rings. I confess I had only heard of Liesegang Rings in a chemical context before this but I now know they occur geologically too, as evidenced below:-

A Comet in Dan Air livery:-

Its interior:-

And its cockpit:-

A BAC-1-11 in the colours of British Airways:-

Its cockpit:-

The front portion of a Boeing 707 was one of the exhibits. This is its cockpit:-

Hawker Siddeley Trident Cockpit:-

Sheila Scott’s Piper Commanche:-

I vaguely remember Scott’s flight round the world in 1966 in the above small aeroplane (the damage obvious in the photo was inflicted by the man she sold it to.)

It wasn’t the lead story today – the murder of an off-duty prison officer in Northern Ireland saw to that – but it still beat the potential loss of 6,000 jobs (count that, 6,000 jobs) at Comet electrical stores down the item list and also, if memory serves, a little local squabble about EU contributions.

Well the US is a large, not-too-far-away country of which we know on the one hand too much and on the other, sadly, not enough.

It’s a disaster for those involved of course, and a tragedy for the dead and their families but did the people of the UK really need such saturation coverage?

Hurricane Sandy also hit Haiti, Barbados and Cuba and we learned far less about that. But they don’t speak English.

Oh, wait. In Barbados they do.