Dendrochronological evidence for a lower water-table on peatland around 3200-3000 BC from subfossil pine in northern Scotland

Tree-ring analysis of subfossil Pinus sylvestris L., from nine new peatland sites located beyond the species’ current northern limit in Scotland, established a regional chronology called WRATH-9. The chronology has been provisionally dated against Irish pine chronologies and provides the first annual resolution picture of Scots pine expansion from c. 3200 bc and subsequent demise from c. 3000 bc. Pine germination and growth is suggested to be associated with a widespread fall in bog water-tables that indicates a regional climatic control. Bog pines progressively declined in number, rather than died out in a single event, reflecting their growth in a marginal habitat, close to a critical ecological threshold. The use of tree-ring sequences from in situ bog pine macrofossils provides a higher resolution insight into past conditions than possible with existing radiocarbon and pollen-based chronologies.

Fairground Music; Augustine Sleeping Before He Can Talk; Telegraph; Cathedral

Four poems.

Death and football: An analysis of men's talk about emotions

This study is concerned with men's talk about emotions and with how emotion discourses function in the construction and negotiation of masculine ways of doing emotions and of consonant masculine subject positions. A sample group of 16 men, who were recruited from two social contexts in England, participated in focus groups on 'men and emotions'. Group discussions were transcribed and analysed using discourse analysis. Participants drew upon a range of discursive resources in constructing masculine emotional behaviour and negotiating masculine subject positions. They constructed men as emotional beings, but only within specific, rule-governed contexts, and cited death, a football match and a nightclub scenario as prototypical contexts for the permissible/understandable expression of grief, joy and anger, respectively. However, in the nightclub scenario, the men distanced themselves from the expression of anger as violence, whilst maintaining a masculine subject position. These discursive practices are discussed in terms of the possibilities for effecting change in men's emotional lives.