Hi there and welcome to Tuesdays Levy Letter. For the second time in as many weeks, fire fighters have been attacked by yobs in Grimsby. It came on their busiest night of the year with almost four hundred call outs. Look North will be getting the latest from the fire service on this.
Also we'll meet the mother, who wants school bus services made safer after her son fell out of the window of a double decker on his way to lessons. And more women in Hull keep on smoking when pregnant than anywhere else in the north. Can you believe this? A quarter of all mums-to-be can't kick the habit so now they're being targeted with a new stop smoking service. Also are we paying too much for our petrol? Parts of Linconshire might be on the doorstep of some of the country's biggest refineries, but prices at the pumps seem to be much higher. We'll investigate this on the programme. And the BBC's Autumnwatch this year is trying to find our oldest and most important trees. Tonight the oak that's a thousand years old and big enough for a party of twenty to have lunch inside its hollow trunk. Don't miss that tonight on BBC One at half past six. Birds As you know, weve talked about the effects of this years heavy rainfall and flooding a great deal on the programme and in the Levy Letter. And still the effects are being shown. Now I read that Blue Tits and Great Tits are suffering their worst breeding season on record, because of the cold, wet summer. Other birds that we might spot in the countryside too could have depleted numbers next year as the Reed Warbler, Whitethroat, Willow Warbler, Treecreeper and Willow Tit also had the lowest number of surviving chicks since bird numbers were recorded twenty-five years ago. Baby chicks died apparently, because they didnt have enough feathers to protect them from the heavy rain and food supplies were at an all time low for them too. So as Bill Oddie regularly says Make Way For Nature In Your Garden and get a bird table and stock it with bird food this winter! Fine Tuning And heres an interesting fact about the way our brains work. When we try to listen to music, our brains switch off brain activity away from visual areas and concentrate on our auditory parts of the brain. So listening to music with our eyes closed is all because our brain is trying to concentrate so hard on listening that it needs to switch off our visual senses. That all sounds fairly straight forward right? Although, Im sure this could prove difficult if you like listening to music in the car! But conductors are wired slightly differently according to this new study. Years of music training has apparently shown that conductors have fined tuned their brain so that both visual and auditory senses can operate fully at the same time. What amazes me is how scientists can work out how our brains are operating. Plugs And Ive got a couple of plugs to do today as well. Nicky emailed me about a charity calendar. I mentioned this a few weeks back too on the programme. She writes The Daisy Appeal continues to raise funds for the new Hull and East Yorkshire Medical Research and Teaching Centre at Castle Hill Hospital. A 2008 calendar has been created in conjunction with the local Artist Tom Harland. These would make lovely Christmas gifts with a suggested donation to the appeal of £7.50 per calendar! At the foot of each page is a detachable Tom Harland print, with space above to write notes and the reverse of each page features a recipe, including ones sent in by local celebrities including Sarah Beeney and also by BBC Antiques Roadshow presenter, Bunny Campione. And I have to say one of my recipes is in there too. Its not haute cuisine, but its the best I could manage! So theres the plug for The Daisy Appeal calendar. And I was told yesterday of some wonderful work thats going on at the moment. Some local people have gone out to South Africa as part of the Niall Mellon Trust. Every year volunteers head out to Cape Town to build houses for people living in dire conditions. At the moment 1350 Irish men and women are in Cape Town, which apparently is the largest ever exodus of Irish people to a charity event overseas. They aim to help about two hundred families and at the end of the week will be able to move these families from their one roomed shack to a house with two bedroom, kitchen and bathroom with running water, electricity and sanitation. So best wishes to the volunteers of the Niall Mellon Trust for the work theyre doing this week in Cape Town. And do you remember I featured an email in the Letter from Reg in Barmston asking about chitterlings, the small intestine of pigs, and where they could buy them. Well, Im not a fan of these really. But Phil is and he emailed in with this. Hi there Peter, This reply concerns the person who asked about the availability of chitterlings. I remember here in King's Lynn, that we used to have them in the fifties when I was a lad, so I have done a bit of homework as to if they are still available or not. The simple answer is that they are available if you are willing to pay the price. After talking to our local family butcher, he put me onto another butcher, who told me that the reason they are "unavailable" was the delicacy is very time consuming to prepare for the butcher, but he told me that if I would like to collect the particular item and prepare it myself (cleaning, cutting etc) I was quite welcome. Hope this is a bit of help. So thanks to Phil for doing his homework on ch! itterlings and hes found a butcher, who will supply it. So there you go. So Reg, if you ask your butcher they might be able to do it for you too. Well, that's it from me for today. I hope you can join me tonight for the programme. And keep in touch if you like with me on email throughout the day on [EMAIL PROTECTED] Take care, Peter And for the latest news and more where you live, go to: http://bbc.co.uk/humber and http://bbc.co.uk/lincolnshire ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the BBC Look North newsletter, go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/england/looknorthhull/newsletter/newsletter_index.shtml, enter your email address in the unsubscribe box. 1.94.4
