February is the biggest suicide month of the year. In January you notice little difference from day to day. But in February it gets light several minutes earlier each day and a week makes a real difference. Suicidal types figure out that if they make it through the winter everything will be alright. Come February they find that things are just as awful as ever. So they top themselves. Not very believable is it? Every suicide is a preventable tragedy.

You might think this rather a morbid way to start a weblog. But it was prompted by a little piece of Radio Two trivia. Today, listeners were told, was the most miserable day of the year. Now there’s something! Goodness knows where this statistic comes from. The reason? Tax returns...income tax and value added tax...and sickness. Not a lot of people know that. And not a lot want to.

I had every reason to feel suicidal after a text from Pete Butler ‘hi pete they have sold ya boat shall I get ya stuff’. This meant an unscheduled trip to Cardigan to dispatch letters to Brian Walker my solicitor in Sevenoaks and Carl Bagwell the Harbour Master in Rye. ‘Events, dear boy! Events!’ was Harold McMillan’s reply when asked the hardest thing about being Prime Minister. More some other day.

Clearly such trials and tribulations energise me. By the time I took myself off to bed I was feeling quite pleased with my day. Reminders had gone off to two customers...worth a thousand pounds when they pay up. And at long last...I exaggerate as I am only a week behind my self-imposed mid-January deadline...the 2005 accounts were on their way to Stockholm. To my delight they showed that most of the money coming in is mine.

Twenty years ago I wrote an essay entitled Green Houses or Blue Moon Waves in which I discussed the work of the marine scientist Otto Pettersson. My sole source was a book first published in 1950 entitled The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson. My manuscript remains unpublished but I included the Otto Pettersson section in The Art of Fine Publishing which I posted onto my website last year.

However Otto Pettersson's work remains unknown buried with the object of his research at the bottom of the Skaggerak. A year ago I did a Google search which confirmed his obscurity and prompted me to write away to Oslo University for more information about the gentleman and his work. Today’s search came back with 415 references to this great scientist. And my comments were right up there on the top page in fifth position.

The background to this tale is that while browsing in the Ashford County Library I chanced across a Rachel Carson book published in 1968 by MacGibbon & Kee entitled The Sea. The book was a 3-in-1 reprint of The Sea Around Us, Under the Sea-Wind written in 1941 and The Edge of the Sea published in 1955.

Under the Sea-Wind was not a success. It enjoyed excellent reviews but few readers. But then ten years later in 1951 came The Sea Around Us and instant success. Between one spring tide and the next Rachel Carson was world-famous and being showered with honours. The book remained high on the best-seller lists for eighty-six weeks and was translated into thirty languages.

There were two interesting side-effects. Firstly Under the Sea-Wind was reprinted in America and published for the first time in Britain. But for the triumph of The Sea Around Us this remarkable book would have remained gathering dust in the basements of a few American public libraries. Secondly her success brought Rachel Carson the financial independence essential for the research and writing of Silent Spring...and about this book the introduction to The Sea had this to say:

'There can be few literate people who have not heard of Rachel Carson. Her last book Silent Spring sounded a tocsin round the world prompting governments in many countries to restrict the use of pesticides. It has been given to few women, other than the mistresses of emperors and kings, so to influence governments. It has been given to no other woman to do so through the medium of a book.'

The mid-Victorians delighted in regarding Nature as ‘raw in tooth and claw’. It made them feel better as they bulldozed their way through the countryside. Of course the tooth and claw are real enough. On my way through Mynachlog-ddu yesterday morning the birds of prey were out in force perched atop the telegraph poles. Too small to be eagles. Buzzards perhaps. I am a bad birdwatcher and can only do small garden birds. Birds of prey are something else.

The Cousteau and Attenborough ‘wonders of nature’ approach is more to my liking. Take the other wales for instance...the ones with an ‘h’. Before her demise in the shallow waters of the Thames Estuary Wilma would dive over a mile for her food...ten times deeper than Tanya Streeter the British world record-holder in free-diving. Here the pressure is 150 times as great as on the surface. The Northern bottlenoses treat the dive as a matter of course. How do they do it?