The ‘flu jab crap continues. Gradually feeling better but still very depressed and not doing much. Hmmph! We are not impressed.
But just to cheer everyone, including me, up a bit I thought we’d have another cartoon from the archives.
Week 50 of the experiment, and just ten weeks to go documenting five things each week which have made me happy of for which I’m grateful. This week we have … Oh God, it’s going to be a foodie week again!
Pickled Onions. I don’t eat pickled onions for months at a stretch, and then I decide I want them, which is what happened this week. Why I don’t eat them all the time I don’t know, ‘cos I always really enjoy them. Unless you’re going to the fiddler of doing your own (which I used to) then Garner’s are the best available by a long way.
Chillies. The chilli crop is nearing the end; there are just a handful left to ripen and the flowers have almost ceased. Even the prolific tiny red Explosive Ember are petering out. But earlier this week I picked a magnificent collection of about 10 each of the large yellow Scotch Bonnet Yellow Mushroom and Hot Lemon.
They must be havin’ a giraffe! A bleedin’ big ‘un n’all.
Yesterday Diamond Geezer, who blogs a lot about various London-y things, posted a list of the cost of various London attractions.
This was prompted by the news that The Shard is to charge a few coppers shy of £25 for the privilege of going to the top to see the view. A view which, likely as not, will be mist, aka. low cloud, rather than the promised 40 miles round London.
So everyone can be equally scandalised, here are the maximum prices from Diamond Geezer‘s list with one or two I’ve added …
£30.00 Madame Tussauds (on the day)
£29.95 The View from The Shard (Time Out website)
£29.00 Harry Potter Tour, Watford
£28.00 Up at the O2
£26.95 Ripley’s Believe It Or Not
£24.95 The View from The Shard (standard price)
£24.00 The London Dungeon
£23.00 London Zoo
£20.90 Tower of London
£19.80 London Aquarium
£18.90 London Eye
£18.00 Buckingham Palace State Rooms
£16.50 Churchill War Rooms
£16.95 Hampton Court Palace
£16.00 Westminster Abbey
£16.00 Kew Gardens
£15.00 Houses of Parliament
£15.00 St Paul’s Cathedral
£14.00 HMS Belfast
£13.50 London Transport Museum
£13.00 St Paul’s Cathedral
£12.00 Cutty Sark
£8.00 Tower Bridge exhibition and walkways
£7.00 Royal Observatory Greenwich
£6.00 Apsley House
£4.00 Wellington Arch
I’m sorry, London attractions, but those prices are just not on and they are why you won’t see me visiting any time soon. So don’t go wondering why you don’t see me, at least until you reduce those prices by 50%. We’re in a recession. OK?
Yes, I’ve done a lot of the attractions. I remember being taken to Madame Tussauds at the age of about 10 (so 50-ish years ago) and my father complaining about how exorbitant it was even then. Here’s my verdict on those I can remember:
Add to which that the London Dungeon, Apsley House, Buckingham Palace, Harry Potter, the O2, The Shard, and Ripley’s hold no attraction for me, which is why I’ve not been to them.
And that is from someone who likes history and going to interesting and odd places. What a sad reflection on one of the great cities of the world and my home!
Thank your personal deity the national museums are all free.
Bastard! One year I’ll learn not to put anything in my diary for at least two days after I have my ‘flu jab. Yep it always gets me, usually for only 24 hours.
This year it hit me hard. GOK why it should.
I had the injection about 9.30 on Friday morning. By 9.30 that evening I was huddled under the duvet feeling like death — the full ‘flu symptoms: fever, aching bones, crashing headache, don’t like bright lights, unable to stay awake but sleeping fitfully and just so depressed.
Saturday’s plans had to be abandoned. But heroically Noreen managed to mop up the couple of bits we couldn’t entirely avoid. Meanwhile I slept the day away. And although I felt rather better by the evening I then couldn’t sleep last night. That’s pretty normal for me when I’m ill: sleep well all day and badly at night.
Humanity is present again today, but only just. I’m still weary and aching; still depressed. Still not functioning properly in the brain department. (Yeah! OK!)
Hopefully normal service will be fully restored tomorrow; there’s too much to do for it not to be.
It’s true what they say about ‘flu, even the after-effects of the injection: it hits you fast and hard, and floors you. If the symptoms come on gradually and you can still function at all, then what you have isn’t ‘flu. If you get hit by a train and can’t function even if you need to, it is ‘flu.
Yes, I usually get some reaction to the injection. I never expect it! But it isn’t usually as bad as this. The only previous year I remember it as bad as this was two years ago when the inoculation contained swine ‘flu (or was it bird ‘flu?) vaccine. That knocked me out for a week! Clearly my body hadn’t seen that before.
What’s interesting though is that not everyone reacts the same. On Friday morning in the supermarket we met a couple who also go to our doctors and who had their jabs several weeks ago: they both said they had had no after-effects at all; not even a sore arm. And my mother says she never gets any after-effects. But I do, and I know several others who do.
Lesson: In future keep at least a couple of days clear after the ‘flu jab, and be prepared to be hit hard. I did neither this year and have only myself to blame. Even Noreen tried to warn me! But did I listen?
But the after-effects of the inoculation, however horrid, are way better than actually having ‘flu properly. One really doesn’t need that, especially if you’re at all immune-compromised (elderly or with a long term condition like diabetes, respiratory problems, etc.) or a carer because ‘flu can really knock you out, possibly even terminally.
So if you’re offered a ‘flu shot by your doctor, I’d say take it. Yes, it may make you feel rough for a day or so, but that’s better than the 1-2 weeks real ‘flu will last.
In this edition of links to interesting items I’ve collected this week, we bring you mostly science-related things. In no special order …
The Bristlecone Pine is an amazing tree which can live for thousands of years. It chronicles climate change past and it looks as if it may be showing the way into climate change to come.
So what are you actually running scared of? Biologist Rob Dunn is always good value and here he looks at how our “fight or flight” mechanism is still running from nasty, big predators.
Still on biology here are a series of amazing microscopy photos of creepy crawlies. Preferably not for mealtime or just before bed, but the images are so brilliant!
We all get earworms. No, not more bugs! I mean that song or tune which loops endlessly in your head despite distractions. Now psychologists are trying to understand why.
Psychologists again! It seems they’ve concluded that what we’ve always been told is true: that men and women can’t be “just friends”. OK, guilty as charged, sometimes — though I’m far from sure it is true of all my opposite sex friendships.
There have been several articles recently about the age of puberty having fallen over the last 100 years in both boys and girls. Do scientists really not understand why? How about better nutrition and hormones in meat? I bet they account for a large percentage of the change. But OK it will be hard to prove.
Finally on the basis of some meta-studies some scientists have come to the conclusion that premenstrual syndrome is probably a myth. Probably true for some women, but I find it hard to believe it’s all in the mind. I think a lot of people will need a lot of convincing.
May your weekend run smoothly!
I love the expressions on the faces of Glasbergen’s cats!
Really major life-changing events (marriage, an influential chance meeting) aren’t common but we all have them and usually several in a lifetime.
What I suspect is more common, at least of those of us who read, is to realise that one has a series of books which have been sufficiently influential that they’ve significantly changed the tone or direction of one’s life.
And reading Mrs Worthington’s entry “Books that shaped my life” in Tara’s Gallery this week I realised that I too had such a list. So I thought I’d document it. Here are some of them in roughly chronological order; I’m sure there are others.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass. I remember these from an early age. They started me thinking about language. Later re-reading it as a student I saw and became fascinated by the unexpected logic, something which has stayed with me. This was later enhanced by Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice.
TS Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. This is something my father used to read to me at bedtime when I was probably about 7 or 8. I especially remember, and still love, Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat. I knew it off by heart and I still remember chunks of it. This was in the late 1950s, long before Cats, the musical. To this day I love cats and I love railways.
WE Johns, Biggles books. I read as many of these as I could get my hands on, probably from the time I was about 9 or so right into my teens. Yes, they were fantasy adventure, but they were also a world into which a repressed (even depressed) child could retreat from the world.
Boy Scout Association, The Chief Scouts’ Advance Party Report. This was the 1966 set of proposals for modernising the scouting movement at the time I was transitioning from Scouts to Senior Scouts. I realised it was important and read it. I didn’t agree with it. I saw it for what it turned out to be: the beginning of the emasculation of the Scout Movement as I knew it and as I believed then, and still believe, it should be. It was thus one of the 3 or 4 straws which directly led to me leaving Scouting; somewhere I would have liked to remain.
John Betjeman, High and Low. I don’t recall what impelled me to buy Betjeman’s latest slim volume of verse in 1966, but it soon became a firm favourite. As a late teenager it lived by my bed and if I awoke, sleepless, I would dip into it until sliding into slumber again. Why would a teenage boy in the late ’60s find a volume of poetry comforting? Isn’t that rather worrying? It didn’t so much kindle in me a love of poetry but an awareness of the changing world of architecture and railways.
Havelock Ellis, The Psychology of Sex. My parents had a copy of this and it was openly available to me on the shelves from a very early age. I read it, and learnt a lot from it, as a teenager. It kept me one step ahead of my girlfriend in our joint exploration and development of our sexuality.
Florence Greenberg, Jewish Cookery. No I’m not Jewish. I picked this up as a student because it is such a great cookery book. It covers all the basics and provides a wealth of interesting recipes. It wasn’t the only cookery book I had as a student, but probably the one I used most often. And I still have it and use it!
David Hockney, Photography. I’m unable to remember now which of Hockney’s books on photography it was that I recall seeing, but it was one of the early ones where he was experimenting with “joiners”. The book was probably his Photographs (1982) or just possibly Cameraworks (1984) although I had thought it was a late-70s book. But whichever it was I found the “joiner” technique fascinating and it is still something I experiment with from time to time. It has definitely been a factor in the development of my photography.
Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time. If there’s one work (it’s actually a series of 12 novels) that changed my life this is it. There are comments elsewhere herein (for instance here) about how I was recommended to read Dance by our friend Jilly, and how that simple recommendation led to what is now the Anthony Powell Society and such a large part of my life.
Long time readers will know that I rather like wasps (yellow-jackets to you Americans) and I’ve written about them before (for example here and here). They are extremely good predators of creepie-crawlies and without them we’d be knee-deep in caterpillars and spiders. They are also adept at reducing dead wood to nothing: they scrape off pieces of wood which they chew into paper to make their nests.
This Autumn we seem to have a plethora of wasps. Not really surprising as we obviously have a wasps’ nest somewhere in our eaves. They come and go through the end of our guttering, a few feet from the bathroom window. And they are still very active; there’s a constant traffic of wasps in and out. That’s fine; it’s as it should be.
But what I have noticed is that we have an extraordinary number of queen wasps this Autumn. They are obviously emerging now, leaving the nest and are off to mate and find somewhere to hibernate. And they are mostly queens (although I think some of what I’ve seen are probably males); they’re far too large to be workers. At about twice the size of the workers (which is what we normally see about) they’re quite impressive.**
But why so many this year? It’s probably partly because we don’t so often see them and I’m seeing more now as they are so close (and they can now escape through the hatchway into our loft, which was previously not possible). But it is probably also partly because it is still mild and they haven’t been killed off in the nest by early frosts.
Vespula vulgaris
We have mostly two species of wasp in the UK, the common wasp, Vespula vulgaris, and the German wasp, Vespula germanica. I don’t know which species my wasps are, but I think probably the former; we do have both species here. I need to catch one and interrogate it; you can mostly tell the species from the face and body patterning, and the gender from size and body morphology as these illustrations show.
Vespula germanica
And these queens buzz. Very loudly but with a lower pitch than workers. I know this because the queens are getting into the house. Lots of queens. Yesterday we evicted three before lunch. But boy is that buzzing annoying: I guess it is designed to be. Like their colouring it could well be a defence mechanism; a warning: Don’t mess with me!
You can hear them coming. Standing in the bathroom this morning I could hear a faint, low buzzing. Alert! Wasp! But where was it? After a few minutes it appeared from the direction of the trap door. They’re attracted to light (I guess that, like moths, artificial light partly dazzles them) so putting out the bathroom light it was easy to shepherd the creature out of the window. Sorry dearie you ain’t hibernating in my house if I can avoid it — if nothing else the house is too warm for you to hibernate.
It’s interesting to watch them. They’re really only a pest when you can’t catch them or cajole them out. And they’ll be gone as soon as we get a couple of good frosts. Generally with wasps in the UK if you leave them alone they’ll leave you alone.^^ Let them be — they are such superb predators.
** No, they are NOT hornets. Hornets (Vespa crabo) are very large, quite scarce, more likely to be found in wooded areas, and distinctly yellow and brown.
^^ The only excuse for obliterating them is (a) if they are nesting somewhere totally unsuitable (like your kitchen) or (b) if you have someone you know to be seriously allergic to their sting as my late mother-in-law was, but that is not common.
I’ve not partaken in Tara’s Gallery for a couple of weeks. This has been partly due to the lack of available hours in the day and partly as the last couple of subjects haven’t grabbed me.
But I have to do this week’s Gallery as the subject is something dear to my heart: books!
And yet I find I have no photos of books. Except for this one.
This was my home office, my desk, about three years ago.
For the last several years I was working I was lucky enough to be able to work from home much of the time. Despite being a project manager much of what I was doing could be done remotely: I had email, a mobile phone, a fax, a laptop. And because my teams were geographically spread meetings were held by teleconference. It actually worked well, and saved the company huge amounts of cash and travel time.
A couple of years into retirement it doesn’t look a lot different. The laptop isn’t there so often, and the fax machine has gone.
The books have been reorganised but are largely the same. These are my working books; the ones I use every day; just a couple of hundred of the thousands in the house.
Here it is today; when I was in the middle of writing this and even with the image above on the screen!
See still lots of books, bigger geraniums and chillies creeping into the top right corner — not a whole lot different!
So yesterday six internationally respected scientists, plus a government official, were convicted by an Italian court of manslaughter for not issuing a warning of the magnitude 6.3 L’Aquila earthquake of 2009 which killed 309 people. They were each sentenced to 6 years in prison.
For what? Yes, that’s right: doing their job to the best of their ability.
On the basis of the best evidence available to them, these experts didn’t issue a warning about the imminence of the earthquake because that evidence didn’t indicate there would be one; because predicting earthquakes is (still) effectively impossible. It’s a decision which most of their colleagues around the world apparently support.
They made an honourable scientific decision based on the evidence. So how can they be culpable?
Now I’m no expert on earthquakes, but my friend Ziggy Lubkowski is a world leader in earthquake engineering. And he is even more quietly and coldly furious than am I. You can see what he says on his work weblog. I commend it; he says it much better than I can!
It would seem to me that the direct consequence of this is that no scientist should now express any opinion as to any the future happening. Or perhaps the only comments should be either “No comment” or “We don’t know”. Surely to do anything else leaves one exposed. That means scientists — which includes the guys who forecast our weather! — will no longer be able to fulfil their roles in society. It will stifle science, progress and more immediately public safety. Would I blame anyone for taking such such an approach? How can I?!
Surely any legal system which can allow such a prosecution to even get to court is deeply flawed. For everyone’s sake let’s just hope that this travesty of justice gets overturned on appeal.
£30.00 Madame Tussauds (on the day)