In lieu of scary shots illuminated by a bonfire, this will have to do for my monthly self-portrait. There’s no special significance beyond the fact that I was buggering around with my mobile.
This year our Ten Things column each month is concentrating on food. Not necessarily the most common or obvious foods, but hopefully ones everyone will recognise.
Citrus Fruits
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
[George Bernard Shaw]
Each month we’re posing five pub quiz style questions, with a different subject each month. As before, they’re not difficult, but it is unlikely everyone will know all the answers – so hopefully you’ll learn something new, as well as having a bit of fun.
Physical Science
Answers will be posted in 2 weeks time.
Our look at some of the significant happenings 100 years ago this month.
4. 1924 United States presidential election won by Republican Calvin Coolidge
4. Died. Gabriel Fauré, French composer (b. 1845)
20. Born. Benoit Mandelbrot, Polish-born mathematician (d. 2010)
30. Born. Allan Sherman, American comedy writer, television producer and song parodist (d. 1973)
Things from this month that I didn’t otherwise write about …
Tuesday 1
What can one say about today except “fucking hell!”? Last night the freezer went on the blink, so I ended up cutting our losses and and ordering a new one at midnight. We just hope enough of the freezer stays frozen until tomorrow – not that there is time to do anything with the new one tomorrow! So I slept badly and had to get up early as the beginning of the month is always busy with admin, of various types, not just ours. It went on all day; every job either had to have something else done beforehand, or caused a follow-on job. I was still at my desk at 8pm – tired, hungry an with a headache – when N arrived home very late from the hospital. Now I have to go and cook tea. Happy bunnies are not us!
Wednesday 2
Well our new freezer did finally arrive, late. So it had to be left cooling down for the afternoon while N and I did a session of talking to patients at the doctors. When we got home we had to heave to and move everything over from the old freezer; it was still playing up but everything had stayed frozen. The new freezer is slightly smaller, so a few oddments had to go – well most will be used as we needed to take out stuff for the next 2-3 days anyway, which will most likely include soup.
Thursday 3
Dear God, the cost of postage is just unreal – and it goes up again on Monday. Today I had to send two tote bags to USA; the package is just big enough that it has to go small packet, and it weighs just over 400gm – so it isn’t large, just annoyingly over size. This cost £15.80 in postage. How on Earth can Royal Mail justify this? By contrast sending a book, also a small packet but just over 500gm withing the UK was just over £3, which still feels too much, but is at least reasonable.
Friday 4
N’s birthday, and I gave her a special present – we went to get our Covid boosters and our flu jabs. But then I cooked a couple of very nice, decent size steaks for dinner – with a brandy, garlic & cream sauce, chips and a fennel slaw – followed by peaches in brandy; plus the obligatory bottle of champagne and a liqueur.
Saturday 5
Absolutely floored. I expect the flu jab to knock me down for 24 hours, but this year it’s also set off an attack of my vertigo/labyrinthitis – which always takes most of a week to resolve. Very unstable on my feet; spent the day in bed; just about OK if I lie flat and still.
Sunday 6
Still flattened, but a bit better.
Monday 7
Now only half flattened, but still struggling with vertical hold and brain fog. Had to cancel my diabetes check-up this morning, and will have to reschedule it. Sadly I also had to cancel lunch later in the week with friends visiting from Japan; really annoying but I’m far from sure my head will be able to travel into central London. That’s the trouble with this vertigo, once it arrives it takes a week to properly resolve.
Tuesday 8
Massive thunderstorms predicted for today, but they didn’t happen. There was some rain, and there was stygian gloom in late afternoon: some of the darkest cloud cover I think I’ve ever seen.
Wednesday 9
Great fun this morning. 06:30 awoke to blue flashing lights. Car wedged(?) diagonally across the road 100m away by a parked white van (I was later told the car had hit the van and done a lot of damage). Police car behind it (nearer us) and further away a fire truck, so it had been going on for a while. No ambulance. Copper and 2-3 firemen wandering about with no sense of urgency. So no clue what had happened. N said later that at 08:30 they were taking the car away. Then about 11:15 there’s a parking attendant putting a ticket on a car which is parked across the boundary between us and next door; whether because he’s parked on the hump, or because the front is encroaching over next door’s dropped kerb we may never know.
Thursday 10
We have some Virginia Creeper rooted at the bottom of our garden – not that we ever see it on our side. It rambles all along the fences at the back of us (the other side of the overgrown alley, and up the far side of next door’s fence – that’s over 30m in length. It’s currently absolutely gorgeous in its autumn red leaves. How can anyone ever want to remove it?
Friday 11
Last evening I rescued a small fruit fly from my apple juice – it was clearly alive, but not very good at doggy-paddle. I lifted it carefully, from below, onto my finger and encouraged it to walk onto a tissue to dry off. It was about 3mm long and clearly black and yellow striped. It sat on the tissue cleaning its legs, its wings, its head and its antennae for several minutes. It was quite an amazing performance to watch, especially as it was previously trying to drown. Then, suddenly – poof! – it was gone. It’s odd how you can feel attached to such a tiny creature in such a short time; I hope it survived for a normal fly lifespan; at least I gave it another chance.
Saturday 12
Why is household paperwork and admin so tedious and time-consuming? I have a routine of doing the not-immediately-urgent paperwork at a weekend, but not having done any last week, today it took me all afternoon rather than the usual hour or less. It wasn’t even interesting or exciting.
Sunday 13
A busy but interesting Sunday. (1) Unloading the last 2 weeks photos from the trail camera there were a number of occasions where Boy Cat was either carefully watching, or actually trailing, the fox as much as to say “I’m just keeping an eye on you to make sure you behave properly in my garden”. (2) I picked our apples. Not a huge crop from our 2 small trees: 20 or so from the Pinova, many small but a couple of a nice size for eating. And just one from the Falstaff which is a good size to eat. (3) We spent an hour or so choosing the photo for this years Christmas card, and getting them on order. Postcards as usual because they make writing cards so much easier: no envelope hassles and no worrying about which card to send Aunt Ethel; plus they’re ridiculously cheap from VistaPrint.
Monday 14
Mmmm. Those apples I picked yesterday are really lovely: crisp, juicy and slightly tart. Much better than anything you buy in the supermarket, and known to be organic too.
Tuesday 15
I actually managed to get done today pretty much everything I needed to. N heroically covered a session talking to patients at the doctors for me after one of the other volunteers dropped out last night. She then had to hot-foot it to the hospital. Meanwhile I sorted out all sorts of other tedious jobs, including taking my keyboard apart to clean it, and starting the grocery order. Why do I always end up falling asleep over the grocery order?
Wednesday 16
Did anything happen today? What day even is it? I’m totally lost. Still at least the council came and took the old freezer away. And N’s flowers arrived.Click the image for a larger view
Thursday 17
Well much to my surprise I not only had nothing much scheduled for today, and I got the afternoon off to do … nothing much except read – which is rare! Our Christmas cards arrived, and look lovely – but you’ll have to wait upon the day to see them. On the downside I had a panic attack about what’s happening at the weekend which necessitated a change of plans – I never understand why these things happen; it’s a real bummer!
Friday 18
A lovely foggy start to the day, and the first real fog of this autumn; although not really thick, just enough to block out the top end of the road. I always liked the fog as a kid, despite growing up in the 1950s with the tail end of London’s pea-soupers and not being able to see more than a couple of meters in front of your face. There was always an air of mystery with the fog (even better if there was fresh snow as well), partly down to the restricted vision, and partly the muffled sound.
Saturday 19
Yet again I missed the literary society AGM. I was intending to go, but everything recently has just turned out too difficult: I still have occasional remnants of the vertigo; the depression isn’t any better and triggers the odd panic attack; transport is a pain with the tube here off at weekends plus major roadworks everywhere; and then N isn’t always great when she gets back from hospital.
Sunday 20
A wet and windy day, so nothing doing outside. Instead we used the last of our apples plus a few strawberries and a dribble of peach liqueur to make an huge crumble – enough for breakfasts for most of the week – which turned out very tasty with cream. Managed to slice my thumb peeling the apples – idiot! Cooked some stuffed chicken thighs (with a drizzle of curry jus) in pastry for evening meal – not the greatest success ever, but very tasty and has potential.
Monday 21
Feeding the pond goldfish today I was struck that although it’s clearly autumn (but not yet that cold) they’re still feeding voraciously – and blimey are they getting big and chubby; seriously substantial fish considering they were tiny tiddlers 2 years ago. It’s said that for tropical fish (I don’t know how true this is of carp) that they can survive on 1% of their bodyweight of food a day, and with 3% they’ll grow rapidly.
Tuesday 22
Why do cut thumbs always spring a leak 24 hours (or more) after the event, when you think they’ve scabbed over OK?
Wednesday 23
Comes upon this day, the gardener. Amongst other things he gave the lawn it’s last cut of the year and top dressed it with home-made compost. It looks a mess at the moment, but if the weather stays mild the grass will soon grow through.
Thursday 24
Had a friendly annual diabetes check-up this morning with one of the Practice Nurses – the one I usually see and get on well with. As usual she knows she doesn’t have to read the riot act at me – unlike some of her colleagues – as I know what I ought to be doing and if I haven’t it’s because for whatever reason I can’t. Taking blood the nurse managed to spring a leak around the needle, so I lost a teaspoon more blood than planned – it’s all good fun! She had a young student nurse with her, who got some hands on practice. I also managed to get a message in, really aimed at the student, about not bullying patients but ensuring they have the information and letting them make their own decisions – with some quiet nudges, which is generally more effective. I also managed to make an appointment with the Practice’s physio, to see if I can get some exercises for my back.
Friday 25
Comes the window cleaner. Quick and efficient as always. And he offered that next time he comes he’ll get a ladder up and check some of the guttering.
Saturday 26
We seem to have very few sparrows around; I’ve hardly seen any in the last couple of years. But today, looking across the road, there were sparrows going everywhere – too many to count!
Sunday 27
So the clocks have gone back, and we’re now on GMT again. I wish we could stay on GMT; continually meddling with the clocks is a pain, and totally unnecessary. Unlike in wartime when every useful scrap of daylight mattered, it isn’t needed now and just causes confusion etc. Anyway GMT is our heritage, so as the country is a theme park we need to keep, and show off, our heritage!
Monday 28
Waking up: “Oh it must be 9 o’clock. What?! No, it’s only 8 o’clock.” Stupid brain hasn’t adjusted to the clock change.
Tuesday 29
Up betimes, only to find my morning meeting being moved to Thursday. So I spent half the morning trying to fix up one of our laptops to replace N’s desktop PC – I failed and gave up. Why is Windows so obtuse and obscure? It’s vaguely friendly for the dumb user, but totally byzantine if you know what you need to do under the bonnet: either you can’t or you have to guess the magic incantation. Gah!
Wednesday 30
One of those days where you get stuck in trying to prepare for unpredictable meetings and everything conspires to stop you – so you end up unreasonably knackered.
Thursday 31
After some unexpected preparatory work by a colleague we had a long, detailed and very forthright meeting this morning makes me hopeful that things might start to happen.
I’ll leave you with some suitably Halloween frosty-looking fir cones I perpetrated a few weeks ago!
So once more, somehow, another month passes and we come around again to this month’s selection of links to items you didn’t know you didn’t want to miss!
Science, Technology, Natural World
Starting here, it’s all downhill, because it seems that a lot of science is actually faked.
Fly brains may be tiny in size but they’re still stuffed with very complex inter-weavings of thousands of neurons, so it’s amazing that researchers have managed to map every neuron. Two reports, first from BBC, and second from Scientific American [££££].
At a different level, scientists have analysed ancient DNA to unravel how the endangered Iberian Lynx avoided extinction.
Some fish in the sea are so bizarre … here’s one that walks on six legs, and those legs can smell its prey in the sand. [££££]
Still at sea, but now above the water, research has found that the windless doldrums around the equator are caused in a completely different way than previously thought.
Staying with things geographical, apparently Mount Everest is still getting taller and not quite in the way we might expect.
It’s no great surprise that scientists have found that the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs was not a one-off.
And talking of meteorites, there was a mega meteorite about 3 billion years ago which was at least the size of Greater London which boiled the ocean and created a 500km wide crater.
NASA has shut down one of Voyager 2’s five remaining instruments to save power.
And finally in this section, did the early universe balloon in size with “cosmic inflation“, or is there a much simpler explanation?
Health, Medicine
This month’s medical matters are all to do with reproduction, in one way or another …
There are many genetic changes that link puberty to other aspects of physiology and affect its timing.
Prof. Christina Pagel highlights why we need to stop ignoring period pain and heavy bleeding!
Why is it that many doctors don’t believe women about the menopause? [££££]
At which point the Guardian asks if wearing a bra makes breasts more perky.
Let’s segue away from “women only” … in a move labelled “bonkers” by many, an NHS hospital in Norfolk has instructed staff that they must not describe babies as “born” male or female [££££]
And finally to the morgue where pathologists have found, during an autopsy, that the deceased 78-year-old man had not two, but three penises – and it is only the second ever such report and the first in an adult. Two reports, from Popular Science and Gizmodo. And the published academic papers make interesting reading!
Environment
In the hope of re-establishing colonies right across Britain, a number of pine martens have been released at a secret locations in Devon.
Social Sciences, Business, Law, Politics
It is being alleged that companies will no longer want to force people to change passwords every few weeks to counteract cyber attacks. I’ll believe it when it happens.
Art, Literature, Language, Music
An illustrator talks about how she went about a big commission.
Brits are forever complaining about the relentless invasion of English by Americanisms, but British English regularly invades the US.
History, Archaeology, Anthropology
What?! So little history this month?!
Archaeologists have found a very rare Bronze Age wooden spade in southern England.
Archaeologists have found another tiny house in Pompeii which is decorated with erotic frescoes.
Going Medieval finds that medieval people were just as much into side hustles as their modern counterparts.
Food, Drink
White mulled wine seems set to be a thing in UK this Christmas, with Marks & Spencer taking the lead.
Why did European cuisine become so bland? Apparently because snobbery decreed the removal of all the spices and contrasting flavours from the cuisine.
Is it possible to make a commercial, ethically responsible, and tasty fish finger?
Lifestyle, Personal Development, Beliefs
We should put down our mobile phones and get back into the habit of reading
So just why shouldn’t women propose marriage to men?
And last, but by no means least …
On discovering something wonderful when skint and posing as a nude model. [££££]
Well I had a good smirk and a snigger when I came across …
Here’s our next instalment of things that happened in ..24 years of yore.
Notable Events in 1824
8 January. After much controversy, Michael Faraday (below) is finally elected as a member of the Royal Society.
8 January. Birth of Wilkie Collins, British novelist (d.1889)
21 January. Birth of Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, American Confederate general (d.1863)
10 February. Simón Bolívar is proclaimed dictator of Peru.
4 March. Founding of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI)in Britain.
19 April. Lord Byron, the British poet, dies at the age of 36 in the Greek city of Missolonghi, where he had taken ill while making plans to liberate the Greeks from Ottoman rule.
7 May. Premiere of Beethoven’s Symphony No.9 at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna.
16 June. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) is established in Great Britain.
4 September. Birth of Anton Bruckner, Austrian composer (d.1896)
10 October. The Edinburgh Town Council founds the Edinburgh Fire Engine Establishment, the first municipal fire brigade in Britain (and probably the world). [Pictured below an 1824 Edinburgh Fire Engine.]
21 October. Joseph Aspdin patents Portland cement.
Unknown Date. The Colorado potato beetle is first described, by Thomas Say.
What? We’re into the last quarter of the year! How? Anyway here’s this month’s collection of quotes amusing and thoughtful – with quite a few slightly longer offerings this time around …
The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.
[Tony Puryear, https://www.facebook.com/tony.puryear]
This neatly leads us to the Minkowski view of space and time: we live in a four-dimensional space-time, where three of the dimensions are the space we are familiar with, each of which can be measured in metres. The fourth dimension can also be measured in metres, but we are travelling along it at the velocity c, the speed of light, and we interpret that as the world changing, and that gives us the concept of time. Time doesn’t “flow”; it is just us shooting along that fourth-dimensional axis. The section we have just traversed is the past and is fixed, immutable; while the section ahead is the future and is uncertain, described only by a series of probabilities or possibilities, over which we have limited control.
[John Elliott, quoted in https://www.newscientist.com/lastword/mg26335081-200-what-would-happen-if-time-stopped/]
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
[Voltaire]
When you recognise that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realise that who you are is not the voice … the thinker … but the one who is aware of it.
[Eckhart Tolle]
Sometimes those who don’t socialize much aren’t antisocial they just have no tolerance for drama, stupidity, and fake people.
[unknown]
“Why do you need a label?” Because there is comfort in knowing that you are a normal zebra, not a strange horse … It is near impossible to be happy and mentally healthy if you’re spending all your life thinking you’re a failed horse, having others tell you you are a failed horse, when all along you could be thriving and understood if everyone, including you, just knew you were a zebra.
[Quoted in https://katywheatley.substack.com/p/this-is-bleak-you-have-been-warned]
If something won’t matter in 5 years, don’t waste more than 5 minutes worrying about it now.
[unknown]
Brains get good at what they do. Negative thoughts create ‘channels’ in your brain. This way of thinking can become your default. If you do a lot of negative thinking, you wire your brain to be good at producing negative thoughts. Your brain also gets good at seeing things to think negatively about. One of the many byproducts of negative thinking is stress, which then leads to more negative thinking.
[unknown]
Royals have always been terrible people who are mostly just good at stealing money.
[Eleanor Janega, https://going-medieval.com/2024/09/27/on-side-hustles/]
Love of liberty means the guarding of every resource that makes freedom possible – from the sanctity of our families and the wealth of our soil to the genius of our scientists.
[Dwight D Eisenhower]
If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality
[Charlie Warzel at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/hurricane-milton-conspiracies-misinformation/680221/]
When stripped of local symbolism and terminology, all systems [of belief] show a remarkable uniformity of method. This is because all systems ultimately derive from the tradition of Shamanism.
[Peter Carroll, quoted in Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_magic]
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
[George Carlin]
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
[JRR Tolkien]
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries – the realists of a larger reality.
[Ursula K Le Guin]
A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.
[Atul Gawande; Being Mortal]
Empathy requires being attuned to the patient’s perspective and understanding how the illness is woven into this particular persons’ life. Last – and this is where doctors often stumble – empathy requires being able to communicate all of this to the patient.
[Danielle Ofri; What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine]
Patients were real, often passionate individuals with real problems – and sometimes choices – of an often agonizing sort. It was not just a question of diagnosis and treatment; much graver questions could present themselves – questions about the quality of life and whether life was even worth living in some circumstances.
[Oliver Sacks; On the Move]
Be kind to yourself in the year ahead … Try to make your time matter: minutes and hours and days and weeks can blow away like dead leaves, with nothing to show but time you spent not quite ever doing things, or time you spent waiting to begin.
[Neil Gaiman; Neil Gaiman’s Journal]