It's Always More Complicated

Dept of, Wow symbolism: Garden shed of vaccine pioneer Edward Jenner added to heritage at risk register:

It was there that he first trialled a vaccine for smallpox in the late 18th century. The hut, built from brick and rubble stone with a simple thatched roof, was christened “the Temple of Vaccinia” by Jenner.

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Dept of, maybe the murmuration is trying to tell us something: Starling Spectacular over the Avalon Marshes - is something foretold stirring???

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Dept of, no, really, I am trying to avoid going 'urgent phallic much' over this arboricultural saga....: How the giant sequoia came to England:

Lobb collected seed, shoots, and seedlings. In fewer than two years’ time these would give rise to thousands of saplings, snatched up by wealthy Victorians to adorn great British estates. The larger-than-life conifer, so symbolic of the vast American wilderness, suddenly became a status symbol in Britain.

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Dept of, now thinking about ancient books bound in selkie skin as basis for fantasy: Eight pages bound in furry seal skin may be Norway's oldest book. You know, the Danes really do not have a very good record:

But when Denmark ruled over Norway, old books and manuscripts were sent out of the country. The Danish king was the one who claimed important relics of the past.

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Dept of, are cockatoos actually parrots (apparently yes)? There’s a statue of a dead parrot in Greenwich.

In case this has passed dr rdrz by, it is now possible for ordinary people to register for access to JSTOR's massive collection of scholarly resources.

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This month's freebie from the University of Chicago Press is Courtenay Raia, The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind in the Victorian Fin de Siècle on psychical research.

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Okay, I know I was going off at people getting all up in the woowoo about the Pill, but this is a bit grim about Depo-Provera: Pfizer sued in US over contraceptive that women say caused brain tumours. I was raising my eyebrows at this:

Pfizer argues that it tried to have a tumour warning attached to the drug’s label but this was rejected by the US regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The company said in its court filings: “This is a clear pre-emption case because FDA expressly barred Pfizer from adding a warning about meningioma risk, which plaintiffs say state law required.”

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And also in the realm of reproductive control: Of embryos and vaccines: If you REALLY want to protect the unborn... on rubella. Abortion historian notes that one reason (apart from thalidomide) for resurgence of abortion activism in UK in early 60s had been a German measles epidemic.... Also recall that my sister - who like me was not of a generation that routinely got this vaccine in childhood - when she fell pregnant with her first getting tested in the antenatal clinic to see if she needed to get the jab stat (in fact, she had high level of antibodies, so maybe we'd all had German measles among all our other many childhood ailments and barely noticed....)

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Something more agreeable: the Royal School of Needlework's Stitch Bank:

RSN Stitch Bank is a free resource designed to preserve the art of hand embroidery through digitally conserving and showcasing the wide variety of the world’s embroidery stitches and the ways in which they have been used in different cultures and times. Now containing over 500 stitches, each stitch entry contains information about its history, use and structure as well as a step-by-step method with photographs, illustrations and video.

Asking good questions is harder than giving great answers: this so resonated with my experience as an archivist: 'often when people ask for help or information, what they ask for isn't what they actually want'.

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Many years ago I used to go to a restaurant- Le Bistingo in South Ken, as I recall - that had a cartoon pinned on the wall depicting a chef bodily ejecting a diner. Waiter to observers: 'He Attempted To Add Salt'. This was rather my reaction to this particularly WTF 'You Be The Judge': Should my partner stop hankering after salt and pepper shakers?

Why do you need salt and pepper on the table, haven't you seasoned the food adequately? (oh, and btw, Gene, as a comment remarks, salt has naturally antiseptic properties*).

*I remember some historical drama of Ye Medeevles on the telly in my youth about dousing somebody's flogged back in salt water (?or rubbing it with salt) to stop it festering.

Okay, will concede that I managed to book my RSV jab, as notified by NHS I could do, with my general practice with reasonable expedition, and it was not an enormous amount of faff to go there and get it done, even if the waiting area was terribly noisy - there seemed to be some kind of social support group going on in one corner - and I managed to mishear the call of a name very similar to mine.

Feeling a bit wamblesome today but no major side-effects I think.

HOWEVER, when I was closing down my computer to go out to get this done yesterday, it said it was ready with Windows update, so I clicked on update and restart and that, my dearios, was the beginning of A Saga, such that I left it chuntering through disk-checking while I went out, and came back to it telling me Something Went Wrong, here are your options -

Several of which, like, take back your update, did not actually work.

I did manage to get system restore to work and get machine working again.

Trepidaciously, I saw it was telling me that update was available this morning and after lunch actually dared this, and mirabile dictu, it worked.

Let us not rejoice yet, though, because I was updating my laptop and saw that that also was signalling Windows Update, and that did all this weirdness and did NOT like system restore.

Maybe if I leave it overnight it too will come into a better frame of mind, though this is annoying as I have an online talk booked and I prefer to watch these on laptop from comfort of settee.

Two, in fact:

Covid booster and flu shot.

Had text saying my GP was offering the first, but with really weird time slots when I logged in via the link, and then had texts and emails from NHS offering chance to book both at local pharmacies, so partner and I both booked for first day available, which was today, at the nearest chemists.

Have been and got them and come back.

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In other news, this morning I had a rather bizarre text purporting to come from Royal Mail, except Royal Mail texts usually say Royal Mail rather than [number]*, and claiming they had parcel for me which they could not deliver because of problem with the address, could I follow link and give right address?

While the link was quite a convincing mockup of a Royal Mail site, there was something just a bit off about the form, and the URL was royalpost rather than royalmail, so I am pretty sure this was some kind of scam, I am just not entirely sure what the point of getting my address is.

Do they then come back to me saying, alas and woe, insufficient postage, please to cough up difference?

A little further running and finding out suggests that the website and the number are in hinky territory, without any actual claims of malfeasance being stated.

*Amusingly, Malwarebytes have been given to mark actual Royal Mail texts as potentially dodgy, because they often contain the link to the tracking site presumably, but didn't pick up this one....

Vaccine, vaccine, vacciiiinnnne! I have appointment to go and get mine at the walkable place next week!!!

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Also, I have finally managed to set up the Nest smoke alarm and connect it to the existing upstairs one, AND to turn off the motion-activated floodlight if one ventures towards the bathroom in the middle of the night.

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Plus, as previously mentioned, did managed to get a Waitrose slot for next week.

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Yesterday, with much cursing and screaming, I did manage to log in to a Zoom meeting with a potential research network Within My Sphere of Interest. I actually interacted with people! within the limitations of that format, and with the audio occasionally doing A Thing that was (something that is probably not even in the tables of memory for many dr rdrz) reminiscent of trying to tune in to a radio station, as it might be Radio Luxembourg or one of the pirate stations, in days of yore, and getting a very distorted signal.

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The delayed parcel has turned up a day early.

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And, of course, even though there are still 'all obstacles in the way' a feeling of

It's Thanksgiving, for my friends in the USA*, and it's International Men's Day.

And it occured to me that one can be very thankful for IMD, if only because it provides a useful and necessary riposte every 8th March to the blokes who come out from the woodwork to moan gripe and whinge Y No International MENZ Day? ('19 November, bozo'.)

It is (surprise! not) of much more recent origin than International Women's Day, according to its Wikipedia entry first mooted 1992 and revived in 1994 which was when it seems to have started taking off, rather slowly.

We, a little cynically, think that perhaps the lack of awareness that it even exists and this rather slow take-up may have to do with the fact that it is explicitly anti-sexist and pro-gender equality and about doing all those things that anti-feminist men moan about as unfair and discriminatory and so on without, however, doing anything about rather than using them to beat women over the head with.

The 'Six Pillars' are as follows:
To promote positive male role models; not just movie stars and sportsmen but everyday, working-class men who are living decent, honest lives
To celebrate men's positive contributions to society, community, family, marriage, child care, and to the environment
To focus on men's health and wellbeing; social, emotional, physical and spiritual
To highlight discrimination against men; in areas of social services, social attitudes and expectations, and law
To improve gender relations and promote gender equality
To create a safer, better world; where people can live free from harm and grow to reach their full potential.

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And, in other news, today I ventured forth into the big wide scary world beyond the front door in order to get my flu jab.

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*I stand corrected!

A day or so ago I came across a Twitter thread exploring the horrors that might eventuate from time-travel tourism - having to take the equivalent of Ryanair to get to your chosen epoch, vast crowds in Renaissance Florence and other hotspots -

So I thought, wouldn't you then get the other thing, the whole 'the Sun-King's Versailles is the new Benidorm', and people going for that really chic, utterly unspoilt, little nook of historical time?

No tourists, nobody there but the Real People of the Day -

(Only then, probably, word of it gets about and it gets Spoilt.)

The other thing was, the people who do Extreme Holidays would probably also do Extreme Time Travel (storming the Bastille? riding with the Golden Horde? the possibilities are many.)

I'm also wondering about the insurance implications: and having one's vaccination certificates up to date. I remember having to have a smallpox vaccination certificate when, I think, it had actually just been declared extinct but certain countries had not yet updated their entry requirements (no, it was in fact after the last naturally occurring case but before WHO declared official global eradication). But if you were going back pre 1980, maybe you should get that done? Anti-vaxxers not permitted to travel in time???

Because reproductive and sexual health seems to be a bit of a theme at present.

Noted lately in the paper: Young women put off smear tests due to feelings of embarrassment and concerns about being hurt, a survey suggests i.e. the 'Pap' test for cervical cell abnormalities.

At first, misled by the descriptor 'young', I wondered whether this was a cohort which had received the HPV vaccine in pre-adolescence and therefore felt themselves to enjoy a happy immunity to the worries that might lead women to be meticulous in taking up the opportunity to been screened (entirely free under the NHS). But in fact one discovers that 'Almost one in three women aged 25 to 64 have not had a smear test within the timeframe the NHS recommends', which is only barely within the demographic to which routine HPV vaccination would apply.

I'm also a bit bewildered by the issues expressed about shame and embarrassment in the context of medical examinations, which - or maybe not? one might anticipate women might undergo in other routine contexts of healthcare.

I guess that whole 70s self-help group thing of 'let's get hold of a load of plastic speculums and examine our own and each others' cervixes' has really gone the way of the dodo, eh?

Repeats the - well I think it's hilarious - anecdote of the nurse who was doing an internal exam (not actually in this particular medical context) and said 'o dear, I can't find your cervix'* - great temptation to say, 'well, I brought it with me - maybe I left it out in the waiting area - ': BOOM! BOOM!

*Apparently some of us have what is known as a pinhole cervix. ?TMI?

The Charlie Gard case.

And okay, besides the honking irony monster that is people whose intended policies demonstrate massive disregard for infant life and welfare getting all on to this, I wonder how many of the contributors to their crowd-funding effort and people squawking about the Evil Fascist Institution That Is Great Ormond Street Hospital (there are not enough sighs in the world) are anti-vaxxers?

Because, really, more children still die in the C21st from preventable communicable diseases than rare mitrochrondial disorders.

It's the whole dramatic narrative thing, innit, alas. Clean water, clear air, sunlight, adequate nutrition and routine vaccinations are not a story. (Not any more, anyway: Jenner, John Snow, Semmelweiss may be fairly dramatic narratives, but the outcome becomes the invisible way things are: smallpox, cholera, puerperal fever - what are they?)

I am not persuaded that the compromise suggested in that Guardian leader: 'Charlie’s suffering could be managed if he were sedated beyond pain for a period while the new therapy is tried' is actually workable: I am inclined to think that the amount of analgesia requisite would be perilous in itself for such a small child.

I'm also thinking of other instances where the Miracle That's Being Held Out is Somewhere Else, not in one's backyard: e.g. people going to (I think it was) Mexico to have laetrile treatments for cancer, and Dr Issels' Ringberg clinic. I wonder if some notion about pilgrimages factors in? - which of course, some people do, e.g. Lourdes. Something about striving and effort and going above and beyond: which don't, of course, reliably lead to the reward of the desired outcome.

I knew I had a few life-admin/domestic things this week: dental hygienist appointment, parcel to pick up from the depot because they put a card through the door last week, go and look for new sitting room chairs -

And I thought, why not, now that booking is opened and I am doing all this life-admin business, schedule my flu-jab -

And I thought, post office depot is not 100 miles from network provider's most local store, I could go there and buy myself a new phone since I am doing no good at all at their website.

So: I have lovely shiny toofypegs.

I have picked up my parcel.

I have a shiiiiny new smartphone that turned out to be cheaper if bought in-store, and has ported over my number without trouble, though I am still getting to grips with it more generally.

And then:

I got in and thought, that's funny, it's that sound as if the tank is refilling -

And then I looked out of the kitchen window and saw a stream of water spouting out from under the gutter from the cold-water tank in the not very accessible loft.

So I rang partner, and then contacted British Gas Homecare (with which our policy also covers plumbing) and booked someone to come tomorrow as it didn't seem urgent-urgent though something that needed attending to fairly soon -

And then went to meet partner so we could go and look at furniture (we think we have spotted some chairs that Will Fit The Bill, though a bit dearer than we had anticipated) -

And when we got in, partner went up into the loft to see if he could at least do something temporary, and it is no longer gushing out but it is coming in at great speed -

So partner is currently sitting up there like the little Dutch boy and we are waiting for an emergency plumber within the next few hours.

The situation is complicated in that the stopcock for the house appears to be in the downstairs flat, the occupants of which are currently out. There is a mains stopcock outside in the pavement, but that is for us and next door, and also, I think one needs some special thing to turn it off?

AAAAAAARGH.

And in connection with domestic concerns, saw this article about the rise of the inept motherhood trope, which of course, my dearios, is by no means a new motif, come on down, Provincial Lady and a vast number of jolly columns in women's magazines, and Jill Tweedie's Fainthearted Feminist, and probably several more that I have forgotten.