Image by Amanda Slater at https://www.flickr.com/photos/pikerslanefarm/40429523162

Dear Readers, uncertainty is a funny thing. For the past six weeks I’ve known exactly what I could and couldn’t do with regard to looking after my leg. I had to use my crutches at all times. I had to rest my leg as much as possible, while doing the exercises from the physiotherapist a certain number of times per day. I agreed with whatever my husband wanted to do for dinner (because he was doing everything, after all).

And now, I find myself having to make decisions for myself, and my anxiety levels are much higher. It doesn’t help that there are two voices in my head.

The first one is the kind, supportive one, the one that reminds me of my mother on a good day.

“Take your time. When you go for a walk, make sure that you have enough energy to make it back home. Rely on your intuition, you can trust how you feel. You don’t want to overdo it and set yourself back”.

The second voice is what I think of as a kind of cynical sergeant-major type. For them, any illness or injury, no matter how severe, can be overcome with a dose of self-discipline. There is no pain that can’t be pushed through.

“You can do more than that! You’re just malingering! And lazy! You should be able to do more than that by now!”

Well, this second voice is not helpful. The only way I’ve found to counter it is to think of what I’d say to a friend in a similar situation. I would definitely be offering voice one. After all, my progress from flat on my back in hospital to being able to walk to Coffee Bank and home again in less than six weeks is pretty miraculous if you ask me. Sure, it’s painful and I’m walking with a limp, but I’m still a tribute to the NHS and to everyone who’s supported me. And, if I say it quietly, I’m also quite proud of myself for getting this far.

So, I’m going to have to get comfortable with uncertainty. I’m aiming to increase my step count by a modest margin each day, but I know that there will be days when I’m tired, or sore, and I’ll rest instead. I like to be in control, but if this past few weeks/months/years has taught me anything, it’s that control is an illusion. One minute you’re heading for a fortnight in Austria, the next you’re on the sofa with a titanium pin in your leg. One minute you’re celebrating the way that your little cat keeps you company when you’re not well, and the next minute she’s been put to sleep. It feels so important to find joy and meaning whatever situation you’re in, if you possibly can. This past six weeks have taught me that the world doesn’t stop just because I’m not running around like a whirling dervish. It’s taught me that I’m not the only person who enjoys helping their friends – other people love to help too, and have taken the opportunity with relish. Why did I ever think that everyone would be too busy to pop round and cheer me up, often bearing gifts? One should never underestimate the love of friends.

It’s also taught me that it’s perfectly fine to weep at someone winning a medal for the first time in Olympics, or at the end of a book when you know that these are the author’s last printed words. What is it about being sick/injured that brings emotions so much closer to the surface? Is it because we’re generally physically low, or because there are fewer distractions, or because we realise what really matters, or all three? Or is it just me? In a way, I like that sense of having lost a protective skin, of being more open to the emotional elements, though it can be a little disconcerting. Sometimes, it feels as if a lot of things bubble to the surface so that they can be released into the ether.

And a final lesson, for me, is that when you’re forced to slow down, you notice more things. I would say that I’m walking at about a quarter of my usual pace, and I was delighted today to see that there are finally bees on the six-foot high Verbena bonariensis in the front garden of a house just down the street from me. I love that the flowers are at head height, so that I can see every detail of the stripy bodies of the honeybees, and even their coal-black olive-shaped eyes as they forage on the purple flowers. I can’t walk and pay attention, so I have to stop. On a normal day, I would probably have shot past, but not today. And what a small but perfect joy it is, to see them going about their business, unperturbed.

Yesterday’s step count – 1438. Blimey.

Violet Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa violacea) Photo By Pyrhan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74415515)

Dear Readers, as you can imagine, over this past few weeks I’ve been spending a lot of time scrolling on the interwebs, and I have noticed that a number of gardens in the UK have been spotting this magnificent beast. This is a Violet Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa violacea), and it normally lives in mainland Europe and Asia. Recently, however, it has been spotted with increasing frequency in the UK, with a breeding record from Leicestershire in 2007, and sightings as far north as Northamptonshire.

How I wish a Violet Carpenter Bee would visit my garden! They are hugely imposing insects, over 3 cm long and with a rattling flight that can be very alarming. As you can see, it’s black with shimmering, iridescent blue/purple wings. In spite of its size, this is a very docile bee, which makes a nice change from all the bitey insects I’ve been featuring lately.

Whether the Violet Carpenter Bee will become established in the UK depends very much on the availability of habitat. The bee burrows into decaying wood in order to lay her eggs, which are provisioned with pollen. The adult bees also use old nest tunnels to hibernate over the winter. Alas, the bee is sometimes blamed for damaging houses but, as the wood needs to be rotten before they can use it, they are a sign of dereliction, not the cause. More decaying dead wood needs to be left around for all manner of insects, fungi and other organisms, rather than being endlessly tidied up.

Female Violet Carpenter Bee (Photo By Alvesgaspar – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2759893)

If you’ve holidayed on the Continent you may well have seen these magnificent bees buzzing past, and, like so many other insects, maybe they’ll arrive here in larger numbers soon. The photos don’t really do them justice, so here’s a rather lovely short film of them foraging.

Here’s the most recent map of their distribution in the UK. They really could turn up anywhere by the look of it! Keep your eyes peeled, people!

So, is there any creature that would make your day if you spotted it in the garden? Apart from the Violet Carpenter Bee, I’d be absolutely stoked with a stag beetle, an oak eggar moth, a praying mantis (most unlikely) or another emperor dragonfly, having had one visit a few years ago. Or I’d settle for a hedgehog – I suspect one is visiting, but haven’t actually seen it yet.

In other news, I am going to keep myself accountable by recording my daily steps here – 935 yesterday. I’m aiming to go for a walk down the street when my pal J gets here, and will hopefully get over the thousand mark. Yay! And yes, I am being sensible – as my physiotherapist said, ‘this is not a ‘no pain, no gain’ situation. I just want to try to do a little bit more every day.

The very unusual Lacebark Elm outside Whittington Hospital (the tallest in London)

Dear Readers, sometimes I feel as if I’m turning into my Mum and Dad. A trip to the hospital on a sunny day feels like a treat! I have a pile of letters from the hospital arranged in date order! But that isn’t to disguise the fact that things are definitely improving, though slower than I’d like.

While I’m waiting at the Fracture Clinic, the Olympics are on a large-screen television and I watch the open-water swimming. Gordon Bennett, these women are tough! One of the other patients is watching something on her phone with the sound up, and I see the man in the front row (foot in an orthopaedic boot) glare at her, sigh, and then turn back to the television. It’s annoying, for sure, but in these troubled times I think we could all do with being a little more tolerant. There are things that need to be addressed, and things that don’t. As a friend of mine says, ‘Is that the hill that you want to die on?” Good question.

Then it’s off to the X Ray department, then back to the clinic, then in to see the doctor. She shows me where the bones are starting to heal at the fracture site on my leg – just a little fuzzy, cotton-wool hill over the break. It almost makes me cry, all those cells doing their job of trying to mend. It’s not quite such good news with my incisions – one on my ankle is refusing to heal, while another one has a tiny bit of sub-dermal stitch showing. Sub-dermal stitches dissolve automatically in the body, but shouldn’t be showing on the outside. So, the surgeon wants to see me again in a fortnight, and in the meantime I see the nurse, Anthony.

To sort out the stitch he needs to pull it up with tweezers and then cut it off as close to the skin as he can.

“It reminds me of when I have to pull a hair out of my chin”, I see, probably unwisely seeing as he’s wielding a scalpel.

He has to stop while he chuckles away.

“That’s exactly what my wife does”, he says.

“Ladies of a certain age”, I say.

Stitch trimmed, he re-dresses the wound on my ankle, and sends me away with a fine bunch of plasters. Hopefully the skin cells in my ankle will soon be as efficient as the ones in my tibia.

And on the way home, we get the same Eritrean driver who picked me up after my operation. He remembers exactly where we live.

“I’m getting better!” I say.

“Praise God!” he says.

And now I’m back on the sofa, but when I get up to go to the toilet I won’t have to use my crutches. The advice is to take it slowly, and stop when it gets too painful, or if the leg starts to swell, which is likely apparently. I know it hurts at the moment, just from wandering around the hospital, so it’s going to be a balancing act, for sure. But it feels as if we’re over a hurdle, and that is always a relief.

Onwards!

Intermedullary nail (not my leg!) Photo By Kolossos – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=500627

Dear Readers, by the time you get this I shall be getting ready to head to my consultant appointment at Whittington Hospital. It’s been nearly six weeks since my fall and operation to insert a titanium rod into the lower part of my leg, and since then I’ve been hobbling about on two crutches. With any luck, the consultant will say that my leg has healed enough to start walking about without them, which will be a great relief to my husband, who has done all the cooking and carrying and bed making and household chores and shopping since my accident. I should add that he’s done it all without a single complaint, not so much as an eye-roll. I intend to cook lots of delicious meals as soon as I can stand for long enough.

In a week or so I have a visit to the physiotherapist, but I’m hoping the consultant will give me some guidelines on what I should and shouldn’t do. Then at the end of August I’m back to pilates and my lovely teacher, who will also, I’m sure, have some ideas.

And I also have a visit to the Department of Nuclear Medicine at the Royal Free for a bone density scan – this is very exciting, as osteoporosis is something that you can actually do something about. The consultant did say that I had a ‘high-energy fracture’, however, though I assume that he didn’t mean it was a result of me donning a lurex leotard and gyrating vigorously.

It’s been strange six weeks – in a way it feels a bit like the first lockdown pandemic, what with being constrained and having to find my own ways of keeping my mood up, though of course this time it was just me who was barely leaving the house. Thank goodness for the Olympics, and all manner of non-demanding television, especially in the first few weeks when the pain was difficult to control – it was hard to concentrate on reading, though it’s become easier since. I think what I’m looking forward to most is being able to walk to a coffee shop or toddle down to the bottom of the garden, to get on a bus or a train and go somewhere, to be able to tidy up after myself instead of relying on someone else to do it. To make my own tea and carry it back to the armchair (I can currently just about do the first, but not the second). Mostly though, I am so grateful to everyone who has been involved in this shenanigans, and also grateful to be born when I was, and where I was – I’m sure for many people in the world, a fracture like mine would have ended up in permanent disability, infection or even death. So if nothing else, this six weeks has taught me how lucky I am, and wonderful people can be, a necessary antidote to the news at the moment.

I’ll keep you posted! And in the meantime, here’s another few Hi-NRG blasts from the past – ‘It’s Raining Men’ by the Weather Girls (and how I love the video 🙂 ) Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood (oh lord, the outrage at the time), and ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order. I can remember the excitement when ‘Blue Monday’ came out to this day, it sounded so different to a lot of what had come before. It was also great for mixing with other Hi-NRG tunes.

After that, I definitely feel like dancing!

Large Marsh Horsefly (Tabanus autumnalis) Photo by Donna Derrick

Dear Readers, horseflies (from the family Tabanidae) are big, robust insects (the one in the photo was almost an inch long), and have a fearsome reputation for biting – they feed on blood although, as with midges, only the females bite. Still, with a horsefly bite you will definitely know you’ve been bitten – I had an encounter with one while on a field trip to Slapton Sands in Devon many years ago, and it felt rather as if I’d been got at with a staple gun. The mouthparts of horseflies are perfectly evolved for their task, with two stout piercing mouthparts (that look rather like daggers to me) and a tongue designed for mopping up the resultant blood. Some horseflies are noisy in flight so you can at least hear them coming, while others (such as clegs) are quiet and bite without warning. Interestingly, although you might not know that you’ve been bitten by a mosquito or midge until later in the day, the immediate pain from a horsefly bite means that they are usually shooed off (or swatted if unlucky). This in turn means that they need to feed from more than one animal to get a stomach full of blood, and increases the risk of them transmitting disease from one animal to another.

Horsefly (Tabanus atratus) Photo By USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab from Beltsville, USA – Tabanus atratus, U, Face, MD_2013-08-21-16.06.31 ZS PMaxUploaded by Jacopo Werther, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28757404

Mainly, however, horseflies choose non-human mammals to feed upon – as the name suggests, horses are popular, along with cows, deer and, in other parts of the world, even elephants. Fossil horseflies have been found from well before mammals evolved, suggesting that they may have originally obtained their blood from dinosaurs. However, there is increasing evidence that the striped pattern on zebras evolved, in part at least, to confuse the horseflies that normally feed on them – it’s thought that the patterns make it difficult for the flies to orientate themselves for landing. Experiments where horses wear striped blankets have been shown to reduce the number of horsefly bites.

One striking feature of horseflies is their eyes – they are often absolutely massive, as you can see in Donna’s photograph above. In living horseflies you may be able to spot incredible bands of colour spreading across each eye, though these fade when the insect is dead. As I might have mentioned before, you can tell whether most species of fly are male or female by looking at the gap between their eyes – in the extraordinary photos below, the female has a broad band between her eyes, whilst the male’s eyes are jammed in close together. I’m not sure whether the difference in colour between the sexes is just due to the angle of the photograph, or is true sexual dimorphism. Either way, it’s fascinating to see how beautiful these much maligned creatures are when looked at in the right way.

Female Striped Horsefly (Tabanus lineola) Photo by Thomas Shahan at https://www.flickr.com/photos/opoterser/4915106328

Male Striped Horsefly (Tabanus lineola) Photo by Thomas Shahan at https://www.flickr.com/photos/opoterser/4189239614

So, how does a horsefly spend its days? Of course there are differences between species, but generally eggs are laid in damp places, and the larvae, on emergence, fall either into the water or onto the soil, whereupon they turn into voracious predators, eating all manner of other invertebrates. The larvae then move to drier land to pupate. The males emerge first (we’ve seen this tendency in everything from hairy-footed flower bees and midges to common frogs) and may swarm in large numbers, looking for females. Fortunately, the males are only really interested in pollen and nectar, and indeed several species are important pollinators. The females hatch, mate and go looking for blood (literally). Once they have imbibed enough protein to ensure that their eggs will develop, they will lay them on plants close to water, so that the cycle can begin all over again.

Female horsefly laying eggs (Photo by By Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE – Horse Fly (Tabanidae) female laying eggs, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40740210

The UK is home to about 30 species of horsefly, and here is one of the prettiest – the Golden Horsefly (Atylotus fulvus), now Nationally Scarce and found mainly in southern England, in particular the New Forest, Hampshire and Surrey. Look at this little beauty!  This one is a male (look at the eyes) and he’s going about his business feeding on the flowers.

Golden Horsefly (Atylotus fulvus) Photo by By AfroBrazilian – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26873272

So, what splendid insects horseflies are! For sure they can be irritating if you’re unlucky enough to get bitten, but they look to me like the Lancaster Bombers of the insect world, big, sturdy and actually rather beautiful. Plus, horseflies are eaten by birds (especially the larvae), and their eggs are  parasitised by a whole range of fungi, nematode worms and parasitic wasps. In the USA adult horseflies are even hunted down by the rather magnificent Horse Guard Wasp (Stictia carolina) which hangs around horse paddocks and takes the flies to provision its larvae. Interestingly, it’s been noted that horses are not disturbed by the large size and rattling flight of the Horse Guard wasps, almost as if they know that the insects mean them no harm.

Horse Guard Wasp (Photo By Howard Ensign Evans, Colorado State University, Bugwood.org, CC BY 3.0 us, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10969866)

And finally, a poem. If you aren’t familiar with Michael Rosen, I invite you to have a look at his extraordinary body of work, from his book ‘The Sad Book‘ about the death of his son, to his many children’s books, to his book about his time in hospital with Covid, during which he was in an induced coma for several weeks and came very close to death. He has done a tremendous amount to encourage children to read, and to combat racism and anti-semitism with his stories and poems that try to tell the stories of marginalised people. But look, he has also written an entomology poem, illustrating the difficulties of identifying flies (and goodness knows there are enough species about to confuse anybody). I hope you enjoy it! PS My guess is that the horseflies that weren’t houseflies might have been deerflies, which are a kind of horsefly. Hope that clears up the confusion 🙂

Flies by Michael Rosen

I know flies. I’ve camped with them.
I heard how they eat. A lot of them land
on things and put down their proboscis that
sits at the front of their heads. Some saliva
comes out and this starts to digest whatever
they’re sitting on. Then they suck the stuff
that they’ve started to digest back up their
proboscis. You can feel that saliva moment
just after they land on your skin, slightly moist,
slightly cool. Then there are the biting ones, that we
call horse flies. Their probosces are like daggers.
They jab that into your skin and suck the
blood up through the dagger. I thought I had
all this figured. The flies that do the saliva thing
are the ones we call house flies and the
bigger house fly type are blue bottles. And there are
some shiny green ones that love horse shit.
And the horse flies come in medium and large,
the medium ones are nippy and when they
land on you, you can hardly feel it, until they
stab you with the dagger. The large ones are
like flying caterpillars, fleshy and angry, and
a bite from them is like being attacked by a
fork-prong. Once I saw one by a swimming
pool waiting to get my shoulder. I grabbed a
flip-flop and threw it and it hit it, first time. End
of horse-fly. I’ve tried a hundred times since
and never got one. That’s it, I thought: house
flies and horse-flies. Then one day we were
sitting at a table and I felt something bite me
and I looked down and all I saw was a fly. But
that kind of fly doesn’t bite. A house fly. Then
there was another. These little house flies
were biting me. I got one and when it fell off,
there was a little drop of blood on my leg. I
picked it up and looked closely: its proboscis
didn’t have the little spongey saliva bit on the
end. It was pointed like a tiny needle. It was a
tiny horse fly disguised as a house fly. It didn’t
say it was a horse fly. It just turned up acting
like it was any old house fly but then did the
horse fly thing in my leg. Not just one of them.
There were hundreds of them. And under the table.
Always under the table.

Regent Street in London (Photo from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37522674)

Dear Readers, before we get on to the main subject of my piece today, I wanted to say a few words about the violence  being wreaked across the country by far-right thugs. If you belong to one of the groups that this hatred has been aimed at, please know that the vast majority of people are appalled at the racism and Islamophobia being expressed and are horrified by the wanton destruction that is happening in local communities, some of it aimed at the most vulnerable people in our society. These thugs do not speak for me, nor i’m sure for the people who read this blog,  And if you are not in one of the groups that are being targeted, and have friends or neighbours who are, it’s worth reaching out to see how they’re doing, and to offer your support. I have a Muslim friend with two small children, who has lived here all her life, and is now afraid to go out. What a terrible state of affairs.

Like so many people, I’ve been appalled by events such as the destruction of the Citizen’s Advice Bureau office in Sunderland (for those who don’t know, these are often the only places offering free advice on debt, housing etc to the poorest people in a location) and the attack on the Spellow Lane library in Liverpool, with all  the shelving and books destroyed. I can’t find a Go Fund Me  for the Citizen’s Advice Office, but there is one for the library, so if you have a few quid lurking  down the back of the sofa, this wouldn’t be a bad place to put it.

Anyway, back  to the nature! I’ve written before about the problem with street lights being left on all night, and the way that affects the insect population, but a recent Chinese study has pointed out that something more subtle has been going on. Scientist Dr Shuang Zhang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences noticed that trees growing in urban  settings had far less insect damage than the same species in  rural settings. The study centred on two species – the Japanese Pagoda tree (a popular street tree in the UK) and green ash trees.

Japanese Pagoda tree (Sophora japonica) Photo By Jean-Pol GRANDMONT – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5618874

Green Ash (Fraxinus pennsylvanica) Photo By Jerzy Opioła – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1796487

The Japanese Pagoda tree in particular has soft, juicy leaves that are normally eaten by a whole variety of insects, but in the areas of highest illumination  they were practically untouched. The scientists visited 30  sampling sites, and looked at the size, toughness and chemical composition of over 5500 leaves.

The hypothesis had been that the increased hours of light would enable the plants to photosynthesize for longer, which could give one of two results – larger leaves, or leaves that were better defended. The study showed clearly that the second hypothesis fitted what was happening – the leaves that were exposed to the most light for the longest time were thicker and had much higher levels of tannins, which are used as a chemical defence against insects. Some of the most brightly-lit trees had not been nibbled by insects at all.

Although these trees might look nicer than those that have been munched upon, Dr Shuang Zhang points out that the caterpillars that eat the leaves are part of a food web that includes the birds and other insects that eat them, and the birds of prey that eat the birds, to mention just a few links.

it’s a bit of a conundrum – it’s important to keep cities safe for those who use them, but surely there’s a way to devise lighting that doesn’t have such a bad effect on animals? Or maybe we could turn at least some of them off at night? And if we have lights in our gardens, can we turn them off when we’re going inside? I shall be interested to see what further research reveals about light pollution and its effects on the natural world.

Dear Readers, my British Trust for Ornithology newsletter had a fascinating question this month. It was from a woman who had noticed that the juvenile starlings in her garden were pecking at the heads of flowers and sometimes tearing them off without eating them. “Are they looking for bugs, or are they just being naughty?” asked the writer.

Well, I’m not sure about the concept of animals being ‘naughty’, though I’ve had pets that definitely knew when they were pushing the boundaries. The answer given was the one that I would have given – juvenile animals often imitate adults without exactly knowing why, and they learn by trial and error. So, I see all sorts of baby animals pecking randomly at first, and then gradually learning what tastes good. Within a few days or weeks, they are able to find their own food.

However, the article then goes on to explain something that I wouldn’t have guessed. Starlings often use green plants in their nests, choosing in particular wild carrot (Daucus carota) and fleabane (Erigeron philadelphicus). The data was taken from an  American study (European starlings were introduced to North America in the 1870s) so I wouldn’t expect them to be using this particular species of fleabane, which is a New World native, here in the UK (unless they’re taking it from gardens). There’s plenty of wild carrot though!

Wild Carrot (Daucus carota)

Philadelphia Fleabane (Erigeron philadelphicus) Photo By D. Gordon E. Robertson – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10314173

What the researchers found was that the wild carrot and fleabane greatly reduced the number of blood-sucking mites found in the nests, compared to nests which did not contain these plants. The chicks from ‘green’ nests had higher levels of haemoglobin than the other chicks, indicating that they were less prone to the anaemia that occurs in chicks from nests with high levels of mites.

Were the starlings just choosing plants randomly, though? It appears not. The starlings were also offered garlic mustard (Alliaria officinalis) but they weren’t interested – in the laboratory, it was found that this plant had no effect on the numbers of mites.

However, not all research has shown that ‘green nests’ in general show a reduced burden of ectoparasites. So what else is going on?

The plot thickens with a UK study which showed that nests containing green plants resulted in better parenting behaviours – the eggs were incubated for longer, the parents spent more time at the nest, and foraging began earlier in the day. Furthermore, the eggs developed more quickly and the chicks gained bodyweight more successfully in ‘green’ nests than in those that contained no plants.

What’s going on? There seem to be a variety of things. Female starlings preferred males who included green plants in their nest-building displays, and this could be a way that the males demonstrate their ‘quality’ as mates. But one tantalising hypothesis is that the plants release volatile chemicals that sedate the incubating birds, and encourage them to stay put for longer. The scientists in the study point out that the starlings in the green nests spend most time on the nest at the beginning of the incubation period, which coincides with strongest release of the chemicals (as the plants dry out they release less and less of the sedating compounds). The beginning of the incubation period is also the most critical for the development of the eggs.

‘Green’ nest (Photo fromhttps://www.sialis.org/nestsstarling/)

There has been a lot of research into the ways that animals interact with plants, both to medicate themselves and to deter parasites. I’m seeing lots of photos lately showing jays and other birds ‘anting’ – placing themselves on top of ants nests, or even using individual ants to remove parasites as the insects spray formic acid. I hadn’t heard of the ‘green nest’ phenomenon before, though, and I’m completely fascinated. There are certainly advantages to sitting around with your leg up, one of them being that i’m actually reading some of the things that pop into my Inbox. Thank you, British Trust for Ornithology!

Coffee Bank on East Finchley High Road

Dear Readers, as you know, for the past few weeks I have been pretty much confined to quarters as I wait for the bones in my fractured leg to heal. Hopefully I’ll be able to be a bit more mobile after my meeting with the consultant next week, but in the meantime my husband has pushed me in my wheelchair to Coffee Bank on East Finchley High Road every Saturday, for their vegan pancakes with maple syrup and fruit, and the best coffee in East Finchley.

It’s amazing how small your world becomes when you’re mostly on the sofa – the Olympics have been a godsend, as has knitting, reading, and the constant stream of friends who’ve popped in for a chat, bringing the outside world with them. I feel as if there are lots of people that I’ve gotten to know much better as we’ve sat around, putting the world to rights, and what a bonus that’s been!

Going outside, even in a familiar spot, brings the stimulation of the outdoors though. I notice how quickly my buddleia has gone over, and how splendid the Verbena looks in the garden just down the road. I notice what a pain wheelie bins are (our garden rubbish collection has just taken place, and the green bins halve the available space to get a wheelchair around), and how just a bit of thoughtless parking can make it difficult to get down a dropped pavement. I notice how I’m having to rely on John being able to see any cars that are approaching, as I can’t see from my lower position. I notice how adults largely just look through me, though children and dogs are often curious and seem to still consider me as a person. But most of all, I relish how wonderful it is to be out and about in the world, to watch people chatting animatedly outside a café, to see the children skipping and dancing, the flowers blooming in the window boxes at Maddens pub, the bright window display in the MIND charity shop.

Inside Coffee Bank, there’s the usual mixture of exhausted young parents, chaps grabbing a quick espresso, folk sitting in the armchairs and reading the paper with their dogs at their feet. The weekend always brings the best pastel de nata in East Finchley, and Marta, the barista, knows that John likes them ‘well-fired’ and I like them as pale as possible, so she always tries to pick out two that meet our (admittedly subjective) criteria.

Pastel de nata. Not from Coffee Bank, but you get the idea (Photo by Lou Stejskal at https://www.flickr.com/photos/loustejskal/27604900533)

John gets toast and smoked salmon and poached egg, and it comes with some Lurpak butter.

“Is Lurpak Danish?” asks John.

And this is of course a chance for me to launch into my Lurpak story.

Lurpak butter (Photo Beigingao Menauha, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

If you look at the insignia above the word ‘Lurpak’, you’ll see what looks like two tiny trumpets. These are Lurs, an instrument that was known in Scandinavia since at least the Bronze Age. They were used to rally the troops during battle, but were also used by farmers and milkmaids to call in the cattle (hence, I imagine, the link with butter).

A Bronze Age Lur found in Zealand, Denmark (By Anagoria – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20724959)

And next to City Hall in Copenhagen, there’s a statue called the Lur Blowers, which features two musicians playing Lurs – apparently it was originally designed with just one Lur player, but it was discovered that the instrument was always ‘tuned’ in pairs, so another chap was added. When I was working in Copenhagen, I was told that there was a legend that the Lur Players would blow a note if an adult virgin passed in the square below, but they were strangely silent on my visit.

The Lur Blowers, by Siegfried Wagner (Photo by By Soys – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19143755)

And so, all too soon it’s time for me to be trundled home. I encounter various neighbours who haven’t heard the story, and so I get to linger for a bit longer and recount the tale of my tumble. People are so kind and thoughtful, and we get to discuss why there aren’t many birds about at the moment, the best kinds of feeding stations to put up, and the sad story of our cat, Willow. And now, it’s back to the sofa to knock up a blog, watch some of the Olympics and maybe have a tiny nap. All this bone growth stuff is surprisingly tiring! But how nice to get proof that the world is still going on around me.

Dear Readers, this talk featured murder, corpses and crime scenes. It wasn’t overly gruesome, but if you’re feeling a bit down you might want to move on….

Dear Readers, I always wondered if I could be a forensic entomologist – someone who uses insects and their remains as a way of gathering evidence about crime – but I’d never thought about the role of the forensic botanist until I signed up for a talk that  Dr Mark Spencer gave for Plantlife last week. And what a fascinating field (pun intended) it is!

Forensic botany has a much longer history than I realised – in fact it played a pivotal role in the case of the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh Jr back in 1932. This case stunned the USA at the time – the young child of the aviator Charles Lindbergh was taken from an upstairs window and held for a ransom, which was paid but the child was found dead in woodland a few weeks later. The case centred around the ladder that was used to gain access to the window – it was found to be composed of both recycled and new wood. The forensic botanist, Dr Arthur Koehler, discovered that the new wood came from a variety of pine that grew only in the eastern USA, so he contacted the 1200 woodmills in the area, and asked them all to send him a sample. From this, he was able to narrow the wood down to only two woodmills, and from one of them he retrieved the receipt from the man who was eventually executed for the murder, Richard Hauptmann. When the police went to Hauptmann’s house, Koehler was able to match the recycled wood in the ladder to missing beams from the attic. All in all, the evidence was damning (especially as a suitcase containing $14,000 of the ransom money was also found in Hauptmann’s house), but questions were raised about witness tampering and planting of evidence, and also about whether Hauptmann acted alone.

In the present day, Dr Spencer is often called in missing person cases, or where the circumstances around a discovered dead person needs to be investigated. He explained that the vast majority of crimes occur in private houses or in ‘non-natural’ places, such as streets, car parks or other urban areas, and that the police, like the rest of us, often suffer from plant-blindness, a kind of tendency to see everything through the lens of being human. He has been able to look at a crime scene that the police were preparing to clear, full of brambles and other undergrowth, and to tell them not to bother, because the plants were all older than the crime and there was no sign of disturbance. Similarly, along with forensic archaeologists, he’s been able to say that a body was definitely not buried in a particular site because there had been no mixing of the upper and lower strata of the soil.

He was also able to debunk the myth that plants, especially nettles, will grow especially vigorously where a body is buried – in fact, a human body is largely toxic to plants in the first few years of decomposition. However, he did point out that brambles and ivy will both eventually grow over a body, ‘locking it in place’ in the landscape. Someone skilled in ageing the different shoots of bramble, such as Dr Spencer, can then give an estimate of how long the body has been in situ.

One of the saddest cases was that of ‘Adam’, a child from West Africa whose torso was found in the River Thames close to the Globe Theatre back in 2001. He was never identified, and the rest of his body was never found, but isotope analysis showed that he had only been in the UK for a matter of days. He was wearing a pair of orange shorts, a colour that was often used for votive offerings. The suspicion was that the child was used for a practice known as muti – the child’s body parts would be used for potions to cure illness, ensure success etc. The forensic botany investigation revealed that the child had been poisoned with Datura (Thorn Apple) and Calabar/Ordeal Bean, which is found only in West Africa. Dr Spencer described this as one of the most distressing cases in which forensic botany had played a part.

All in all, this was a compelling talk – Dr Spencer talked about what an honour it was to work with the police and other expert witnesses, but most of all what an honour it was to work with the dead, and be able to tell their stories after they could no longer speak. The talk itself is only available to members of Plantlife, so sign up if you haven’t already! Their next talk is about children and their relationship with nature, which sounds like a complete change from crime scenes and corpses,  but I’m sure it will be no  less interesting. I shall report back!

Dear Readers, the past month has been a real education in the kindness and thoughtfulness of friends, both online and in real life. And today, my friend L brought me something I’ve been thinking about getting for myself for ages – she’s lent me her spare microscope so I can have a look at my pond water and who knows what else?

I remember that when I did microbiology at Birkbeck about a hundred years ago, I loved spending time on the microscope best of all. Everything from the water that plants grow in to cross-sections of stems to the feet of a bluebottle suddenly became fascinating. The detail and the structures that are revealed are awe-inspiring, in the old-fashioned sense of the word – you can see the relationship between structure and function so much more clearly, and it’s especially delightful when you can see a tiny single-celled creature going about its business in a drop of water. One of my favourites is a tiny algae called Volvox, which forms colonies of up to 50,000 cells, and is very common in ponds.

Volvox (Photo By Frank Fox – http://www.mikro-foto.de, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20240900)

So, I shall shortly be asking my lovely long-suffering husband to head out to the garden to get me a jam jar full of pond water, and I shall report back on what I find! And if I’m not sure, L has also lent me this precious book on Freshwater Microbiology, published in 1918 and full of hand-drawn microscopic creatures.

In general news, my leg is generally improving, at least in terms of pain – I’m down to just having low-dose codeine and paracetamol once at night, from a high of 4000 mg of paracetamol and 240 mg of codeine, so that’s a real improvement, especially for my digestion. I go to see the consultant next Thursday, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get rid of at least one crutch and start building my strength back up again. Fingers crossed, but things are definitely heading in the right direction. I was also contacted by the Department of Nuclear Medicine at the Royal Free Hospital today, so I’ll be going for a bone density scan later in August.

On the cat front, we have opted to have Willow cremated, and should get her ashes back in a week or so, so that we can say goodbye to her properly. We will also be getting a pawprint and a fur-cutting – I know this might sound weird, but because we weren’t with her when she was put to sleep I think it might be a way of making it ‘real’. I guess it reminds me of when I found some silver hairs in my Mum’s hairbrush after she’d died – it felt somehow important to have a physical artifact, something that was actually part of her. We’re all different, of course, and there are no right answers.

I’m definitely not ready to let another cat into my poor bruised heart, but I am tentatively thinking that when I’m back to full mobility, I might foster again for a bit – I love having a cat in the house, and having the opportunity to learn more about these animals – everyone has his or her own personalities, quirks, and annoying/endearing habits, and they always teach me something. But again, let’s see how we go. I’m feeling a little bit gung-ho at the moment, as my leg ceases to be a cause of intermittent misery, but I need to be self-disciplined and to work within my limits. I’ve come so far (it’s only four and a bit weeks since my operation) and it would be silly to over do it or cause damage now.