David Bradley – Page 47

The Tide is High – a Fenland Gothic

The Tide is High by David Bradley

Madalief watched from atop a crumbling embankment as a fox hunting on the fen below leapt suddenly into the air. It arched its back and as its brush quivered, gravity took hold and its forepaws pounded the damp earth and the creature thereon; the last heartbeats of the tiny, anonymous prey beneath.

The wind was soft and poured a mist over the land to set on the fen, shifting ambiguously as if in time with a far-distant tide. Ignorant of that ethereal and nonchalantly poetic endeavour, the fox moved on, ever hopeful of sensing the subtlest lub-dub of a murine heart or catching the fiery breath of a Devil’s coach horse.

Madelief imagined that it was her lowland ancestors who had taught the English how to drain the vast marshlands of this region all those years ago. The drains that crisscrossed the acres with their incendiary gases and their feverish ague. Ancestors that helped erect windpumps at strategic intervals between the inland island settlements whose inhabitants traversed their world only by coracle and causeway in times gone by. The V-shaped veins took the rains away to the north, pumped with the lie of the land.

Across the fen, a barn owl fretted over the encroaching mist and headed silently away from the tide to its nocturnal roost. Its face mirrored the full moon that dimly spanned the horizon veiled by acres of mist. There would be no hunting in this lowly crepuscular light.

Madelief ploughed on, a solitary walker, espying an occasional otter or a grass snake taking to the water in its wake. They would sidle aquatically across the ripples for a moment or two before quickly disappearing from sight. They would take routes so strange that water will flow uphill to the sea from here on out. The sea that refuses no river.

The darkness was coming and with it, the occasional will o’ the wisp and more worryingly those insistent bearers of the ague. Madelief shuddered as if with an oncoming fever at the thought of catching her death and strode on. She ignored the skulking black shape of a fen tiger…there were no fen tigers, she knew that…it was merely mist-enshrouded shadows dancing to the devil’s tune in her imagination. She had a place to be, she had a message to deliver.

With each stride, the pulse of the tide pulled her on. On towards the settlement, the name of which had been scribbled in charcoal on the bare inside of a sliver of bark grappled hastily from the crumbling faÃ§ade of a tree, a plane, ironically enough. Scribbled just as hastily but almost illegibly was a name. Refuge was that name. Somewhere safe to stay. Somewhere dry. Somewhere she could unroll her message.

Madelief had walked for miles along the muddy crests of those V-shaped veins, heading inland away from the tides, her journey charmed by the occasional grass snake or a vulpine pounce. Her message was all in her head, it was plain and simple and yet it was likely no one would take heed, Nevertheless, deliver it she must to those who might still care, to those who might know how to engineer a new solution to an old problem. The problem of how the full moon can give new land to the tides.

By degrees, the mercury had risen. Inch by inch so too the tides. Year by year, the air had somehow grown thicker, more cloying. It had taken on a new viscosity, soaking up the rays and staying them lest the winter be chilled once more.

So now, where Madelief fancied she could see a distant windmill on a rise it was not to be. There were no sails on this windmill. This windmill, surrounded by water, was strangely a far more ecclesiastical affair, an ancient translucent tower, reaching up, cutting the sky from its aquatic surroundings. A vitreous spire pointing accusingly at an angry God that once offered his people famine and flood. A shard…

===

Riding High on the Tide is the third of three Xmas Gothic short stories I wrote just before Xmas on a whim and each taking less than an hour (as you can probably tell) to put together.

The first of the trilogy- The Tea Lady – can be found here and the second After Death, here, there’s a PDF version of the latter too. I have now written six microstories in total. Two trilogies, you might say.

After Death – a Xmas Gothic

After Death or We three kin by David Bradley

A PDF version with colourised text for each of the three characters’ voices can be found here

“How does it go, again?

“Bad fly boss walk jam nitty gritty”

“You’re listening to the boy” Together: “from the big bad city”

“That’s it, yeah, that’s it, I remember.”

“Jaaam hot, this is jaaam hot”

“Sssh…have some respect.”

“Sorry, yes that’s it…sheesh, they don’t write them like that any more. You can barely make out the words in that awful stuff the kids listen to now.”

“Yeah, ‘granddad’, when did you get all ‘old folk’s home, you’re only 136, got your whole life ahead of you!”

“Hah, whole life, that’s funny…I remember when 100-years old became the new three score year and ten”

“Seems like only yesterday”

“Well, it wasn’t it, it was the year 2073, when they worked out that gene edit wasn’t it? When they reset the years to AM and started counting from 1 again”

“Yeah it was…funny, I’d just turned 13 when that song was recorded, it was class, annoyed the hell out of my parents, rest their souls”.

“13? And the rest!”

“Well, okay, I forget, it gets hard working backwards with these new dates and age really makes no difference these days, does it?”

“Yeah, ‘granddad’, like I say you’re still heading for the old folks home.”

“If you can get a place, even the multi-undergrounders are stuffed full.”

“Yeah, sometimes I think back to when they were almost empty, I used to work in one of the original sites, doling out the vaccine, I must have told you that before.”

“Yes, yes, a million times. Vaccine was never the right word though, was it? It wasn’t a stimulus for your immune system to fight a disease, after all. It was something altogether different.”

“True, true.”

“I still don’t get why we say AM though…ante mortem…doesn’t that mean ‘before death’, we’re living in a world that’s after death, so it should be AD.”

“Yes, but back then AD had religious overtones, didn’t it Anno Domini, year of Our Lord? Allelujah, Jeebers saves and all that?”

“Yes, no need for religion now, but I suppose labeling the years PM, for post mortem, comes with its own baggage and it’s not really like we’re living ‘after death’, we’re just, you know, living without it.”

“Indeed we are, hence all those multi-undergrounders, and all those people with so much time and so little to do with it…”

“It’s quite sad, really”

“Which is why we’re gathered here today, isn’t it? Not everyone wants to be ‘vaccinated’ or ‘edited’, or whatever you want to call it. It’s not like you stop getting old.”

“No.”

“Cracking tune though.”

“Aye, a banger, as we used to say, haha.”

“Interesting choice…oh, oh the curtains are closing.”

“This is jam hot, this is jam hot”

“Sssh…have some respect for the dead, would you? And it’s not ‘bad fly boss’ it’s ‘tank fly boss’.”

===

After Death is the second of three Xmas Gothic short stories I wrote just before Xmas on a whim and each taking less than an hour (as you can probably tell) to put together. There’s a chronological joke for Rush fans in this story.

The first one – The Tea Lady – can be found here. The third, The Tide is High, is here. I now have six microstories in my trilogy.

The Tea Lady – a Xmas Gothic

The Tea Lady by David Bradley

Rare these days is the house with a pre-warmed pot and the vessel filled with near-boiling water to mash loose leaves. Most people just dunk a dusty bag, swirl it a bit with a spoon, and flick it into the sink. There may be a little hug of the bag against the lip of the mug to leech the tannins into their brew prior to that nonchalant flick. But, rare is the proper teapot, the ceremony of the tea strainer, the chink of teaspoon against china cup and saucer. Rituals are ingrained and maybe our descendants with their vacuum-sealed space food will see that lip service of the teabag in the mug as somehow quaintly ceremonial. Who knows? Maybe they won’t even have electric kettles come the next millennium. Not even the tea leaves can look that far into the future.

But they can stew over the coming days and months, sometimes even a year or two. The dregs that slip through the fine gauze, strain against the interior curves of the cup. They might in their astringent configurations foretell of a new-found friend to be well met, a tall, dark stranger perhaps, or even an imminent death in the family. It’s all grist to the mill for Georgie.

Georgie was actually christened Mabel Georgina Brown, sweet enough. Even as a child though, Georgie thought that Mabel made her sound old, like somebody’s grannie. Georgie is much more sprightly. Georgie is fun. Mabel is maudlin…although not quite so maudlin as Maude. Georgie laughed inwardly at her own little joke. A joke never shared with an audience, a joke with no real punchline, not much of a joke at all.

Now, she’s entered her tenth decade, Mabel is still Georgie and she measures out her afternoons in teaspoons.

Ah, yes tea. So revered that one particular strain, a poignant blend, takes its name from God’s Own County and yet its roots are very much in the far-flung reaches of the long-gone, rosy-flushed Empire. Georgie never drinks the stuff. Too bitter for her palate and the addition of the proverbial spoonful of sugar really wouldn’t help it go down. Tastes like history rather than the future, Georgie always thinks. And, it is futures that Georgie sees in tea. Not futures of the fiscal kind. No, the futures Georgie sees in other people’s tea, and specifically, the tea leaves that reside in the smooth curves of china, once the drink is drunk, are an investment of an often much more maudlin nature.

Today’s guest is late. It is not a problem. The kettle is yet to boil and to pipe aboard the visitor. Georgie is expecting a gentleman caller this afternoon. In her youth, her cheeks would rapidly take on an embarrassing glow at the very thought of a gentleman calling on her. The gentlemen, and more commonly, ladies who call these days are investors, not in love, but in futures…their futures.

The kettle begins its call, its lament to the repeated, once almost daily, scalding of its insides.

The teapot is silent and ready.

Leaves sit heaped in the caddy awaiting their calling.

Perhaps today’s caller has had a change of heart. Not everyone looks to the future, even at this time of year. But, as the kettle whistles its climactic monotone, Georgie does not respond to its plea. The kettle boils dry. Georgie sinks into the past.

The tea leaves remain unmashed.

===

The Tea Lady is the first of three Xmas Gothic short stories I wrote just before Xmas on a whim and each taking less than an hour (as you can probably tell) to put together.

The second of the three is After Death (PDF version) and the third The Tide is High. I have now written another three microstories.

BIRD REPORT 13 – Glossing over any egrets

This post is an online version of my latest nature column, which I volunteered to write regularly for our bimonthly, printed village newsletter. the Xmas issue has an article about local starling murmurations, report 13 is for the next issue.

In the last Bird Report, I mentioned sightings around our local patch of some quite unusual birds, birds that are normally associated with sub-Saharan Africa, or at least the much warmer parts of Europe. There were two glossy ibis at RSPB Ouse Fen in November. Subsequently, there were sightings of more at RSPB Fen Drayton and close to Earith Sluice. It is likely there are about seven not too far from us.

I also mentioned Cattle Egrets in the last issue of which there were five or so on farmland on the edge of Fen Drayton and sometimes some seen in the nearby RSPB reserve roosting alongside the cormorants beneath skies filled with the shadowy forms of the starling murmurations. Now, many readers will know the little egret, the grey heron and perhaps the bittern, but the cattle egret is a less well-known member of the family.

When I moved to Cambridge a little over thirty years ago, it seemed rare to spot a little egret, although grey herons definitely frequented the banks of The Cam not far from where I lived. Seeing a little egret on the Norfolk coast was an occasional treat, but now their numbers are up greatly, it seems. I’ve counted 30 or so at a time in fields at the edge of the Fen Drayton reserve. Also on the rise are great white egret numbers. They seemed to be a true rarity until very recently, now even the most novice birder will have “ticked” them several times on local reserves and I’ve seen them on several occasions feeding on the Cottenham Lode alongside grey heron and little egret. Those cattle egrets too, once a very rare sight, are seen more and more, with handfuls, trailing after any cattle they can find in our locale. On the Somerset Levels they are now reported in their hundreds.

Climate change is no doubt playing a part in allowing these species to spread farther and farther north into the British Isles from their erstwhile homes in sub-Saharan Africa, to North Africa, The Mediterranean and beyond. The glossy ibis is found scattered around the warm regions of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Caribbean, for instance, but birds that are breeding in southern Spain seem to opt to spend the winter in The British Isles over the last decade or so. But there seems to be another force driving these egrets and other wading birds. The non-native and very edible red swamp crayfish has in recent years thrived in the lakes of northern France, for instance.

I say edible, this delicacy known stateside as the Louisiana crawfish or crawdaddy, is a native to northern Mexico and the southern USA, but has been introduced to Asia and Europe and has established itself invasively in southern Europe and more recently spread to those French lakes. This has apparently given the birds that enjoy a few crawdad themselves a stronger foothold further north. It was perhaps inevitable that those species would find ways to extend their range and feed on the native aquatic species found in our coastal, brackish, and inland water, especially the species with a migratory tendency. If the red swamp crayfish gains a clawhold in those waters, it will be bad news for some of our native species, such as the European crayfish, but good news for the feathered fishers.

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Spottin’em in Cottenham: Recent sightings

Some interesting recent activity in and around Cottenham. One cold and foggy November night, wigeon were reported flying over the High Street and a Sunday morning soon after saw a couple of Egyptian geese over Broad Lane, a first sighting for one reader of that non-indigenous, but widespread, bird in Cottenham.

There have been a couple of waders, green sandpipers, specifically, sighted along Long Drove, they’re not uncommon in the fens, but always nice to see. Also, at the time of writing, around 60 whooper swans were on farmland at the Twentypence Marina end of the Cottenham Lode where it drains into the River Great Ouse, sometimes known as the Old Bedford River.

Also, way off its normal patch, a dusky warbler has been seen in Aldreth at the part of the village known as The Boot. A white stork (possibly an escapee from a collection) has been seen in Somersham.

A Saturnine and Jovial conjunction

Jupiter and Saturn will appear very close together in the night sky on 21st December in what astronomers refer to as a rare ‘Great Conjunction’. They are not literally close together, they will be millions of kilometres apart but as viewed from Earth they will appear to be separated by less than a fifth the diameter of the full moon as it appears in the sky. This is the closest they have been in conjunction, just 0.1 degrees of arc, since the seventeenth century (the year 1623), in a rare ‘Great Conjunction’. In that year, Wilhelm Schickard invented his Calculating Clock, a mechanical precursor of the pocket calculator.

When that last similar conjunction occurred the two planets were close to each other in the sky but also appeared close to the Sun so would’ve been difficult to observe. Prior to that, an observable conjunction occurred in 1226 long before the invention of the telescope in the year that Saint Francis of Assisi died, apparently.

Just to clarify, as planets orbit the Sun, they occasionally appear to be close to each other in the sky, it’s an optical illusion. On 21st December, Jupiter and Saturn will be almost 800 million kilometres apart in the solar system.

To see the conjunction, look low in the south-west after sunset. As the sky darkens, first Jupiter and then Saturn will become visible. Both planets are bright — in the case of Jupiter brighter than all the stars — so will be obvious in a clear sky. By 17h00 GMT both planets will be less than ten degrees above the horizon for UK observers, so it is important to find a line of sight without tall buildings or trees that will block the view.

They will be visible to the naked eye, but with a small telescope you will be able to see both planets in the same view and Jupiter’s cloud belts will be apparent as will Saturn’s rings. The peak of the conjunction is the 21st, but they will appear to move apart from each other only slowly in the days that follow. There is lots of musing as to whether such a conjunction in history was the origin of the myth of the Star of Bethlehem.

UPDATE: Night of 17th December, the Moon, Jupiter, and Saturn will form a pretty little triangle together in the night sky

Midline Glioma – research fundraiser

UPDATE: December 2021 – Exceeded 100k! Research has already been funded from your donations, so thank you!

UPDATE: Emily was hoping to reach her target by Xmas Day, she went storming past that number on the 23rd December – £50615 raised from just over 1700 donors, which is fantastic. She originally set 10k as a target, then moved it up to 25k, passed that and moved it to 50k, which is when I first mentioned the cause here, on Twitter, and on Facebook. She was at the half way to the 50k at that point just over a week ago. Hopefully, we can draw in more donations from a few of my followers. Thank you! Keep those donations coming in.

Diffuse Midline Glioma, H3 K27M Mutation is not a phrase you want to hear from a doctor. It’s a type of tumour that most commonly affects people under about the age of 25 years but over 3 years. It’s very rare – 100 people in the UK annually – but always lethal, sadly. The tumour grows rapidly within the Central Nervous System and has a devastating effect on the spinal cord or the brain depending on precisely where it grows.

I must admit I’d heard of spinal tumours, but don’t think I’d heard this full phrase until a friend posted about it on social media as their daughter had started a fundraiser to raise funds for research. Emily passed her initial fundraising target quite quickly and has upped the ante, now aiming for £50000. She’s more than halfway there with well over 1000 donations so far. Sciencebase is happy to give this worthy cause a mention in the hope that a few readers take her plea to heart.

I’ve written generally about rare diseases several times over the years and how they are often neglected by mainstream medical research and the pharma industry because by definition they each only affect a small number of people. Of course, there are many, many rare diseases and the total numbers of people that are affected are large. At the other end of the scale though, is often a terrible tale of someone afflicted by something rare and untreatable, which is precisely why we need to raise funds for the individual cases. So, here’s the link to Emily’s JustGiving page. Please dig deep, as they say.

Glossy Ibis in Cambridgeshire

I’ve mentioned local sightings of an ostensibly African/Mediterranean bird before, the Glossy Ibis, they have been spotted at various RSPB sites Ouse Fen, Fen Drayton, Ouse Washes, and elsewhere in the last month or so. I saw a couple of them at Ouse Fen not long after one was first sighted by the warden and others there. There is evidence of perhaps five or maybe seven locally. It is worth noting that over the last decade or so, some of these birds which have begun breeding in Southern Spain have opted to spend their winters in The British Isles.

Three have now taken to feeding on the southern end of the Ouse Washes.

Oh, and there’s a bird that’s usually found in Asia in our locale too, a Dusky Warbler, Phylloscopus fuscatus, seen for the first time in Cambridgeshire in December 2020 at “The Boot” in Aldreth. I took a detour on the way home from snapping the three Glossy IbisÂ to see it, there were lots of twitchers, birders, and toggers around, but none had seen it at the time and I didn’t catch sight of it either…

Thinking outside the password box

There is a lot of conflicting advice about passwords all over the internet, often complicated by so-called cybersecurity agencies charged by governments to keep their citizens safe who put out mixed messages. Much of the advice is contradictory and even troubling in the sense that it will suggest three or four measures everyday users should take that are mutually exclusive or worse still not secure at all.

So, I asked a proper computer security expert, Adam Stewart, to give me the best advice to protect your data and logins.

“You will, no doubt, have seen advice on passwords, such as: set something complex, use three random words, use a password manager, don’t write them down, do write them down, use a different one for each site, use a special one for email, ‘…and mathematically I think you will find that…’, the list goes on,” he told Sciencebase, and I’ve had to agree, yes, the advice provides complicated mixed messages that many people will find very confusing.

“The problem is,” he adds, “no advice fits all situations. You may come up with a perfectly acceptable password approach for you, but it will not work with all websites and apps in all situations.”

So, I asked, how do we everyday users get around that problem?

“I would say a better approach is to “think outside the password box”. By that, he means we should all think about how we can protect our computers, tablets, and smartphones and the files and logins we keep on them.

Here are the three basic things you should do, according to Stewart:

For protection – if available enable two-factor authentication (2FA) or multi-factor authentication (MFA). Once enabled, this requires you to use a a second device such as your phone or tablet to confirm it’s you logging in.

For detection – many websites and apps these days have the ability to warn you when they are accessed and show from which device, enable this function if it is available, if you get an alert that somebody has logged in and it wasn’t you, change your password immediately.

For response – make sure you keep a backup of your files on an external hard drive or on another device, and/or in the cloud. But make sure that cloud site is secure with 2FA and a different password to any of your normal passwords.

We still have to fill in that password box though and Stewart suggests that we should all use a password manager if we can. A password manager can make strong passwords for you and you only need to remember the one strong password for the manager itself. A password of at least 16 characters is strongest just don’t make it “passwordpassword”.

Oh and one more related word of advice from Stewart, no tech giant will ever call you on the phone about your computer or phone or anything else. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon etc,Â will never call you, for any reason, those companies with their billions of users and customers, simply do not work like that. If you get a call claiming to be from any one of those corporations, just politely (or impolitely) decline their invitation to connect to their system and hang up.

The brand new moths of 2020

I have counted well over 300 species of moth in our garden this year(almost 9000 specimens), mostly at night, although there were one or two dayflyers (excluding butterflies, which are moths but are not usually listed as such). That is a small fraction of the total number of moth species listed in the British Isles which tallies at 2500 or thereabouts, 180,000 species of lepidoptera globally.

Of those 300 or so species about 30 were new to me having not ticked them in the garden before. Here’s a small selection starting with the rarest, the Clifden Nonpareil, a moth that was extinct in The British Isles by the middle of the twentieth century but is making a comeback.

The Wormwood

Vaccination NOW

TL:DR – At the time of writing, vaccination of COVID-19 was getting underway. It is still highly recommended despite the disinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories.

In a few month’s time, the first 10 million people will have been vaccinated against covid. Within two months, 4000 of those people will have a heart attack, 4000 will have a stroke, 10000 will be diagnosed with cancer, 14000 will die.

How many of those illnesses and deaths will be due to the vaccination? None of them.

But, the antivaxxers will start to claim some of those 4000 strokes, those 10000 cancers, those 14000 deaths as being caused by the vaccine. They will be wrong to do so. Why, because if we were to start counting 10 million people from today, none of them yet vaccinated against covid, within two months, 4000 of those people will have a heart attack, 4000 will have a stroke, 10000 will be diagnosed with cancer, 14000 will die.

If you know 100 people of all different ages and demographics, then one of them will have a heart attack within the next four years, one of them will have a stroke in that time, a couple of them will be diagnosed with cancer, and in those same four years, 2-3 will actually die. That’s the statistics. If you’re one of somebody else’s 100 friends, then you could be in any of those groups. This is the normal of life, disease, and death.

In the new-normal of the covid world, we need as many people as possible to be vaccinated to quash the spread of this new virus, otherwise there will be much bigger numbers to record in all of the above.

Drug discovery scientist Derek Lowe has much more to say on this topic having built on a twitter thread from Bob Wachter (Chair, University of California San Francisco Department of Medicine).

Of course, once we’re vaccinating millions of people, there will be some side effects and there will be some effects that arise that might be caused by the vaccine or just other random effects of the human condition. The fact is though, that the morbidity and mortality rates for covid will far outstrip any side effects of adverse reactions seen in the people who get the vaccine, this much is true from the trials of thousands of people who have been tested with the vaccine already.

The antivax movement will jump on every disease, every death gleefully proclaiming that the vaccine is to blame. But, 14000 in every ten million people would die in any random two month period before we’d even heard of covid. Now, that we have covid with us that is an extra cause of death to add to our terminal list. Vaccination will minimise those extra deaths, so that hopefully none of us will lose too many of our 100 friends to this dreadful disease.