The great British Flake shortage

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Britain is headed into the ice cream season and we’re nose to nose with a shortage of flakes. 

No, not people who lock themselves out of their houses and get in by involving half the people they know, three neighbors, and half a dozen cops, then discover that they’d left a downstairs window open for the cat and could’ve climbed through.

Not that kind of flake. There’s no shortage of that kind anywhere. We’re talking about one of the basic food groups of British cuisine: Cadbury’s 99 Flakes, a folded chocolate stick that gets stuck into the top of a soft-serve ice cream cone. The manufacturer says the shortage is caused by a spike in demand.

I

Irrelevant photo: a camellia. 

reland reports that it’s facing the same crisis, and I can’t speak to how that affects Ireland but I won’t rule out the possibility that Britain will collapse without 99 Flakes, that civilization (such as it is) will end, or that rioting will break out everywhere an ice cream truck plays its prefabricated song. 

So why’s the 99 Flake called a 99 Flake? No one knows. The maker has a theory, though:

“In the days of the monarchy in Italy, the King had a specially chosen guard consisting of 99 men, and subsequently anything really special or first class was known as ’99’ — and that is how ’99’ Flake came by its name.” 

On the other hand, that could be total bullshit.

 

The obligatory cat story

In March, a London to Manchester train was delayed by a cat on the roof. The train was taken out of service, the passengers were–is decanted the right word?

Sure it is: The passengers were decanted onto a different train, which left for Manchester with all of them on board, because you know what humans are like once they get an idea into their heads, they just had to get to Manchester. And the cat–being a cat–stayed right where it was, thanks, and refused to comment on what it was doing or how it got there.  

Someone created a makeshift platform for it and when it was damn well ready–some two and a half hours after it was spotted–it got down and left. Staff at Euston station described it as swaggering off.

In a massive public relations failure, no one offered to open a can of cat food for it. 

The cat had been dangerously close to 25,000 volts of electricity (what other than electricity would there be 25,000 volts of?) running through the overhead lines, which is why no one got up there with it to convince it down.

 

And the obligatory lockdown story

A stationery store and workshop in London handed out blank postcards asking people to send their lockdown secrets in anonymously. When I last checked, some 1,200 people had sent in cards.  It’s probably more by now.

A few excerpts: 

“We got married in lockdown so we wouldn’t have to invite you.”

“I’m a bisexual woman and I haven’t told my friends or family.”

“I hide bars of chocolate in an old Oxo tin.”

“I haven’t had sex in seventeen months.”

“I haven’t worn a bra for three months.”

“He may be a Tory bastard but I can’t help but have a thing for Rishi.”

“I love my leg hair.”

“I take really long baths with snacks and a drink and maybe a movie. It’s the only room in the house with a lock.”

“It has been so long now literally everything turns me ooon.”

Britain meets Napoleon and they fight a few wars

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The Napoleonic Wars dragged on for some 15 years, and although you can draw a neat line between them and the wars with revolutionary France that came before them, it’s not an important line for our purposes. All told, the wars went on for some 23 years.  

Which is a long damn time for the people who had to fight them, for the people at home, and for the person who’s trying to winnow it all down to one or two thousand words. What do you say we focus on the wars’ impact on Britain? Even there we can only slide along the surface. 

What were the wars about? In part they were about France overthrowing a king, along with the aristocracy that used to flutter around him, setting up a republic in its place. That set the ruling classes in the rest of Europe on edge.

Screamingly irrelevant photo: An African violet

But the wars were also the European powers fighting over who was going to be king of the mountain. 

King of the mountain?That’s a kids’ game, or at least it is in the US. It’s simple: Kid A pushes the usually unsuspecting Kid B off of something and pretends it’s a game instead of just Kid A being a jerk. The only rule is that Kid A has to yell, “I’m the king of the mountain.”

Kid B usually retaliates, but Kid A’s expecting it and is harder to push off. Kid A also has a habit of being bigger than Kid B.

Yeah, we knew how to have good, innocent fun when I was young.

The mountain, in the case of both the Napoleonic Wars and the wars with revolutionary France, wasn’t just Europe, though. It included the seas, everybody’s colonies, and international trade. Which is a bigger mountain than we ever fought for when I was a kid. 

 

Eeek! Revolution!

Before we go on, though, we need to nod a little more deeply to the French Revolution, because it scared the pants off the British ruling class. Remember how I said It had overthrown a king and his fluttering aristocrats? It also killed him. Mind you, England had done the same thing some time before, but it had sewn a new king securely onto its throne and was playing nice again, leaving revolutionary France out there on its own among the European powers. 

As Roy Strong puts it in The Story of Britain, “Everywhere the French army went the old order of things crumbled.” 

Scary stuff if your income and possibly existence depends on the old order. So the British upper classes looked at Britain’s restless and impoverished industrial and farm workers, as well as at its skilled artisans who had no political representation, and thought, You know, we could have a problem here.

And in fact they did. All three of those groups were demanding change. And once things start to change, you can’t control the direction they go in, can you?

The obvious solution wasn’t to pay them better or expand the right to vote but to keep them in line more effectively. An assortment of repressive laws were passed: Habeas Corpus was suspended in 1794. (If you’re in the mood for a translation, Lord Google has obligingly led me to a dictionary.) The next year, they passed the scary-sounding Treasonous Practices and Seditious Meetings Acts and a few years after that the more gently named but equally extreme Combinations Acts. Associations of workers were now illegal. Criticizing the king was treason. 

The acts weren’t enforced often, but they didn’t have to be: They drove the radical movement underground, and there we’ll leave it. It’ll dig their way out later. It’s not up to us.

 

The military

It’s bad manners to write about war and not talk about blood, gore, strategy, alliances, and fighting, but my manners are pretty awful and we’re going to skip the battles, the shifting alliances, and the peace treaties. They’d only make you dizzy and I’ve already gotten dizzy for you. Why should we both suffer? By way of a summary: Britain’s interests were centered on keeping its power at sea, protecting its colonies (not as in protecting them from harm but as in protecting them from some other power snatching them away), and protecting trade. 

The fighting was both land- and sea-based, and it spread across Europe and reached into Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In The Story of Britain, Roy Strong says the nature of warfare changed. Armies became citizen armies, drawing in a huge chunk of the fighting-age male population.

That Britain’s power was mostly at sea didn’t keep it from expanding its own army and fighting on land as well. In the past, its army had been made up of professionals and mercenaries. Now it drew in men from every class, every religion, every region. In 1789, Britain had 40,000 soldiers. In 1814, it had 250,000.

If you add the volunteers training to repel an invasion, you’ll get 500,000 people carrying weapons. (That may or may  not include the navy. Toss a coin.) Strong says it was the first time the population of the British Isles had been “forged together in martial unity on such a scale.” Basically, that’s a lot of people swinging their support behind the war. 

In the last paragraph, I casually mentioned the possibility of a French invasion. Did you spot that? If you take a quick run through British history, you can hit Control C on “Britain was worried about a [             ] invasion,” then in some random number of places hit Control V and fill in the blank with the appropriate country. Think of the time you’ll save in case of an actual invasion. You’ll be an entire sentence ahead of everyone else.

I can’t swear that the fear of an invasion has always been justified, but it often was, and in 1803 Napoleon had gathered his Army of England in Calais–that’s on the French side of the English Channel–where they dipped their booted toes in the sea and chanted, “I’m the king of the mountain.”

Did any country ever do more to provoke a war?

No, you can’t believe everything I say here. Salt water does terrible things to leather, so that’s a pretty good hint that I’m messing around. But a French army genuinely was sitting on the coast in Calais, eyeing Britain and justifying Britain’s long-standing fears. 

Britain responded to its fears by building fortifications along the coasts, organizing militias, and spreading rumors: The French were digging a tunnel under the Channel. The French were coming on a fleet of rafts powered by windmills. The French were coming in balloons.

No, that I didn’t make any of that up. And France really did consider the balloon plan. These were the early days of hot-air ballooning. 

The invasions never happened. They were sidelined by other, more important battles, by a peace treaty, by the weather, by a test fleet of barges sinking.

Still, even invasions that don’t happen cost money, and these–at least the ones after 1803–were funded by the Louisiana Purchase. That was when the U.S. bought French land and made it part of the U.S. It was funded with a loan from a British bank, Baring Brothers, which basically means that the British were funding the invasion of Britain.

But hey, that’s capitalism for you. There was money to be made.

I had to go to WikiWhatsia for that, but it’s too good to pass up. It’s decently footnoted and seems to be legit.

The invasion finally foundered on sharp rock of British control of the Channel.

 

The money

But it’s not only invasions that cost money, so do all the other bits and pieces involved in waging war–food, weapons, ships, those defensive towers along the coast, and anything else you can think of. Britain raised its taxes. Food prices rose drastically. Unemployment went up, which the opposite of what I’d expect during a war, but this one put a crimp in trade and also happened at a time when labor-saving machinery was being introduced on a large scale. 

You can multiply all that by some suitable number after Napoleon closed European ports to British trade. Bankruptcies grew, and so did the price of grain. So did industrial unrest and food riots. 

Some people joined the army out of sheer desperation. They were cold, they were hungry, and if they joined upnthey could at least get themselves fed.

What happened to the wives and families left behind when married men enlisted? According the British Library, they earned what they could, they turned to the parish for the little help it gave, or they starved. The Duke of Wellington weighed in against recruiting married men because it would “leave their families to starve.”

He lost that battle.

The later years of the Napoleonic Wars were marked by strikes, riots, and attacks on all that lovely labor-saving machinery that put people out of work. In Yorkshire and Lancashire, the militia was called in not to fight Napoleon but to put down dissent.

When the war ended, the taxes that had been imposed to pay for the war didn’t go down and returning soldiers flooded the labor market. All that fed into the Peterloo Massacre and assorted efforts to raise pay and win the vote for ordinary people. 

 

The settlement

You probably know how the movie ends: France lost. Think of Napoleon’s troops slogging through the Russian snows, defeated by General Winter. Think of Waterloo. Hell, think of rabbits if you like. It’s your mind. Napoleon was exiled. He slipped out of exile and raised an army. He lost again. He was exiled again and eventually he died, as we all do sooner or later. Turn the page.

What happened to everyone else? The peace did a careful job of maintaining the balance of power in Europe–it lasted for forty years–and land grabs outside of Europe were solidified. Britain got Singapore, Malaya, the Cape of Good Hope, Malta, Guiana, Trinidad and Tobago, and St. Lucia. Its hold on India was, for the time being, unchallengeable. 

The cult of Britain’s king and queen expanded beyond court circles and became a focus of popular patriotism, with the king cast as the father of the nation (so what if he went mad every so often?) and the queen as the model of British womanhood. And the aristocracy, having entered into the Napoleonic Wars a hard-drinking, hard-gambling, dissolute bunch, emerged pinched and puritanical. 

Some day I’d love to understand how those changes sweep through a culture or a class.

According to Strong, it was a matter of having seen what happened to the aristocracy in France and recasting itself as deserving of respect–and all the more so because its right to rule continued to be under attack at home. 

In 1802, Debrett’s Peerage sorted through the aristocracy and presented it as a more visibly coherent group than it had been. And the growth of public schools–those weren’t schools for the likes of you and me but for the upperest of the upper crust–brought the sons of the aristocracy together, unifying their attitudes and experience, forming lifelong networks that reinforced their awareness of themselves as a class that was meant to rule.

Yeah, I know. It makes me want to throw things too.

What did people do during lockdown?

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Well, Gareth Wild completed a six-year labor of love, which was to park in every space in his local supermarket’s parking lot. Or–since he’s British–car park, which makes it sound like a place our cars go to play on the swings. It’s not. It’s a flat stretch of pavement marked out with yellow lines and it’s almost as much fun as it sounds like it is.

Gareth Wild is a man who lives up to his name. 

He went about this methodically, not just parking here and there but studying a satellite view of the car park. He made color-coded diagrams and spreadsheets.

Or possibly just one spreadsheet. I hope you’ll forgive me if I exaggerate. It’s the excitement of the thing. 

In a tweet, he explained his method: “Rather than walking around the car park counting each space and exposing myself as a lunatic, I used the overhead view to mark out a vector image to make it easier to identify each space.”

A vaguely relevant photo, since I’ve mentioned cars, and by extension driving. This is a traditional Cornish traffic jam: cows being moved from one field to another. They weren’t in any kind of a hurry.

The parking lot/car park has 211 spaces. I’m going to assume that doesn’t include the handicapped spaces or motorcycle spaces, which he couldn’t use. He’s got kids, so he could legitimately use the parent-and-child spots.

Don’t you learn wonderful things here? Hasn’t your world become richer and your brain stranger?

And what else did people do during lockdown, Grandma?

Other people used the various lockdowns to drink at home. In England and Wales, 2020 alcohol deaths hit a twenty-year high, climbing almost 20% higher than the year before. Blame the way the pandemic disrupted their work and social lives if you like. 

That doesn’t mean everyone ended their evenings shitfaced on the living room floor, but a substantial number of people did take to hazardous drinking at home. 

For what it’s worth, a similar thing seems to have happened during the bubonic plagues. Emphasis on seems, because no one was tracking the numbers. The evidence is anecdotal.

Although the government didn’t shut down the places where people gathered to drink completely, the authorities in 1665 London (by way of example, since it’s the only one I have) did give them a nasty look, calling them “the greatest occasion of dispersing the plague” and decreeing that they had to close by 9 pm.

That included coffee houses, reasonably enough. It wasn’t about people drinking but about gathering. At night. 

The plague worked the night shift. Before 9, everyone was safe enough.

That information about the plague is, I admit, hanging from a thin Covid hook, but it was the authors of the study who put it there. Presumably they decided that Covid sells. I’m only taking advantage of their opportunism and then blaming them.

*

In the U.S., some baffling number of people used lockdown to collect trading cards, which drove up the prices. Boxes of first-edition base set Pokemon cards (whatever that means) have sold for as much as $400,000. So speculators rush around to stores and buy up whole inventories–a deck might sell for a couple of dollars–then break up the sets and resell the more expensive cards online. They can go for a few hundred dollars.

What’s the connection to lockdown? People have too much time on their hands, maybe. And the people who don’t have too little money have too much. My best guess is that no one’s collecting the cards because they care about them. They’re collecting them to sell to people who are buying them because they think they’ll be worth more tomorrow. Or to put that a different way, everyone’s collecting them because other people are collecting them. 

Not that I actually know that. Maybe someone loves them enough to spend $400,000 on a set. We are a strange species, as I’ve said before–and I’m sure you wouldn’t have noticed it yourself if I hadn’t.

In an effort to make sure the U.S. lives up to its reputation as well armed and completely insane, a disagreement over trading cards in a Wisconsin store (a Target if you know the U.S. retail landscape) ended with a man pulling a gun on four other men in the parking lot. 

No shots were fired, no Pokemon characters were injured, and the guy with the gun had a permit, so it was all okay, but Target suspended sales of trading cards in stores, at least temporarily. They’ll still sell them online where it’s harder to shoot people.

*

In Britain, the proportion of people working from home more than doubled in 2020, but they’re still a minority of working people. About a quarter of people who work were working from home at some point in the week. 

Or more accurately, at some point in the week they answered the survey question. Compare that to 2019, when it was 12.4%. 

That was unevenly distributed. In London,that  was 46.4%, and in the most expensive suburbs it was 70%. If you wondered why Covid has landed hardest on people with the least money, you can start here. It’s not the only reason, but it’s door you can walk through to find the others.

 

And what happens when lockdown ends?

When lockdown ends, all the fun moves to the black market in fake test and vaccination certificates. Researchers found 1,200 sites selling them worldwide. By now, I’d bet on that number having gone up. If you’ve got £25 (or more) and an itch to pass yourself off as safe to be around, you can buy one. Police in Connecticut ended up with a whole box of fake vaccinations cards from an anti-vaxx rally. Whether someone was there to sell them to a likely crowd or was nobly giving them away I have no idea.

As for the fake test certificates, they’re showing up at borders, where people use them because they’re faster, cheaper, and more certain than genuine Covid tests. Unless you get caught.

*

Britain’s traffic-light system for labeling countries safe, risky, and Very Scary to visit has created the usual chaos. 

The environment secretary said people could travel to countries on the amber list. (If you speak American, that’s the yellow warning light.) Then the prime minister said people shouldn’t visit them unless they had pressing reasons. Then the Foreign Office said it was safe to visit 20 amber-list countries and it had published the list on its website, so there. 

That’s 20 out of how many countries are on the amber list? Lord Google tells me 170 countries are on the amber list. He also tells me the world contains 195 countries at the moment. And that 43 countries are on the red list and 12 on the green list.

Lord Google’s math is worse than mine. And I set a high standard. As does the U.K. government, but at least I’m not pretending to run a country.

Is it safe to lift Covid restrictions?

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The latest Covid statistics from Britain are both cheering and worrying, although they’re starting to tip toward worrying. 

Nothing’s ever simple, is it?

On May 12, the country had only 11 Covid deaths and 2,284 cases. Compare that to January 22, when 1,401 people died of Covid and January 8, when the country had 68,053 cases. (Deaths peak a bit later than cases, which is why I seem to be cheating here.)

Some 67% of the British population is at least partially vaccinated. 

That’s the cheery part. So why don’t I just shut up and celebrate?

Blame those pesky experts. Also the pesky data they work with. And more to the point, blame the government–I’d think something was missing from my day if I didn’t–which dithered about whether to quarantine travelers coming in from India and about changing its let’s-all-proclaim-lockdown-over-and-be-happy plans.

 

Irrelevant photo: Ornamental cherry blossoms. We tried growing non-ornamental cherries. The birds didn’t even bother to say thanks.

Stephen Reicher, from Sage, the government’s science advisory group, is warning that the government has to be prepared to not to “dither and delay as in the past” if it turns out that one of the Indian variants has figured out how to sidestep the vaccines. He talks about acting hard and fast, which–well, unless the government gets a politico-personality transplant, isn’t in the cards.

Three of the Indian variants are known to be in the U.K., and one of them in particular is keeping the scientists up at night. It’s called B.1.617.2 by people who can remember that it’s called that, and in a week the number of cases showing its profile doubled in Britain. 

Sorry, It didn’t double, it more than doubled, although we’re not talking about a big block of people yet. A few days back, it was 520. What’s worrying is that it could be more transmissible than the Kent strain of the virus, which is the one that used to keep scientists up at night. Possibly as much as 50% more transmissible.

To some scientists, the tea leaves are looking frighteningly similar to the ones they saw before the Kent variant caused a surge in December of last year.

Come Monday, pubs and restaurants will get the okay to serve people indoors, and indoors among maskless people is exactly where the Covid virus likes to come out and play. So that adds to the worry.

Other restrictions are on a let’s-get-rid-of-these-soon list, including working from home if at all possible. And the travel industry’s been pushing hard to get people going on vacations again. Or on holiday if you speak British.

The new system to allow overseas travel involves traffic lights. Red, yellow, green–all those soothingly familiar colors. Arrive from a red-light country and you go into the kind of hotel quarantine that signals We’re Serious about This. Right after you mixed in the airport with people coming from green-light countries, who get to take a test and go home. 

What’s on the test? Three math questions, one logic question that the government will get wrong, and the old standby, Who was buried in Grant’s tomb? (The answer’s below.)

Any virus that violates the rules will pay a fine. 

Assorted scientists are warning that viruses don’t play by the rules and that it’s very hard to collect fines from them. 

Will the government back away from the planned reopenings? It’s dithering. 

The assumptions behind this are: 1. that 72% of the population will be vaccinated by August or will be protected by having recovered from Covid. 2. that most of the deaths will occur in people who’ve been vaccinated, since although the vaccines are startlingly effective none of them gives 100% immunity–not even against hospitalizations and deaths, although early reports said they did. No one’s to blame there. We’re learning as we go, every last weary one of us.

 

Controlling the variant

One way that Britain’s hoping to keep control of the variant is by intensifying the vaccination programs in areas where clusters are found. I have no argument with vaccinating more people, but there’s a two-week delay between vaccination and a decent level of protection, this isn’t an immediate solution.

On top of that, although the vaccines provide a much greater level of protection than we had any right to expect, they’re not like having your big sister or brother ride the school bus with you. In other words, they don’t give you 100% protection against either bullies or Covid. And when we’re talking about numbers as large as, say, the population of a country, a 2% gap in the protection can end up affecting a lot of people. 

So even though we don’t have any indication yet that B.whatever-whatever can run faster than the vaccines, its transmissibility alone means it’s dangerous. 

Modelers are warning about the possibility of a third wave of infections that could be larger than last January’s. If, that is, the new variant’s as transmissible as they fear.

Am I worried? I’m not losing sleep, but I wouldn’t advise anyone I love to start a travel business right now. Or to eat indoors at a cafe or pub. Because there’s no way to eat or drink without taking that damn mask off, and busy as scientists have been since the pandemic hit, they haven’t sunk their teeth into a solution to that problem.

 

WHO weighs in on a related topic

The World Health Organization has warned that vaccinations are “life-saving, but on their own, they are not enough.” 

That’s in response to the US’s optimistic and (I think) mistaken decision that fully vaccinated people don’t have to wear masks in many indoor settings. 

According to WHO’s Mike Ryan, “Relaxing measures and taking away mask mandates should only be done in the context of considering both the intensity and transmission in your area, and the level of vaccination coverage.

“Even in situations where you have high vaccine coverage, if you’ve got a lot of transmission, then you wouldn’t take your mask off.”

 

Collapsing the curve or watching it skyrocket

Almost from the beginning of the pandemic we heard the phrase flattening the curve. It was one of those word clusters–a bit like herd immunity–that we came to think we understood because we’d heard so often. Or read it.

Well, a new approach to modeling the epidemic says that if you make enough changes at a crucial stage, the curve doesn’t flatten, it collapses. In other words, you get to lace on your big muddy boots and stomp the little bastard. 

And if you miss that crucial time? 

Um, yeah. You have a massive damn outbreak on your hands. Or feet, if we want to hang in there with the boots metaphor. 

The most interesting thing is that the modelers couldn’t come up with a scenario that put the results anywhere between those two extremes.

One of the most powerful ways to control an epidemic is to test known contacts of infected people (which of course means finding them first and quarantine them if they test positive). But there’s a limit to how many people you can trace and test every day. If the number of cases goes past that limit, the disease spreads and congratulations, you’ve just lost control of your epidemic.

The key is to act early and decisively. (See above, Mr. Johnson.)

“A policy that would have worked yesterday will not only take much longer to take effect, but it may fail entirely if it is implemented a single day too late.” Björn Hof, the central mind behind the modeling, said: “Most European countries only reacted when health capacity limits became threatened. Actually, policy makers should have paid attention to their contact tracing teams and locked down before this protective shield fell apart.”

What Hof didn’t say but what seems to be implied here is that Britain’s strategy of lifting restrictions anytime the virus settles down to a less threatening level is self-defeating and leads to another spike later on. 

 

 

All right, gloomy guts, how about some good news?

Okay. In animal trials, a nasal spray vaccine has created sterilizing immunity. That’s the kind of immunity that (in words of one syllable) could wipe this bug from the face of the earth–or at least from your lungs. It would stop you from getting Covid and it would stop you from giving it to someone else. 

The current vaccines can’t go that far. They minimize the risk, and with it they minimize transmission, but they don’t eliminate it.

The vaccine needs only one dose, you don’t have to look away while someone pokes a needle into your arm, and it doesn’t have to be transported at temperatures so cold that sound freezes from the air and thoughts shatter. You probably wouldn’t want to deep fry it, but you don’t need to refrigerate it either. 

But it’s still got a series of trials to go through before we can get our mitts on it. Keep your eye on this one, though. It sounds promising.

*

A cheap Covid test is being developed that reports back in four minutes and is 90% accurate. 

This one can work with either a nasal swab or a saliva sample and it’s actually a bit more accurate with saliva samples, meaning people could stop sticking thin objects up their noses. 

Didn’t our mothers all warn us not to stick things up our noses? Do you have any idea what we’re messing with, using swabs to test ourselves?

It can also spot infections in the early stages, which is important since that’s when they’re most contagious.

Have I written about this one before? I’ve lost track. It seems like some fast, accurate test is always in development. And then we hear nothing more about it. I’m hoping we’ll hear more about this one.

 

So who is buried in Grant’s tomb?

Grant is buried in Grant’s tomb. (That’s Ulysses S., Union general during the Civil War and later president.) 

When I was a kid, some hundred or so years ago, we used to ask each other this. Repeatedly. Maybe we thought the answer would’ve changed. I don’t know if kids in New York still do it. Grant’s tomb is along the Hudson River, begging for kids to use it as the base of stupid questions. 

I haven’t tried the question on anyone in a British airport. I probably should. 

Strange British Festivals: The World Custard Pie Championship

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To prove that the pandemic is nothing to mess around with, the 2020 World Custard Pie Championship–like so many other non-essential events–was canceled.

But was the contest truly non-essential or was that just the decision of some self-serving, soulless sort with a scrub brush for a brain? Did they consider its obvious cultural, political, and academic importance? 

Ah, well, let’s not be too hard on self-serving, soulless scrub brushes. It’s been a rough year for everyone.

And it doesn’t matter anymore, because barring a major step backward in the U.K.–that’s pandemically speaking, of course–the competition will take place in 2021, so let’s learn what we can about the details, quick before it’s too late to enter. 

Irrelevant photo: A camellia, I think. In fact, I’m reasonably sure. Of course it’s a camellia. What else would it be? A snowmobile?

The World Custard Pie Championships fits nicely into the category of strange traditional festivals that England (or maybe that’s Britain) is so good at, even though this particular tradition is no older than fifty or so years. That makes it modern, at least by British history standards, but it’s a good enough imitation to fool my filing system. 

And if someone would help me sort out whether these festivals are a particularly British thing or a particularly English one, I’d be grateful. I’m sure it would help me understand the country better. Are people this strange in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland?

 

Origins, rules, & important stuff

The origins of most truly traditional traditions have been lost by now, but since this one’s a newcomer–a nontraditional tradition–we can document it: Coxheath, Kent, needed to raise money for a village hall and came up with the idea of inventing a tradition. Or at least that’s my interpretation. I’m reasonably sure no one put it that way when they were sitting around the pub figuring out what to do.

The pub’s also my interpretation. I’m convinced that these traditions all started in the pub. Even before pubs were invented.

How does the championship raise money? It costs £60 for a team to compete and £40 to set up a stall. Unless you’re selling food and drink, in which case that’ll be £80, thanks. If a town can keep its festival going for a few years and get itself some publicity, it’ll raise enough to buy a bucket of paint or three. 

By now the custard festival’s had enough publicity for teams to fly in from around the world. Or so the website says. They manage not to say how many teams have flown in. Two’s enough to justify a plural.

The rules are simple. Each team’s made up of four people and they line up and throw pies at someone–I assume it’s another team. Using their left hands. I’ll go out on a twig and guess that if you’re left handed you throw with your right. If you’re ambidextrous, you’re disqualified. If you’re amphibious, you can throw from under water, but it won’t be an advantage–at least not in terms of scoring. You’ll be a hit with the crowd, though.

Scoring? Your points depend on where your pie hits your opponent–six points for a pie in the face, three if it hits from the shoulder up, and one for any other body part. 

If you miss three times, you lose a point. 

The judges’ decisions are final. 

Throwing pies at the judges when you don’t like their decision is frowned upon, but they don’t say that for fear of putting the idea in some suggestible person’s empty little head. And yes, having to throw with your nondominant arm is a perfect excuse for not being good at it.

Unlike dwile flonking, you don’t have to be drunk to do this, but this being England (or should I say, “This being Britain”?), you’re more than welcome to show up dressed in something silly. Or as they put it in British, in fancy dress. Don’t wear anything you’re attached to, though, because by the end of the day everyone’s wearing custard.

And now the bad news: They don’t use real custard–it’s not the right consistency–and the formula for whatever they do use is a closely guarded secret. Presumably, neighboring towns are just dying to poach the festival and that’s all that stops them. The only ingredients they’ll admit to are flour and water. The Calendar Customs website recommends not eating whatever it is.

The contest’s usually held in May or June, but this year, with the number of vaccinated people going up and the number of Covid cases (“so far,” she said nervously) staying low, it’s been rescheduled for September 21. 

They’re expecting 2,000 pies to be thrown. The day begins around noon with a wet sponge competition for kids, who as any fool knows can’t be trusted with pies.

*

Some time ago Autolycus suggested that I might want to write about another great British tradition, rhubarb thrashing, and I did try, but I couldn’t find enough information to go on. Besides, it’s a perfectly sensible game where two people stand inside trash cans and whack at each other with rhubarb  sticks, and where’s the laugh in that?

Why more isn’t written about it remains a mystery. It’s one of those rare subjects where Lord Google offered me no more than a single page of links, most of which were to a kids’ program, the BBC’s mysteriously named Blue Peter, which decided many and many a year ago that this was what the kiddies needed to know.

Those kiddies have now grown into adults. If you want to know what’s wrong with the world, look no further.

I am, as always, grateful for people’s topic suggestions, even when I don’t end up writing about them. Some–like rhubarb thrashing–just don’t lead anywhere, but you never know. Some are glorious.

Why some folks who recovered from Covid keep testing positive

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At some point during the pandemic, the good folks who comb through Covid tests noticed that a certain number of people who’d recovered from Covid kept testing positive, although further testing couldn’t find any live virus in their systems. Now a study offers us a theory about why that might be happening.

But before we go on, remember that this is a theory. Repeat after me: It’s a theory, it’s a theory, it’s a theory.

Ready? In simplified form, since that’s as much of it as I can handle, bits of Covid’s genetic sequence can embed themselves in human DNA, getting there by a process called reverse transcription. Don’t worry about what it’s called, though. I only mention it so it’ll have a name and we can call it when lunch is ready.

Irrelevant photo: Daffodils by a stream. Photo by Ida Swearingen.

Before you come unglued about the idea of Covid embedding itself in your DNA, understand that it doesn’t mean Bill Gates is embedding himself so he can send you instructions to buy his latest product or divorce your–or his–wife. Something like 8% of our DNA is made up of sequence fragments left there by ancient viruses. That sounds eek-ish, but they do nothing more than sit around looking ancient. And if you know how to read them, interesting. They’re not responsible for diseases or divorces or anything else beginning with D.

Now if they were retroviruses, they’d use a position in our DNA to replicate and make us sick, but Covid isn’t caused by a retrovirus, so if it’s there, it’s doing nothing.

Take a deep breath. The situation isn’t any worse than it was a minute ago. 

From there on everything gets complicated, but I did escape away with this much information: 1, It’s not yet clear how common reverse transcription is with Covid; 2, if it’s happening at all, it might mean that some Covid immunity gets integrated at the cellular level (that would cause a good thing); and 3, it might also be responsible for the autoimmune responses that show up in long Covid (that would cause a bad one).

Warning: The study’s still controversial, with some scientists yelling–in a more academically appropriate way–”This is bullshit and it’s feeding into people’s fears.” Make of it what you will. I suggest tucking a sprig or two into your hat and waiting to see what it’s done in a month or six.

 

Covid and evolution

You’ve probably heard people say Covid will become less deadly over time. Didn’t the plague? Didn’t, after the Spanish flu epidemic, the flu?

Mmm, well, maybe. There are two problems with the argument. The first and biggest is that evolution’s random, driven by a combination of pure dumb chance and the pressures put on it by outside circumstances. So as any given disease evolves, it could become milder and it could become more deadly. Or could become neither and change in other ways–ones we care about less.

But that’s old news. The second problem with the argument is newer and more interesting. A group of necrophiliacs–

Sorry, a group of scientists studied the bodies of 36 sixteenth-century bubonic plague victims and compared their immune markers with those of people living in the area today. The modern residents showed a greater genetic resistance to the plague than the sixteenth-century bodies did.

“This suggests these markers might have evolved to resist the plague,” said Paul Norman of the Colorado School of Medicine. 

Because it’s not only diseases that evolve: So do we. And if the study’s correct, so did we. Or at least so did the people of that particular town.

If you want to get whacked with the full scientific verbiage, the article says, “Among the current inhabitants, the team found evidence that a pathogen, likely Yersinia pestis which causes bubonic plague, prompted changes in the allele distribution for two innate pattern-recognition receptors and four Human Leukocyte Antigen molecules, which help initiate and direct immune response to infection.”

Got it?

Me neither. That’s why quotation marks were invented.

The good news here is that humanity can adapt to massive medical threats. The bad news is that, even if some of us have genes that will protect us against Covid, we can’t know in advance who’s got ‘em and who doesn’t. And for those genes to spread through the population would take I’m not sure how many generations and many deaths, which would unsentimentally eliminate those of us who don’t have ‘em. 

In short, if you can get vaccinated, do. 

 

Does vaccination either stop or slow the spread of Covid?

A study that followed vaccinated and unvaccinated hospital employees found that vaccination dramatically reduces asymptomatic Covid infections. In fact, the change was enough that a pretty dry writeup of the study used the word dramatically. The word didn’t wander into this paragraph because I was struggling to keep us all awake.

So what? So it means that vaccinated people will be dramatically less likely to pass on infections. If you don’t get them, you can’t give them. 

How dramatic a change are we talking about? A week after getting their second shot (or jab if you speak British), vaccinated people were 90% less likely than their unvaccinated co-workers to have asymptomatic Covid.

In that case, how soon will the pandemic be over? 

Um, yeah.

A group of infectious disease modelers at Northwestern University are playing with the numbers and trying to figure that out for the U.S. alone. Their projections are lining up nicely with the numbers reported from the real world, so they’re worth listening to. Basically, the number of Covid deaths and the number of severe cases are going down. That’s the vaccination program at work. 

Rochelle Walensky, of the Centers for Disease Control, said, “The models forecasted some really good news, and an important reminder. The reality is it all depends on the actions we take now.”

Basically, she says, controlling the pandemic depends on people getting vaccinated–quickly.

Is forecasted a real word? Yup. To forecast has two past tenses, depending on what mood it’s in when it gets out of bed. Forecast is one and forecasted is the other.

You can’t always forecast which mood it’ll be in. 

I didn’t know that either.

“The results remind us that we have the path out of this,” she said, “and models once projecting really grim news now offer reasons to be quite hopeful for what the summer may bring.”

But the modelers warn that this doesn’t mean all restrictions should be lifted at once. Surges are still possible, and new variants are a threat. 

They don’t specifically mention this, though, so I will: Until vaccines get to the rest of the world, no country is safe. 

Which leads me to this: As of May 6, 44% of the US population and 51% of the UK population had been vaccinated. Compare that to 9.4% in India, 4.4% in all of Asia, and below 1% in all of Africa. Which is an elaborate way of saying even the safest of us is a long way from safe. 

Appeals to our higher nature are fine, but the desire for self-preservation’s a powerful force and always worth a mention. 

 

Long Covid

Long Covid has a new name: Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2–or PASC to its friends. 

Why does it need all that? Because in my experience, when the medical community can’t cure something, they rename it. 

Since I’m claiming to have experience, I’d better cite my qualifications. I lost four years of my life to some sort of post-viral exhaustion that was so vaguely defined it had to be diagnosed by picking two symptoms from List A and three from List B. Or maybe it was one and four. Either way, I watched the syndrome go through two or three name changes before I stopped keeping track. 

The experience means that I’m more afraid of long Covid than I am of the severe form of the disease, although I won’t argue that we should all feel that way. 

I’d like to think the new name’s a sign that long Covid’s being taken seriously, and if the number of articles about it are a measure of seriousness it just might be, but being taken seriously isn’t the same as anyone knowing how to cure it. Or even knowing what causes it. 

Long Covid lands on people who had severe Covid and on people who had nothing more than a mild case. And this next bit is news to me: It also shows up in people who had asymptomatic cases. It can range from mild to debilitating to horrific. In one study, less than a third of people with long Covid had fully recovered five months after they left the hospital, although that’s a skewed study because it only follows people who were hospitalized. 

A different study found that nearly half the people hospitalized with Covid felt they hadn’t fully recovered after seven months. Either that study or a different one (forgive me, I get dizzy when I’m around numbers for long) says one person in ten will have Covid symptoms months after recovering from the disease itself. 

This is all still new territory. Expect the numbers to be contradictory. No one even has a fixed definition of long Covid, so you’ll find the game being played by different rules in different studies. And the playing field keeps changing size. In fact, some studies are working with cards and others are convinced it involves a ball. 

It’s not clear yet who’ll get long Covid. Working-age women are the most likely, but men can get it, old people can get it. Young adults and kids can get it. No one seems to have a demographic Get Out of Long Covid Free card. 

An article from Yale University says we are “facing the prospect of a chronic condition without diagnostics or therapeutics. We are facing a post-viral condition of potentially historic proportions and are almost completely in the dark about the underlying mechanism.”

It goes on to talk about lives that are changed overnight, about long Covid’s disproportionate impact on minority communities, and “a health care system that can offer no substantive assistance.” Not to mention long Covid’s “financial toxicity”–and since the article comes from the U.S., people’s loss of health insurance.

Yeah. It scares the hell out of me. 

Covid’s silver lining: another Zoom call goes wrong

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If the pandemic cloud has a silver lining, it’s Zoom, which gives us such wondrous ways to screw up.

On the day that his party–the Republicans–launched a state campaign against distracted driving, an Ohio state senator, Andrew Brenner, participated in a Zoom call, and being a master of the technology he didn’t trap himself in a cat face and have to assure members of the state’s controlling board that he wasn’t a cat. No, he started the call in a parked car, showing his very own human face. Then he left the call for a few minutes and reappeared in front of a homey background. 

He’d have been fine if it hadn’t been for the seatbelt he was wearing. And the way he fixed his eyes straight ahead as if he was driving and turned his head from time to time as if he was changing lanes. And the moments when the background wavered and a road appeared beyond what looked very much like a driver’s side window, which had also appeared. 

The meeting was, of course, live streamed to the public. 

No, we don’t take in the real scandals of our age, but give us a politician in a seatbelt pretending to be at home and we sink our teeth in until they hit bone.

Irrelevant photo: rhododendron

“I wasn’t distracted,” Brenner said before digging his hole a little deeper by adding that “I’ve actually been on other calls, numerous calls,, while driving. Phone calls for the most part, but on video calls I’m not paying attention to the video. To me, it’s like a phone call.”

Which is why he did all the cloak and dagger stuff to look like he was someplace other than in his car. 

I suppose, since we’re talking about Zoom, that I have to mention another call that went wrong: Canadian MP William Amos showed up at a virtual parliamentary session stark screaming naked except for a strategically placed mobile phone. He was, he said in his apology, changing out of his jogging clothes when his laptop camera turned on. He’s patriotically placed, you’ll be glad to know, between the Canadian and Quebec flags.

 

. . . And bringing those two themes together

Have you ever had one of those problems that you can’t get anyone to pay attention to, no matter what you do? Geoff Upson, in New Zealand, had been tried to get some Auckland potholes filled and when he ran out of sane solutions he spray-painted penises around them–at last call about a hundred of them, some in neon paint.

I’d love to tell you that they’ve now been filled, but instead Auckland Transport activated the police on the grounds that penises distract drivers, making them a safety risk. 

No, not owning one. Seeing one painted on the road. 

They also said that it’s dangerous to paint on the road. They have your best interests at heart, Geoff. 

No word on whether the potholes have been filled. 

 

. . . And having nothing to do with any of that

A Belgian farmer moved a stone that was in his way and accidentally added a thousand square meters of France to his country.

In 1819, after Napoleon’s defeat, the Belgian-French border was marked out with a line of stones that had the date on them. If that makes it sound like the French-Belgian border’s a low-key sort of thing–well, I’ve never been there but that’s the impression I got too. It also sounds like the farm might be an international operation, at least some of the time. Intentionally or not. 

Two things kept this from being an international incident: One is that the countries aren’t at war. The other is that in 2019 the stones were geo-localized, so the wandering stone could be moved back to its original spot, although I expect the farmer wasn’t happy about it. 

*

Six years ago, developers in London illegally knocked down the 1920s Carlton Tavern. This kind of thing happens regularly. Generally the developers say, “Oops, wasn’t that what we were supposed to do?”then pay a fine and go on to build what they wanted to. But this time some 5,000 people and a couple of local politicians organized a campaign.

To make sense of this, you have to understand that the building’s owners and the people who wanted to save the place aren’t the same folks. The owners asked for planning permission to convert the building to ten flats, which in American means apartments, and they didn’t get it. English Heritage–that’s an organization dedicated to preserving, um, you know, English heritage–was set to give the building listed status, which is a form of protection for buildings with historical significance, but two days before it came through the bulldozers knocked the place down.

A leader of the campaign said, “We had a suspicion . . . that they would do something, so we asked English Heritage to think about listing it. They took a plaster cast of every tile, and documented everything.”

That meant the local council–that’s the neighborhood government–could and did order the developers to rebuild it, brick by brick by brick. A few parts were reclaimed from the rubble, the rest were re-creations.

The Carlton reopened in April and is being run by Homegrown Pubs. One of the people involved said, “The pub tells its story from the half-broken fixtures that we’ve got. You can see bits of broken wood–it’s not all perfect, which we really love because it gives character and charm to the building.”

James Watson from the Campaign for Pubs said, “I never imagined that I would see a planning inspector order a developer to put back what he’d just knocked down, to look exactly as it was. I thought the developer would get a slap on the wrist, a £6,000 fine. It has set an incredibly useful precedent. Other planning inspectors will remember it, and so will developers.”

Watson also said that most developers are smart enough not to just send in the bulldozers. They “take some tiles off the roof and let the rain in. The beams rot, it collapses, and they say to the council, ‘This is a derelict site that needs to be rebuilt as flats.’ “ 

Why do pubs need protecting? They’re not just places to sit from 10 a.m. until you’re shitfaced, although up to a point you can do that in them. They also play a role in holding communities together. They’re a kind of public living room. But for a combination of reasons, running a pub is an increasingly hard way to make a living, so they’re disappearing from the British landscape. A few are being bought out by and run as community-owned businesses, which have the advantage of not needing to make a profit.

Your feel-good story for the week

A department store chain, H & M, has introduced a free service that allows men to borrow a job interview suit, free, for twenty-four hours. 

“Research shows that it takes less than one second for an employer to judge your ability based on your appearance,” according to an H & M manager. Hence the program’s name: One/Second/Suit. You don’t even need to dry clean it when you’re done. You send it back in pre-paid packaging and they’ll take care of that before the next person gets it.

If anyone offers a parallel service for women, unfortunately I haven’t heard about it.

A quick history of town criers

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The pandemic dictated that this year’s Town Crier Championships had to be held in silence, so this might be a reasonable time to stop and ask about town criers’ history in England.  

 

The Normans. Doesn’t everything trace back to the Normans?

In England, we can trace town criers at least back to 1066, when the Normans invaded the country and put themselves in charge, adding an overlay of the Old French they spoke to the Old English that everyone else did.

While they were at it, they also took over the land, the government, and anything that was left after that was parceled out.

The reason I mention their language, though, is that roughly a thousand years later town criers still start their cries with “Oyez, oyez,” which is French for “Listen up, you peasants.” 

Okay, it’s French for “Hear ye, hear ye,” which is English for “Listen up, you peasants.” And it’s pronounced, “Oh yay,” for whatever that information may be worth. 

Whatever they say after that, they’re supposed to end with “God save the queen.” Or king. Or whatever. 

Screamingly irrelevant photo: primroses.

The reason we can trace town criers back to the Norman invasion is that two of them were woven into the Bayeux Tapestry, which tells the tale of the invasion in–um, yeah–tapestry. You can pick out the town criers because they’re carrying hand bells, which they rang to gather people around them. Because, loud as they were, a bell was even louder. 

They were sometimes called bellmen. 

Even today, town criers open their cries by ringing a hand bell, although historically some used drums or horns. 

But in spite of their Frenchified call,  it wasn’t the Normans who introduced the town criers–at least not according to the website maintained by the Loyal Company of Town Criers, which says the town criers in the tapestry were Anglo-Saxons carrying King Harold’s news about the Norman invasion to the populace.

Harold? He’s the guy who not long after sending out news of an invasion lost the battle, the war, and his life. 

If the loyal company is right and the town criers in the tapestry were Anglo-Saxon, then the tradition predated the Normans.

And who am I to question a loyal company? 

Well, I’m the person who stumbled into the Windsor and Maidenhead Town Crier site, which also mentions the tapestry but says its town criers came into the country with the Normans. 

That’s the trouble with drawing your history from visual art. A lot of interpretation is involved.

A third site ducks the issue by saying the town criers’ position was formalized after the Norman invasion. 

So we’re going to be cagey about this. Go eat a cookie or something and I’ll move us along while you’re distracted.

 

The town crier’s role

With the medieval period we can pick up more verifiable information about town criers. At a time when most people were illiterate, word of mouth was the social media of its day. Also the newspaper, the radio station, and the TV set. As Historic UK explains,  “most folk were illiterate and could not read.” 

Well, holy shit. As if being illiterate wasn’t bad enough, they couldn’t read either. Talk about multiple handicaps.

So the town crier would ring their bell or blow their horn or pound their drum, gather people around, and bellow out the news, proclamations, bylaws, thou-shalt-nots, thou-shalts, and whatever else the person pulling their strings felt was important. 

They had strings? Who pulled them? 

I haven’t found a direct answer, so I’m patching this together as best I can. Sprinkle a bit of salt over it, would you? 

The string puller(s) would probably have varied with the period we’re talking about. At at least some times and in some places, town criers were paid by the proclamation. Some sites talk about a city or town having a town crier, which makes it sound less like a casual job, and one site talks about town criers proclaiming ads. You know, “Oyez, oyez. Lidl is selling three lettuces for the price of two, but hurry or they’ll all be gone. God save the salad dressing.” 

But local government would also have come into the picture, wanting its announcements cried out, wanting the reason for a hanging made public, passing on announcements it received from the king or queen, which gives me a nifty excuse to mention that town criers were considered to be speaking in the name of the monarch, so attacking one was an act of treason.

Generally, once the crier had read out a proclamation, they’d nail it to the door post of the town pub. (Come on, where else are you going to gather the citizenry?) That gives us the word post in the sense of news and communication. 

Okay, they also made their proclamations at markets and town squares and anyplace else people could be counted on to gather. But an inn? If people gathered and listened, they might well step inside, buy a beer, and talk over what they’d heard. And a smart landlord might well offer the town crier a free beer after a well-placed announcement, although that’s the purest of speculation.

One site says town criers also patrolled the streets at night, looking for troublemakers (who else would be out after dark?) and making sure fires were damped down after the curfew bell rang. 

The origin of the word curfew lies in the Old French for covering a fire: cuvrir and feu. Fire was a constant threat in medieval towns. Having an old busybody with a bell making sure everyone really did cover theirs would be annoying but also useful. It’s believed (which is to say, it’s not exactly known) that one reason more people didn’t die in the Great Fire of London is that town criers warned people about the fire. It’s also believed that many more people died in the fire than were ever counted, so if you’ve still got some salt left, use a bit more of it here, because a good part of what I’ve found on the topic was written by nonhistorians. And speaking as a nonhistorian myself, we screw up more often than we like to admit.

Towns did organize unpaid overnight patrols (you’ll find a bit about that here), and the watchmen were sometimes called bellmen, but all men were expected to volunteer or to pay someone else to take their shift. They could all have been town criers, in spite of sometimes being called bellmen. I’m going to crawl out on a thin branch and say that some nonhistorian got fooled by the word bellman being used for two different jobs.

So who got to be a town crier? Someone with a loud voice who could sound authoritative. And someone who could read, because proclamations would come in written form and needed to be read out accurately. 

Town criers haven’t, historically, all been men. Some were husband-and-wife teams, and some were women. The Northwich 1790s records mention a woman who’d been carrying out the role “audably and laudably” for more than twenty years.

The collective noun for a group of town criers–of course you need to know this–is a bellow of criers. 

As literacy spread, town criers became less important, and where they continued, more decorative. These days, if you find them at all you’ll find them dressing in three-cornered hats (or other gloriously outdated headgear) and all the clothes that go with them. They’re most likely to show up to open local events or at contests.

 

And that brings us back to the silent championships

And so we return to this year’s silent championships: If the contestants couldn’t make a noise, what were they judged on?

Organizer Carole Williams said it was “a return to the bare bones of crying. . . .It’s a real skill to write a cry that sticks to the theme, that enlightens people, and doesn’t bore the audience. And it all has to be done in 140 words.”

That makes it sound like a shouted tweet, doesn’t it?

Williams, by the way is a crier from Bishops Stortford, which I include that because place names don’t get any more English than that, and a member of the Loyal Company of Town Criers, which I include because it hosts the competition and because organization names don’t get any more English than that. Even if you make them up.

Normally, the contest is judged on sustained volume and clarity, on diction and inflection, and on content, but this year’s entries had to be recorded and since not everyone could be expected to get their hands–or their cries–on good recording equipment, the organization decided to make sure everyone had an even chance.

The contest raised money for a mental health organization called–appropriately enough–Shout. 

*

Thanks to Bear Humphreys at Scribblans for sending me a link to the silent crier championships. 

The Covid chronicles: Is herd immunity still possible?

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With Covid raging in India and Brazil, it’s a strange time to be talking about herd immunity, but a cluster of scientific articles are doing just that. 

How many people need to be immune to a disease in order for the population as a whole to be protected? The answer varies with the disease. For measles, which is very contagious, the estimate is 95%. Vaccinate that many (or wait till they get sick and grow their own immunity) and the other 5% will get protection simply from not being around anyone covered with itchy little spots. 

For the initial Covid strain, the best guess was that herd immunity would come when 70% of the population was immune. But as a planet, we handled the disease so badly that we’re not dealing with that strain anymore. Instead, we have a small raft of more contagious strains, so the bar we have to jump over before we reach herd immunity has probably gone from–oh, let’s say waist height to shoulder height. 

Oh, yes, lucky us.

Irrelevant photo: Wood anemones.

So far, the countries with widespread vaccination programs also have groups of people who refuse to be vaccinated–that’s in addition to some who for medical reasons can’t be. They also have groups who for social and political reasons haven’t been reached. The US and UK haven’t done as well at vaccinating ethnic minority groups as they have at vaccinating whites. When I last checked, in April, Israel had gotten only dribbles of vaccine to the occupied territories, saying they weren’t its problem.

And most importantly, the world at large has done a shit job of getting vaccine to the poorer countries. So all those pools of unvaccinated people are where the disease will spread and mutate and create new variants, each of which carries in its itty bitty little pockets the possibility of outrunning the vaccines that those of us who are vaccinated are so relieved to have. 

Israel has vaccinated just upwards of 60% of its population and has in large part returned to normal life, but that normality depends on keeping its borders largely closed and wearing masks indoors. Countries like New Zealand and Australia, which have in large part stamped out the virus, rely on tight border control and strict quarantine. How long they can or have the will to keep those barriers in place remains to be seen.

One article (the link’s above) says that the trick will be keeping restrictions in place once case and hospitalization numbers drop. Primarily, it says, these will be Covid tests and masks. 

And just so’s you know: There’s no agreed-upon definition of herd immunity. I’m going to skip the details and say only that this doesn’t make the conversation about it any clearer. For a sensible discussion, go here.

Some of the articles I’ve read say we’re unlikely to ever completely eliminate Covid. In countries that have been heavily (but not completely) vaccinated, it’s likely to continue circulating and causing deaths, but at dramatically lower rates.  

Sorry. It’s not the knock-out punch we were all hoping for, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative.  

Dr. Anthony Fauci tells us not to worry about herd immunity.

“People were getting confused and thinking you’re never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is.

“That’s why we stopped using herd immunity in the classic sense. I’m saying: Forget that for a second. You vaccinate enough people, the infections are going to go down.”

 

The search for a Covid pill

At least three of the big drug companies are working on pills to keep mild Covid from turning into severe Covid. If they succeed, they’d make Covid’s continued presence in our lives a hell of a lot more manageable.

The first days after the virus moves into a human host are its busiest. It sets up housekeeping in a cell and creates a family to admire its work. And then the family spreads out, setting up housekeeping in new cells. And so forth. It multiplies like mad, and that’s when we’d need to drop that little pill–you know: the one that doesn’t quite exist yet–down our throats to disrupt the sequence. 

Researchers have trolled through existing drugs, hoping to find one that would, by chance, do the job but so far haven’t come up with anything. Hence the search for new ones.

One that’s in development is a protease inhibitor, which would interfere with the enzymes the virus needs to multiply. (No, don’t ask me. I’m just playing parrot here.) Drugs that treat AIDS and hepatitis C are protease inhibitors, in case that gives you the same illusion of understanding that glowed so nicely in my brain until I realizes I didn’t really understand a thing.

Other drugs in development target the virus itself. That does’t glow quite as nicely and I’d love to say more about the process but that’s all I’ve got, although I can repeat that they’d disrupt the virus’s ability to replicate itself.

The companies are hoping to have the first of the drugs on the market by the end of the year. And they may end up being used in combination to keep the virus from evolving some form of resistance. 

Don’t give up, folks. We’ll get through this, even if life isn’t quite the same as it used to be.

It wasn’t perfect then either, was it?

The Wallpapergate scandal goes free range; welcome to Nannygate

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I hope you don’t mind a quick dip into political sleaze, because I do enjoy a good scandal and here in Britain we have one that’s going free range. Just before an election. Yes, friends, Wallpapergate is turning into Nannygate which is turning into Personal Trainergate.

I’ll stop gloating for a paragraph or two and translate for myself: Boris Johnson is being investigated for asking Conservative Party donors to pay for his and his partner’s £200,000 refurbishment of the prime ministerial residence, but that’s a few-days-old scandal. Now it’s now come out that he also approached donors to pay for his and his partner’s nanny and his personal trainer. 

I did use the phrase “the couple’s nanny,” but no, the nanny doesn’t take care of the couple, although if she (and I’m making assumptions there, I know) did she might’ve saved them from their wallpaper. But no such luck. She’s there to take care of their kid, who’s a year old. 

I won’t get into the whole nanny thing. Really. I won’t. I’m putting on mittens to limit my typing. 

Irrelevant photo: speedwell–a wildflower

It all makes me wonder, though, if Johnson also tried raising funds to pay for a food taster and a herald to blow the trumpet when he’s coming into a room. If he has, it hasn’t hit the headlines yet, but I’m ruling nothing out. 

The latest of Wallpapergate is that Conservative Party staff members have been told to hand over all communications that relate to it. They’ve been threatened with criminal charges if they don’t, which has a certain irony since their boss isn’t being threatened with criminal charges, although the email they were sent did say, “You are put on notice that this is a criminal investigation.”

Johnson is said to have taken out a personal loan to pay back whatever money was borrowed to cover  the renovations of his flat, although he’s dodged questions about when he did that. The loan he received hasn’t been declared, and neither has whatever he borrowed or solicited and then repaid. That signals trouble, although I have no idea how deep.

Prime ministers are given £30,000 to wipe away all visible traces of their predecessors, so that leaves only £170,000 to repay. 

To put that in perspective: If you worked a 40 hour week at the London minimum wage, which is higher than the national one, you’d take home something in the neighborhood of £17,000 a year, so if you didn’t frivvel that away on groceries and rent or anything else, it would take ten years to save that up. 

At the London real Living Wage of £10.85, you’d take home something like £22,000. 

Johnson, on the other hand, makes £150,000 a year as prime minister. That means he’s licking the underside of the top 1% of British earners, but he’s apparently told friends that he needs to make twice that just to keep his head above water. Rumor says he’s broke, although you might want to wait until the music stops and the numbers have all tried to grab the chairs that are left before you decide what to believe on the subject.

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But I mentioned elections, so let’s talk about them: All across the country we’ve got local elections coming up on Thursday, and they’re being taken as a test of the impact all this is having on the electorate. Whether it’s a fair test is arguable. I’m not sure how much national politics translate to local elections. 

Some pundits speculate that the mythical man in the pub (and I’m reasonably sure they do mean the man) doesn’t care about Wallpapergate. What I’ve noticed, though, is that most of the Conservative newspapers seem to have turned against Johnson on this. I haven’t a clue how it’ll go or what it’ll mean. 

In Scotland, though, the elections will decide whether there’ll be another referendum on leaving the United Kingdom and joining the European Union. That referendum, if it’s held, will either be sanctioned by the British government or it won’t be. And if it isn’t, it’ll either be held anyway or it won’t be. I think that covers all the possibilities.

It’s going to be interesting here for a while.