An aye for an eye…

Cat on a hot new roof: Pixel checks it over!

Writers remember everything… especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he’ll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar.
    Art consists of the persistence of memory.
— Stephen King: Misery

I have written on here before about the NHS at its worst (for me). But on Saturday I experienced it at its very best. Before I tell you how, I need to take a few steps back, and tell you the why.

Last Tuesday, after six weeks of seemingly continuous rain, my kitchen and bathroom roof was replaced (very loudly); and I finally removed the bucket and pan from under the spot where all the water had collected in the roof void and made its way through. Then, when the scaffolding was dismantled on Wednesday afternoon, I went and sat outside with my cat Pixel amongst the cement dust and general mess, and reflected on how we’d muddled our way through from the morning I slept in; Storm Floris found the weaknesses in the old roof; and I woke up to an inch of water soaked into the kitchen floormats and collected in poor Pixel’s food-bowls, as well as splashed up the walls and kitchen door (where the weak spot was). It could have been worse, I suppose. But it felt like a disaster… — an expensive disaster.

The loss of distant horizons – almost, but not quite, a literature review…

On my way to school pickup one smoggy, sweltering summer afternoon, I heard an older woman just ahead of me telling two small boys they’d have to go straight home that day. “It’s good to be outside,” she said, “but sometimes the air is not good air.”
– Beth Gardiner: Choked

As soon as I had gotten out of the heavy air of Rome and from the stink of the smoky chimneys thereof, which being stirred, poured forth whatever pestilential vapours and soot they had enclosed in them, I felt an alteration of my disposition.
– Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger

Some describe sixteenth-century Bolivia, where the Potosí silver mine was the largest in the world at the time, as the start of the Anthropocene – the geological era in which human activity began to have a significant impact on the natural world. The air would never be the same.
– Tim Smedley: Clearing the Air

The last act when life comes to a close is the letting out of the breath. And hence, its admission must have been the beginning.
– Aristotle: On Youth and Old Age, On Life and Death, On Breathing

Introduction
When I originally started researching the subject of air pollution, at the beginning of March 2019 – driven by personal health issues to produce something in-depth for my blog that would, hopefully, also heighten awareness of this worrying subject (especially in this rural Elysium that is Warwickshire’s Feldon: where defilement of any kind probably seems at its most improbable), I had aimed to put the resultant article to bed in time for World Environment Day on 5 June 2019 (whose theme, this year, was, fittingly, #BeatAirPollution).

Paradise Regained…

So let extend thy mind o’er all the world,
In knowledge, all things in it comprehend.

It was an email from my good friend Paolo that did it. Not directly, of course. Just a little nudge; which, in turn, morphed into a diminutive, but nagging, suggestion; which, gnawing at a widening area of brain-cells, wouldn’t let go. Thirty minutes later, I had changed into some light walking trousers, a thin T-shirt, and a medium-weight fleece. (Although the only marks in the sky were man-made – the number of planes travelling over Tysoe having seemingly increased in the last year or so – the Met Office warned of northerly twelve mile-an-hour winds: making seventeen Celsius feel like fourteen.)

He knew how to keep Christmas well…

There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn’t ate it all at last! Yet everyone had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits, in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows!
– Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol

Three months ago, I wrote about my inchoate struggle with food allergies. And then went perfunctorily wheesht… – especially concerning the related battles I ended up fighting as my former fine fettle fell away….

You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone…

My momma always said, “Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

It seems Mrs Gump was right. The Good Lady Bard brought home such “a box of chocolates” just over three weeks ago – a generous thank-you gift… – and one of its many yummy constituents took me completely by surprise: giving me an intense allergic reaction. Two antihistamines, and two hours – plus many puffs of my blue Salbutamol inhaler – later, and I was on the way to recovery. It could have been much worse, though. The upshot being that I now take a pair of prescribed EpiPens with me – absolutely everywhere I go.

It looks like one – or some combination – of the many proteins in cow’s milk is to blame (eleven various forms of “milk”, from “Dried Whole Milk” to “Dried Whey”, were listed amongst the fifty-eight(!) ingredients): meaning that foodstuffs I have consumed all my life (and once helped to produce) are now permanently verboten. (Because of the 92% probability of cross‑reactivity, anything containing sheep’s and goat’s milk is also off the table. Mare’s – or even camel’s – milk will, in all likelihood, be just fine, though!)