The Holly Tree

The Holly Tree

It must have been about the time of the Coronation, sometime in the early Fifties, when I went with my Gran to put some flowers on her husband’s grave in Tewkesbury Cemetery.  I had never known him, because he had died in 1940, from the after effects of a World War One gas attack, six years before I was born.

My grandmother died in 1980, and I moved to Australia.  Nobody visited the grave.

I returned in 2005 and I was shocked to see that the grave had become so neglected that a sizeable holly tree had grown upwards out of my grandfather’s last resting place.  

I looked around at the other graves.  Many of the Tewkesbury families’ names I recognised.  The Sircombes, the Sallises, a Hathaway – even a Shakespeare lay by some Tustins, who were buried near some Hoptons and Warners.  

They were all Tewkesbury people, (I recognised their family names) but I knew none of them, because they had all died before I was born.  It was then that I realised that my grandfather would have known almost every one of them.  He’d known where they worked, where they lived, who he would have met up with in a local pub.  They might have been in the Abbey Choir, or played in a made-up cricket match in a local street.
Many of his friends left Tewkesbury by train to fight in the Great War.

The holly tree was growing out of my grandfather’s grave.  
It had grown from my grandfather.  It was my grandfather.

It was then that I realised that he was sheltering his friends from the storms of winter and shading them from the summer sun.  Who could say his grave was neglected?
May he live on for generations to come.

The Holly Tree

 It must have been about the time of the Coronation, sometime in the early Fifties, when I went with my Gran to put some flowers on her husband’s grave in Tewkesbury Cemetery.  I had never known him, as he had died in 1940, from the after effects of a World War One gas attack,  six years before I was born.

My grandmother died in 1980, and I moved to Australia.  Nobody visited the grave.

I returned in 2005 and I was shocked to see that the grave had become so neglected that a sizeable holly tree had grown upwards out of my grandfather’s last resting place.  I looked around at the other graves.  Many of the Tewkesbury families’ names I recognized, the Sircombes, the Sallises, a Hathaway – even a Shakespeare lay by some Tustins, who were buried nearby to some Hoptons and  Warners. 

They were all Tewkesbury people, and I knew none of them, because they had all died before I was born.  It was then that I realised that my grandfather would have known almost every one of them.  He’d known where they worked, where they lived, who he would have met up with in a local pub.  They might have been in the Abbey Choir, or played in a made-up cricket match in a local street.

He would have known the friends of his who left Tewkesbury by train to fight in the Great War.

The holly tree was growing out of my grandfather’s grave.  It was made from my grandfather.  It was my grandfather.

It was then that I realised that he was sheltering his friends from the storms of winter and shading them from the summer sun.  Who could say his grave was neglected?

May he live on for generations to come.

Building 75

 

BUILDING 75 - Keep Out

This is a horror story.  It is often true.  

Do not read further as it contains disturbing material!

Every day, on his way to work, the young man passed a large grey building in an even larger field.  It was a bit like a hangar on an airfield, but it wasn't quite that.  There was a feeling of menace about Building 75, but the young man, and indeed, all the young men from nearby did not know what it was.  There were all the usual rumours, but no-one knew, nor what had happened to Buildings 70 to 74.

Ivy clad and lonely at the top of the hill, very few people entered, and he couldn't recall seeing anyone come out.

He told his friend about it.  His friend laughed it off, and asked why the young man thought that there was something special about the building.  

"Would you like to look around it?" 

"I think I've just found an ideal 40th Birthday present for you." said the friend.  

"You see, I'm one of the very few keyholders of the place.  I can't tell you who owns it, or what's inside.  It's beyond Very Secret, and past Immensely Secret.  I've never been in there myself and so I don't know what is in there."

The young man was curious.

"Who gave you this key?"  

"I told you, I don't know"

"You must have some idea of what's inside!" 

"I have no idea."

"You still want to go into Building 75?"

"You bet!"

On his birthday, the young man went with his friend, and his friend took his key and opened the door.  The young man noticed the floor was uneven, and he stumbled  a couple of times.  The air was thick and he found breathing difficult.  He no longer could tell the time.  It was more and more difficult to catch his breath.  He'd had enough.  This wasn't a fun birthday present at all.  He tried to run for the door and he fell over on the uneven floor.  He could see old men in the distance.  They were all dead, they were just piles of bones.

Breathlessly he went round all the walls to find the door.

There was no door.

Anywhere.

Thirty five years have passed by in a flash.  The building is darker now, and quieter.

I am that young man.

I have not found the door in thirty-five years, but one day, someone will come through that door, and I must somehow get out.

But if you read this, you won't have found the door either.

And you, and I, and all the others, will all be piles of bones.

Tree Disease in Snow Gums

 I heard some very sad news today and I found myself surprisingly quite emotional about it.  Apparently (it was Breakfast News after all), one of the key features in the Southern Uplands, the Snow Gums, are in trouble.  (You can tell we're in a different hemisphere, can't you?  We have Southern Uplands and you have South Downs, both of which are elevatory land structures.  (Hills and Mountains)

Anyway, (distracting thought over), I heard that the beautiful snow gums are dying, and they are dying because of a disease caused by beetles, and also global warming.

I originally come from North Gloucestershire, in the UK, and in my youth I used to play in the fields.  These fields were bounded by hedges.  They've worked out that a new plant variety grows in a hedge every hundred years, so if there are four or five main species of plant in a hedge, it's probably round about 450 years old.

Our hedges contained blackberry briars, dog rose hips, haws and elms.  The elm trees stood out because they were two hundred years old and up to a hundred feet (33m) tall.  They were magnificent trees.  I used to wake up as a small child, and look across a couple of fields to a group of about ten of these giants.

From 1970 to 1974, I went to Bradford University, which entailed a lengthy 200Km long train journey.  Coming south at the end of term, once we had passed Birmingham, heading south, we went through "my" country, the wooded country I knew and loved, where the hedges held the giant elms.

It was 1971 when the Dutch Elm disease reached Gloucestershire.  I don't think it was particularly Dutch, but it was caused by beetles that turned these elms into Edam cheese.  There was no cure.  The affected trees had to be felled, and then all of the timber, every twig, had to be burned.  You killed the beetle, but you burned the tree.

At that time, there was no "Global Warming", but the beetles were real enough.  Every twelve weeks or so, as the train headed south from Birmingham, the country had changed.  Gradually, the trees where I had played were fewer and fewer.  After a couple of years, the land seemed flat.  And empty.

I have never been to the Southern Alps.  I have never seen a snow gum.  But when I heard that it was a beetle-borne disease, I feared the worst.  The elms, for all their magnificence, were only a fairly small part of the mixed ecosystem.  The snowgums are in a virtual monoculture with its own small ecosystem.  I don't know what has developed in Botanical Research over the last fifty years, but my guess is that the infestation is uncontained, and the wood will have to be burned.  A couple of years ago, we had terrible wild fires, which pushed several species of plant and animal almost to extinction.  This time, the disaster is in a small alpine ecosystem that exists in wild country.  Sadly, how many animals and plants will survive the almost certain destruction and burning of the Snow Gums?

A statistical approach to Corona virus

You know that from a previous post, I surveyed different pandemics and found that the second wave was larger than the first wave.

This was true right from the Black Death right up to the Spanish Flu

First, if you don't know about graphs, this is the terminology I use.

The horizontal axis (X) measures the wavelength in days which can be measured  either peak to peak or trough to trough.

The vertical axis (Y) measures the amplitude which is the number of cases discovered each day.  We do not know the true numbers of cases, because they are governed by the number of tests, the number of people who recovered and the efforts to minimise the number of cases.

The time taken to germinate is fourteen days, therefore I smoothed the curve by graphing the AVERAGE of the last fourteen results, each day.

My thoughts are as follows:

I have an X value smoothed by 14 points.  The shape is identical to previous historic pandemics.

If you have a medical event, it will have to be a wave of infection and healing (or death).  There is no time for a standard wave to form, and so the second wave is added on top of the first wave to form the largest wave.  This is why it is so important to attack the  pandemic as early as possible, so that the second wave is minimised.

Think of a pebble dropped into  a pond each ripple gets smaller as its amplitude is spread over a wider circle.

I've calculated that REGARDLESS of what is done (the smooth amplitude wave will vary depending on what treatment is available) the time of variation (i.e. the wavelength) will remain constant at about four and a half weeks from trough to trough.

There should be a gently falling line along the top of the waves which will cut the X axis after the fifth wave at about mid-September this year. We shouldn't even think of crossing international boundaries until early August, mid September and the end of October, but not in between.  "Normality" should return at Christmas.

So, sadly, it looks as though I shall miss the Fair, Abbey 900, and Florence, my favourite city.  Perhaps 2022, but I shall be 76, buut at least I shall not die of the pestilence :)