18 May 2024
Last Sunday, the day after I’d written about Israel realising “their ceaseless rocket attacks have probably killed the Israeli hostages that Gaza was holding”, Hamas announced that one of their Israeli hostages had died from wounds inflicted by an Israeli rocket attack. I sometimes wonder who reads these mutterings.
Later in the week, we discovered that scientists have discovered an earth-sized planet orbiting a small, ultra-cool red dwarf star some 55 light years away (which, bearing in mind that it takes less than 1½ seconds for light to get from earth to the moon, is a long way away). It’s about the same size as Earth and orbits its star in 17 days, which means that a year there lasts 17 days and, if I lived there, I’d be well over 1,500 years old.
How do they know there aren’t two planets of the same size relative to their ‘sun’, 180o apart, on the same plane, that take 34 days to circumnavigate the star?
On earth, a 2019 study of almost 8,000 cats by the Royal Veterinary College has shown that some breeds tend to have shorter lifespans than others and the Sphynx cat, an ugly, hairless little beast bred intentionally (and incestuously) in the 1960s, has an average lifespan of 6.8 years while Burmese and Birman cats live for an average of 14.4 years. The average lifespan of all breeds was 11.7 years.
There are two obvious conclusions to be drawn if these results are accurate and representative of all cats in a particular breed:
- if you want a long-lived furry friend, get a Burmese or a Birman cat
- if you want to get rich, breed Sphynx cats.
Much coverage has been given to the Garrick Club’s decision to allow members to join after almost 200 years and somebody has suggested a list of women who might become members, including people like Mary Beard, Judi Dench, Elizabeth Gloster, Amber Rudd and Juliet Stevenson but it’s not clear whether these people have actually expressed an interest in joining, or even whether they were consulted before their names were mentioned. It may be entirely misguided on my part but I’d love to have been there when Judi Dench was told she’d been suggested as a potential member.
I’m also puzzled by the people who have been named as members, though I admit some have been embarrassed enough to resign after their membership was made public. Having turned down invitations to join various clubs over the years, I still can’t imagine wanting to join any club that excluded women but that’s basically because I feel more comfortable in the company of women than I do in the company of men.
The limited membership problem made me think of Mensa, the organisation whose membership is limited to people who score highly on IQ tests. I could never see the point of joining a group of people whose only common feature was enjoying doing IQ tests.
But I sometimes wonder if I’m a bit unusual. I did a bank of tests recently and one question involved listing as many words beginning with P I could think of in a minute. At the end, I was told I’m the first person they’d ever come across whose first suggestion was ‘pterodactyl’.
I recently read ‘A Spark of Light’ by Jodi Picoult, who presents the story backwards. It has a thought-provoking plot, is well written and telling the story backwards adds an interesting dimension to it; the first section is headed ‘Five p.m.’, the second ‘Four p.m.’ and so on (with an unavoidable coda headed ‘Six p.m.’) An interesting selection for book clubs?
As we age, our senses can weaken, with a need for glasses and hearing difficulties usually the first to be recognised. Losing our sense of smell can be harder to identify, despite its close links to memory. Sometimes a particular smell can bring back a vivid flash of memory from decades ago and scientists are wondering if losing our sense of smell might be an early sign of the memory loss associated with dementia. However, research has been complicated by the loss of a sense of taste, which is closely related to smell, being one of the symptoms of Covid.
Smoking also dulls the sense of smell and I remember when I gave up smoking that I smelt something, possibly cowslips, and realised I hadn’t been able to smell them for years. This could, of course, be a good reason for smoking like a chimney if one works in a sewage plant or an abattoir.
When I first started work, every office had ashtrays, heaped high with butts and, looking back, it’s shocking to remember that we smoked in department stores, foodshops, aeroplanes, cinemas and trains – even the London underground – had special ‘no smoking’ coaches. Nowadays, smokers have become social pariahs who huddle together in windy corners and a 2021 survey showed that the number of adult cigarette smokers in America had fallen by almost 50% in the previous 15 years.
This is bad news for tobacco companies but, as good capitalists, they reacted by offering smokeless nicotine pouches and vapes which give the illusion of smoke. Even more disgustingly, at least to those of us who used to smoke French cigarettes with the distinctive flavour of Algerian black tobacco, vapes now come with fruit flavours, presumably to hook in younger smokers. The pouches contain anything from 1½mg to 9mg of nicotine, compared with the 8mg to 20mg in cigarettes, of which only 1-2mg is actually absorbed.
To put the dangers of smoking into perspective, according to the Office for National Statistics, about 75,000 deaths in 2021 in England and Wales were smoking-related; about 21,000 were alcohol-related and about 5,000 were drug-related. The last figure includes 2,250 from opiates, 850 from cocaine and the other 1,900 from all other class A, B and C drugs, of which about 20 were related to cannabis (though more deaths from other drugs were of people who also had traces of cannabis in their system).
What nobody seems to know is the percentage of people actually using these drugs who died so these totals don’t indicate the relative lethality of the various groups (but don’t we wish we weren’t starting from here when classifying and taxing various drugs).
Lesser Mutterings 