What is this Covid, Actually?

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
Step out of line, the man come and take you away -

                        Stephen Stills: For What It’s Worth Dec 1966

Here are a few thoughts around where we might be in the current debate about what Covid is, and the place of vaccines as a benign countermeasure to any effects it engenders. We might start with the idea that a serious disease has for some reason spread across the world and is causing a significant number of deaths as well as serious illness. A small but significant minority of people refute this, but if we wish to pursue a realistic debate, we must start with the assumption that a disease named Covid-19 exists and warrants investigation (qua Stephen Stills "There's something happening here/What it is ain't exactly clear).  

So, is it clear? Is there any mileage in the view that this Covid 'pandemic' created from nothing but the authoritative voice of government and media? Could this be another plank in the ongoing construction of one of the greatest acts of sleight of hand, 'bait-and-switch' or whatever you like to call it in the history of the world?  

My instincts in March 2020 at the beginning, when looking at the UK figures for Hong Kong flu in 1968, were that the 1968 (and 1957) events were deadly indeed but had by no means been the subject of co-ordinated and prolonged lockdowns and general governmental push towards mask-wearing and social distancing. Why then were the prospects in this latest event any different?  

By May 2020 it was way too soon to compare the numbers, but H3N2 had at that time seemed to have proved deadlier than COVID-19. Between 1968 and 1970, the Hong Kong flu killed between an estimated 1 and 4 million, according to the CDC and Encyclopaedia Britannica, with US deaths exceeding 100,000, and the UK 30.000. In May 2020 Covid 19 had reportedly killed around 295,000 globally and around 83,000 in the United States.   

Do we trust these figures? Between 1 and 4 million seems to be a meaningless statement, for example, but in a half hour of research trawling many websites, I could find no consistently authoritative numbers.   

Here for example is what GAVI says "In terms of the number of deaths COVID-19 has caused (349,095 as of 27 May 2020), it is actually more comparable with previous flu pandemics. The Asian flu in 1957-1958 killed an estimated 1.1 million people, close to the 1 million people thought to have been killed by the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968-1970". Not 4 million, then?  

We can read in Wikipedia that “worldwide deaths from the so called Hong Kong virus peaked in December 1968 and January 1969”. At the time, public health warnings and virus descriptions had been widely issued in the scientific and medical journals. In Berlin, the excessive number of deaths led to corpses being stored in subway tunnels, and in West Germany, garbage collectors had to bury the dead because of a lack of undertakers. In total, East and West Germany registered 60,000 estimated deaths. In some areas of France, half of the workforce was bedridden, and manufacturing suffered large disruptions because of absenteeism. The UK postal and rail services were also severely disrupted.   

But do we look back on the years 1968-1970 and see panic, lockdowns and endless debates about vaccinations and controls? In the West, certainly we do not. These years were populated by seismic events, such as the Apollo moonwalk, Prague Spring, the escalating war and TET offensive in Vietnam, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, Woodstock, student demonstrations especially in Paris but elsewhere, the Ohio University campus shootings…  

The World Health Organization estimated the case fatality rate of Hong Kong flu to be lower than 0.2%. The disease was allowed to spread through the population without overarching restrictions on economic activity, and a vaccine created by American microbiologist Maurice Hilleman and his team became available four months after it had started. (More about Hilleman follows below).  

Meantime, in current Covid-19 global up to date figures using Worldometer, the reported deaths worldwide currently is 4.5 million. (Sept 2021). This is 0.058% of the global population. 0.2% UK.0.198 % USA 0.16% Sweden (Using Worldometer figs for deaths and population).    

However, we know that the UK presents its figures as deaths with Covid within 28 days of a positive test.  Are we clear what India does? Or China? Or Brazil? Do the Worldometer figures address these different approaches to data collection and interpretation? And indeed, finally, and crucially, how many deaths have actually been prevented by the waves of draconian measures put in place by governments worldwide? It ain't exactly clear.  

What is clear is that distance lends a kind of perspective. The last truly devastating global pandemic was incontrovertibly the so-called Spanish Flu post 1918. The world was at that time already in tremulous shock. That pandemic simply ripped through populations already traumatised. It created a new fractured politics, a new fractured art. However which way we look at the current sets of data, the effects of current pandemic - in terms of illness and death - bears no relation at all to the 1918 devastations. That is exactly clear.  

And so to vaccines.   

Maurice Hilleman was a difficult beast, but massively influential as a vaccinologist at a time when the zeitgeist did not challenge the concept in the way in which we are led to believe today. He is now more or less faded into obscurity. But in his story in the late 1960s, we have many of the elements repeated in today's melange of activity: angst, virtue-driven certitude, mutations, quickly developed vaccines, maverick scientists, conflicting political and medical opinion.  

Interestingly we read this about Hilleman in a 2005 Obituary: [ BMJ Obituary republished in the National Library of Medicine https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC557162/   

"Hilleman characterised several viruses and identified changes that could result when a virus mutated. This concept, which he worked out while at the Walter Reed Institute of Army Research, helped prevent a huge pandemic of Hong Kong flu in 1957. Learning that the flu was a new strain, 40 million doses of vaccine were rapidly made available in the United States."  

"Hilleman's style of working was iconoclastic. Dr Offit said, “To give you an example of how he worked, in 1963, [when his daughter had the classic symptoms of the mumps,] he swabbed the back of his daughter's throat, brought it to the lab to culture, and by 1967, there was a vaccine.” He added, “Today's regulation would preclude that from happening... If Maurice was alive today, I doubt he would be able to be Maurice. He was a very strong-willed person and a person like him could face a high level of inertia.”  

"During his more than 60 years in basic and applied research, he earned a reputation as an often harsh , impatient fellow who tangled with industry and government bureaucracies. Hilleman defended his pushy and prickly behaviour (today also we might say deeply sexist), which offended some colleagues and co-workers, as crucial for science to advance. He argued that politics, not science, determined which breakthroughs were brought to the marketplace".  

And so in the space of 60-odd years, it seems we have a complete volte-face of the public perception about the deployment, and the constitution of vaccines. The mavericks today are named Montagnier, Yeadon, McCullough, Raoult, Fuellmich, Zelenko.....  

In the current marketplace of opinion (for many opinions are indeed monetised via (anti)-social media and burgeoning video platforms), debates are intense. We might look at the assertion that most of the vaccinated population have no idea of the substance they are allowing into their bodies. Or perhaps very little idea. This, of course is incontrovertible. But whether this is a reason alone to vilify the current crop of vaccines, produced in circumstances which are familiar to mainstream virologists, is absurd. The bigger picture is how medicine has become compromised since the development of a post-enlightenment science-based medical establishment, and petroleum-based solutions which have overtaken and more-or-less supplanted natural and holistic medical practice. How to understand and respond to this is a matter for individual conscience. In a free society, this remains a right and is the source of discussion, such as this one.   

Aside from people of faith, for most people living in the maelstrom of modern existence, when defining how we stabilise as best we can, the health of nations, there can be trust in the authority of the day which is paid for through the Social Contract (whether this be via taxation, or democratic affirmation of the majority, or tribal acquiescence). Or we can develop and act upon our  individual knowledge of the workings of viral vectors, mRNA and their relationship to spike proteins et. al. and so act independently according to individual conscience. The perspective of history tells us that this pragmatic approach to medicine - with all the checks and balances of scientific understanding - saves lives and improves the prospects of millions. 

That is the balance which we inhabit in the modern era. But what is new, of course, is the prospect of the weaponizing by governments of the binary between vaccinated and unvaccinated, and between the tested and untested. This set of notes ends where that discussion starts. But the mood music in the airwaves is not promising.   

September 9th 2021

Update: December 27th 2021 : Here we are in the UK.

Recent UK Government announcements on  Covid Passport interventions in the everyday, neatly summed up in terms of Identification Document Validation Technology (IDVT).

For What It's Worth 

Buffalo Springfield. Released December 1966 

There's something happening here

But what it is ain't exactly clear

There's a man with a gun over there

Telling me I got to beware 

I think it's time we stop

Children, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down? 

There's battle lines being drawn

Nobody's right if everybody's wrong

Young people speaking their minds

Getting so much resistance from behind 

It's time we stop

Hey, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down? 

What a field day for the heat  

A thousand people in the street  

Singing songs and they carrying signs   

Mostly say, "Hooray for our side"   

It's time we stop

Hey, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down? 

Paranoia strikes deep

Into your life it will creep

It starts when you're always afraid

Step out of line, the man come and take you away 

We better stop

Hey, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down? 

You better stop

Hey, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down? 

You better stop

Now, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down? 

You better stop

Children, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down?   

Songwriter: Stephen Stills For What It's Worth lyrics © Cotillion Music Inc., Ten-east Music, Springalo Toones, Ten East Music, Richie Furay Music, Cotillion Music, Inc.  

T.S.Eliot Reading "Landscapes"

I found this quite by accident recently, whilst doing a Google search on "no concurrence of bone". Those words were triggered in my memory when discussing with an old friend the last line "And Zero at the Bone" in Emily Dickinson's "A narrow Fellow in the Grass". 

Thanks to this random thread of events, the piece now also appears on the T.S.Eliot Society website at www.tseliotsociety.uk

T.S. Eliot reads Landscapes from Don Yorty on Vimeo.

I. New Hampshire

Children's voices in the orchard
Between the blossom- and the fruit-time:
Golden head, crimson head,
Between the green tip and the root.
Black wing, brown wing, hover over;
Twenty years and the spring is over;
To-day grieves and to-morrow grieves,
Cover me over, light-in-leaves;
Golden head, black wing,
Cling,swing,
Spring,sing,
Swing up into the apple-tree.

II. Virginia

Red river, red river,
Slow flow heat is silence
No will is still as a river
Still. Will heat move
Only through the mocking-bird
Heard once? Still hills
Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,
White trees, wait, wait,
Delay, decay. Living, living,
Never moving. Ever moving
Iron thoughts came with me
And go with me:
Red river river river.

III. Usk

Do not suddenly break the branch, or
Hope to find
The white hart over the white well.
Glance aside, not for lance, do not spell
Old enchantments. Let them sleep.
"Gently dip, but not too deep,"
Lift your eyes
Where the roads dip and where the roads rise
Seek only there
Where the grey light meets the green air
The hermit's chapel, the pilgrim's prayer.

IV. Rannoch, near Glencoe

Here the crow starves, here the patient stag
Breeds for the the rifle. Between the soft moor
and the soft sky, scarcely room
To leap or to soar. Substance crumbles, in the thin air
Moon cold or moon hot. The road winds in
Listlessness of ancient war,
Langour of broken steel,
Clamour of confused wrong, apt
In silence. Memory is strong
Beyond the bone. Pride snapped,
Shadow of pride is long, in the long pass
No concurrence of bone.

V. Cape Ann

O quick quick quick, quick hear the song sparrow,
Swamp-sparrow, fox-sparrow, vesper-sparrow
At dawn and dusk. Follow the dance
Of goldfinch at noon. Leave to chance
The Blackburnian warbler, the shy one. Hail
With shrill whistle the note of the quail, the bob-white
Dodging the bay-bush. Follow the feet
Of the walker, the water-thrush. Follow the flight
Of the dancing arrow, the purple martin. Greet
In silence the bullbat. All are delectable. Sweet sweet sweet
But resign this land at the end, resign it
To its true owner, the tough one, the sea-gull.
The palaver is finished.

1933-1934

Peter Green

Peter Green was a brilliant team player. As well as a gentle soul and unique genius.

The original Fleetwood Mac demonstrates this in spades: 3 brilliant guitarists with their own unique styles, with the solid Fleetwood/McVie rhythm section holding it all down.

The Peter Green Splinter Group saw the man re-emerging with all the old powers in place, with a band of musical excellence and mutual nurture.

 Examples:

The original Fleetwood Mac at their zenith  

The Peter Green Splinter Group 2003:

[  YouTube Link:  Copyright reasons disallow the video itself to be embedded here, sorry! ]

Behind the music there are all those stories. And in the music, and its inter-song presentation in the second video, there is food for woke vigilantes to chew on.

None of it matters. There is transcendence here.

Wind-in-Pines Remembered

These are a few snatched images from old notebooks and albums stored away for almost a half-century. How well I was looked after - with my travelling buddy Bob - by the Burnham family in those Summer 1972 days! It was a special time. Why I took no more photos is a mystery. Though of course, a Kodak Instamatic and a couple of 24-frame film rolls was all I seemed to think was enough for a 3-month sojourn in the USA. But in recompense, the memories of Sebago Lake remain fixed vivid in the mind.

How we enjoyed creating this! Long gone now I'm sure

Wind-in-Pines

Not far, though it seems an age; yet
No eternity, just an instant in time.
Here is another country; here
City vapours vanish, and sweet air
Whistles the wind-song sifting in Pines.

The rain is music in the forest trees
And the mingling of a past and present falling
Softens the carpet of ground for a transient listener.

Here is a new song, yet scarcely
Dare I listen, dare
Scarcely touch the brittle stems
Perennial
Yet only of a moment’s time.

Sebago Lake, Maine
June 22nd 1972

Eduardo Paolozzi: General Dynamic F.U.N.

Featuring in the exhibition space at the Woodstock Museum this month is the touring exhibition of silk-screen prints from Eduardo Paolozzi. It is on show until February 9th and features a series of fifty screen prints and photolithographs created between 1965 and 1970. These screen prints are firmly rooted in the pop-art movement, and pre-date the more famous iconography of Andy Warhol: both artists employing techniques which allow for replication of the work in various modes of colour and sequence.

A swift look through the comments made by contributors to the visitors' book encouraged me in the view that I was not alone in finding the mainly-chaotic in this well-organised presentation. A sense of humour and detachment helps to get the best of these images. I came away echoing the thoughts of the majority about this heap of images from advertising, films, cartoons, screen and cultural icons and much else by way of cultural ephemera. The art presents a window to the minds of generations now, that have been exposed constantly to multifarious and random ideas and images from all directions, putting upon us a constant pressure to sift and sort through so much input - so that in the end we must rest with the flow in a place which may or may not fit a coherence.

© http://wutw.co.uk/eduardo-paolozzi-general-dynamic-f-u-n-the-oxfordshire-museum/

Momentarily I called to mind the commercial work of Robert Opie. He, like Paolozzi had passion for advertising ephemera as a boy and young man, and I remembered him from one summer maybe 50 years ago now, where I lodged in his house in West Ealing and was surrounded by tins and packages of famous consumer goods and commercial brands, which later formed a minuscule part of what has come to be a major collection and commercial enterprise. To each their own: art or commerce in ephemera, the subject for reflection today.

From Robert Opie Collection
© https://www.museumofbrands.com/time-tunnel/ 

Hampton Gay: Small Place, Big History

Hampton Gay is one of those unusual and fascinating places where railway, canal and river all meet, to indicate every possibility of progress and prosperity. But these days, Hampton Gay is a hamlet down a simple track, a few cottages, a church, and several shapes in the ground which are all that is left of former dwellings. A major feature is the ruined 16th Century manor house, now a scheduled monument, which answers to any description such as "picturesque", "haunting", "eerie" or "evocative". 

The Manor

We took a few hours on the last day of 2019, to explore this place, walking from the nearby village of Hampton Poyle in December half-light. The idea was to visit the ruined manor, but also to pay small homage to my grandfather, who spent a couple of years with his wife and growing family, as a cowman here just before the Great War

Like many villages nationwide, Hampton Gay's population was more numerous in medieval times. Post-Black Death, the decline was almost complete by 1428 when the village was exempted from taxation because it had fewer than 10 householders. 

But there was always the mill. And the development of the wool trade. These two elements to the growth of Hampton Gay were the source of its prosperity from the 16th Century, until a series of 19th century disasters overtook the village and brought it to its current incarnation, a place of memories, but also of contemplation and a livelihood for a few families in the current, prosperous-looking households.

Economic and Social History 
Hampton Gay had a water mill on the River Cherwell by 1219, when it became the property of Osney Abbey. It was converted to a paper mill in 1681, working with the converted corn mill at Adderbury Grounds, 12 miles upstream of Hampton Gay. The mills originally produced pulp, and from this, the paper was made in batches by hand until 1812. 
Then in an upgrade, Hampton Gay mill was re-equipped to manufacture paper mechanically and continuously. Then even more development and prosperity came in 1863–73 when the paper mill was rebuilt with a gasworks, steam engine and other machinery. 

But then, a disaster: in 1875 the mill was destroyed by fire. But it was restored to production in 1876, and further to this, in 1880 it had both a water wheel powered by the river and a boiler-fed steam engine. Production rose to about a ton of paper per day. 

The Mill and the Manor
The tenants running the mill during these upgrades, were a J. and B. New. With the manor house nearby gradually going past its prime, it was divided, and the New partners became tenants of one side. However, by 1887 - coincidentally with the terrible fire which ripped through the manor in that year - the News went bankrupt and the mill and associated property were sold to settle unpaid rent. 

The Manor
The Barry family built the manor house in the 16th century. Their money came from wool, and the fortunes of the manor and its upkeep followed the pathway of the demise of the wool trade with the development of the Northern cotton mills. And so, the manor kept its Elizabethan style until the 19th century, but by 1809 it was in a state of neglect, and well past its former glory. 

And so it was, in the 1880s the house was divided, and its final demise came in that fire of 1887. The house has never been restored and remains an ivy-clad ruin. 

Enclosure and Agrarian Revolt
In the mid-16th Century, with wool still a major source of wealth, the Barry family enclosed land at Hampton Gay for sheep pasture. In 1596 Hampton Gay villagers joined those from Hampton Poyle to join a revolt against the enclosures. 

The rebels planned to murder members of the landowner family and then to march on London. But the plot was foiled, and five ringleaders were arrested and taken to London for trial, and one was sentenced to death. But the Government of the day also recognised the cause of the rebels' grievance and determined that "order should be taken about inclosures...that the poor may be able to live". Parliament duly passed an Act to revert the land enclosed since 1588 to arable. The problem of enclosed land, of course, reared its head again in the late 18th century, but by then the focus of prosperity in Hampton Gay had firmly switched to the mill. 

Rail Disaster
The Oxford and Rugby Railway, built  in 1848–49 ran between Oxford and Banbury and adjoins Hampton Gay. The nearest station at Kidlington was closed in 1964, but the railway remains open as the Cherwell Valley line.

The Shipton-on-Cherwell train crash, one of the worst accidents in British railway history, occurred near Hampton Gay on Christmas Eve 1874.  Workers at the paper mill in Hampton Gay assisted the injured, and the inquest took place at Hampton Gay manor.
Full details appear in an Oxford Mail retrospective here. 

The Church
Hampton Gay had a parish church by 1074, with restorations and additions during the 13th Century.  It was completely rebuilt in 1767–72, though the architectural style is somewhat piecemeal and unprepossessing. In the context of the current state of the village, it has its own charm and is a reminder of busier and more fortunate times.



Epilogue!

Why did I record this here? I guess only as a small homage to my Grandfather, and his time here which I first learned about, as most of us with Ag Lab forebears do, from research into family ancestry. 

Edwin Betterton at Hampton Gay 

. Here is his image, from a larger photo of his father and brothers, in the Oxford Journal Illustrated August 30th 1916.  

Edwin Betterton August 1916

Naunton Dovecote, Glos.

In another of those dull wintry days which seem to be the norm this season, we took a trip out across the Gloucestershire borders with no particular aim in mind. We saw the signpost to Naunton on the A436 past Bourton-on-the-Water and decided to take that road. And so by serendipity we chanced upon the Naunton Dovecote, a site I had not known about,  but one which repaid a visit, especially as the light lifted awhile and the sun shone on the ancient stonework to create an inviting scene to explore awhile.

A notice-board has the following guide to the past and present incarnations of this quite special place by the river.

The Naunton Dovecote is reputed to be 15th century in origin but sadly there is no documentary evidence to confirm this.  Its architectural style suggests that it was built in the early 1600s but only dendrochronology would be able to establish this with any certainty and the tests carried out to date have been inconclusive.

Whatever its age the Naunton Dovecote is an important building, being Grade 2 listed and an Ancient Monument. It is typical of the stone-built Four Gabled style of dovecote and is particularly large, having 1,175 nestholes. Inside, the bottom tier was filled in during the Second World War to prevent the chickens, which were housed there, laying their eggs in the back of the nestholes! Most dovecotes had this adaptation made when brown rats became a pest around 1750.

Nestholes

There are 903 open nestholes now form the basis of a nesthole sponsorship scheme. Donors who have made gifts to help purchase and restore the building. Additionally, friends of the Naunton Dovecote Trust have sponsored some of the nestholes inside the building.

View on arrival

Ownership of a dovecote was limited to a privileged few in earlier times: in this case to the Lord of the Manor of Naunton. The young “quabs”  were farmed as a luxury meat for the table and their by-products (known as guano) were considered the finest fertilizer known at the time.

A dovecote was also something of a status symbol for the Lord of the manor and so tended to be in a prominent position and built to the highest standards of the day.

In those days also, the pigeons feasted freely on the surrounding crops - whether or not they belong to the Lord of the Manor. This caused hardship and bad feeling among the peasant classes.

The Naunton Dovecote is unusual in that it lies in a Valley by a river and is, fortunately for the general public, visible from all around. Dovecotes were normally built on prominent ground so that the pigeons could keep an eye out for predatory hawks.

The Louvre or Lantern at the top of the building was designed to allow the Doves in and out, but not the hawks, who could not negotiate the vertical flight pattern needed to enter and leave. The Louvre of the Naunton Dovecote was redesigned when it was restored in 2001 as there were no visual images remaining of the original arrangements.

When corn became very expensive 1794 to 1918 the dovecotes fell into disuse and many of the 20,000 dovecotes originally recorded in Britain fell down or lost their original features by conversion to other uses.

Not so the Naunton dovecote which, because it lay by a river, was converted to a mill for grinding corn for animal feed. The door was moved from the east elevation facing the manor to the South a window or doorway was built in the North elevation and a 1 storey extension on the South side covering the door was built. It was dug from the river into the Western side of the mill and the large wheel was driven by the force of the water.

The most recent project, completed in July 2018, included excavating the head race where the water entered the lean-to on the Western side, and this can now be seen by visitors.

 in 1952 due to a decrease in the volume of river flow and thus pressure, the wheel was removed and the dovecote was used to house cattlemen's chickens and pigs for general agricultural purposes.

The currently ruined turbine house by the sluice was built in 1929 to supply electricity to the Manor House. One recent project included repairing the turbine house as a ruin, removing and reinstating the turbine machinery and digging out the first section of the head race exit leat from the building. Again, visitors can now see these features which lie beyond the dovecote building by the river.