Chim chiminey, chim chiminey, chim chim Cher-ee – Marshfield – March 2021

Spring has sprung.

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Weir Pool frog nursery has opened 🐸

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4th March 2021, and a year since we flew back from India to the UK. At the time the UK had a grand total of 55 cases of coronavirus. A week later on 12th March the WHO declared it a pandemic and two weeks after that the UK was in lockdown! On the 4th March this year 6,385 people had tested positive in one day. At the peak, in January this year there were 68,000 new cases in one day! It‘s hard to believe that a year on we would be in this situation. The UK is in its third lockdown and the whole world continues to be impacted by the virus.

One of my favourite Instagram posts this month has been ‘March 2021, much like March 2020 but with toilet rolls on the shelves’. 😝

Virus? What virus?

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We couldn’t go to Brazil this winter but the Brazil Covid variant came to us. Not a good alternative and hopefully it won’t interfere with the ‘roadmap’ out of the ongoing lockdown.

The country lanes and woodlands around Marshfield are peppered with these cute little purple violets.

Violets always remind me of Mum ❤️ and also the African Violet perfume which seemed to be all the rage back when I was little. I remember the lady in the little post office in Dyrham village selling it. I also think of Mum when I see those Parma Violet sweets. I always think she likes them but I could be wrong…. like the long running Bournville chocolate fiasco. Basically I grew up thinking Mum liked the Fry’s Chocolate Cream bars, Turkish Delight and Bournville dark Chocolate. I always thought she liked over-ripe bananas too, but now I look back I realise that she probably just ate things that we didn’t like, rather than waste it, bless her. I have done the same over the years too.

In one of the “Free Stuff” boxes in the high street the other day I saw a little bottle of what I assumed was perfume. In my heart it was African Violet, but in reality I have no idea. However, I picked it up as it reminded me of my childhood. Kay Savage and I used to make perfume out of flower petals and water. Gosh I hate to think how badly it actually used to smell! ….I think I’ve mentioned that before.

Anyway, I just went out to the garden to take the photo below, and saw Mum over the fence. I excitedly showed her the bottle ready to reminisce, but she he has no recollection of African Violet perfume at all. So I went to the front door to ask Dad, and although he doesn’t remember the perfume he does remember old Mrs Moss who used to run the post office in Dyrham. I said how I remember her selling off very old stock and that she had lots of little bottles of what I remember to be African Violet perfume. He said he remembers the very old stock because he got a pair of socks from her once and when he brought them home and pulled them on to his feet they broke apart because they were rotten. Dad, being Dad (and like Mum) he never took them back to complain. 😊 It’s funny what you remember some 50+ years on – never anything of importance that would help in a pub quiz or Who Wants to be a Millionaire…. or school exams over the years 🥴 ….but lovely memories all the same.

I was talking to a nurse the other day in my doctor’s surgery, having gone there to have a blood test. I was explaining why, that despite being the grown up age of 59, I still didn’t like needles. I thought that it was because as a child the school nurse always called us in alphabetical order, and seeing as my maiden name began with a ‘W‘ I was always at the end of a long line of anxious children queuing down the school corridor. Each of us was watching as child after child, with surnames from A though to V sheepishly entered the nurse’s room. We could hear muffled yelps as the needle went in, and saw them walking back to the classrooms holding their arm. Anyway I was telling the nurse this story and she said how her great-grandad was in the army and back then they used the same needle for every soldier. So if you were at the end of the line it was pretty blunt and therefore more painful. Can you imagine that now!? Madness.

Despite my dislike of needles I went along to have my vaccine at the centre set up at the Bath Racecourse. I couldn’t actually feel the needle going in which was amazing. When I went along with Glen four days later I started to walk to the entrance with him so I could take photos of him in the queue. I was told by a volunteer that I wasn’t allowed to take photos of the outside of the vaccine centre…. no one told me that when I was there taking photos of the inside four days before. Oops.

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And yes I am younger than Glen but yes I did have my jab before him! Don‘t ask… especially don’t ask Glen! 😬

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Now that Glen and I have finally had our first dose of the vaccine it means that, not only has Jack had it, but all four of Lauren and Jack’s parents and all six grandparents have now been inoculated. Most of us had the Oxford version, otherwise known as AstraZeneca and the blood clots! (now that definitely sounds like a punk band Alan! 😂)

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Excuse the dodgy photo, but we wanted to capture one of the colourful pheasants that are in abundance in the countryside around the village. Most fly off before we can get a photo but this one walked slowly away from us across the field, but not slowly enough for Glen to get his camera out of the backpack before it was too far away. We hear them all around us on our walks across the fields. I’ve seen lots right by the car, stood in perfect sight with the sun catching their colourful feathers as I drive down the lanes on my shopping days but never where we can take a perfect picture of them. Another bright sunny day I drove towards a large field of sheep and their newborn lambs. They all suddenly started running towards the farmer who had just gone through the gate up ahead of me, from every corner of the field. It looked like rice being funnelled through an hourglass. It would have made a brilliant photo and I wished that in those moments we had the technology to just blink our eyes and take a photo in that split second. I guess we do in a way, it’s called memory, I just can’t share it with you though.

On 27th March I took Mark to have his jab and as I sat outside watching one after the other of willing ’vaccinees’ donning their masks and traipsing in to the surgery at socially distanced intervals, I thought about the thousands of used needles and empty vaccine vials these centres must have at the end of each week. I wondered how they disposed of them. I ‘googled it up’. As I typed into the google search bar ‘what happens to the used’….. ‘What happens to the used vaccine needles’ popped up! I was obviously not the only one wondering.

I read an American article which said that an unintended consequence of COVID-19 safety procedures has been a surge in trash, from face masks to gloves, and now the discarded syringes and needles from COVID-19 vaccines. If laid end to end, the needles from the number of vaccine doses needed to inoculate the entire U.S. population, about 332 million, would create enough waste to wrap around the Earth 1.8 times. Why do they measure things like that! I have no concept of how long that is, other than very long! I was heartened to learn that manufacture Pfizer actually requires the return of the trays and boxes of the vials to enable it to fulfil its commitment to reusable resources. I must say that I found myself thinking about how they could clean those tiny vials out and re-use them like the doorstep milk delivery companies do with the milk bottles. I guess it wouldn’t be viable (vial-ble excuses the pun!) So, what happens to the needles and syringes? Well they heat them to 360degrees for 90 minutes to sterilise them and then make them in to plastic ‘bricks’ encapsulating the needles and are put in landfill! I can’t help thinking that maybe Trump, if he had got in for a further four years, had planned on using the ‘bricks’ to build that wall between the USA and Mexico!

After reading to the end of the American Covid-19 vaccine rollout waste management problem it gave me a list of further reading to click on. “You might also like:“ The first option being “This is how old your dog really is in human years, and its not age x 7.” 😳 Not exactly what i was expecting after what I thought was a serious bona fide site which answered my original question.

I’m not sure I actually want to know what the UK does with such waste, or India. I have watched a video recently showing garbage trucks backing up to the harbour’s edge and sliding the contents into the sea. It beggars belief in this day and age…. although anyone having been to India probably won’t be surprised.

In other news, I was envious to hear that following a meteor entering our atmosphere and streaking across the skies near here, a family in Cheltenham found a ‘chunk’ of it on their driveway. However, as everyone got excited, I was just hoping it wasn’t carrying some out of space virus! Mars-coronavirus-3! 😉

NASA’s Perseverance vehicle has been ‘exploring’ the surface of Mars since it landed on the red planet on 18th February after it’s incredible seven month journey. It has been going about its business behind the headlines of the news. Sadly the violent clashes with Police in Bristol and the ongoing “when can we go to Benidorm on holiday?” question have taken priority in the headlines again this month.

There is always a bit of happiness around in The Marsh, even on a dull day…

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Someone had painted a rock and left it in a tree 🙂 It looked welcoming and cute in the daytime
but it might be a bit of a shock to someone walking their dog after sunset!

Catkins, or lambs-tails as we used to call them as children

To end the month with a housey lockdown sort of finale we arranged to have the chimney swept. As it turned out it was on the first day that we are legally allowed to walk with or sit outside with another family. Anyway, I was looking forward to it as this was going to be a sight I hadn’t seen for some 50 years and something I thought I’d never see again. As a child my Dad would sweep our chimney with a huge circular brush on a long pole poked through a piece of old sheet draped across the fireplace. It created a lot of dust and mess but he was creating special memories for me as he did so. That and the delivery of dirty bags of coal seem a lifetime ago, and I suppose it was.

So a professional chimney sweep in 2021 is not sooty faced and doesn’t sing, or dance on the roof. However, he was a lovely man, but was armed with a disappointingly small chimney brush, two large blocks of foam and an electrical dust collecting device. This ensured that there wasn’t any mess and the whole job, including a natter, took just 30 minutes. It was underwhelming photo-wise and made me look on the internet for a photo of the old-fashioned brush Dad used on his normal open chimney and not the narrow, lined, safe chimneys for log fires nowadays. I went on to read how the first occupational cancer was actually found in chimney sweeps back in the 1800s. I had already read about it in Bill Bryson’s book ‘The Body’ actually. I also came across photographic evidence of chimney boys, the young children who went along with the sweeps to climb inside, and up into, the chimneys. I know this county is not perfect even today but my goodness we have come a long way since those days.

Before I end this month’s blog I want to make a note that the England had a census this month. It was all very modern with the option to complete the form online. Nothing like the first census back in 1801. I know it wasn’t exactly a complete census but I always think of the Domesday manuscripts as the first, or oldest record of a census. Called the Great Survey and completed back in 1086 by order of King William the Conqueror, It was written in Medieval Latin and was mainly to determine who owed what taxes.

I have just read that Marshfield was a settlement in the Domesday Book. It recorded a population of 68 households, putting it in the largest 20% of settlements recorded in Domesday. It had 36 villagers, 13 smallholders, 1 priest and 18 slaves! 😳