09:00 Today is St Patricks Day. Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia, has told us that her 7-year-old twin daughters, Lily and Jessie, have been encouraged to wear something green today in honour of St Patricks Day. Lois and I are looking forward to seeing pictures posted by their teacher. There's nothing yet, however, but watch this space. It's a Catholic school, so we imagine a fair proportion of the children will have an Irish heritage, and we expect a fair take-up of this suggestion!
10:30 We go for a walk on the local football field.
We also visit the so-called Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) [Stop calling it that! - Ed] between the second dog-walking field and the new housing estate - it's the area seemingly devoted to pools of muddy water and piles of junk, plus a mechanical digger and some portable toilets: the work we have witnessed being done there has been enthusiastic but with no obvious purpose to it - what madness!!!!
aerial view of the local football field: the so-called Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is
just behind the left-hand field (the tree-dotted, so-called "second" dog-walking field)
as we pass the "DMZ", a mechanical digger is doing some pointless work there again
- what madness !!!!
10:50 We stop at the Whiskers Coffee stand and we order a hot chocolate (Lois) and a flat white coffee (me) and we drink them sitting them on the buddy bench outside the Prestbury Parish Council offices.
we sip our drinks outside the Parish Council offices
For added interest we observe and photograph passing dog-walkers [Can you prove that that represents added interest? - Ed], also the parish's football field line chalker guy, who is renewing the chalk lines marking out the football field.
note the dog-walker (left) and 2 new customers for the Whiskers Coffee stand
note the Parish's football field line-chalker guy with his machine (left),
and a dog (right) being "walked" by its owner (not shown)
Life is good haha!!!
15:30 We have a cup of tea and some bread and home-made jam on the couch.
I look at my smartphone, and see an interesting discussion about Neanderthals on the quora website, and a few reasons why we don't see many (or indeed any!) around nowadays. Certainly Lois and I saw a fair smattering of local people on our walk this morning, and they all seemed to be homo sapiens as far as we can judge, if that means anything - a small sample-size admittedly!
Chandler Grant (crazy name, crazy gal!) has been trying to answer the question "Why is Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA totally absent from the
human gene pool?"
She writes, "The Y-chromosomal genes sequenced from Neanderthals
are also absent from modern human males. The reason is that the “admixture”
story of Neanderthals and archaic H. sapiens is a very messy
one (not necessarily incorrect, though). And we must keep in mind that the
database is not perfect.
"The absence of Neanderthal mtDNA could be caused by the dying out of the H. sapiens population(s) that interbred with Neanderthals (which may also explain the absence of Y-chromosomal genes from Neanderthals). Also possible, but not without flaws, is that genetic drift occurred, the mtDNA was incompatible and either led to foetal death or death of the less-fit “hybrid” children, that Neanderthal males sometimes interbred with female H. sapiens and thus did not contribute their mtDNA, or that the “hybrid” offspring of the Neanderthal mothers (whose fathers would have been H. sapiens) were raised in the Neanderthal groups and died out with them.
"But that gets tricky when you try to account for the fact that in modern East Asian and European human populations, the total introgressed Neanderthal DNA found spans 20% of the entire Neanderthal genome — so admixture had to have occurred to some extent, and quite a bit. The most parsimonious and data-fitting explanation for this is that there was very recent interbreeding (conservatively, 37,000–86,000 years ago)."Here’s what sounds good to me, personally:
The original population(s) of H. sapiens whose members
interbred with the Neanderthals around this recent timeframe also interbred
with other H. sapiens populations before dying out, and if the
successful offspring had happened patrilineally, the mtDNA would not be passed on
and the Neanderthal genes we see in modern human populations would. (Then you
have to account for the lack of Neanderthal Y-chromosomal genes, but that
wasn’t the question)."
16:00 We make an appointment with our dentist's surgery for Lois to have her dislodged crown looked at - the earliest possible time with our usual (Romanian) dentist, Daria, is not till my birthday, which would be a damper on the day. So we accept one with a different dentist, Chris, for next Wednesday (24th).
Fascinating stuff !!!! But how complicated! My god!
an artist's impression of how a Neanderthal group might look like,
when walking over our local football field
The surgery is obviously experiencing difficulties caused by the pandemic - hence the lack of timely appointment slots. We imagine they are having to "space out" customers, to fulfil social distancing guidelines. I don't suppose they will want me to accompany Lois into the waiting-room, as I would usually do. I think I will just have to drop Lois off in front of the surgery, and either wait in the car or go home and wait for a phone call to come and pick her up afterwards.
Daria, the Romanian dentist with the good, relaxed conversation skills
and the charming smile, photographed here with a typical patient
16:15 We go out for a drive to keep the car "ticking over" - we haven't used it for a week.
We drive to Bishops Cleeve and back, a drive we wouldn't normally consider doing in Cheltenham Gold Cup week, but as this year this premier horse-racing festival is being staged "behind closed doors", we take the chance, and it turns out to be okay.
The police are really serious this year about keeping people away from the races after last year's debacle. In the almost 50 years since we moved to Prestbury, we have many times taken a walk along one or other of the many footpaths that lead to the back of the racecourse, looked over the fences and sampled watching some of the races "for free". This year the police have closed all these footpaths, or so I've read in the local news websites. My god - what madness!!!!!!!
flashback to 2009: the racecourse in happier times -
we walk along the footpath that skirts the back of the course
19:45 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I settle down on the couch and listen to the radio, the latest edition of Melvyn Bragg's discussion programme "In Our Time".
Unfortunately I don't get much out of this programme - facts and theories come thick and fast, and although I try to take notes, I have to give up in the end, half way through. Even presenter Melvyn Bragg himself seems a bit out of his depth - usually he keeps his invited academics on a short leash and makes sure they don't get too technical, but tonight the academics are just too articulate, I feel, and there's no stopping them or even "interrupting their flow" occasionally - damn!
Why did most fish species die out towards the end of the Devonian period? I get the impression that it's something to do with plants coming out of the oceans and beginning to populate the land, breaking rocks down into soil, and the soil getting into the ocean and making things unpleasant for the fish - something like that! But I may have got totally the wrong end of the stick here. I plan to do some private research and then listen to the programme again another time.
21:00 Lois emerges from her Bible Class and we watch a bit of TV, the latest programme in the series "Amazing Hotels".
This edition is about the 130-year-old 5-star Torridon Hotel, built originally as a hunting lodge, in north-west Scotland.
One of the hotel's proudest boasts is that he has a bar stacked from floor to ceiling with a different whisky for every day of the year - cripes!!!
the bar of the Torridon Hotel, complete with its 365 different whiskies,
from every corner of Scotland - yikes!
Tonight, a young Canadian couple staying at the hotel, have booked a "whisky-tasting experience", which we watch. We learn that some whisky-lovers will pay enormous prices for a really special dram. A bottle of Macallan last year went for £1.4 million at auction - my god!
We also see presenter Giles Coren practise measuring out a dram of whisky using a special measuring glass.
I only found out this week, incidentally, that the right of customers to have an officially-approved amount of drink in their glass was actually guaranteed for us in the Magna Carta, signed over 800 years ago by King John and the barons, on June 15th 1215.
What a crazy country we live in !!!!!
presenter Giles Coren (right) practises pouring out an
exact dram of whisky, under the watchful eye of French barman, Shane
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!
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