Tuesday May 18th 2021

09:00 Lois and I stay in bed a bit longer today - there's no rush, so why not take advantage of that?! I see on my smartphone that the main COVID topic is the "Indian variant", but it seems to be very localised in areas where there are large numbers of Asians, and is almost entirely affecting people who haven't been vaccinated.

I put this type of article in the "sensationalist" category - for a start it deals in percentages of variants, not in numbers of cases, and talks about 5 million people living in "areas" where the variant is the dominant one, which is a bit vague, to put it mildly. Perhaps the media are getting desperate!

10:00 Perhaps a bigger story is on today's Quora forums, where the question has been asked, "How accurate are the pictures we get of medieval times from Hollywood movies set in that period?".

Surprisingly, the answer coming from historical expert Kip Wheeler seems to be that if Hollywood were depicting medieval Europe accurately, between one-third to one-sixth of young adult women between the ages of sixteen and forty should be "visibly pregnant when they waddle into range of the camera".

It was a world without legal birth-control, and women had a large number of children, that is, if they weren’t nuns, of course. 

Margery Kempe, the Christian mystic living in Norfolk in the early 1400's, for instance, had fourteen children by the time she was forty. And, as Jason St. Pierre comments, this number reflects the 14 children who survived - we have no idea how many other babies were miscarried or died at some point later on. 

A reasonable guess at the normal number of pregnancies for an average medieval woman would be that they would have had about ten children, of which about a third would survive to adulthood. So for true authenticity we need to see more pregnant women in movies, or "women in pig", as Nancy Mitford puts it in "The Pursuit of Love".

some typical medieval women

I check later in the day and I see that other experts have weighed in, pointing out that many characters in films set in medieval times aren't wearing hats, which is a glaring error. Also far too many men are clean-shaven.

What madness!!!! Wake up Hollywood!

On the vexed question of "medieval teeth" - would they have been rotten, given the lack of advanced cosmetic dentistry? Some say yes, they would have been awful; others, however, think that medieval teeth wouldn't have been that bad, because most people in those days did not have the dubious "benefit" of all the sugary foods that we have today. So the jury is still out on that one.

Fascinating stuff !!!!

15:30 We go to our near neighbour Frances's house to water her greenhouse and plants in her absence: the greenhouse - yes, that makes sense. But her other plants are in any case soon going to get deluged by proper rain any moment, if the gathering storm clouds are any indication. 

We decide to go ahead anyway and water everything: if we don't, the rain is sure to hold off. Damn, we can't win haha !!!

we start watering Frances's garden, as storm clouds

gather (not shown)

Lois assigns me the key job of turning the water on and off

16:00 We come home and have a cup of tea. Down comes the rain - oh dear!

19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's Tuesday Bible Reading Group on google meet. I settle down on the couch to watch Episode 4 of the Danish crime series "The Killing".

I try to follow the plot but I'm getting more and more confused. 

I get distracted by news that billions of cicadas are waking up in the US after a 17-year sleep. I know I've got a maths degree but I have trouble squaring that cycle length with the fact that Lois and I remember cicadas being active at some point in time during the time when we were living in Maryland in 1982-85.

As usual, and quite predictably, the return of the cicadas has sparked resentment among other, more hard-working species, as I see from Onion News.

KNOXVILLE, TN—In response to the brood’s re-emergence after lying dormant since 2004, several area insects reportedly said, “Wow, hope you had a nice 17 years off,” to a group of periodical cicadas Tuesday, expressing annoyance over being forced during the prolonged absence to torment humans on their own.

“You certainly look refreshed—that was some break, huh?” a local mosquito told the cicadas as it called over some ticks, wasps, fire ants, and brown recluse spiders that sources confirmed worked twice as hard to inflict fear and disease upon humans while the cicadas “took their sweet, sweet time doing God knows what” beneath the ground.

“Us? Well, we’ve stayed busy flying into people’s eyes and ears, biting everyone, and generally preventing them from enjoying the outdoors. We sure could have used your help, but don’t worry, it’s cool. I mean, it wouldn’t have killed you to pop in a few times over the past 17 years to scare the shit out of some kids by buzzing around in their faces. No worries, though. We covered for you. Oh, I see—now that you’re finally back, you’re just going to lie around and mate? You know what? Fuck you guys.”

At press time, reports confirmed the cicadas had agreed to do their part by emitting a deafening, 100-periodical cicadas hum that would ensure no one in eastern Tennessee could sleep for the next four to six weeks.

It's such a pity, isn't it, that whatever happens, you can find a lot of moaning going on from some source or other. I've noticed that fact from listening to BBC News on our radio in the kitchen. Any event anywhere in the world, and you can guarantee that BBC correspondents will find something or somebody prepared to moan about it in front of a microphone or at the end of a phone line.

What a  crazy world we live in !!!!!!

21:00 Lois emerges from her google meet session and we go to bed early - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!