A garden is never the same from one year to the next – a big part of its delight. But if one season highlights this more than any other, it’s that final part of the deciduous tree’s year, when the leaves may, or may not, fleetingly colour up, before falling to the ground, to rot.
As the season progresses, actual weather, future forecasts and the display of the earliest trees might give a hint of what’s to come, but nothing’s certain or assumed. It’s only after the event one can really review the season and say either “That was a bit of a damp squib”, or, “What a corker”. This year has definitely proved to be the latter, and a time of much delight, even if the opportunities to appreciate the displays in glorious sunshine have been quite limited. But there’s the rub – clear skies, and plunging temperatures are usually what ends the display. Coupled with a few gales to blow the weakened leaves off.
It was way back in October 2012, that I discussed the biochemistry of leaf colour change, which I don’t plan on revisiting. However, finding this post reminded me how much the garden has matured since then, and in particular how many of the trees which have put on such a show this year, had only just been collected as seed, and sown. In addition, several of the expensive plants which provided some of the colour interest back then succumbed a few years ago.
I decided to produce a shortish YouTube of the displays this year since it enables me to highlight just how long the season can be in a good year, the variety of leaf colours, and how a large part of this is a pure fluke. Not only do you have no idea when you germinate an Acer palmatum seedling, of its leaf form, but you also have no idea of eventual vigour or the timing and colour of any autumnal leaf display. I can’t even claim much credit for relative plant positioning, other than that many are too close together, and will need some further ruthless editing. However, a key decision was made to plant many of the autumn leaf colour trees, to the East of hedges or other trees. Since our land in this part of the garden slopes away in that direction, the coldest air can flow down the hillside, the trees still get half sun (or at least light, in these gloomy days) and most importantly, the trees are protected from the worst prevailing South Westerly winds.
The YouTube also names the most significant plants, for anyone interested in such things. The major driver for the gorgeous display this year has been the consistently warmer-than-average temperatures, which have been maintained through most of October and November, finally ending with a rare clear sky night on the 24/25th which saw temperatures at last fall to minus 7 degrees C behind the house.
I hope you enjoy this video, which shows the colour changes in chronological order from October 5th to November 25th. But do make sure you click on the cog setting to the left of the YouTube logo once it’s begun playing, and then on the quality option, and choose HD, which will then appear as a red HD overlying the cog icon when the video plays (or it’ll look a bit blurry, which would be a shame!)
As the second of four musical diversions in this post which reflect the emotional charge of this season, I’m including a recording of the classical jazz tune “Autumn Leaves”, sung below by Eva Cassidy.
It was a fluke discovery for me during the last 10 days, and I’m completely riveted. Not just by her singing and playing, and the grainy black and white footage from a live concert in Washington, just a couple of days after New Year’s Eve, 1996. But also the story of how the recording came to be made, and how she died from a recurrence of a malignant melanoma she’d had radical surgery for, 3 years earlier, just 10 months after this recording. She never achieved significant recognition in her lifetime, and that this recording ever came to be made at all was very fortunate. You can discover a lot more of interest about her in a fascinating documentary made with her band members (Eva Cassidy – One Night That Changed Everything). This includes a comment by the pianist that his subtle playing halfway through was the result of improvisation after he’d asked her what key she was going to be singing the song in, just before the song began.
She’d picked a new minor key, they’d never practised before. He knew, of course, that it was being recorded, live, and that the attempt to record the previous night’s concert had, for technical reasons, been a failure. This was their last chance. And remains the best record of her wonderful abilities. I also learned that to maintain an income whilst she taught herself how to play the guitar over the 6 years she played with her band (Chris Biondo – bass/producer, Lenny Williams – piano, Jimmy Campbell – drums and Keith Grimes – lead guitar), she worked in a tree nursery, and was very much at home “with nature”.
Did she know the cancer had/was returning when she sang this song? I don’t think so, although she had gone down with a bad cold which was getting worse by the second night’s show. Whatever. Her efforts seem perfectly suffused with autumn’s melancholy.
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A few fleeting, and uncommon recent sightings merit a record here.
First, a couple of wonderful examples of pwdre ser (Welsh for “rot from the stars”), or as it’s more commonly known, angel or star jelly. 
This was the best example I’ve seen which explains its likely origin, not as something that falls from the sky, but rather the leftover jelly from a frog or toad’s oviduct after a predator – most likely a crow or buzzard, has caught the amphibian and eaten most of it.
On the day after I’d taken the camera down to photograph it, a heron took off from our upper pond. The landscape is still a necessary if chilly hunting ground for many, even when it’s moving into a more barren-looking state.
Secondly, something I’ve never witnessed before, on one of my slow late afternoon walks along our stream. Just at the tail end of a run, and in the low, near dusk light, I spotted a small but bigger than normal trout dash upstream, and then back again. Difficult to judge its size, but maybe 15 to 20 cm. 
This would have been fairly unusual, but a second or two later, 2 similar-sized fish actually jumped out of the stream, in a panicked way, at roughly the same point, though nearer the stream’s far bank. I didn’t have my camera, and anyway, the light was too poor for photography, but I’ve never seen this happen before on our stream, and certainly wouldn’t expect it at this time of the year. I’m assuming that it might have been linked to a trout spawning event, since I’ve seen no fish at all anywhere in the stream, for many days after this, despite the water level dropping back after recent rainfall has subsided.
The third event was a poorly photographed, but clear, lunar halo which I saw by chance outside the back door this week. 
These are fascinating brief natural phenomena, which can’t be predicted, and are local in their development. All to do with ice crystals forming in thin clouds very high in the atmosphere, which I discuss in this previous post.
I’m assuming that most readers will accept these records as factually true and honest, to the best of my ability. This is how I’ve always approached compiling this blog. Although there was one memorable occasion way back on April 1st 2013, titled “Out of the Blue Black”, when, since it was April Fool’s Day, I thought I’d have a bit of fun.
The curious weather conditions leading up to the date meant thick ice forming in a water barrel which Fiona used to wash her wellies, before coming inside. She’d propped the ice slab up at an angle, and hey presto, the following morning there was another facet of thick ice that had formed.
Spotting the closeness to April 1st I saw an opportunity to create something special. All I had to do was between us, carefully lift the heavy, fragile and now multi-faceted mass of ice onto the metal table. Then take some arty photos and finally think of a narrative, complete with accurate links, and decide on a slightly oblique introduction to lull readers into a false sense of understanding, about what I was going to feed them.
In those days I allowed blog post comments and quickly realised from both the huge number of comments and the nature of many of them, just how easy it is to fool lots of intelligent people. A plausible narrative from a (previously) apparently trustworthy source, and sensible questions didn’t seem to be asked – the comments and my responses are still there at the end of that post. I felt more than a little guilty that I’d deceived so many people (in a hopefully harmless way). But it left a lasting impression of the power of any person, professional, authority or media, which has a trusted status, to deceive others. (I’m not even sure whether I’ve ever confessed on my blog to this ruse before.)
Perhaps you might like to start to play this beautiful, and also appropriately melancholic piece of music – an arrangement of ‘October’ from Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons – Autumn Canto (clearly recorded during the Covid era) by the Italian Ensemble Lorenzo Perosi, as you read to the end of this post. Notice the different image now chosen as a still for this video – not reflecting how the 3 players looked for the actual recording.
Looking back on an autumnal season, or a singer’s career after they’ve died, is easier to do with information, images or even songs to hand. More sense can be made of the arching trajectory of that time. I was reminded of this today after reading more of Dr. Clare Craig’s recent book “Expired: Covid the untold story”.
I warmed to her narrative and openness about her own personal journey (similar to mine) of extreme concern and fear of what was coming our way in the first few Covid months, followed by increasing scepticism based on her personal medical knowledge (she read medicine at Cambridge, then further training and study at Oxford and has subsequently enjoyed a high powered career in pathology and genomics, as well as becoming a mother of 4). She explains that she first came across the term lockdown, when she spent time with her family in New York, and her children had to get used to “lockdown drills” which were designed to educate terrified children into how to react should a gunman enter the school. Little did she think that they’d later become widespread as a societal control tool.
Her book tackles many of the beliefs and myths which have developed around COVID-19. I was intrigued that a key starting point was her exploration of respiratory viruses’ ability to travel very great distances after being breathed out as tiny aerosols, thus rendering many vigorously implemented control measures we’re now familiar with (masks, social distancing, even lockdowns) largely irrelevant in the eventual spread of the virus. It chimed with my quote from a pig husbandry web page about porcine respiratory (coronavirus) viruses, PRCV, made in my very first blog post on the subject on January 31st 2020: “PRCV is respiratory-spread and believed to travel long distances, and because of this, it is extremely difficult to maintain herds free from it. Very few countries have not been exposed. This proved to be remarkably pertinent, though I didn’t realise just how relevant this information was at the time.
Dr. Craig also discusses in a very open and honest way how all of our brains are easily susceptible to creating an incorrect view of reality, and also how we ALL assume we’re right on the vast majority of subjects, and are then very reluctant to change our minds. Myself included!
I’m sure this book won’t make it onto any of this blog’s readers’ Christmas wish lists, but perhaps it should. And certainly onto the reading lists of anyone who aspires to a seat in future governments or cabinets, who sooner than we might think may be faced with similar tough decisions on how to tackle the next BIG infection threat coming our way.
Why I’ve chosen to touch on this subject again, is that whilst many will be wondering what presents they’re going to buy and give to loved ones this year, there’s a group of people in the UK with sadly more pressing needs. The VITT (Vaccine-induced Immune Thrombosis and Thrombocytopenia) group has been set up to try to fight for some sort of justice for family members who died or have suffered life-changing consequences as a result of following our trusted medical advisors and politicians and having the speedily produced and mass promoted Oxford University/Astra Zeneca Covid vaccine.
If you click on their group’s website link, you may choose to read some of the tragic personal stories. You’ll also have the option in the next few days to make a contribution to a fighting fund to enable them to take the very first small steps in bringing a legal challenge against Astra Zeneca for the harm caused by its vaccine. Their condition is not imagined – it’s real and has been medically acknowledged. It would be great if they could get a few more pledges to take them over their stretch target. Sadly obtaining justice in the form of both recognition of their plight, and possibly some adequate compensation for lives destroyed will be a lengthy and expensive process.
But neither Astra Zeneca, Oxford University, Vaccitech who developed the novel mode of delivery of the vaccine, nor the government wish to engage with these citizens, who “just did the right thing”, and “took the jab”. It’s not clear how much Astra Zeneca actually made from marketing this vaccine (apparently their first venture into human vaccines). Evidently, Oxford University pocketed around £130 million in royalties from the vaccine sales, which was at least in part passed on to its employees as a gesture for working through the pandemic.
However, I note that on November 6th this year that
All that money splashed on a possible quick drug fix for obesity, eh?
I’m also reminded about Vaccitech, a private company I’ve mentioned in my posts before, whose founders launched a rapid IPO share listing of their company on the Nasdaq exchange in April 2021, just as news of the blood clot issue was starting to become obvious from reported side effects. It was Vaccitech who spent many years developing the novel technology used to create the OU/AZ vaccine, yet, curiously chose and succeeded in keeping out of the limelight, as the vaccine was rolled out. The founders pocketed around £25 million each from the rapid IPO. It’s not only seen its share price decline from about $17 at IPO launch, to around $3 now but has also, interestingly, just changed its name coinciding – I’m sure not linked in any meaningful way – with the launch of this VITT legal challenge. The new company has been called Barinthusbio
Strangely again, given all the hoo-ha about Britain being the first to produce a Covid vaccine, their (not so new) company website now says this on its home page:
Barinthus Biotherapeutics plc (formerly Vaccitech plc) is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing novel T cell immunotherapeutics that guide the immune system to overcome chronic infectious diseases, autoimmunity and cancer.
Hmmm. No mention of vaccines there, eh? Except in the old name.
But I love this new page explaining why they’ve changed the name, to one with a purpose!
The inspiration of the name from Arthurian legend nods to our UK-based history, while the strengths of a good guide and navigator very much reflect our company values and technological approach:
- Leading the way with our passion for science,
- Having the flexibility to adapt and take advantage of opportunities or avoid obstacles,
- Empowering employees to navigate for themselves,
- Being accountable to ensure we are maximizing value to drive innovation,
- And of course, inspiring trust (sic) in the patients who we are working on behalf of.
Ahhh… that critical point about inspiring TRUST.
We all know that all the vaccine manufacturers were sufficiently lacking in confidence about their vaccines’ likely long-term safety records to insist on government indemnity before ever releasing them into any particular country. 
Still, at least it seems Vaccitech have dropped the vaccine development idea. I wonder why? Of course, anyone reading up on the “extremely rare” VITT, will probably realise that this legal action is just the opening salvo in what will be a legal battle royale playing out over time since the serious side effects rapidly appearing on the government website soon after the push for vaccination was initiated (which dissuaded me from having one) contains a huge list of different disease conditions, many permanent and many extremely debilitating.
Not to mention the even more serious, and numerous, side effect issues with the novel mRNA vaccine technologies developed by Pfizer and Moderna. All of this may well be completely unrelated to the apparent ongoing rise in excess human mortality in a swathe of countries around the world over the last couple of years, which no governments or parliaments seem prepared to acknowledge or investigate.
If you follow the link to the Our World in Data site, you can easily play around with different countries to see just how many more people are now dying over and above the expected numbers taken from the 5-year average from 2015 to 2019. We’re not talking trivial figures here – often 10 to 40% more dying than would be expected, over most periods, and still continuing several years after the first, biggest, and most serious waves of Covid-19.
But how strange for our media and governments not to be worried about this ( apparently). If, given the HUGE (or so we were told), number of people who died of Covid and therefore who couldn’t sadly die again, how is it that many more people are still dying – not from Covid, and largely not from respiratory problems but other issues, and with higher numbers right across the age cohorts. Not just the elderly.
Just what is going on?
This is simply too large a topic to dive into in such a tiny blog, and for the majority of the population who’ve taken their jabs as they were told to, it’s clearly too late to worry about. Although it’s perhaps worth reflecting on a couple of previous issues with rushed-out vaccines, like the Cutter incident of polio vaccines, or the much more recent Pandemrix flu case.
Then consider the recent Danish research on the extraordinary variability of serious adverse events (SAEs) recorded after the use of different dose batches of the Pfizer Covid vaccine in Denmark.
(Numbers of suspected adverse events (SAEs) after BNT612b2 mRNA vaccination in Denmark (27 December 2020–11 January 2022) according to the number of doses per vaccine batch. Each dot represents a single vaccine batch. Trendlines are linear regression lines. Vaccine batches representing the blue, green and yellow trendlines comprised 4.22%, 63.69% and 32.09% of all vaccine doses, respectively, with 70.78%, 27.49% and 47.15% (blue trendline), 28.84%, 71.50% and 51.99% (green trendline), and 0.38%, 1.01%, and 0.86% (yellow trendline) of all SAEs, serious SAEs, and SAE-related deaths, respectively.)
And ask, why such massive variations in what one would surely assume was a standard vaccine product?
Might this have something to do with the fact that Pfizer changed the method of manufacture of the vaccine doses completely from that used to create the vaccines in their initial clinical trials to the one that was used for the mass global rollout? (The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines given to the public weren’t those studied in the clinical trials)
Did you know that the mRNA vaccines contain lipid nano-particles to actually transport the bits of viral RNA across potentially all human cell membranes, and then once in those cells the product’s designed to allow this RNA to stimulate the manufacture of masses of virus spike proteins. It’s these spike protein elements, produced by our own body’s cells which then elicit an immune response (helpful or otherwise).
This is a completely different concept from all previous conventional vaccines, where the vaccine contains the actual original infectious agent which may have been killed or weakened. There’s no crossing of the foreign material into ‘ordinary’ cells through the cell membrane. The foreign antigen is simply detected by our complex immune system cells, and elimination is achieved through engulfing and destruction of the foreign material, as well as antibody production to counter any future exposure to similar antigens.
Did you also know that the second, different, mass production protocol for Pfizer and Moderna vaccine manufacture uses the well-known bacteria E.coli to accelerate the production of dose material. One potential cause of problems with this approach has been highlighted by a recent study that has found massive amounts of actual bacterial DNA, not just viral RNA, included in the vials of vaccines.
(Or as an addendum published just after this piece was posted, the very recent research by scientists at the MRC Toxicology Unit at the University of Cambridge – maybe the clue’s in the name – which revealed that “that misreading of therapeutic mRNAs by the cell’s decoding machinery can cause an unintended immune response in the body.” And in a third of the sample of patient’s they looked at. So the mRNA “vaccine” didn’t just make our cells produce viral spike proteins, but instead our cells produced different proteins, because of this mis-reading – and these different proteins also had the potential to elicit immune responses. No one knows what impact this might have had – it clearly wasn’t known about or studied in the very curtailed trials before the “vaccines” were rushed out. But reassuringly (?) the Cambridge scientists say they’ve worked out a tweak to how mRNA vaccines can be made in future to minimise this, and heck, we know that the billions of doses already given have been “safely delivered”. Don’t we? Well worth a read to study the language the report’s scientists use, and assess what you make of it – should you have received one of these jabs.)
What are you, and what am I to make of all this?
I guess many really don’t want to know.
They simply wanted a quick fix to a big crisis. I’m sure we all did. The trouble is, there’s clearly a really murky world out there where BIG money is made, and uncomfortable truths are glossed over. How many have stopped using Teflon pans? Not us. I’m afraid.
How long did it take for the UK government to own up to the tragedy of HIV-contaminated blood products being administered to haemophiliacs? October 2022. The Macfarlane Trust was set up in 1985 to help the increasing numbers affected by HIV-contaminated blood products. And this was clearly just an accidental event. Not one where the overwhelming majority of media and governments were rubbishing or silencing any rational dissenting science and evidence-based opinions. Fortunately, this is beginning to change, at least over COVID-19-related discussion.
How long for the full story about COVID-19 vaccines to really come into the general consciousness? Decades at best, I guess. I note that Pfizer has just axed 500 jobs from their Sandwich, Kent site ahead of global financial losses this quarter, following reduced sales of COVID-19 vaccines and other treatments.
But before then, perhaps think hard about the next new must-take medical development, I reckon. And when there are calls for another lockdown, or mask-wearing, or a new vaccine, from a new set of politicians, think about that a bit more, too.
Think about who you choose to trust. The Trusted News Initiative, by a curious coincidence established in September 2019, just before Covid hit the scene? Check the list of the powerful influencers who’ve formed this cartel. Or perhaps the independents with no obvious financial axe to grind? Assuming that they’re even allowed platform access to raise their concerns or heterodoxy.
Who knows?
Me? I’ll just stand and watch the woodcock.
Or sheep.
I think I understand, at least in a small way, what makes them tick.
Thanks to The Brussels Choral Society and Ensemble Orchestral de Bruxelles conducted by Eric Delson, for this final seasonal, and possibly appropriate piece of music.