There have been fewer butterflies by this time last year, but the weather did really delay all the flowers coming out so its not surprising.
But July had made up for it, firstly with a tortoiseshell a couple of weeks ago, warming up on the fence.
But last week, I was contemplating getting rid of the overgrown and looking almost past it sow thistle. Then decided to look closely at all the fading heads and small aphid patches – thinking there is still a lot of life here. Then I saw them.
Lots of little caterpillars. The sun was coming up and made for a few awesome pictures.
I think they are starting to look like bright-line brown-eye moth caterpillars after looking through many options, but we will see. One has made it over to my small growing cherry tree and has munched its way through half a leaf or two, but that’s ok. There’s plenty there and it is food for them.
The cherry tree muncher
The detail on them is amazing when you get up close. I was also treated to large and small white butterflies making an appearance at last. Drawn in by the lavender rather than the nasturtiums. It landed as I had my camera in hand watching the bees, a rare treat compared to waiting, following and still not catching them. I hope for more to come.
To be honest, reality has never been completely normal for me. Once I was aware of the world, time, mortality, people, ideas and so on, I didn’t know how to be ‘normal’ – although I kept trying for quite some time. Everything is constantly changing, there is no stopping, standing still and taking stock of it all. To me it’s like trying to review what it was like being on a rollercoaster while you are still on it.
Reality has been really thrown out of shape this last year and a half for many. When we started to hear whispers of this ‘pandemic’ in January last year, my brain adjusted and adapted without me even trying. You see, for the past two decades, maybe longer, I have been fixated and focused on the idea of a virus. A virus outbreak to be more specific. My interest was actually first piqued in the early 90’s at school when we learnt about HIV/AIDS in PSE (Personal and Social Education – i think), I became quite interested in the science of it all and concerned by the risk fed to me by the media. Then came foot and mouth, and bird flu, and swine flu and the rest of the more recent ‘outbreaks’ which did the rounds, leading to the culling of many animals and overall made very little impact to peoples general day to day lives. But each time, I would be on alert. Watching and monitoring for any evidence or paper that would show it has crossed over, it had mutated, the risk has increased. But it never happened. No evidence ever did materialize and I did not see what I had decided were the next stages of a real outbreak with a viable threat to humans.
Along the way, I also happened to get into Zombie films. They used to freak me out, and played on what I decided was a natural fear of unseen disease, but in zombie films they made it seen, and it looked like you and me, it was the grotesque exaggeration of it all really impacted me (I think having Hyperphantasia did not help here at all!). But eventually it made me question the reality of their scenarios and setting for it. Picking it apart so I could understand it and know when to have appropriate fear. It can easily be misplaced and does not usually go well when it is present but not necessary. Fear really can control you.
Around 2018 I got quite into a game on my phone, I believe it was called Pandemic, so no guesses needed what it was about. The player is to start the virus in their preferred country and then gather ‘points’ as you infect more and more people, adapting the virus and working out how to make it supreme and deadly. It seemed just like a biological weapon skill game, how to fuck up as many people as you could and kill the world. While you are doing this, the world fights back by trying to find a cure, and if you aren’t good enough with your mutations and variants, then they cure it and the world recovers. Now in this, other things occur – even though it is just one screen of the world with flashing blobs to pop, and seeing small blue planes fly around to sort out the cure. After a number of attempts, I won. I created the one that took out the world. And it didn’t feel like a win, in any way. In fact, something else happened. I ran through all the data in my mind, all the scenarios and variants being played out in a ‘simulated’ setting, but I realised all that data goes somewhere. Yes, it could be paranoia, I considered that and thought you know what, whether it is or isn’t, I’m not playing anymore. It felt uncomfortable and I am only usually faced with that kind of discomfort when my spidey senses activate. I stopped playing it a year before the wheels were set in motion with Event201 in Oct 2019. Once that started, it was inevitable what was going to follow.
So, last January 2020, whispers from abroad started to happen. A co-ordinated effort to get the patchy information out and start reacting – they did a good job at first. It was substantial enough to take notice, more than just an article here and there, top medical people were discussing it. But there was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on that didn’t add up. All the stories and pictures seemed very set up, not natural at all. They were so specific with giving us a ‘heads up’ on everything and doing things so illogically, it gave it away to me. And the fact that all the governments (mostly) gave a co-ordinated response – that does not happen and I don’t believe we are that organised to do it if we were indeed ‘taken by surprise’ by a virus out of the blue. But where it was heading didn’t look good to me, real virus or not. I decided to start ordering a few more packets of things for the cupboard and organised to use some of our savings to send my husband on his dream trip, to Egypt to see the pyramids. I had a feeling the way they were telling it, travel would not be something we should be planning too far ahead for. I worried he wouldn’t be able to go, so we booked it and he went, in the first week of March and was back before lockdown. By this time however, my view of it all had changed. Not on him going away, I still think that was the right thing to do and the right time. The overview of my personal thought had changed.
In all my wondering and thinking of viruses and pandemics, something occurred I did not foresee. All the makings of an outbreak but without there being a virus. With this new scenario playing out, so came a new state of thought, I call it Schrödinger’s virus. I now simultaneously live in a world where the virus both exists and doesn’t exist. Part of me is ready to accept that there could be a virus that has the ability to cause untold mortality as they say, but with no evidence to back that up, that idea is put into my theory category. And in day to day life and from what I see it doesn’t exist. Death rates and figures, funeral directors and all parties who should be able to make it obvious but they are saying the opposite, so believe both, or neither, or one? We are also being pummelled by high level propaganda every day from every media outlet and social media side, it’s difficult to not be consumed by it. I wrote a fictional book a few years ago about a virus outbreak, not a zombie one surprisingly, just one that changes humanity. I worried though that there may be too many plot holes or that it didn’t quite hold up – having seen what was rolled out and used to convince the masses to be under the spell of pushers peddling their wares, I really shouldn’t have worried. I feel like I am now living a badly scripted, badly acted plot hole. It has taken a twist though with recent increases in infection, but not unexpected. I have been theorizing on all this since last March/April time and following the articles as best I can, which only a few months ago predicted that the roll out of the miracle cure, is in fact causing unintended (as far as we know) consequences. Only time and data can tell on that one – I want to be wrong. I really do hope I am.
It’s no secret that people see things differently to each other, think differently and react differently. It’s pointed out to us often, within men and women hugely – a classic book I never got round to reading springs to mind – Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus. I have heard this book mentioned and referred to by title on many ocassions (never an actual quote). But almost possibly to deflect from the fact those differences can cause issues and it’s easier to breeze over them and wave them away as ‘they just are’ rather than address them. It can be hard to get along with, communicate effectively with and have a balanced relationship with someone if you are unaware of why or how you are different. Just acknowledging it exists isn’t really enough in my opinion if it’s a fundamental one. We give people many excuses for their behaviour often without delving into the reason for it. Or think that by giving it reasoning can go someway to excusing it. Not in my mind. I like to know the why, it usually helps me to determine any possible conslusion, judgment or result that may need to occur.
There are many reasons why people don’t get along, and with some people you never will. But I find it interesting to understand why, even if the fault lies with me, it’s still good to know that. There are lots of important lessons around this I think, helping to form how we see the world, how we think the world see us, if people have that concept. But understanding why you are different can actually help you to fit in. Not in the tradiontional sense of adapting to others ways and fitting into their pattern – but finding your own fit. To a point, we all have to get along; living side by side and weaving our way through life together (unless you have removed yourself from having to). But finding out who are can be a tough one and coming up against others opinions, ideals or wills can be a challenge when they clash with your own. In this modern time of instant and sometimes public ommunication, being aware of the impact of influences is important.
But it should also be factored in that ideals, thoughts and perpsectives can change with time and experience. Your own and other peoples. It would be odd to expect to be the same person at 40 that you were at 20, impossible in my view. So it shouldn’t be a suprise that you may ‘outgrow’ people as they say, or ‘drift apart’ or simply just change. All of those can be correct, and are ok. But if poth parties aren’t aware or mature enough to really understand that, then there can be difficluties and I guess, arguments and fall outs. It’s not easy when you may have outgrown someone, but they haven’t you.
On top of personality and general interest differences, there are the fundamental ones that can affect things. For that I will reference one that can go completely undetected, for decades and even life, but is a really important one in my recent experience. The ability to visualise in mind. Some people can’t. Most people can apparently, and there is a percentage who over visualise. Although they don’t actually know, they have presumed that only 2% can’t visualise – calling this Aphantasia, the small percentage, maybe 10% they say over visualise – called Hyperphantasia. And everyone else they say is on a varying scale of being able to visualise between not at all and all the time. That is what they used as the base ‘normal’ level.
I didn’t know this was a thing, until well into my 30’s. All my life I have visualised, over visualised and remembered much, places, dates, times, people, events, amounts, information. Usually relevant to my life, some of it outside events and extremely useless trivia that seems to hang around of it’s own accord. I naively presumed that everyone did this. So, the applecart in my mind was well and truly tipped over, when through various discussions and disagreements between myself and my husband, I discovered through continued questioning and reasoning what I consider to be a fundamental difference, and one that was actually the root of many of the issues. He did not visualise. At all. It sounds small doesn’t it? He doesn’t ‘see’ pictures in his head, and I do, what’s the big deal? I wish it weren’t one, and that it was just as easy as he is left handed and I am right handed. But the nature of what unfolded from that was more complex – there were different areas it affected firstly between us, and then indivdually. We also both had to content with understanding we really aren’t like each other or everyone else. And being honest, it can throw you sideways a bit when you just thought you were average and like everyone else. Then also realising that no-one else is really who you thought they were either. It can bring a whole lot of questions, and did. Opening a few more strange doors into self knowledge that I couldn’t help but venture into.
I then tried to work through it all and address which areas I felt it affected and why, trying to help my husband adjust to this new knowledge and explain to him as best I could, what is going on in peoples minds. While at the same time trying to integrate this new aspect of thought into my own assessments, of myself and others. It was a game changer for me and has given me an entirely different perspective on my past, present and future, and how I view and try to understand other people.
If you would be interested to read more about this experience, my book Meeting in the Middle of Nowhere is available on Amazon.
The kites are back, haven’t seen many yet this year, but they often pass right overhead catching the thermals. If I have my long lens handy I get an occasional shot. One from this year and a few from last year.
Today has been very exciting in the garden. The warm weather and flowering plants have bought in an abundance of insects.
After seeing lots of ladybird larvae on my rose bush that had grown very tall in the last few months, I’ve been checking in case I see any grown up and today I saw them all. I don’t think I was checking properly before, just a quick glance and you can miss them. But I believe there are 5 different ones, just today, on one plant! One had strayed over to the charlock too.
10-spot Adalia decempunctata
2-spot ladybird Black on red
Middle stage ladybird
7-spot ladybird
7-spot ladybird larvae
22-spot ladybird
22-spot ladybird
Harlequin ladybird
The picture of a larvae was from a few weeks ago, but that’s not bad for a short time in the garden in one afternoon. Its roasting today and not easy to stand in it for too long, but I will be back out there again for rumage around. Have been picking more berries today to whip up a pudding which I may just share with you all later. Well, the recipe that is, I haven’t made enough for everyone.
Here is one from last year to add a bit more colour to a pretty cool set 🐞
I see lots of talk about cashless, the people for and the people against. I’ll put my two pence worth in.
I find it a strange concept, but work well with it, money. Cash has been the norm for a very long time, and in principle, theory and practice it works. You earn it, you spend it, you live. It seems simple. And it is. But somewhere along the line, someone decided to shoehorn themselves between the simple transaction of one person giving it and one person receiving it. The banks are the middle man between you and your money. They hold it for you and in turn get paid for that privilege. In fact banks only get to make huge amounts of money, because we have money. They also then get to see what you do with your money, there is then a financial record for you. It’s a win win for them.
Then someone else decided that there needed to be another middle man between the seller, the bank and the purchaser. They introduced the merchant fees via card payments, so now there are two middle men making money from the seller/buyer transaction. So now you have two outside parties essentially making money from the fact that you have it, and that you decide to spend it. Seems ridiculous to me, but what do I know.
Now, with the looming threat of cashless, I felt there is a need to review cash again and how it actually affords a number of freedoms many seem to overlook. That is my assumption, and it could be that people may just not care, but either way the outcome doesn’t change because you may feel differently about it. It is not the idea in principle of having a cashless society that bothers me, on the face of it, it sounds practical and efficient. All your monetary transactions recorded and monitored, reviewed and analysed. Doesn’t sound weird at all. Much. Have to say, despite the fact that I lead a very boring ‘record’, I don’t really want there being a central point showing what I watch, eat, read, wear, like, don’t like, who I talk to, what I say. Why should that be recorded anywhere – back in the day you would have had to pull together an awful lot of receipts for that, and follow someone for a really long time. Now most people share all that on public forums, which is fine if they don’t mind. I personally still believe that I wouldn’t want anyone finding my personal diary if i had one. And that is what it would contain. Your hopes, dreams and fears. Who you like and hate that week. But now it is all online, shared on a daily basis, freely. Another thing that I don’t understand, and think maybe I am just wrong about people and they really don’t mind what I see as an intrusion.
Back to the issue of cash – the problem I instantly think off with that idea, is all the areas of life it will affect. Firstly though, I’ll put the plus sides forward and you see if you think you personally will benefit from any of these. They will be able to make sure you pay all your taxes on earnings because they will know about all your income. They can stop drug dealers and money laundering (but fail to mention the amount of it that happens online). And as far as I know criminals have bank accounts and crypto currency is being used in all sorts of enterprises, so it might not minimise that after all. That’s the advertised benefits for the system creators.
So, what are the upsides to us the user of this digital credit system, the ones whose money is being taken from us or will simply bypass us, to be given back at somebody else’s whim, because from where I’m sitting, all the benefits are with the controller of your money. As we are pushed into a society where social credit scores are becoming the norm, reward based games and point scoring being inducted into people’s psyche, I can’t help but worry that access to your finances will be dictated in the future as they try to have more control generally over people’s decisions in life. Like a parent who decides if you are ‘allowed’ to spend that much, or are ‘allowed’ to take part in an activity. We know these systems already exist in other countries, so it is not unreasonable to think it’s a blueprint to be tried on others.
Maybe I am wrong to think people should be outraged and horrified at the idea of someone telling you where to go, what to buy and who not to talk to. As a grown up the idea of being treated like a child again is awful and one I won’t be going along with. But to my surprise I have witnessed multiple examples of people handing over responsibility for themselves and their lives to the state. I can only imagine they think it is there to help you, or look after you, or to wrap an arm around you and tell you it will be alright. Once I looked into it further, I could see this was not by accident. I enjoy reading social history to try and work out how we got to where we are. And I suspect the concept was born after WWII when the ‘cradle to grave’ ran alongside the NHS being created. Giving the people the impression the government was here to look after you from birth to death.
Weirdly though, I read a lot about the Victorian era growing up and had no idea there would be government handouts and benefits when you got older. I believed that if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat, therefore you would die or end up in the workhouse/poor house. So thought I had better be resourceful and employable. From around 10 years old I thought this was how would be. I always thought at a minimum I could be a chamber maid or cleaner and was frustrated I wasn’t able to work until I was 16. It was quite a surprise to learn about benefits for unemployed people as well as disability benefit which made sense, and child benefit (which I couldn’t get my head around why we had that at all). I also thought it seemed like a way to control people, restrict how much they have and tarnish them. It used to have a bit of a stigma attached to say you were on benefits, not so much now. But on the face of it they were a ‘helping hand’ whereas I saw it as an apron string being tied around you, and it felt as such for the short time I had to claim unemployment in my late teens.
I kind of see the same thing with only cashless. The only way they can monitor, dictate, control and decide things for you is through your ability to live – money. It can all tie back to that. If you have to ‘scan’ in anywhere to buy food, what if you are rejected? What if the system crashes? What if they freeze your account? What if you don’t have enough to buy what you need? You can’t borrow any money because you aren’t ‘allowed’. It used to sound like crazy talk, and now it’s a potential reality. Sugar tax, another one that raises alarm bells (trust me, it’s all tied in), they decide you are too fat for whatever scale someone somewhere decided, so you are put on a diet by the state (because you know, got to save the NHS). You try to but a treat. Denied. You want to have a drink, water only. And if anyone else buys you something, they will know because of all the cameras and because you had to ‘log in’. That person will either be denied too, or deducted social credit points.
The odd thing about that is, some people do genuinely seem to like the idea, they have admitted they cannot control their own lives or finances, and they would feel safer and happier if someone else took responsibility. Or, they openly admit they want to see people ‘punished’ for lack of will power or habits. I can’t see any other reason for it, why else would people be okay with that idea becoming part of their lives or inflicting it on others, of having an overseer or surrogate parent setting all the rules and enforcing them.
Words and their real meaning seem to have been terribly lost of late, and the concepts that accompany those words are being overlooked or not given the time they deserve. I like to use words to describe exactly what I mean, but now know that not everyone has the same meaning for things. Not everyone can imagine with pictures in mind, but however you do, please try and imagine where this all goes. And if you do not see a problem with where we are or how we got here, then good for you. I however, am keeping a keen eye on what is currently unfolding at an alarming pace. These are strange times upon us.
A further piece on Monitoring if you need some help with vision of how far they might take it for the next step.
MKW Publishing 