Stotinki From Heaven

Today was supposed to be a strike day for railroad workers in the UK, but apparently their strike -- originally scheduled for Saturday, today and Wednesday -- has been called off. We're still having a tube strike on Thursday, which means London underground services will be running minimally if at all. In addition, the postal service is due to go on strike for a couple of days at the end of the month and even nurses are talking about industrial action.

May you live in interesting times, as someone in China once apocryphally said.

Fortunately, since I walk to work, the transit strike shouldn't affect me much. And mail, I can take it or leave it -- I never get anything important on paper anyway, except my New Yorker subscription, and frankly I wouldn't mind if that stopped coming for a while. The nursing strike is a bit more worrisome.

We had a quiet Sunday here. It rained almost all day, sometimes pretty hard. I read the first 60 pages of "Great Expectations" and I'm finding it pretty smooth sailing, though it's scary how quickly I get drowsy when I'm reading a book. It doesn't happen when I'm on a computer, I suppose because computers are more interactive.

I took Olga to the cemetery in the afternoon and even though it was wet and drizzly she walked with enthusiasm. (I forgot to bring her tennis ball, though, which earned me reproachful looks.) We're supposed to go back to the vet this evening for a checkup to see how her dental abscess (or whatever it is/was) is doing.

I found the coin that you see to the right on our high street. I was perplexed about where it was from but eventually figured out that it's a Bulgarian 50 stotinki coin. (Apparently a stotinka is the equivalent of a penny -- there are 100 stotinki in a lev, the name of which comes from the Bulgarian word for lion.) Who knows how it got lost in my neighborhood. Apparently it's worth 13 US cents or 11 British pence.

The image on the coin is the Madara Horseman, which I'd never heard of. It's a large rock relief carved on a cliff in Bulgaria in the 8th Century.

You learn something new every day, right?

Wardrobe Organization

I had to go pick up a prescription for Dave in St. John's Wood yesterday morning. He went to a hospital urgent care center near the school on Friday but the doctor forgot to give him some of the recommended medication, so I went back for it -- ear drops and throat spray. That's St. Elizabeth, above, keeping watch over the hospital's entry foyer and the empty wheelchairs.

Dave is not a happy puppy. He's having trouble eating because his throat and ear are so painful. He says the doctor swabbed him for strep, and I guess we don't have the results of that test yet. His fever seems to be down, though, so that's a good sign.

It was indeed very rainy yesterday. I spent the day reading The New Yorker and I'm pretty much caught up now and ready to start "Great Expectations." I also did a load of laundry, watered some plants and organized Dave's armoire.

Dave's method of storing clothing is basically to pile everything up -- and I say "pile," but even that implies a level of neatness beyond what I'm really describing. I'm convinced that he forgets he owns a lot of his clothes because they disappear at the bottom of a mound or the back of a shelf. I hung his pants in one place, shirts in another, summer stuff in another, stacked shorts and t-shirts together and flipped the stacks so he'd wear some of the stuff that had previously been relegated to the bottom.

A lot of it he probably won't want to wear, because when Dave wants to dispose of an article of clothing, he doesn't put it in the trash or the charity bag. He shoves it to the back of the closet. I remember when I met him he had a big pile of clothes on the floor of his closet. I took them all to the cleaners and got them wearable again, and only much later realized that was pretty much his clothes disposal pile.

The other day I came home to find a pair of socks lying in the middle of the bedroom floor. "What are these?" I asked him.

"Oh, they have holes in them," he said.

"So they're trash?"

"Yeah."

Of course one wonders why they were not therefore in the trash can...just like one wonders why dirty clothes often don't make it to the hamper.

But anyway, his clothes are much more organized and hopefully visible now, and whatever he doesn't want to wear perhaps we can get into a charity bag.

Here's one more Halloween pic I forgot to use earlier -- a creative jack-o-lantern I saw on my way home from work!

Are You Still You?

Well, it's starting to look like I might escape whatever illness Dave has. It's primarily an ear infection, we think, and he's on antibiotics. He felt better yesterday but feverish and in pain again last night, so he's kind of up and down.

My boss, meanwhile, came back to work yesterday and it turns out that although she had a sore throat, she never had a fever. So she might have had something else entirely. (She'd run a marathon the weekend before and I suspect she was simply worn out.)

So far, I feel fine. In fact I was hoping to do some walking this weekend, but the weather is supposed to be abominable so that probably won't happen. Perhaps I can finally catch up (again!) with my stack of New Yorkers and start "Great Expectations," which has been sitting neglected on an end table next to the couch.

I did read an interesting New Yorker article this week exploring the idea of identity as our lives progress. Are we the same person now that we were when we were young, or are we essentially an entirely different person, with different behaviors, goals, relationships? Certainly our knowledge changes over time; maybe we change so much, too, that we aren't even the same self anymore.

The article postulates that some people see themselves and their past in a very episodic fashion, in which who they are now is entirely different from who they were, say, 20 or 30 years ago. And others see their lives as very linear, a slow evolution in which their current persona is still related to their more youthful ones.

Personally, I think I'm of the linear variety. When I look back at my teen-aged self, for example, it still feels like me; a painfully and embarrassingly clueless me, but me nonetheless. I can see how the person I was then has become the person I am now. I guess others may feel so distinct from that earlier identity that they don't even see themselves in their own past.

Anyway, it's an interesting idea.

Feverish

The plectranthus is blooming again, as it does in the fall. You might remember I wrestled last year with whether to overwinter it or let it expire outside, and I wound up bringing it in. I did the same this year, but it's already dropped so many leaves that I put it back outside again. I may let it go. We'll see. It's a pretty warm-weather plant but it's treated here as an annual and it doesn't like British winters, even indoors.

I forgot to tell you about my birthday evening -- not that there's much to tell. I came home from work on Wednesday and made a big ol' martini, and Dave and I watched "Midnight Cowboy," one of my all-time favorite movies. (Despite the presence of Jon Voight, who has become a politically odious person in his later years.) Dave also bought me an allegedly squirrel-proof bird feeder for the garden, so we'll see how well that works out. I've missed our feeders since we took them down because of rodent activity and I really want to be able to watch the birds again. (I hope squirrel-proof also means rat-proof, though I suppose almost nothing is truly rat-proof.)

Dave continued not feeling great yesterday and wound up going home early from work, and sure enough, he's sick. He had a 101.5º F fever (38.6º C) last night. My boss is also sick with something similar, so I suppose it's only a matter of time before I get it, as I am surrounded on all sides! It doesn't appear to be Covid. Dave took a test and it was negative.

Graffiti on Billy Fury Way

Unfortunately, this means we had to cancel my birthday dinner outing for tomorrow night, but that's no big deal. We can do it anytime.

I tossed the found chrysanthemums this morning -- but hey, we got a whole week out of them!

Isolation and Sporcle

It's pouring down rain this morning. The dog went to the door, looked out and said, "No way." And then demanded a treat, just for looking! The canine nerve.

Isn't this a crazy story about Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul? I read some statements to the press by a guy who used to employ Paul Pelosi's attacker, and he said the guy had been pretty reasonable until recently, when he became more and more obsessed with online message boards and Q-Anon type conspiracies. I have a theory about this, and I suppose it's not very revolutionary. I think the problem is isolation.

When humans live in social groups with real-world interaction, we moderate each other's behavior. Just by talking to each other and living side by side, we even out every individual's wilder tendencies. But when we spend more time by ourselves and go online, delving into more and more specific, self-selecting subgroups of like-minded people, that moderating tendency goes away. We develop the feeling that all people think like we do, even though we may in fact hold some crazy, extreme views.

In other words, if you spend all your time in online chat rooms devoted to hating Nancy Pelosi, you're going to think everyone hates Nancy Pelosi. Because that's all you're exposed to.

People need to rub elbows with other people of different viewpoints. It's what makes our society healthy and keeps us all in the center of the road, so to speak. There's not enough of that going on these days, and that's partly why extremism has taken hold so deeply among so many people. We've siloed ourselves into like-minded online communities where information isn't so much exchanged as reinforced, and the moderating influence of others who may think differently is absent.

Like I said, not a very revolutionary theory. In fact, pretty widely accepted, I think. But all of that was rolling through my mind yesterday as I read stories about Paul Pelosi's assault.

Of course, I'm sure mental illness plays a role in all this, too. But again, healthy socialization can also help keep mental illness in check, as we saw during the pandemic when people were deprived of contact and mental health issues soared.

Here's a little quiz I took yesterday while on a work break. A web site called Sporcle offers a variety of challenges including one to name all the world capitals. The quiz begins with an empty map and you simply type in the names of capital cities, which then appear in green. You have 20 minutes to name all of them.

As you can see, I wound up naming 151 of 197 world capitals. (I missed the ones in red.) My weak spots are Pacific island nations, Caribbean nations and the Balkans. I really think I would have come up with Minsk, Tirana, Singapore, Brazzaville and a few others if I could see the map better, but anyway, I didn't think it was a disastrous result. The timer adds an element of tension that I think interferes a bit with recall.

Also, spelling counts. It took me multiple tries to nail the spelling of Tbilisi. On the other hand, if you enter the old or colonial name for some cities -- like Colombo, Sri Lanka or Dar es Salaam, Tanzania -- the quiz changes it to an apparently more modern name that I didn't know.

Then I took the US state capitals quiz and could only name 43 of 50 on my first go-around, which shocked me. I definitely knew all of them when I was in school and for years thereafter! But it's knowledge I don't use much and it's amazing how it slips away. I couldn't even name the capital of New Jersey and I LIVED THERE FOR TWO YEARS! Anyway, I took it again later and got all of them, so hopefully that knowledge has been reawakened in my memory.

(Top: A very autumnal-looking bus shelter in West Hampstead.)

A Cake Day Mystery

The flowers on our Thanksgiving cacti have started opening. I guess this particular plant is really more of a Halloween cactus, given the timing! (It's done this in past years, too.) As I said the other day, when I posted a picture of the unopened buds, the two bright pink cacti are far ahead of the salmon and white ones.

I love those flowers, looking like flying Asian dragons or exotic Amazonian birds.

I spent much of yesterday down an Internet rabbit hole trying to identify that pottery chip I found on the Heath. (The last picture in yesterday's post.) The only reason I feel compelled to do this is because it seems like it should be possible, given that we have a recognizable section of the design and also, on the back...

...a piece of the potter's mark, which seems very distinctive and unusual. Unfortunately I got no words with the mark. Not even a complete letter!

Some of you asked about Google Image Search and I tried that. It didn't give me any satisfactory results. I then Googled green transferware antique plates and scrolled through dozens of images with no luck. Through the clumsy magic of photo editing I made an approximation of what I thought the complete mark might have looked like and tried searching that:

But I got nothing. Google thought it was a tattoo and kept giving me tattoo designs back. Even when I specified pottery marks I didn't get anything similar.

So, yeah, I'm open to suggestions! I think my only option might be to find a book of British pottery marks (there were booming pottery industries in Britain in the Victorian era, particularly around Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire) and see if I can find one that looks similar. Of course, it could have been imported, in which case all bets are off.

Still, the quest is kind of fun. I love a good mystery.

Today is a big day for me. As of this evening (I think?) I have been on the planet 56 years. Yes, it's my birthday. Dave and I have no plans today but we're going to celebrate this weekend with a little dinner outing.

The Dancing Leaf

Now that Halloween's out of the way (and we had no trick-or-treaters here, as usual), I'll post photos from my walk with Olga on Sunday.

I just love seeing her out in nature, doing her dog thing.

As I said yesterday, we went to the West Heath, Sandy Heath and Hampstead Heath Extension, the first time we'd been on that full loop in almost a year. We haven't visited the historic Pitt House Gateway in a long time.

We also went to Golders Hill Park, where I took the last photo featuring Olga's tennis ball, because soon thereafter...

...she completely gnawed it apart and destroyed it. The girl was full of energy!

On the West Heath, we found a leaf dancing in mid-air. I was captivated by it, but Olga kept saying "Would you come ON!?"

She refused to look at me for this shot -- she was watching a flock of pigeons nearby. That tree at Golders Hill has been leaning for years but now I see that it has completely collapsed. I imagine it's not long for this world, but it sure is colorful.

Anyway, all in all, we had a terrific walk. I was glad to see her energy levels so high.

I also found another chip of interesting pottery -- this one featuring the lower half of a person. Looks like he or she is holding a fan or flower while grasping the hand of another. It would be interesting to see this pattern whole, but I guess we'll have to use our imaginations.