Category: in the news

Tree

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The stormy weather that prevented our trip out to Robben Island (top tip: always believe the Harbour Master) also brought down a tree in the neighbourhood. A big one, too. Maybe 20m of oak, now lying right across one of the roads. There was much oohing and ahhing on the local WhatsApp group, and a couple of lines thanking the Deity of the day for not letting the big tree fall on anyone foolish enough to be out and about during the horrible overnight weather, and for it missing any houses or parked cars.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tree has not gone anywhere and is still blocking that road some 15 hours later though, and I’m left wondering if the allegedly omnipotent being responsible for the tree coming down safely, ended His/Their involvement at that helpful “not maiming or killing anyone” point, and therefore stopped some way short of preventing any ongoing inconvenience caused by the tree falling as it did.

But we’re told that these big guys upstairs – whichever one(s) you choose to believe in – work in ways in which our puny human brains cannot comprehend. So maybe the ongoing, annoying detour to get out of our local area is there for a good reason (I mean above and beyond the several tonnes of wood blocking the quicker way).

Or maybe there’s some other reason, unrelated to sky fairies.

One thing worth noting is that the oak trees in the neighbourhood were assessed as healthy by the City’s experts back in February. So either the wind was completely off the scale last night (it was pretty breezy), or this oak somehow fooled the tree doctor earlier in the year.

Anyway, there’s plenty of firewood readily available if you’re willing to put in a little bit of hard graft befoe the City turn up, whenever that might be.

Meanwhile, in South Africa…

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Here’s today’s news:

> Stage 5 loadshedding: meaning an average of 10 hours without electricity each day.

Here’s our local supermarket’s tongue-in-cheek repsonse:

Yes, those are candles. A huge array of many different types of candle.
And yes, that light top right was being powered by a generator.

> There’s a massive fuel price increase this week because the government has f*****d the Rand:

“Motorists are in for a shocking fuel price increase from Wednesday. The price of petrol will go up by R1.71 per litre, diesel by R2.84 and paraffin by R2.78.”

> The President is attending the inauguration of Zimbabwe’s President, even though the entire world knows that the election was more rigged than a particularly complex 19th Century tea clipper:

…the elections were marred by controversy – including issues with the voters’ roll, the banning of opposition rallies, reports of biased state media coverage and voter intimidation.

> Cyril will then be heading home to “address the nation”, and tell us that the enquiry by the SA government into whether the SA government supplied arms to Russia has found out that the SA government didn’t supply arms to Russia, but the SA government can’t show us the SA government report exonerating the SA government, because that would “jeopardise the work of the SA armed forces”.

> And all this is being rubbed like salt into an open wound as the ANC shitterati dance with each other while the country falls apart:

“The mood [fire emoji] [fire emoji]”?
Is it,? That’s weird, because the mood is very different across everyone else in the country. But then I guess that it’s easy to be happy and dancey when your continual mismanagement, gross incompetence and widespread corruption only negatively affect other people.

Ugh. Trash.

Return of the Mac

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United’s 10th signing of the transfer window. Welcome back, James McAtee:

It’s a great signing, albeit just a loan: this guy is still very much in Man City’s plans for the future. And I love the Twitter video announcing his return. (B)eagle-eyed viewers will recognise bits of the A57 Snake Pass (Manchester to Sheffield, see?) at the beginning of the clip, and that celebration after that goal at Blackpool…

Being honest, it’s not a bad line-up for the Blades overall, in what we all know is going to be a very tough season. Sure, it’s not full of stellar 100 million megaplayers like ManU or Citeh or billion pound spending Chelsea(!), but it’s a decent squad.

And that being the case, I just don’t know why we couldn’t have got more of these deals done earlier? We clearly needed more players in our first three games, and we are not in a position – nor were we ever – in which we could afford to have a delayed start to the season.

And yet…

OK. So now, are we at full strength? Is that it?

Or do we have a late, late signing up our sleeves? Cut off is 11pm UK time.

BA 2.86

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Oh good. A new variant of Covid-19. <party emoji>

If it seems like we haven’t had one of those for a while, it’s because we haven’t. Well, not an interesting one, anyway. This one though – sadly – is of interest.

Why? Well, it has 35 mutations on its spike protein. That’s the bit that our immune system recognises. 35 mutations means that it’s likely to be disguised (at least partially) from our immune systems, meaning that we’re more likely to become infected with it: even if we’ve had the vaccine or if we’ve had Covid (of any variant) previously. It doesn’t mean that we won’t have any defence against it though. More likely just a bit of a slower, poorer one.

We don’t know a lot at the moment: we’re not really looking for Covid as much as we have been before, so this could be sneaking in a bit under our radar. We’ve only seen 9 cases* in 5 countries, which seems like nothing, but at least 6 of those cases have no travel history, suggesting that they acquired the virus locally to them. It can’t just have appeared from nowhere: that indicates community spread.

And those 9 cases (UK, Demark, USA, Israel, and now South Africa) show very similar genetic sequences. That means that they haven’t had much time to mutate or change, and that indicates a rapid spread.

We’re not seeing millions of hospital admissions though, which might (hopefully) mean that this is not going to cause serious illness or mortality. But it’s likely there just isn’t enough of it yet for that to be a foregone conclusion. It is being found in wastewater screening, which probably means that there is a growing reservoir of undetected cases out there.

Honestly, scientists have been waiting for the next wave. There was never any chance of Covid just going away. And we’re still (yes wow, “still”, even after 3½ years, lol), in the early equilibrating days of what will almost certainly be a long-term virus/human relationship. Each party is still weighing up its opponent and figuring out its next move. Metaphorically, at least.

It remains to be seen if this variant will trigger a new public health crisis or will fall away without troubling us too much. At this point, the jury simply doesn’t have enough information to make any decision, and so we wait and we keep learning from the information we can get.

At the moment, it’s very much watch this space. And maybe hope for a not guilty verdict.

* I had to update this figure twice while writing this post.

Not yet, please

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The weather has turned in Cape Town, and after a long, wet, cold winter, it would seem that spring is on its way. This oak tree in Constantia certainly thought so yesterday:

The trouble is – and hear me out on this one – we don’t really want it to be spring just yet.

[Capetonian people arrive en masse Chez 6000 with pitchforks and flaming torches]

No. Actually, we want spring to come at the normal time, which is probably about a month from now. Because while the dams might be nice and full (99.6% this week, down from 100.4% last week, to be exact), we need them to be like that in the middle of September too, when spring should start.
And if there’s going to be no more decent rain, that isn’t going to happen.

Also, it’s no secret that when it doesn’t rain, Capetonians use more water, so there will be a compound reduction of the amount of stored water we have going into what we’re told will be a long, hot dry summer.

Of course, this is just what climatologists and meteorologists are telling us, using their years and years of collective training and education, their cutting-edge computing models, and their interactions and collaboration with experts around the world.

You might well hear something different from your mate Keith, who has read something on Facebook. And we must thank Keith for taking some time out to share his thoughts on this, busy as he is also being an expert on Eurasian geopolitics, the New World Order paedophile network, cryptocurrency, and the reasons why Elon Musk is a “great guy”.

But I digress… often.

All I’m saying is that while it’d lovely to have a bit of nice weather right now, starting spring this early will have unpleasant knock-on effects in March and April. And I know that might seem a long way off at the moment, but we’ll look back on this post once we get there’re in the midst of heatwaves and water restrictions, just so I can say I told you so*.

* I won’t do that**

** OK, I might do that