Glorious Autum
This weekend the grey clouds lifted for two days of glorious sunshine, just in time for my sister and her squeeze to finally visit us.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she beamed.
Oh no! The heath is pleasant enough but overly familiar and we would probably sink ankle-deep into the mud.
“Come on, let’s go into the woods!”
Woods? I have seen a few strips of woodland around the Friendly Neighbourhood Atomic Weapons Establishment, but that is miles away and surrounded by busy roads.
John was even harder to mobilise than me, moaning about a cold, but when I saw my sister’s face fall, I relented and pulled him along. He perked up when he looked at the map: there were a number of small footpaths leading into blank areas which might or might not be covered in dense forest where we could get suitably lost.
And so we trudged off. Walking past alotments and chocolate box houses I thought how pretty this village actually is, once you are away from the council flats. And we found the woods. Quite suddenly, after climbing over a fence in a horse paddock where we had inexplicably ended up in (we are good at getting lost—Conor has nothing on us; just read this) we were standing on a soft carpet of golden leaves, surrounded by majestic trees and breathing in the scent of mossy earth and toadstools; the scent of woods in the autum. We could almost feel its healing powers suffuse our bloodstreams; washing away tiredness, runny noses and sore throats. The Japanese believe that forest air really has healing properties—after all there are a lot of bioactive molecules given off by leaves and resins—and they have a word for it, shinrin-yoku, which translates as ‘Wood-air bathing’. It almost sounds like part of a Haiku (and there is even a link between Haiku and Chemistry—how is that for universal interconnectedness?). I think I now know what they mean.
But it wasn’t just the scent. The wood changed as we walked on; the path turned from mulchy to sandy, leading through a hazelnut coppice which looked almost like gallery forest against the backdrop of giant old trees, but with flecks of red and gold promising the colour riot that autumn still has in store. We walked on over a spongy meadow and past carpets of blueberries. We were too late for the berries but we picked handfuls of puffball mushrooms: easy to identify and delicious in a omelette. The ground was covered with the prickly husks of horse chestnuts. You could live on these woods and I felt pleasantly at home, like a potential native.
It is this walk in the autumn forest that will haunt my memories when I’m homesick and frightened in the steaming jungles of Borneo. Perhaps my sister will remember it when she is seasick and covered in spray on a rocking whale-watching boat in New Zealand. The two of them are going in December—if they are let into the country, given the current threat of bird flu.
Ah yes, bird flu. Every now and then, an avian virus recombines with a strain of human influenza and causes a pandemic which can lead to millions of deaths world-wide. A mildly infectious but highly virulent strain, H5N1, has been traced since late 2003 and has now arrived in Europe; just in time for the start of the flu season. Those who know about these things reckon that it is not a question of whether it will recombine with human influenza, but when. And they seem to think that the outcome will not be relatively mild, such as in the 1968 pandemic, say, with just a few million deaths worldwide, but deadly—deadlier perhaps than the infamous flu pandemic of 1918 which claimed 50 million lives at a time when population density was much lower. Current figures predict between 750 000 and 2 million deaths in the UK alone (compared to about 100 000 in the 1918/19 pandemic). The ‘official’ figure I heard on the radio is 50 000.
How do politicians arrive at these figures? Do they take the lowest possible estimate of the epidemiological models and divide it by ten so that it doesn’t seem as if the number has been pulled out of a hat (which it has)? It reminds me a bit of fishing quotas. But I digress: 50 000 is a good, ‘honest’ figure. It sounds realistic, yet allows Johnny Average to think ah well, it won’t be me —the same Johnny Average who plays the lottery every week 😉 —and he may think it won’t be his family either, provided that his kids aren’t too young or his granny too old. Not so: the 1918/19 pandemic was a disease of young people with strong immune systems. It will be us.
But it may not happen, at least not yet. After all, the BSE epidemic didn’t happen either. And we won’t know how lethal the recombinant virus is going to be, and for how long, until it emerges.
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Denni