Staying forever young - lockdown week 6

Our wildflower collection is starting up again. Try as I may I cannot name them, but I'll keep trying.

I could press them and investigate at leisure. Greg promised not to grass on me down the rugby club.

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"Jim" Al-Khalili had Brian Green on the Life Scientific, Radio4 this week. He's big into String Theory as a way of unifying theoretical physics/mathematics - big 'Relativity', little 'Quantum' and one equation. The strings are fantastically small, vibrate in 10-11 dimensions and cannot be practically demonstrated. Apparently the collider is too weak to detect them. Based on supersymmetry. What does it all mean? Over to you Clive H.

  Brian has feelings of hollow dread. He has taken his equations billions, trillions and squillions of years into the future when everything disintegrates. He thus reflects on the impermanence of stuff. We need to leave a trace - the here and now is it he says. A bit of mindfulness. 

  So he is simply one of us.

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Katya Adler - very pleasant Brexit-Europe news presenter had James Cracknell on One-to-One this week. An olympic gold medalist who had a severe head injury 10 years ago. There were serious medical problems and then the lifestyle consequences of frontal lobe injury. I think also that his story contained strong elements of depression. He was very candid about his pre injury behaviour - selfish, determined, stubborn, lacking empathy. All advantageous to enable sporting performance at the highest level and all, according to him, not great qualities for normal life. He was told these might become more pronounced post-injury.

  Most of us would struggle with a small portion of his story. After 10 years he has come through it and I think, I'm not sure, he thinks he is not that different from before. Apart from being more reflective. "We are all works in progress".

  Another fellow traveller. 

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Dom attended Cobra meetings - well someone with a bit of clout needs to. 

  It does look, with the help of hindsight, that we are late getting into testing, track and trace. No point having a funny turn, but the number of bereaved families is high.

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I'm increasing the reach of the blog by email and twitter. We already use Facebook. Thank you to the Thursday NHS retired team who read Lockdown 5 and commented. There are a few extracts here:

'Read through your blog and found it very interesting (I shouldn't really say that because it may encourage you) and was drawn to continue all the way through. You come across as being a bit curmudgeonly – you've certainly kept that side of your personality very quiet.'                                                                                                                           Dave Whalley

'Still here still got 10 toes!!'     Allen Jones [a reference to Allen's magnificent fight with his arteries - ed]

'Did the GP prescribe you anything for the grumpiness?'         Dave Devlin

'Welcome to the blood pressure group I am a long standing member.
But GP's desire to create the blood pressure of a 20 year old in the body of a 70 year old means dizzines and the occasional failure to stand at all.'              John Rotchell [John famously fainted during a concert in Cornwall. Geoff Gill, fellow bass, kept him upright while still singing - ed]                                           

I have to admit to a certain amount of grumpiness. Like James Cracknell, it has always been there, and it doesn't necessarily mellow with age. Nor should it. There are some daft things around apart from me. There's no cure.