A Baby is Born

                                                                        Atomic Dot

First baby for youngest child and her husband;  new grandchild for mrs maytrees and myself. She is nick-named atomic dot  with her 12 year old cousin, well established as micro dot.

Mrs maytrees was called as dot years ago simply because I found her Irish Christian name difficult to recall.

Eyesight

 Probably as one becomes older health issues become more prominent in one's life.

This time for me eyesight is the issue. My eyesight was excellent until the onset of age 70+ which may better than average.  However a visit to Jimmy Fairly, opticians in Wimbledon Village was very impressive. 

The opticians took about an hour in checking my eyesight using what appeared to me to be very advanced equipment. When the eye testing session was finished  the results were thus:

Quite what the results mean is unclear to me hence there is little point in endeavouring to make the above slightly darker for ease of reading. However the helpful optician informed me that I had cataracts in one eye. She promised to send me an email detailing the problem so that I could pass this on to my GP with a view to her putting me on  list for a minor NHS  operation to eradicate the cataract.

Meanwhile she arranged for a lenses for my eyeglasses to be made in Paris. These would be then fitted in a couple of weeks, all for the princely sum of c.£120 which does not seem too bad. 

St Georges NHS Hospital - Resus Dept

Feeling poorly during the week I was given an appointment to see a local doctor within an hour. She spoke to me at length then telephoned the St Georges NHS Hospital on call heart doctor, for advice. He advised her that I attended the hospital's A&E department at once.

Knowing that one can wait hours in A&E before being seen, the doctor's advice for which she was very apologetic, was depressing but none the less with mrs maytrees, I traveled there by bus.

The triage system and  testing at  St George's A&E reception, surprisingly to me anyway, led to an immediate admission to the hospital's Resus department. There I was given blood tests and seen by some half dozen staff. A  modern room with a bed was provided. 

Low blood pressure, Af and an abnormal hear rate were the problems.  The medics advised that if a decent  heart rate was not restored asap, I would have to be admitted to ward.

Their  medical action  then included an injection for c. 25 minutes, of Digoxin which google describes as:

Digoxin belongs to the class of medicines called digitalis glycosides. It is used to improve the strength and efficiency of the heart, or to control the rate and rhythm of the heartbeat. This leads to better blood circulation and reduced swelling of the hands and ankles in patients with heart problems.

However  checking to see what the disadvantages of Digoxin are, I see again through Google  that these include:

Feeling dizzy: If digoxin makes you feel dizzy, lie down so that you do not faint, then sit until you feel better. 

• Feeling or being sick (nausea or vomiting) ...
• Diarrhoea. ...
• Changes in your vision (including blurred vision and not being able to look at bright light) ...
• Skin rashes. 

The disadvantages are helpful to know as some I have experienced but had believed to be part of the disadvantages of Covid-19 (for which I had been hospitalised some years back) and simply aging.

The Resus doctor told me that despite the sometimes frenetic activity, he reveled in working there, a point repeated by many of the staff I spoke with whilst in the Resus hospital room. 

Amazingly, while awaiting the effects of the digoxin injection, the hospital provided supper and tea for me all free of cost.

Autumn/Fall

An early morning walk two days ago in brilliant sunshine took me past some beautiful autumn scenery, see for example the scene above of   the garden of the local Catholic church, although my iPhone photograph  does not do it justice.

The road on our nearby home was covered in leaves, hence presumably the USA name of Fall  as distinct from the British Autumn..

Since the above picture was taken, there have been torrents of rain particularly  during last night and this morning, so that the autumnal views have largely dissipated to be replaced by wet leaves underfoot.

Perhaps the name autumn is  the more apt before many of the leaves fall, with the latter name (fall)  being apt when most of the leaves are swept down from the trees by the passage of time or weather.

Lord Nelson

 

 

The Nelson Hospital in Merton Park is named such I believe, because Lord Nelson who was born in East Anglia had a home in that part of the world.

A few days ago The times had an interesting article about Nelson in its weather report page: 

Britain’s most famous naval battle took place 220 years ago on Tuesday. In October 1805, a combined French and Spanish fleet was ready to sail out of Cadiz to the Mediterranean. Admiral Horatio Nelson raced to engage the enemy, although the French commander, Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve, wanted to avoid a confrontation, despite his 33 warships outnumbering Nelson’s 27.

Reports that Villeneuve was about to be replaced as commander persuaded him to sail, in a heavy sea swell and strengthening winds, on October 20. Nelson realised a storm was brewing and that he needed to battle the enemy fleet urgently before conditions deteriorated. On October 21, however, the wind dropped, leaving both fleets wallowing in a heavy sea swell. Nelson was obliged to concoct an audacious battle plan — two columns of ships would sail into the enemy line for a head-on attack before launching broadsides at close quarters.

Villeneuve tried, and failed, to head back to Cadiz, but the two fleets met off Cape Trafalgar when Nelson launched his attack. His flagship, HMS Victory, bore down on the enemy and sustained heavy fire, before it ran under the stern of the French flagship, the Bucentaure, firing devastating broadsides that left the ship disabled.

The centre of the Franco-Spanish fleet was reduced to chaos, but the crew of the French ship Redoutable massed an attack on Victory that left Nelson mortally wounded, before HMS Temeraire crashed into Redoutable and caused mass casualties on the French crew.

As the battle raged on, the devastating British gunnery ground down the enemy ships until the Franco-Spanish force collapsed. Although many of the British ships were badly damaged, the allied fleet was devastated, with 20 of their ships captured and many of the crew killed, wounded or taken prisoner. The gathering storm now blew the ships towards a rocky shore, and by next morning, several of the captured ships sank while some of the Spanish ships ran for Cadiz. All told, 14 of the captured ships were destroyed, and the total loss of life in the storm was worse than during the battle. As a result of the engagement, the Battle of Trafalgar left Britain in command of the seas.

Today of course, the UK's Health and Safety Executive would doubtless not have permitted a man with one leg and blinded in one eye to work as an admiral on board a ship of the fleet.

Autumn Lawn

 

The lawn at home is covered in somewhat unruly and ugly looking wild mushrooms as above.The fox which often enters the garden and forages ignores them as do so far after a week, the birds.

 The Times today has an interesting short article part of which reads:

This is an outstanding autumn for woodland fungi. It seems that the combination of summer heat and heavy September rain has generated an eruption of the fruiting bodies we know as mushrooms and toadstools. Naturalists with long memories may recall the same thing happening in the wet autumn of 1976.

The ancient woodland of Savernake Forest, in deepest Wiltshire, is alive with these fungi. The boles of some of the veteran beech trees there are encrusted with huge growths of the giant polypore Meripilus giganteus. More generally, honey fungi abound. These are nature’s decomposers, turning so-called “dead wood” into forest fertiliser.

The ground below stands of birch trees is studded with panther cap, blushers and fly agaric. Walk there with care, and delight — perhaps pondering how transformative it would be to encounter a hookah-smoking caterpillar on top of just one, as Alice did in her Wonderland. Best of all, the summer drought and the dry October have combined to ensure that few mushrooms and toadstools have been besmirched by slug damage (2025 has not been a good year for slugs or snails). This is the autumn to take up photographing fungi.

Trying to identify which variety of mushroom has sprouted on our  small patchy town lawn is proving difficult despite the photograph above. Some in the family wish the mushrooms and the lawn to be mowed away. 

I am puzzled by the fact that so many mushrooms have appeared on our lawn whereas those of neighbors seem unaffected. Presumably the spores were dropped by magpies, other birds or even or foxes  all of which abound in Wimbledon near to the Common.

Given The Times writer reports the large number of wild insects that can take refuge and thrive in mushrooms less deterred than is usual by larger species I am letting the mushrooms be for the time being.

NHS Again

 

After a Wimbledon Dentist spent some three hours last week tackling my teeth and jaw for the princely  NHS sum of c. £27, it was amazing to receive notification from St Georges NHS Hospital to attend an appointment there later this month.

The   Maxillo-Facial unit is the relevant department as my jaw is apparently is affected by the issues. 

Hopefully the speed of this initial appointment does not signify that the problems are too severe.

 We shall see. 🙈