Thursday 5th October 2023 - Was My Reaction a One-Off? and Gardening Club

I was taken aback when listening to a broadcast on You Tube, while Peter was watching it on his tablet. It was covering an aspect of vaccines, which hasn’t been in the main stream media. It wasn’t just about the current topical Covid vaccine, it extended further. Amongst other useful facts, I learnt the following. Vaccines are not all produced at the same manufacturing unit, of course it would be impossible or impractical to do so, especially with the one for Covid which has been produced in millions of doses. An important part of the production is the actual process. As an example of the polio vaccines, administered to children in the 1950’s, there were doses produced by Cutter in the US not using the correct process. Of the children receiving one of these vaccines, 200,000 had temporary polio, others contracted permanent polio and there were those who died from polio. Why should I be so interested in the 1950’s polio vaccine? I’ll tell you why, I was paralysed after one of the polio vaccinations, administered in the 1950’s. My mother was so worried I had contracted polio; one of her uncles had it as a child and she saw the awful effects it had on him – so did I. As it was, my paralysis was temporary – phew – but it leaves me with the question; was my vaccination reaction a one-off, or were there other manufacturers who didn’t use the correct process? All in all it is a very informative broadcast, which if you are interested in watching or listening to, (it lasts forty-three minutes so you may want to make a cuppa or watch it in sections) it can be accessed via this link to YouTube

Time to move on now to Tuesday afternoon’s Gardening Club; a much lighter subject. This month’s speaker was Bill Drayton who gave us a talk on Norfolk Wildlife. I think it is safe to say, we were all wowed by the photos and videos he showed as well as the information he imparted during his talk. I am pretty sure the committee will be asking him for a return visit to talk on a different but relevant topic. One little snippet of information was, badgers like peanut butter sandwiches. Bill put down a trail of cubes of sandwiches to encourage a garden badger towards his camera. The footage convinced the doubting owner of the garden Bill filmed in; he definitely does have badgers. Bill showed us the camcorder he uses, which has the facility to take photos too. I was impressed with its versatility and compactness. Back home, I told Peter about Bill’s camcorder and it turns out (I really should have known this – dunces cap for me!) it is pretty well the same as his camcorder which he uses to film the Boxing Day Swim before posting on YouTube. What Peter’s camcorder has done, is given me an idea of filming around Overstrand and putting the videos on my website. I am not promising anything but after trying out the camcorder on our walk yesterday afternoon, it's a very definite idea. I have also tried out the camera, it is lower in megapixels than my compact camera but as I always reduce the file size of my photos, before including in my blogs or posting on Facebook, it will more than likely be good enough. So, today’s photo was taken on the camcorder’s camera, of one of the multicoloured crysanths I purchased at the penultimate car boot sale.