Ichneumon wasps

This ichneumon wasp was spotted laying eggs on a hebe. Ichneumon wasps are longer than the usual common wasp, and there are many different species. They are harmless to humans.

The Hexagons of Social Distance

Consider a person – a normal person, someone who feels, looks, needs and loves, who farts and toilets just like anyone else on the planet; we are one species after all. But that person is now an island, who has to be two metres away from anyone else, an imaginary cage around them. Social distancing we call it in the newfound argot, or perhaps that should be self-cellation? Because if you picture it, a person surrounded by others all two metres apart forms a hexagon.

So one person can be surrounded by six others, each covering their own two square metre patch of ground, an imaginary cell of 12 square metres imprisoning the lot. But each side of the cell is the wall of another, and so on – the cells forming the edge of more cells, and so on, spreading across the countryside like a mutant form of Christaller’s central place model.

So 31 people are now entrapped, seven hexagons mentally formed in the mind, 84 square metres of anguish. You can dehumanise it and put it in numerical form: 4n+3. So consider a small town, 10,000 souls. 4n+3…… That’s 2499 full hexagons, 29,988 square metres of incarceration. Scale it up again to the 60 million or so in the country – 15 million cells, 180 square kilometres of nothing – you could socially distance the UK inside South Gloucestershire. But would you want to? Imagine the anxieties seeping out, spreading from person to person, just as invidious as the virus. Some of the vertices will break, dots disappear, a minor statistic to the holistic view, a deepening dark hole in the fabric and wellbeing to others. Will the breaks grow and cut completely off?

But it will burn out – vertices can snap and form other shapes. It will get better.

Eristalis pertinax

Hoverflies are out too - Eristalis pertinax.

Andrena flavipes

And here is another - Andrena flavipes, the yellow-legged mining bee,

Andrena scotica

The sun comes out, and so do the bees - this one is Andrena scotica. Note the little golden coloured lump projecting out of the lower band - this is a stylops, a parasite of bees.

Life is like flying an aeroplane

Life is like flying an aeroplane. When everything is ok, you are at cruising altitude, above the clouds, enjoying the sun - you are happy, everything is fine, any problems are well below and not an issue. But sometimes you hit clear air turbulence, lose altitude, and suddenly those things you could safely soar over are potential things to hit, and the lower you fall, the more things there are. Most of the time though there is enough time to regain control, level out, and start the gradual process of regaining the height and returning to cruising level. Some people will never get there - the flight surfaces have been damaged, you never reach the top, but you can still cruise and enjoy the sun, you just need to be more vigilant for those occasional things from below which stick up into the flight path. The other thing is that each time you are taken lower and lower by the turbulence, you have to spend more and more time in collision avoidance before being able to level out, as there is so much more to hit. And whatever you do, you want to avoid hitting the deck.....

The Mask

When depression has hit you at the beginning of the day, facing other people, work, places seems hard, and off-putting – you don’t want people to see you as you feel, you don’t want to have to explain, perhaps several times. So you pull on The Mask.

The Mask is an act, a barrier which starts at the face. You interact, laugh even, pretend that everything is ok, so that you can get through the day and complete your tasks with everyone thinking that things are normal, or whatever normal should be these days, with depression you are never quite sure. But it’s a brittle barrier, a high maintenance barrier, one which leaves you tired and in need of periodic escape just to recharge and face the rest of it. It’s like an egg-shell – seemingly hard and impervious, protecting the inside, but it only needs one sharp and well placed hit to break through and crack. If you get it right you can almost deceive yourself and start believing it to be the truth, getting you through the day, but when you walk out of the door from work and sit down on your own, the deflation sets in, the unrealised tension generated by maintaining it oozes out, and it hits you that the issues are still there – they always will be. It’s only how you deal with them that differs, and maybe one day things will be such that you won’t have the depression in the first place, and The Mask can be mentally filed away, placed back in the mental equivalent of Davy Jones’ locker, buried deep and hopefully not to be seen again.

But the door from work isn’t the end of it, you’ve got to go home, which is when you realise that The Mask isn’t just a mask, it’s a Janus Mask, multi-faced. What works outside of the home might not work at home, they know you better, are closer to you, recognise more. So The Mask morphs, takes on different forms, strengthens some parts, weakens others. But it will work – you got through the day before, the day before that, the sun still came up – what can possibly go wrong?