Heritage Open Days Venture further afield to visit historic gems
IKNOW we get excited about Bristol Open Doors every year (see Pages 2-3), but venture a little further afield and you get the very wonderful Heritage Open Days, which are running this year from September 10-19.
And while Bristol Open Doors has introduced charges this year, Heritage Open Days remain resolutely free.
There are a few places in Bristol opening under its banner, along with loads in the surrounding area. Among places close to home that’ll be open are the amazing Acton Court (which everyone has to see!), Saltford Brass Mill, Ram Hill Colliery (Coalpit Heath) Temple Church and Frenchay Unitarian Chapel. Go a little further afield and you’ll find loads in Bath, South Glos and North Somerset - including one of my own favourite items of quirk, the Nore lighthouse at Portishead (pictured).
Go further afield and you have places opening all over the country. Plan your outings at www.heritageopendays.org.uk
Henleaze Juniors
If you attended Henleaze Junior school in 1965 and earlier, there’s a new Facebook group you can join to meet up with other alumni and reminisce. Find it at tinyurl. com/sxx8ta9s
Pathogen parties
Don’t know about you, but I’ve never known a time when I’ve known so many people who have Covid, or who have recently had it. All of these folks have been twice-jabbed, and report symptoms from almost nothing through to feeling like they’ve been hit by a train.
Since I’m writing this just before Mrs Latimer and I go off on a (well-deserved) holiday, we’re in purdah lest we get it and have to cancel.
The unwise and reckless part of me, though, sort of wishes I could catch it to get it over with.
Do you remember how until not very long ago, mothers used to host “chickenpox parties”? A child would go down with the pox and their mum would tell all the other mums in the neighbourhood, and they’d bring their children round for a big play-date in the hope the kids would catch it - and thus “get it over with”, and tick off one of the childhood illnesses on the list.
Perhaps some parents still do this, though nowadays the medical profession disapproves, saying vaccination is safer.
But is there, or will there ever be, such a thing as the Coronavirus party? Will some be tempted to deliberately try and catch it to “get it over with” at a time when they still have reasonable levels of immunity due to vaccination, and before some horrible new variant emerges?
As a non-doctor, I am pretty sure it’s a terrible idea to take your gran or grandad round to someone’s house for a pensioner play-date (jigsaws, cribbage and complaining) because the hostess’s grandad has the ‘Rona and is raving insanely about Brexit and The War and how there’s not enough kidney in Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies anymore. So don’t do it, OK?
It seemed to me that it was such an obvious idea that maybe some people somewhere in the world are holding Pathogen Parties, so I checked the Internet, half thinking that Google could show me the fastest road and public transport routes to the nearest Rona Rendezvous.
But no, Wikipedia says there are frequent rumours of such gatherings, sometimes of young, fit people wanting to “get it over with”. And also of barking antivaxxer loons wanting to either prove there’s no such thing as Coronavirus, or because they wish to acquire “natural” immunity under the ancient laws of Magna Carta rather than have their Precious Bodily Fluids polluted by Bill Gates and the Lizard People, or whatever conspiracist bullocks they believe this week.
But apparently there’s little evidence any such things have happened. Urban legend and all that.
That’s not to say that they might not happen in future, and not necessarily for Covid. So for instance, it’s now the best part of three years since I last had a cold. And you’re probably the same, right? If any of us caught a cold in the last 18 months it would simply have proved that we were not doing our Covid precautions correctly.
I’m not sure what the benefits would be, but if I catch a cold in the coming months I’ll let you know. Anyone nostalgic for having a cold can come round to ours and I’ll sneeze at you while we watch the Band of Brothers box-set, as Mrs Latimer administers the Lem-Sip and sneers about man-flu.
Cheers then!