ŷ������

��

I have two weddings to go to, so I thought I’d get myself a nice dress. Not a “that-looked-much-better-on-the internet-but it-sort-of-fits-and-my-sweat-suit-is-in-the-wash�� kind of dress. But a real dress. Something I like that looks decent on, and I feel good in. OK, so realistic expectations aren’t my strength.

I hate clothes shopping any more. Those three-way mirrors should be against the My friends are all busy (or so they say). And there’s no way I can bring my husband. Not for the reasons you might think. He’s one of the kindest most patient people I know, and he doesn’t even mind clothes shopping. But his idea of a nice outfit for me tends toward retro slut. Flattering in some respects, but talk about outfits I wouldn’t be comfortable in. I’d feel like I was delusionally auditioning for a Bond film. At least a decade�� too late.

So, with the internet my oyster I start my dress quest. I quickly learn there is a dress type called “Wedding Guest.�� Who knew? Now they need to have a wedding guest dress register so you could see if anyone was going to wear the same dress to the same wedding. And it would have to list their dress size, to know if you might look better or worse than the other person (no sexism here). Meow.

I look at more of these wedding guest ensembles. There’s a whole type that is obviously designed by the penal system; pencil skirts worn with stripper-high heels. No way you could get away in that get-up. And look, some even come in orange.

And then I come across those dresses with matching little jackets. That sounds like a good. This could give the optical illusion of a waist. Then better yet, I remember something the women in the generation before me called a “two-piece dress.�� This is a coordinating skirt and top, where the top glances over your hips, like a wave over the cliffs of Dover. Being short, this sounds like a good idea, because once a dress fits around me, there’s usually a few yards too much fabric on the top portion.

So, I type “two-piece dress�� into google, expecting tasteful, possibly even classy dress ensembles for the completely grown-up woman. But what do I get? Page after page of skirts with matching belly shirts. This is a cruel joke against anyone over 40. I think about contacting my Member of Parliament, Conner Burns, but then I remember he’s also a paid consultant for an oil company, so would likely be all for more .

I groan at the computer. My husband pops his head into my office, “Everything OK?�� I see his eyes flick to the screen of inappropriate dresses. “Come on, let’s go shopping in person,�� he suggests. I glare. I narrow my eyes, then I have thought. “And we can get a bite out for supper �� saves me cooking!�� Marriage is all about compromise.

Have you guys heard about how vaccination was “first discovered��? About the Englishman, who used the fact that milk-maids, the women who milked the cows didn’t seem to ever get smallpox �� hence the saying, “Like a milkmaid’s skin��? That’s the story I knew, but it turns out he wasn’t the first to figure this out. Inoculation had been practiced in West Africa for hundreds of years before Jenner-baby ever thought of it. African doctors would take a small bit of infectious material from one person, and scratch it into another with a thorn. They understood that this would protect the recipient from the full-blown, and deadly disease. Smallpox killed 20-80% of those who got it, changing the course of history and nations; a likely . It was the most common cause of blindness, and could leave survivors with all sorts of problems, not to mention the horrendous scarring.

Smallpox Victim, NYC 1881

The African medics were likely working on the well-known fact (since 430 BC) that smallpox survivors never seemed to get it again. They took this to the next level, by developing inoculation, also called variolation. It was introduced to the global north during the 1721 Boston smallpox epidemic. But the African origins of inoculation are typically not noted in immunology texts. Instead, it’s Edward Jenner who’s called “the father of immunology�� and is given sole credit for this world-changing discovery. But like most truths, the real story is more complicated, and more interesting.

In 1706, Cotton Mather, a highly placed minister, documented racist, and prolific writer, asked the enslaved African, Onesimus, if he’d ever had smallpox before assigning him to work in his home. Asking enslaved workers about their smallpox history was standard practice before assigning them to work inside the slave owners�� homes. Didn’t want to expose family to smallpox, and everyone knew if you’d survived you wouldn’t be getting it again. But, Onesimus’s answer, “Yes and no�� stumped Mather at first. Onesimus (the name Mather gave him) explained the practice of inoculation, hence “yes�� he had been infected, but “no�� he never had the disease. (Yes, the hypocrisy is neon-lit, that this “Christian�� minister accepted the “gift�� of an enslaved African, and all during a time when American colonists were arguing that England was enslaving America by not granting its independence. Yet, Mather was also able to hear what Onesimus was telling him, and recognise its importance.)

Mather, who almost pursued a career in medicine, avidly read all the latest publications. He went around Boston to ask other slaves if they’d had the same sort variolation. Many of them did, and it turned out that slaves with the tell-tale scar on their arm fetched a higher price. In 1714 Mather published an essay in the London’s Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, including quoting Onesimus in his accent, “People take Juice of Small-Pox; and Cutty-skin, and Putt in a Drop.�� As the first American -born fellow of the London’s Royal Society, that was headed by Isaac Newton at the time, Mather was eager to raise the stature of Boston (and himself) in the eyes of European intellectuals. Fighting smallpox and other infectious disease was a hot topic in the early 18th century but, nothing much more happened. Not yet, anyway.

On 22 April 1721, fifteen years after Mather learned about inoculation from Onesimus, the HMS Seahorse, sailed in from the West Indies and docked in Boston Harbour. There was smallpox on the ship, and despite taking all the precautions available at that time, an epidemic broke out, eventually infecting roughly half of Boston’s 12,000 inhabitants. Mather quickly published an “Address to the Physicians of Boston�� calling on them to use inoculation to save lives. Only one person responded favourably, Zabadiel Boylston, alternately described as a doctor or an apothecary. (Boylston also turned out to be the future President John Adams’s great-uncle.) Zabadiel Boylston inoculated his six-year-old son and two enslaved Africans, and announced their successful inoculation on 15 July 1721.

Other area doctors and councilmen were horrified. Despite everyone knowing that surviving the disease resulted in future immunity with survivors even called upon to care for infected people, the idea of purposefully infecting people was just too weird for Americans and Europeans. Anti-inoculators, colonial anti-vaxxers, rose up in droves. They considered this variolation to be a form of terrorism as if “a man should wilfully throw a Bomb into a Town.�� They embraced conspiracy theories too (sound familiar?), including that inoculation was really an effort on the part of enslaved Africans to kill White folks. One anti-vaxxer (of 1721, I’m not suggesting current ones time-travel) threw a grenade through Mather’s window with a note, “COTTON MATHER, You Dog, Dam You; I’l inoculate you with this, with a Pox to you.��

Personality comes into it, too. Mather was an arrogant prig who had been involved in the Salem witch hunts of 1692. A self-righteous, fifty-eight-year-old, blow-hard was easy pickings for the brand new Bostonian satirical newspaper, The New-England Courant. The newspaper’s editor, James Franklin was none other than Benjamin Franklin’s apparently somewhat less clever older brother. And as yet another interesting aside, Ben was an indentured servant to his older brother James. The Courant debuted in August 1721 and jumped right into the inoculation debate, deriding Mather and his newest idea, chalking it up as nothing more than another attempt at self-aggrandizement.

But to their credit, Mather and Boylston soldiered on with their inoculation campaign to “Conquer the Dragon��. It’s good to know even annoying blowhards can do good. By the time the epidemic had run its course, the data were in, and they were striking. Of the approximately 6,000 who contracted the disease, those who were not inoculated had a 14% chance of dying. But only 2% of the roughly 600 Bostonians who had been inoculated died.

Mather and Boylston were initially recognised for their important work with Boylston travelling to London for a time. Onesimus bought his freedom, with little else known about the rest of his life, besides the fact that he had a wife and a son who died. More smallpox epidemics ensued, with about 400,000 dying each year. Variolation was the best defence until the safer vaccine was developed from cowpox by Edward Jenner, in 1796. It took almost another 200 years before The World Health Organisation declared smallpox eradicated in 1979. This world-wide victory came about through the cross-fertilisation of ideas and opportunities, across cultures and continents. The report by an enslaved African to his owner, who was able to see beyond his own racism in this instance. Here’s to Onesimus, whose real name is lost, and the African doctors who developed variolation, finding their way into all immunology textbooks.

I went outside to get the empty fox dish. Now before y’all go worrying that I’m upsetting the balance of nature, and encouraging bad habits in wild suburban animals, Martin Hemmington, the very founder of the says it’s OK. He says it’s perfectly acceptable to leave just snacks, not so much that they become dependent on you. That way you can keep an eye on them so if they develop a medical problem or get injured, you could intervene more easily. And I sorely miss Lucy, the amazing fox who befriended us when we first moved here, but that really is another story.

So, there I was picking up the dish licked to a gleaming shine when one of our English Language students came out of the house, stopped and pointed toward our cat. ‘I think Charlie’s got something,�� she said, then strode off toward town.

I hadn’t noticed him at first, but he definitely had something dark, and furry, mostly stuffed into his mouth, with the tell-tale tail hanging out like a piece of errant spaghetti.

‘OK, Charlie what have you got, now?�� I could only surmise that his bounty was already dead with a lack of sound or movement from his prize. Phew, no pressure of rodent rescue. As I closed in, he uncharacteristically growled at me and slunk under the car. In that growl, I heard, Get your own effing mouse, you lousy hunter! And to be fair, he never has seen me catch my own. Another embarrassment for him, I’m sure.

I remained crouched down, peering under the car, reaching toward him aimlessly, and beseeching him to come within reach. Stupid, I know.

I heard footsteps and saw the flash of red socks �� our postman. He stopped.

‘Perfect, I was about to ring your bell.�� There was not one bit of anything in his voice like it was normal to speak to someone crouching, talking to the space under a car. But then again, I can only imagine all the weird and wonderful bits of humanity he must witness as a postie, hence why my antics didn’t even warrant a stifled smirk.

‘Oh, hi, yes, thanks,�� I managed as I got up. I liked this guy �� just my sort of human; beaded necklace peeping out from his uniform collar, and he always wears the red socks. Not a requisite part of the uniform even though they match the trim and lanyard perfectly, just his signature addition, as he’d explained when I’d asked before. He held out a cardboard mailer toward me. ‘Won’t fit through the letterbox,�� he offered and smiled. I took the outsized mailer marked ‘DO NOT BEND�� and he carried on up the street.

I have this strange default of always thinking I’m in trouble. Even though I really haven’t done much to brag about in that realm. Hence, my mind raced, what could I have done, now? Could it be a photo of me eating a grape (maybe it was two) before I bought them at the supermarket? Surely, they wouldn’t go to all that bother? My mind scrambled to remember any other recent misdeeds. Meanwhile, my hands ignored my ridiculous thoughts and worked the stiff envelope open. Inside there weren’t any photos or even subpoenas. Instead, there was not one, but two awards for two of my books! Well, knock me over with a feather.

[image error] Writing’s a funny thing, in that it’s a form of human expression not unlike many others; you feel a pressure, a drive to do it. But I also saw a study done by the Society of Authors, London (link) finding that the vast majority of us do it to connect. And that is certainly a huge part of it for me. So, getting these awards was terrific. It gave me the feedback that some folks ‘get�� my writing, and even enjoy it. Thank you, Mill City Press. You’ve pumped up my oomph, revved up my mojo to keep on keeping on.

This is not the stuff of a retro science fiction movie with a really cool poster (I see a Neanderthal man carrying an unconscious but beautifully coifed cave women with germs that look like mini-flying saucers bombarding them both), but a fact of permafrost loss. Anthrax, Smallpox, and things we don’t even know about are hitting the air when long-buried bodies are exposed. Really.��

It’s already happening. In August, 2016, a 12 year old boy living in a remote part of Siberia (not your usual Siberian hangouts), the Yamal Peninsula in the Arctic Circle, died of Anthrax. Over 20 others were hospitalized. It looks like the anthrax came from the infected corpse of a reindeer that died over 75 years ago, that was exposed with the unprecedented loss of permafrost �� normally permanently frozen ground. Two-thousand reindeer were also infected during the 2016 outbreak. Over a million were killed by anthrax earlier, in the 75-year-ago outbreak, and it is their bodies that have inadvertently served as reservoirs. With temperatures rising three times faster in the arctic as in the rest of the world, lots of long-buried bodies are thawing out.

I used to work in laboratories, so I’m familiar with this freezing of biological things, that you can then thaw out for later to use. For bacteria and viruses, this works a treat, especially when you have constant freezing temperatures (like permafrost used to be until we came up with global automatic defrost) and darkness. And just like in the laboratory, you can bring the material back to its preferred temperature, and presto change-o, it’s back in action. So, from this laboratory common-knowledge, once you realize we’re at risk of losing 40% of the permafrost that’s built up over the hundreds of thousands of years, it is no surprise at all that all kinds of nasties will be resurrected.

And that’s what we’re starting to see. Scientists found RNA fragments (another molecule in cells�� genetic machinery) of the 1918-19 Flu Pandemic, also called the Spanish Flu. ‘Hey, it’s an old flu, who cares,�� you say? Well, the . And remember, it’s a virus; antibiotics don’t work.

But wait, there’s more.

Scientists have found fragments of the DNA of the Smallpox virus in the remains of Stone Age people and 19th Century corpses, all previously frozen, in, all together now, ‘the permafrost��. And they found sores on bodies that looked like smallpox. There have been Smallpox epidemics, including one in Siberia in the 1890s. They did their best to bury the dead into the permafrost on the banks of the Kolyma River, but warm up the planet, and 120 years later these river banks are eroding, exposing bodies.

In case you’re not familiar, Small Pox is nasty. It killed 400,000 people in Europe annually in previous centuries. Besides death, it can also lead to blindness, repertory problems, and blindness, and of course disfigurement. And you guessed it, it’s caused by a virus.

Smallpox killed millions, leaving survivors scarred, disfigured, blind and with other lasting effects. The WHO declared the virus eradicated in 1980.

��Everyone used to get vaccinated against it, until 1972 in the US. . So, what if it rears its ugly little virus head through our pulling the plug on the planet’s freezer? We don’t have much for fighting the virus once you have it. But we do have some stores of the vaccine just in case Small Pox ever does return somehow. But we only have about 35 million doses of the vaccine, whereas there are about 7.5 billion people on the planet as of 2017. And of course, the vaccine won’t help anyone already infected.

But things we already know about, such as the Spanish Flu, Smallpox and Anthrax aren’t our only threat. What about diseases we’ve never been exposed to? Think of the��millions of Native Americans killed by the diseases brought by Europeans, as they had no immunity built up against them. Who knows what bugs we may soon face. . Luckily for us, that big old virus only infects amoebas. But this discovery confirms such pathogens exist.��

Permafrost in the High Arctic that has yet to melt.

So think of all this next time you buy something in plastic, or that is plastic. When you drive when you could have cycled or walked. When you could write a letter against the new drilling in the exposed arctic, when our governments subsidise fossil fuels. We are all one interlinked system, and it’s poised to possibly take a giant bite out of us.

It was a few weeks ago when we went out to dinner. I only eat beef outside of the house as it is. With our natural veggie tendencies, we have a few meat and fish-free days each week. I had been vegetarian for a short while when I was in university, but various relatives kept forgetting and cooking me meat when I visited, and I didn’t have the heart to reject their efforts at a warm welcome. I had always liked the taste of it, I had given it up on ethical and ecological (although I don’t think these are unrelated) grounds. Animal agriculture is responsible for a staggering 51% of global greenhouse emissions, according to a . Raising livestock uses 30 per cent of the earth’s entire land surface. This includes ��33 per cent of the global arable land used to producing feed for livestock��. It takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef, compared to only 244 gallons of water to make 1 pound of tofu. And of course there is the all the animal suffering that goes on in inadequately run aspects of the industry.

So there we were, in town centre, Bournemouth, on the first floor (‘second�� in the US) of a fun restaurant with a nice view of humanity milling about outside. It was a Friday night, there was a nice buzz about the place and a guitarist sang hip versions of pop songs.

To be fair, the restaurant is a steak house. So I ordered one, with a big fat jacket (baked) potato, and salad. It was brought to the table still sizzling. I was hungry.

But it didn’t taste as good as I’d anticipated. I’ve been finding this recently. When I’ve ordered a burger or steak it doesn’t taste as good as my memory says it should. I grew up in a beef-loving family, ‘Just cut the horns off!�� my grandfather used to tell various restaurant servers, with a gleam in his eye that��would make you think he was about to get a lap dance. (I know, creepy, but that’s how he was about his beef.)

And then there was this. Just a few days earlier, I saw a post about a new breed of beef steer, with double the muscle mass. (It turns out it’s not new, it’s been around for at least 10 years.) I’ll warn you, you might find the video distressing. I know I did. I think the person who posted it thought it looked ‘awesome�� with all the extra muscle giggling about. But look into the beast’s eyes. I see a forlorn animal, pleading for relief from carrying this extra bulk on a normal bovine frame that he will only find with death. And it is those eyes and that face�� that I saw as I ate my last steak.

.

Only now that I’ve lost my appetite for beef can I bear to look up anything about these double-muscling animals (or ‘DM�� as they call it in the trade) without feeling to guilty. It’s not that I know exactly what sort of animal bore the steak on my plate. But the idea that we would purposefully breed a harmful mutation in an animal for some sort of perceived ‘benefit�� to us humans horrifies me. And it turns out the DM business it is due to a mutation that has then been selected for, and just like all the weird mutations we humans seem to find attractive in dogs that we then call ‘pure-bred��, the mutation brings problems. These DM animals are ‘prone to to respiratory disease, stress and dystocia��. I looked up dystocia. It means difficult birth. With these animals, the calf is too bulky to be born easily. This is a little like the highly popular French Bull Dog, bred for their abnormally large heads to the point where they all have to be delivered by Cesarean Section (and they can’t swim �� their big heads will sink them, but this is for another blog).

Nothing like a little reading to change your mind and your appetites. I’ll have the tofu burger please, with the grilled mushroom—yum!

From the Atlantic Magazine Archive 2013

Yes indeedy, ladies and gents, boys, girls, trans and, pans, , not only believes this, he quoted Scripture in Congress to ‘prove�� his point, Genesis 8:21: “Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though all inclinations of his heart are evil from childhood and never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done.��

Well, who else should be in charge of the asylum, but the lunatics?

If his goofy, science denying, but powerful butt thinks Scripture is the only thing he can listen to, well, here’s some for him. In fact the theme of being accountable for our choices runs throughout Scripture.

��So here’s Shimkus baby’s twitter handle. I’m just sayin��. Slowing our race toward the climate precipice has gotta be worth a few tweets to say the least.

��If you’d like Tweet to: @RepShimkus while it’s still a free country here are some ideas.

“He who sows wickedness reaps trouble�� (Proverbs 22:8a) .

“All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty�� (Proverbs 14:23).

“Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you�� (Romans 13:3).

“But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor. For each will have to bear his own load.�� (Galatians 6:4-5)��

And hey, I’d visit NYC and Florida while��we still can.

Rolling Stone 2016.07.05. Can New York Be Saved in the Era of Global Warming?

But did you know they’d also�� worked against Hitler? Hey, ‘you gotta use what you got, to get what you want��. But spells, really? A group of . Can’t say it didn’t work, eh?

So, casting spells against an elected leader such as Trump is nothing new. But can it actually work? It turns out there are two areas of scientific research that speak to this, about whether or not we can change an outcome by thinking about it.

Like many people, you’ve probably had the experience here and there where you suddenly start thinking of someone you hadn’t heard from for a long time, and then bam the phone rings and it’s them. This happened to me recently. Old friends I’d lost touch with in Leipzig came up in conversation for me, and then a half hour later there was an email from them in my inbox. Sure, it could be just coincidence. But here are two areas of science that get at this question.

Non-locality—Spooky Action at a Distance. The first is something called . This is what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance.�� I don’t pretend to understand it any deeper than the basic idea which goes like this. You’ve got two sub-atomic particles, bits of an atom and they had been paired up—energy-wise I believe, having to do with the electrical charges on them. Then you separate them physically. If something changes with one of them, the other will respond immediately, even when the particles are separated by miles. There is no previously understood method of energy transfer or communication that can explain it.

This non-locality business in physics is well-established and taken as fact now. So, understandably people have been wondering if this could explain some extra-sensory phenomenon and connections we experience with other people. Nadeau and Kafatos have a terrific book on this, The Non-Local Universe: The New Physics and Matters of the Mind.

So this brings me to the second type of research on this subject.

. In as much as prayer is another form of thought done alone or in groups that’s meant to make changes in the world, to me it’s akin to what Wiccans and others consider spells. Some studies on prayer find that it does make a difference, for example, . But other studies find it doesn’t work. Interestingly, one of the variables that may make the difference as to whether or not the target of the prayer knows. It may be that prayer works better when the recipient does NOT know about it!

��So, Wiccans, Witches and Warlocks of the world—schtum’s the word!

I know, I know �� sounds like I’m making this up. But I’m not. There’s this microscopic bug called Toxoplasma Gondii, a single celled parasite that lives in a third (!) of all humanity, where it’s mostly harmless. But if it wakes up it, it can do some pretty weird stuff, like eat out our brains. Yum.

But before I get to explaining how it messes with us humans, and how to avoid it, you’ve got to hear this wild ride Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii) takes between cats and mice.

You see, in order to reproduce, T. gondii must get into a cat’s stomach. It can live in other stages of its little one-celled life in most if not all warm-blooded animals including whales. But to reproduce, the biological imperative of us all, it absolutely must get into a cat’s stomach. And one way to do that it so be part of a rodent treat. Double yum.

Now here’s the strange part, once it gets into mice or rats, which it does when the little critter has ingested it from contaminated plants, water or soil, it changes the rodent’s behavior forever. Yes, eau du chat has become their favorite scent. And the rats can also show sexual arousal to the smell of cat pee—not normal. It does this by altering certain parts of their brains, including their amygdalae which regulates fear and rage in all of us.

‘Eau du chat has become their favorite scent.��

Meet Red Cloud and Izzy, who were my pets. No one was infected as far as I know.

(their urine in particular) whereas they are usually, and understandably repelled by these natural predators who regularly snack on chimp. And this effect is strangely specific. The infected chimps were not attracted to lion or tiger pee, and they are not natural predators.

Enough about everyone else, you say, what does this have to do with us? Well, first of all, you can reduce your chances of infection by avoiding undercooked meat, unwashed produce, contaminated water, and cat poo.

This is why pregnant women are warned against cleaning the litter box, and certainly not without gloves. They should also where gloves while gardening and wash their hands thoroughly after any of these activities. T. gondii can spread from the mother to the infant where it can cause miscarriage, or long-term and serious birth defects, as well as more subtle problems for the kid later in life. All good things to avoid.

For the most part, if your immune system is on the job, and not compromised by chemotherapy or HIV for example, then you wouldn’t even know you’re harboring this creepy one-celled critter. But it can show up with flu-like symptoms, and for those with reduced immune functioning it can come alive from its dormant state and infest your brain and muscles. There are treatments including antibiotics and anti-malarial drugs.

Now here’s the really interesting part for me. There are a number of studies showing that the mostly dormant infection does change people. It looks like . Some studies link more right-leaning politics to T. gondii infection. Other studies have linked it to constant rage and aggression, increased rate of car accidents. Some research shows infected men to have an increased interest in aggressive or violent sexual acts, from bondage to rape. Yet women carrying the bug have been found to be warmer and caring, outgoing, conscientious, persistent and moralistic.

So, maybe these behaviors that we tend to think of as coming from a combination of our history, our experiences and our personality come down to a parasite. A measly one-celled invader. Or at least it’s a factor. Who knows what links science will reveal in the future between the rest of nature, and us.

I didn’t want to break the law, especially��in my new��country. I had been living in the UK for about a year, and was about to open my own business, out of our home. So, I called ‘The Council��, the local municipal government. The first person I spoke to suggested I speak to another. Person Two explained the person I really needed to speak to had a phone phobia but I could send an email. OK, I can see how they roll. But, Person Two did explain that the biggest issue with working out of your house was typically the parking. If you had a lot of people coming at once and taking all the spaces, this is what neighbours would complain about. Meanwhile, I learned that: other people on our small, closed (dead-end) road also worked from home including a photographer and a couple of graphic artists (this makes the place sound a lot more arty than it is). I also got the advice that I should send the email stating that ‘no reply will be taken as permission to go forward.�� Brilliant, or ‘brill�� as we say here �� why move your mouth more than necessary.

Although I had all intentions of continuing to work for the National Health Service (NHS) when we moved down here to the south coast of England, as I had been in outer London, either I pissed everyone off through the multiple interviews, or there really were funding cuts. In any case, I now had nothing to lose by using the odd little extension to our house for the purpose. It has a separate entrance into a small square room, a staircase up to another room, and a bathroom, all with a door separating it from the rest of the house. Perfect. I hung up the requisite diplomas and pictures, and put a doorbell in the waiting room with a sign to ring to let me know you’re here. Soon, my schedule was full.

Zeus was a great dog.��

This was the thank you card from his owner, Susan after I’d taken care of him for about a month while she recovered from surgery. Meanwhile, I got Zeus to stop a lot of his bad habits, which was very easy to do, but Susan seemed to think this was quite a feat.

One afternoon in the middle of a session with a very nice fellow, the doorbell rang. I assumed I’d made scheduling error and excused myself to see who it was. Downstairs stood a tall young, anxious looking man with an ID card hanging around his neck and a clipboard in his hand. He wasn’t anyone I knew.

“Hi, may I help you?�� I smiled. He averted his gaze, pretended to look at the clipboard.

“Erm, yes. How many people work here?��

“Just me.��

“All the time?�� He raised an eyebrow, looking emboldened.

I was surprised at how nervous I felt. “I did contact the Council and told them I’d be working from the house.�� I swallowed hard. “They didn’t say there would be a problem (because of course they hadn’t said anything)��.

The young man just stared at me. Oh, no! They’re going to shut me down! Give me a fine! Deport me for doing psychology without special paperwork or a decoder ring! A vision of me in the hold of a very slow cargo ship back to the US flashed in my mind. He couldn’t cuff me, could he? Then I remembered the therapy client upstairs.

“I don’t know if you’d mind (always a good way to start a sentence in Britain), but I do have a client waiting upstairs for us to finish.�� I checked the clock on the wall. “I’ll be done in about fifteen minutes. Can you wait?��

I thought he was going to throw up. He stuttered and looked everywhere but at me. He tried keeping his eyes on his trusty clipboard then all of a sudden his whole demeanour changed—like the governor just gave him a reprieve.

“What’s this house number?�� he asked me.

��پ���.��

“Oh, sorry, I was meant to go to number five.�� He exhaled a happy sound. “It’s Ian back at the office. His handwriting is rubbish.�� And with that he bounded out of the waiting room.

Later that evening while I was scouting the fridge for the world’s easiest dinner my husband came in and leaned against the counter wearing a wry smile.

“You want hear something interesting?��

��ٳܰ���.��

“Well,�� he said with great promise. “Do you know the woman who lives at number five?�� This was a rhetorical question, so he continued. “Paul, you know, the guy next-door, has been calling the Council and complaining because the woman at number five has had customers coming and going all day and night. The neighbours have been complaining about not being able to park.��

I emerged from the fridge. “Ah, the old parking problem.��

“Yup, customers every twenty minutes…�� David’s smile was bigger. He was holding on to the punch line.

“OK, I give up. What’s that’s about?��

“Sex. She works as a prostitute!��

So here I was on a street lined with neatly kept Edwardian houses, in a ‘good area�� (read, boring). It was my turn to grin. This was just what the neighbourhood needed as far as I as concerned. I mean of course, only if she actually enjoyed her work, which in my understanding was possible although rare in the sex industry.

Paul, who’s a devout church member, had been having regular discussions with Ms Five about her soul. But according to Paul, the woman was steadfast. She had been in the sex trade for over 25 years. The money was good and she could choose her own hours, and it is perfectly legal.

And you can only have one person providing the sex at any given time. Someone else can take bookings or clean for example, while another person provides the services. Otherwise, if there’s more than one person providing sex at a time, then that’s considered a brothel, and that is illegal.

“So how old is she?�� I couldn’t believe it, but I was insulted. This young guy was completely disgusted at the idea of me selling sex!? Huh!? Should I have David find him and defend my dishonour?

“She’s fifty.��

That was older than I was at the time. I was really mad.

As an American living in Britain, I have wonderful opportunities to embarrass people. I don’t include myself in this because I don’t embarrass easily (an advantage and necessity of being from the United States), and British people, especially in the south of the country are readily embarrassed. Easy pickings, really.

This was even in my wedding vows to an unsuspecting Brit, ‘To honour, love, and embarrass��. OK, not really. Although I did walk down the aisle to the theme song from Mission Impossible. Truth.

I’m an inveterate dog person. I’m way too lazy to actually own one, so I just stop everybody who has theirs out and about, and ask if I can ‘say hi�� to it. The vast majority, I’d say over 98% of dog owners and walkers, are amenable and friendly. One day, early on in my life in old , we were walking through a charming old English small city of . This means stalls galore on the main shopping street and throngs of people. A woman and her friend were walking an irresistible Jack Russell. The woman was happy for me to make a fuss over the dog, which I did and he enjoyed.

“He’s a spunky little guy, isn’t he?�� I offered. The woman and her friend looked confused. My husband stood silent, looked like he might be beseeching me to do something, But what?

“Sure is a spunky little fellow! Don’t you think?�� I thought maybe it was my accent. You’d be surprised how often people can’t understand it. At this point my husband tugged me away. The two women nodded like spring-necked toy dogs on the back shelf of a car.

“Sara, that means ejaculate, over here!�� I got in a loud whisper.

“O��.��

And this was just the start.