Thread 10 - TalkLair: “The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles.”

[Kucinghitam]

Continuation of previous threads (thread 9).

Although the nights are gradually drawing in, the new lair of JTT escapees is all cosy and homey inside. The hearth is glowing, the walls covered in dubious artwork, books by non-approved authors line the shelves, rugs are down on the floors (and assorted pets curled up on them).

We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

Oh no @MavisMcMinty! I hope macman is looking after you. Coincidentally I’m currently working through a paper on Covid-induced anosmia. The loss of smell and taste takes away such a wedge of life’s pleasure.

We’ve had thunder, lightning and hail this morning. When the hail started Kasper looked at me with his little WTF face. I’m not sure he’s ever heard hail before.

Heh, macman has taken the day off work, pretending he has my cold but he doesn’t. He’s actually installing new taps on the kitchen sink and draining the hot water tank into the bath.

The only thing I can taste is the sugar I add to my coffee - I noticed when I forgot this morning - and a can of coke also tasted sweetish last night. But otherwise eating and drinking brings no pleasure at all. The senses we take for granted!

Hope you feel better soon, Mavis, and that your sense of taste and smell come back quickly.

Re only being able to taste sugar, I had a cold some years ago where all I could taste was salt and even plain tap water tasted of salt. It was weird and very unpleasant, but thankfully didn't last long.

Oh, gorgeous gorgeous Kasper! I'm in love with his floof...

(And get well soon, Mavis!)

A cat who clearly - and sensibly - has no plans to go out.

Hope taste returns soon, Mavis.

Best wishes Mavis.

Cyan - I love Victorian Bigot as a username.

Re: table manners, I'm definitely a Victorian Bigot with regards to myself and my own children, from the moment they were old enough to sit up at the table. Not only did I insist on knife-in-right/fork-in-left (and other "Victorian" British cutlery conventions), but I also insisted on correct Chinese chopstick etiquette and correct Malaysian hand-eating etiquette.

OTOH, I mostly don't care a fig for how others comport themselves at the meal table, so long as they: (a) use relevant cutlery where required, in whichever hands enable the neatest eating; (b) chew with mouths closed. I am aware that even these basic standards are sometimes considered Dreadfully Uptight.

On the subject of cute animals, has anyone seen the pictures of the Hazel Dormouse in the Grauniad? I challenge anyone not to get a lump in their throat!

Don’t, Sinner - of all the creatures my cats bring in, the dormice make me saddest. So cute.

…Although I suppose it’s good news that we still have dormice at all. There are thousands of miles of hedgerow in Devon, my cats can’t possibly patrol them all.

I'm another Victorian Bigot with regards to table manners. It partly stems from a childhood wish, and expectation, that when I grew up I'd be The Queen. My parents used this desire to improve my behaviour by saying 'Now The Queen wouldn't do that, would she', which worked pretty well.

Hearing people eat with their mouths open is disgusting. We were having dinner with friends one evening, meatballs in tomato sauce, and the late-teens son, who I sat next to, speared each meatball on his fork and then noisily licked the sauce off. It was utterly revolting and I had to ask him not to. It was that or run out of the room. I didn't understand why his parents didn't say anything.

Kasper is such a dude! I love him.

Mavis, I do hope you feel better soon. Have you got any COVID tests to hand?

Probably got one in the larder somewhere but it’ll be pretty old and out of date by now, not sure they work on newer strains of the virus (but that may be a belief without basis).

I’m avoiding people whether it’s Covid or a cold. Macman hasn’t caught it from me so far (although pretended he has to take the day off work) and has had two more Covid boosters than me.

How are you, Mouse? Still sore, I expect? I feel a right twat for whining about a fucking COLD, sorry. x

I have also come down with what I hope is a cold, since I spent yesterday on an eight hour drive from NJ to Maine with my DDIL and 8 year old DGD, and they have come up so DDIL can look after her 85 year old DGM for a few days after surgery. We can all do without any other infection being passed around, but the cold symptoms started up while we were en route. It is so nice to be back home with DH again though.

Colds suck, Mavis, so you're definitely not a twat! I'm definitely sore and yesterday I was a total grump for a lot of the day. I sort of feel like I'm living someone else's life right now. I think things are happening so quickly that none of it feels real. The morphine is a godsend! I had some during the day yesterday when it was all a bit much and last night to help me sleep.

I'm feeling more positive today. Snoop is coming round later and I'll have a shower while she's here. I don't have a walk in shower so I was a bit too nervous to have one without someone around yesterday in case I fell or something. I've been looking up stuff about the sort of tube I have and was delighted to find out it's very easily removed. It's a jej, so instead of going into my stomach it goes into my jejunum which I only learned existed this week!

In other news, I intend to leave the flat today!

Another plaguey cold victim checking in. Tested and its not covid, but blimey its giving me a kicking. Not convinced it hasn't turned into a chest infection, if no improvement by Monday I'll be trying the doctors.

So pleased you're feeling well enough to leave the flat @MouseMinge it's a beautiful day out here.

Sympathies with all the cold sufferers. A bad cold is never nice but we are programmed to think “oh it’s just a cold” rather than “I feel rubbish and am going back to bed”.

Glad to hear you’re feeling up to leaving your flat today @MouseMinge - a bit of air and a change of scene sounds like a good idea. You’ve had so much thrown at you in such a short space of time it’s going to take time to process.

I wanted to go out earlier than this but I've been waiting for my Amazon order to arrive at the Morrison's lockers and it's there now, so off I go!

Do YOU dry your sink?

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4940656-do-you-know-anyone-who-considers-a-wet-sink-messy

Maybe you can answer something I’ve been wondering about - I just had a bath and added my usual oils and bubbly stuff, and thought “Oh, that was silly, I can’t even smell them!” and then I thought “Well maybe my BRAIN can still smell them even if I can’t”, ditto the pillow spray I’m in the habit of using before bed.

If I can’t smell something through my nose, does my brain still smell it or not?

Sorry, that’s as well as I can articulate it, hope you understand what I mean!

This is definitely not my area of expertise (and in fact was crying over the paper earlier this evening as I hate senses stuff so much) but if the neuronal cells that carry the signals to the area of the brain involved in perceiving smell (olfactory bulb) are compromised, or the olfactory bulb itself is inflamed/dysfunctional in some way as a result of a virus or whatever, then no, your brain can’t smell it because it’s not receiving the signals. If we can’t sense a stimulus then our brain can’t perceive it, so we can’t experience the sensation.

Disclaimer: I have been drinking. Bint or Kuc will explain it better than me

Namechange fail!

Wow, that's dredging the depths of my memory. As far as I can recall there's no olfactory equivalent of blindsight (or if so, it hadn't been discovered when I studied these things). And certainly if the receptor cells/olfactory bulb are out of action or blocked by mucus then no perceptible smell should mean no psychological effect.

Having said that, I always had an urge to experiment on HotToast back on the old place to see whether eucalyptus or similar helped her breathing when she had a cold. Not by getting through to the brain but by a direct physical action on the nose lining.

But MrBint always tells me I'm not allowed to perform informal experiments on friends and family.

Sorry - that answer assumed general familiarity with blindsight. Which on reflection may not be common knowledge.

Broadly, the optic nerves feed 2 areas of the brain. One is the visual cortex, which takes up a lot of the brain at the back of the skull and is subdivided into assorted specialist areas that each 'see' 1 aspect of the information from the eye - shape, colour, movement , lines etc. All the info from these visual cortex subsections is then put together into an overall picture and fed to the conscious part of the brain so you know you are seeing a running brown dog, stationary red post box, Mondrian painting or whatever.

But to get to the visual cortex the optic nerves have to go through the middle of the brain, which houses some leftover old bits of brain from earlier stages of evolution. On its way through it drops off some information in the 'obsolete' visual system, but that part of the brain isn't connected to the conscious bit of 'you'. And anyway you have a shiny modern visual cortex to do all the seeing, so that old part doesn't do anything.

Except ....

In some cases people lose vision not because of eye or optic nerve problems, but because of damage to the visual cortex. If the damage Is minor they might still be able to see, but not in colour, or not be able to see where the edges of an object are. If it's severe they might not be able to see at all.

If you ask one of those people with complete sight loss from visual cortex damage to count dots on a screen, or catch a ball you've rolled across the floor they will (understandably) tell you not to be ridiculous, they can't do that because they can't see the dots or ball. If you manage to persuade them to humour you and just guess, they will guess the correct number of dots, and will catch the ball (even if you make sure they cant hear it). But will flat out deny being able to see those things. Which is correct. The 'them' part of the brain can't. The supposedly obsolete bit of the brain still has working 'vision' and feeds the information to the part of the brain that needs to carry out the action, but it doesn't tell the part that knows why or how the body is doing it.

How fascinating! Thank you both. xx