Yesterday, after I had finished chatting in Italian in our zoom class, Phil and I stomped at pace (as they say nowadays instead of ‘quickly’) into the village to get ourselves vaccinated against flu. One of the advantages of getting older is that they invite you to go and do such things without charge. While there we checked whether they were also doing Covid booster injections, which we have also been invited to apply for. Yes, they were doing those too and so we had a ‘jab’ in each arm. We’ve never yet had serious reactions to such injections but this time both of us feel some bruising in our upper right arm where the friendly nurse administered the Covid booster. So it goes.
Nowadays you can have these injections at chemists’ shops, depending on who has the vaccine available, but this time we went to the local doctors’ surgery. Our doctors’ main clinic is based in Uppermill, the biggest of the Saddleworth villages, but at one time the smaller villages each had a small surgery. About 10 years ago, probably more, the premises in our village were closed for refurbishment. It’s been really nicely done but recently it only seems to be used very occasionally and then mostly for administering flu vaccine and Covid boosters, very rarely for consultation with doctors as far as I know. Maybe it’s another consequence of the shortage of doctors in the NHS but it seems rather a shame to have perfectly good facilities standing empty most of the time.
As we had our various injections, I watched the nurse dropping the used syringes into a special bin and asked her what happened to them. Would they be sterilised and recycled? No, she told me, they are carefully destroyed. I know that used syringes can’t just be re-used and can’t be thrown into ordinary rubbish but you might have thought that by 2025 they would have found a way of usefully recycling them.
Such a lot of waste in the modern world!
Orly Noy is a journalist and editor at the Hebrew-language news magazine Local Call. In this article, on the second anniversary of the attack by Hamas on October 7th, she reflects on the changes in Gaza and Israel, and the devastation, and the fact that so much of what has gone in Gaza was hidden from many Israelis.
Here’s a section of what she wrote that particularly struck me:
“On a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum a few weeks ago, I was struck by how familiar the photos looked, although in terms of devastation, Gaza looks far worse than Hiroshima after the atomic bomb – which did not pulverise kilometres of standing structure. In Hiroshima, the bomb took between 90,000 and 140,000 lives. In Gaza, some estimates already top 100,000, and the final figure when the dust settles will be unknown.
One photograph especially caught my eye at the museum: Human Shadow Etched in Stone, the shadow of a person who was apparently sitting at the entrance to a bank when the bomb dropped, the only thing left being the imprint of their shadow on the steps. Perhaps that is always what great horrors become: the absence they leave behind. So in Gaza, and in a deeply different way, so in Israel too.”
I followed a link to information about that Human Shadow Etched in Stone and found this:
“The British mission to Hiroshima and Nagasaki noted in 1946 that the surfaces of asphalt roads "retained the 'shadows' of those who had walked there at the instant of the explosion," and judged them "objects of macabre interest and pilgrimage for visitors".
“The "human shadow" at the entrance of the Sumitomo Bank was approximately 260 metres (850 ft) from the hypocenter of the atomic bomb explosion at Hiroshima. It is thought that the person had been sitting on the stone step waiting for the bank to open when the heat from the bomb burned the surrounding stone white and left the person's shadow visible as a darkened area
The person who cast the shadow almost certainly died immediately in the flash of the bomb. Witnesses reported seeing a person sitting at the entrance just before the explosion, and a soldier testified he had recovered the person's body. The museum exhibit claimed the shadow belonged to a 42-year-old woman named Mitsuno Ochi (越智ミツノ, Ochi Mitsuno), but conclusive proof of this claim cannot be determined and the victim's identity remains unknown.
In January 1971, part of the stone containing the artifact (3.3 meters wide by 2 meters high) was cut from the original location and moved to the museum. As the shadow had been degraded due to weathering, in April 1975, the museum began research into preserving the shadow. In 1991, the museum reported that earnest investigation of preservation methods had commenced. At present, the stone is surrounded by glass.”
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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