Fake 202

From time to time I make remarks about BH's move to decaffeinated tea and coffee. Now, I find myself in nearly the same position.

I drink very little coffee, but I do drink tea, and of late I have been finding that afternoon tea has been unreliable, quite often having a soporific rather than a stimulating effect. Not what it say on the tin at all. And then the heat police are saying that caffeine and alcohol are both bad news for older people when temperatures are as high as they have been for some weeks now. So I have started to dabble with decaff tea. Not for the first cup of the day, which has something of the function that the first cigarette of the day used to have, but maybe for subsequent ones. And I have avoided green tea on the odd occasion that it is available, having learned from somewhere that, despite its innocuous appearance, it has a high caffeine content.

So far, the taste seems to be OK but the colour is not too clever. The colour of decaff tea is rather dull and muddy compared with that of real tea. We shall see how I get on.

And then there is the matter of Simenon's cat of reference 3, last noticed at reference 2, and visible underneath the fake tea in the snap above. When I got to the end of my second read, I was confused, because it seemed to start at the same place as it finished, with the wrecking ball swinging around the row of houses on the other side of the street. Eventually, I decided that I had failed to compute all the toing and froing in time in the story. Not a straightforward, simple moving forward in time at all.

Also that the story is as much about the business of growing old, as seen from the point of view of a seventy year old, once vigorous man - as about the rather sorry pickle that an older couple had got themselves into, living together, but only communicating by writing mostly unpleasant messages to each other.

I shall have a third go, taking more care with vocabulary this time, and I shall also try to persuade BH to have a second go - and then we can have a proper book club go at it.

Last up, back on the deer, recently noticed from the other island, at reference 4. Not forgetting the white tailed deer of reference 5. The prompt this time being wondering what happens in the rather larger island of Ireland. How do the deer get on there?

Fairly rapidly, I learn from references 6 thru 8, that the position on deer in Ireland is much the same as that in a number of other European countries; that the number of deer is growing and needs to be managed. No doubt, as in the Isle of Wight, you have some people campaigning for more deer and some for less. There also seems to be a worry that the native red deer are being corrupted by immigrant sika deer, although I do not yet see why this is a cause for concern. And I have yet to find out whether deer were ever numerous there after the last Ice Age - say in the last ten thousand years - or whether they were ever important for aristocratic sport, as they were for a long time in this country.

I am reminded of once reading that red deer were a much better way of getting meat out of marginal land than cows. Something about their doing less damage to the grass and to the ground in the course of their grazing. But that was a long time ago. There is also the catch that our own attempts at eating venison were not that successful, in the sense that I did not like it as much as beef.

PS 1: for an explanation of the distribution maps of Appendix 1 of reference 6, I turned to reference 8, from which they had been taken. Open squares for positive sightings in 10km squares in 1978, spots for 2008, thirty years later. My eyes can't cope at normal scales, with a spot inside an open square making what is left of the interior of this last look grey.

Statistical noise apart, these deer all look to have spread a good bit in the thirty years.

Snap above taken from reference 8.

PS 2: and not forgetting that yet another scheme for national identity cards has fallen through, as reported at reference 10. The civil servants keep on trying, but it always gets squashed after a respectable amount of money has been spent. Having been peripheral to such a try back in the mid 1970s, something that I notice from time to time, for example at reference 11. Meanwhile, very few of us bother about all the information that the likes of Google hold: they are only into making money out of us, rather than into control for it own sake. Or so the story seems to go.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/07/fake-201.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/06/mutant-turkey.html.

Reference 3: Le chat - Georges Simenon - 1967. Presses de la Cité.

Reference 4: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/07/scone-report.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/03/white-tails.html.

Reference 6: https://www.npws.ie/sites/default/files/publications/pdf/Deer%20Management%20in%20Ireland%20March%202015.pdf. Deer Management in Ireland: A Framework for Action - Department of Agriculture, Food & the Marine, Department of Arts, Heritage & the Gaeltacht and others - 2015.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sika_deer. The east Asian version of our west Asian red deer?

Reference 8: Distribution and range expansion of deer in Ireland - Carden, R.F., Carlin, C.M., Marnell, F., McElholm, D., Hetherington, P. & Gammell, M.P. - 2011. 

Reference 9: The Deer of Great Britain and Ireland: An Account of Their History, Status and Distribution - Whitehead GK - 1964. Maybe to come.

Reference 10: Burnham scraps new digital ID scheme: Incoming prime minister says money saved will go towards tackling cost-of-living crisis - Jim Pickard,  Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 11: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/04/senior-moments.html.

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