When someone eats a sausage

How we are not the superior species and never will be.

I used to be well. Before I became perimenopausal I think I was well most of the time. I had no chronic disease that I knew of (endometriosis wasn’t diagnosed, accidentally, until I was 41). I wasn’t particularly sporty but I wasn’t sedentary either. I hadn’t broken a bone since 1975 when I fell head-first out of a tree and caught my hand in a noose and somehow the drop matched my height exactly so that as if in a Mission Impossible film, my head was left hanging a few inches from the ground.

But the menopause changed me. My mother says now, you are so often ill, and that’s not true but it’s more true than it used to be. I had Long Covid in 2021, although I never tested positive. But it was Long Covid. And then this year. I ran a fell race in late March, got some virus, and was in bed for days. That was bad enough but the aftermath was also dire. I just felt wrong. I was running again, but I lacked energy. It wasn’t lack of fitness. It was as if the energy wasn’t quite reaching where it should go. I remember energy crashes from Long Covid. I could run easily one day, and the next find myself at the shops half a mile away wondering seriously how I would find the strength to walk home. This felt like that. I have read enough about Long Covid to know that my mitrochondria weren’t working properly; that my immune system is in overdrive. But I didn’t know how to fix it and I still don’t.

That isn’t the worst though you’d think it would be for someone sporty. Nor is the worst the heightened allergy symptoms that every hayfever medication does not touch. Constant congestion, a streaming nose. But the worst is the headaches. Every bloody day, all day, and resistant to painkillers. They are such fun. But at least they have an abbrevation. I have NPDH. New Persistent Daily Headache.

I should be well. I am fit, I eat wholefoods, I take vitamins, I drink enough water (although Covid and post-Covid make me extremely thirsty). I don’t smoke, I rarely drink, I love weightlifting. I sleep fine. But I couldn’t shake whatever that post viral thing was and although I was better, I was not better. Funny, that’s what I would say if anyone asked me now how I feel about the last year of heartbreak (but they don’t). I’m better but I’m not better. And just as I was thinking I was recovering, I got another virus. Maybe it’s the same one. Maybe it was lurking and fancied another go. Maybe it’s one of the 200 rhinoviruses that people don’t take seriously because they mistake the “common” in “common cold” for “unimportant” when it means “ferociously successful.” So here I am, writing this with a headache, snuffling, and wondering when I can have a nap, two months after I first fell ill.

I know though that other people’s illnesses are probably as dull as other people’s dreams.

So here is something I’ve managed to write instead, for pleasure.

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In the 19th century, a Whitby surgeon named George Merryweather became convinced that the best way to tell a storm was coming was to observe the behaviour of leeches. His invention, the Tempest Prognosticator, is now famous. It consisted of twelve glass jars. Each housed a leech, and Merryweather deliberately chose glass so that his “little comrades” would not be lonely. If the leeches climbed the jars, as Merryweather observed that they did when the pressure changed, a small bell was rung. It was ingenious. But it was not as useful as the mechanical barometer, which was invented around the same time and which superseded the Tempest Prognosticator for the simple reason that it didn’t involve leeches, or glass.

George Merryweather is a hero of mine. At the time of the 1861 census, the Merryweather family lived at 19, Well Close Square in Whitby, now a handsome cream town house with seven bedrooms and five bathrooms, run as a guesthouse. Merryweather’s Tempest Prognosticator was ten years beyond its moment of fame, when it was exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and it is unrecorded whether Merryweather was still communicating with the Whitby Philosophical Society, as he had begun to do in 1850, with the following reasoning: “As the foreknowledge of storms must be of universal importance…I therefore purpose addressing you, through the medium of the post office (in order that my notices may be duly stamped with the date), informing you beforehand of an approaching commotion in the atmosphere.” He asked for his prognostications to be marked for accuracy; I have no record of the Society’s response. No matter: Merryweather kept writing. On February 2nd, he predicted a storm to take place within thirty-six hours. “I do not,” though, “trouble you with a little blustering of the wind, such as took place last night.” All his forecasts — although this word was not yet common — are tests of his little comrades and his device. “At half-past ten o’clock last night, I had indications of a gale or storm. Although this morning is so mild and beautiful, I must do my duty.”

In June, a Thomas Watson wrote back. “Your prophetic words ‘that you had signals on Monday morning…of an approaching change, with thunder, or a strong gale in the next twenty-four hours’ — are verified! With the exception of about twelve hours, I.e., the change has taken place within thirty-six hours, the storm commencing, I believe, about five o’clock this morning.”

Merryweather did not scorn the barometer. He called it “one of the most valuable instruments that science could boast of.” He just thought the Tempest Prognosticator was superior. “What an invaluable addition [it] must be, to foretell a storm so long before the barometer is materially affected. …Of what incalculable value this apparatus would have been, had it been distributed throughout the kingdom, to warn people, so long beforehand, of the dangers that were likely to take place from the winds; as much, or more so, as a householder to be told beforehand that his house was threatened with fire. Precaution in both cases would cause a sharp look-out, and in a great measure dangers would be avoided.” But science preferred mechanics to animal signals, and science was probably wrong.

No animals died during the typhoon of the 2004 tsunami, unless they were caged or confined. If they could run, they ran, and they ran in good time, ahead of humans. They could sense the water coming. But how?

In an unregarded corner of the Leeds Library, I find a book that has the air of the unread. It was written in 1873 by the Reverend C. Swainson, vicar of High Hurst Wood in East Sussex. I look for more about him, and find that he was named Charles, and a naturalist. He only stayed for two years at High Hurst Wood, but in that time he wrote the Handbook of Weather Folklore, his second most influential book. (The first was Provincial Names and Folk-Lore of British Birds, written at his next parish.) Charles married a woman called Isabella Gossip, a fact that I love but that is of no use. And he compiled two hundred pages of animal, plant and insect forecasters. His book is so comprehensive as to be redundant. Animals who forecast rain: cats, hens, mice, weasels, rats, guinea-fowl, seagulls, crows and dirt-birds (woodpeckers). Their methods are varied: the dirt-bird just has to sing; seagulls come inland; cats wash their jaws with their paws (an assertion which makes me think the Swainson family did not have a cat), or they sneeze; cattle turn up their nostrils (how?) and sniff the air, or lick their forefeet, or lie down but only on their right side; dogs eat grass. All these are forecasts of rain.

If pigeons return home slowly, there will be rain.

When the heron flies low, the air is gross and threatening into showers.

If the fish don’t bite, there will be rain.

Seagull, seagull, sit on the sand. It’s never good weather while you’re on the land.

Insects are also useful. A bee was never caught in a shower; crickets are the housewife’s barometer, foretelling her when it will rain although the Reverend does not tell us how. If there are flies on the ceiling, expect wet weather. A long-bodied beetle in Bedfordshire is called the rain-beetle, on account of its always appearing before rain. But only in Bedfordshire.

How is anyone meant to keep track of all these portents? How can anyone watch for flies and beetles and dogs and cats and check cows are lying on the correct flank? But the tsunami did not lie. Eyewitness accounts saw elephants screaming and running for higher ground, dogs refusing to go outdoors, and zoo animals retreating to their shelters and refusing to emerge.

Saute crapaud

Nous aurons l’eau

(If the toad jumps, rain will come).

In Patanangala beach in Sri Lanka, sixty people died during the tsunami. The beach is part of a nature reserve that usually houses elephants, leopards and countless birds. When Ravi Corea, president of the Sri Lank Wildlife Conservation Society, visited after the disaster, he saw no animal carcasses on the beach. Elsewhere expected deaths of goats, dogs and buffaloes just didn’t happen. How? Probably animals can sense the earth’s vibrations, and knew something was skewed and dangerous. Possibly they could hear things we cannot. Perhaps it’s pressure changes. Either way, they are ahead of us.

Animals are so good at predicting disaster, in Japan they are studied as potential earthquake predictors. A 2011 paper into “Unusual Animal Behaviour Preceding the 2011 Earthquake off the Pacific Coast of Tohoku, Japan,” researched UABs (Unusual Animal Behaviours) Keywords: pets; dairy cows; earthquake precursors; unusual behviors; milk yields. 113 of 703 cat owners noticed unusual behaviour in their pets; 236 of 1, 259 dog owners reported UABs. (But not the other 1023.) Neither of those fractions are particularly impressive. But lab mice in Kobe, the day before its 1995 earthquake, showed a “drastic increase” in locomotive activities (the scientists mean running about), while “the circadian rhythm of mice locomotion disappeared in the days before the Wenchuan earthquake in China.” Cats and dogs meanwhile showed behaviours that included biting, hiding, taking their kittens outside, climbing a high tree or disappearing. In Ibaraki, a prefecture 140km from the 2011 earthquake epicentre, cows began giving less milk six days before the earthquake, and this continued for four days. The paper ends with caution. “Our study indicates that these two phenomena could contribute to the prediction of EQs, but the longitudinal and objective measurement of UABs and the verification of the relevance between milk yield levels and other EQs need to be performed.”

Can elephants predict earthquakes? Almost certainly. Do cows lying down or frogs croaking differently mean it’s going to rain? I’ll end with this from whoever writes the blog at the Royal Metereological Society. “The fact that, in one of the dampest countries in the world, it quite often starts to rain shortly after some cows lie down is probably true - but it's equally likely that a cow will lie down shortly before somebody talks about football or eats a sausage.”

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