Hall of Heroes in Find My Past

Find my past emailed me about their Hall of Heroes. The only one I already knew was Edith Cavell in WWI. The others included stories involving Wales, the Basque children, the Irish, and Serbia.
findmypast.co.uk

Saving Photos and Finding Lost Photos for blogs, books, emails, greeting cards, cakes and memories

Writing a blog about preparing for Chinese New Year in 2015, I was hunting for my old photos showing hotel decorations with red lanterns, Chinese dragon dances outside restaurants, Orchard Road and Shopping Malls decorations. My laptop ran out of photo storage space so all my photos are lost on a disc storing them somewhere in the office. I could not find my old Chinese New Year photos in my Facebook pages. I found some photos in Wikipedia but it's a whole hassle and delay trying to check whether you have to credit the author and how do you spell their name, can you copy it, do you run the danger off copying the link but not the actual photo.

Facebook For Storing Photos
I found old photos of me and my books and myself in libraries with children on Facebook. But not Chinese New Year in Singapore.

Photos saved in Emails
Finally I checked my own emails with the search for the word Chinese New Year.

Success! Hooray! I had sent photos of Chinese New Year in Singapore to friends.

So now I can stop complaining that gmail has stored over 7,000 emails in the cloud and insists on trying to send me the lot every time I log in. I am truly grateful to gmail for storing my emails forever.

Whatever happens to my laptop, lost, stolen, upgraded, my photos in old emails and still intact and recoverable. So now anything I want to be sure not to lose, I shall email to another member of the family.

Here's an old photo. It has to be one of mine before I found the editing programme I bought for iPhoto which enables you to correct the horizontals.
Orange lanterns for Chinese New Year and a lion.

For my posts on travel go to my blog Angela Lansbury author travel.
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Ghosts and mental health

Adding further to scientific evidence for experiences of ghosts being not ghosts but having other causes from outside the person claiming to experience the ghost or inside their head. Even intelligent people can be fooled into thinking that they have met and spoken to people who cannot be caught on camera, seen by others, nor found next day in broad daylight.

Apparently ghost companions are a real, recognised danger when people grow light-headed on mountains and imagine phantom friends or enemies.

Here is an example of a fit, resourceful man, who in the night has a conversation with a man in his tent who is not there next day.

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2745714/My-battle-death-angry-hungry-polar-bear.html

Cuddle cots for the stillborn - what about mourning for mothers? Last photos? Hospital photographers?

Cuddle cots. Any new idea which helps grieving families is welcome. I do wonder about the hygiene of adults and children (siblings of the stillborn) touching a dead baby. I also wondered why a mother of three healthy children would go on to have three stillborn babies. I suppose you keep hoping that the next live birth will replace the feeling of loss and write over the memory of the baby which died with the memory of a baby which lived.

Why would anybody want to keep cuddling the baby for 48 hours? Maybe it takes 48 hours to accept that the baby is dead and you can do no more for it.

Some people never move on. They keep the bedroom the same. They keep the photos on the wall. One family, the Alexander wine company, keep on a wine bottle the photo of Alexander, the father of the current (writing this in 2014) company owner's father.

People try to keep the name of the dead person, calling all children, grandchildren, or future sibling by the name of the ancestor or deceased relative.

That's what a graveyard is for. Even if you don't think that on the day of judgement the bones will all jump out of the graves. The authorities just want the name on the gravestone and the date of death in case the police need to exhume the body. But the family often wants a poem or picture. They vista the graves of the dead.

I have moved from mourning a stillborn baby, which doesn't happen to every family, to losing a parent, to anybody living a full lifespan. Now what about increasing number of people whose elderly mothers die in hospital? Should they have cuddle cots?

The mother of a stillborn baby might be in a hospital bed. But what about the widower with the walking stick, worrying about his car getting fined in the hospital car park, or the daughter of pensionable age herself has no chance to rest in hospital before seeing the body for 15 minutes in a morgue (queue and wait for your body's 15 minutes in the morgue bed) or getting the body back in a coffin.

In Victorian times when most people died at home, the dead baby was set up on the mother's knee or in her arms for a first and last photo. The Japanese still have open coffins. (One can still hope that the body will revive. It happened twice in South America in the last couple of years.)

Maybe we are moving slowly, gently, in that direction. Next we will have hospital photographers to take photos of the family with the recently deceased, propped up in bed.

Newspaper story on cuddle cots in Daily Mail online.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2744458/Meet-parents-using-refrigerated-cuddle-cots-buy-time-stillborn-babies.html

Read more quirky, thoughtful and informative posts by Angela Lansbury on travel, restaurants and other subjects.
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Blue eyes began only up to 10,000 years ago. Oops - no blue eyes in the bible

If blue eyes started maximum 10,000 years ago everybody in the bible, old and new testaments, had brown eyes. So any oil paintings in the national art galleries showing blue eyed saints and prophets and biblical scenes will need to be re-painted or given texts on the walls explaining the artist's mistake.
(Research reported in Daily Mail online about findings from university of Pittsburgh.)

Ghosts and Macular Degeneration

   I've never believed in ghosts and used to think ghosts were explained by the usual suspects:

1 People in white sheets play pranks. 

2 Miss a night's sleep and you are open to suggestion. 

3 Trees backlit by street lights cause shadows on the bedroom wall. 

4 After somebody dies you keep seeing them, wishful thinking. 

Sight and miss-sight

But now there's a sensible explanation.

   I had read about this just after my late father's death. He was an optician. I scanned through all the copies of optical journals he'd saved because I knew he was not a saver so I thought they might have something vital. 

One of the journals had an obituary of a friend of his. 

Another had an article on macular degeneration being a suspect you test for if a patient confesses to seeing worrying images.

   If I remember the article correctly, it suggested that large heads and large hats might be caused by blurred after-images or negative images, especially if you sees white light in darkness with a silhouetted of a person or tall object and then turn to the light, you see the reverse.

  But now, out in the daily newspapers, to reassure everyone, are accounts of sensible people suffering from Charles Bonnet syndrome. Another theory. With a useful name, giving it an air of scientific credibility.

Add on this new theory. That when you have a blank in the middle of a picture, caused by deterioration of the eye, your brain tries to fill the blank with familiar images.

   The eye and brain are amazing. You know if you acquire bifocals, invented by American Benjamin Franklin, or trifocals, you may have difficulty seeing through them. 

However, if you persist, as I did, some time between three days and a week, you will find you automatically adjust.

Let's go back to the question of the relationship between eyes sending messages to your brain, and ghost-like images, interpreted as ghosts. 

The trick to confidence and control in life is to attempt to acquire knowledge from checked sources, and not to allow yourself to believe that weird forces are performing spiteful or unpredictable random acts. 

Science analyses theories. Takes all possible causes. Checks whether a causes b, b causes a, or both a and b are caused by c. Can c be reproduced in a laboratory, observed by more than one person, recorded for all to see, not just hearsay from one person. Can the experiment be repeated, after other causes are eliminated. 

Most of nature and science follows regular patterns. If you find a regular problem, a pattern, persist long enough until you find the pattern which provides the answer. That's what I learned today.

Simple. Macular degeneration and after images create blurred or remembered images.

I checked on Wikipedia under Macular Degeneration for an image.

A scene as it might be viewed by a person with age-related macular degeneration.
Source	http://www.nei.nih.gov/photo/keyword.asp?narrow=Eye+Disease+Simulation&match=all (TIFF image)
Author	National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health

I dream of my dead parents. But when I wake I cannot reproduce these images. I cannot show them to anybody else. I cannot resurrect the same image the next day. Nobody else has seen what I dreamed of in the night. I had a dream, a night dream, a day dream. If you like, a ghost.

Useful Websites

UK National Health Service On Causes and Cures For Images or Hallucinations

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/charles-bonnet-syndrome/

Wiki on Macular Degeneration with images and links to text sources 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macular_degeneration

The Sight seen by the eye and other images with USA origin details

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eye_disease_simulation,_age-related_macular_degeneration.jpg

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Wine and Dine At Home Club Events

We started in the lounge with smoked salmon on brown bread cut into tiny squares, and the same with a platter of pate, plus two white wine aperitifs.

Small glasses - the bottles were shared between 10-12 people. We planned on having two wines with each course, so a eight quarter glasses of wine is two glasses of wine each. 

We drove there car sharing, so we had one driver who had to limit his drinking, three non-drivers who had only their health and waistlines to worry about.

Cheeses with grapes.

Cheeses with grapes, celery, assorted biscuits and crackers.

A sweet finish. Muscat or any sweet wine from your local supermarket.

Dessert of pavlova with strawberries and cream brûlée. Yummy.

Many groups of friends meet in the UK and Singapore.

Central London Wine society.

Hertfordshire wine society runs Grand Cru suppers. Prices are about £35 per person which includes food and wine. To join you need to be able and winning to take your turn hosting a dinner, which means cooking a three course meal for up to 14 people, including cold starters to serve for the stand up reception in the same or another room, and having space for one or two tables seating the 14 diners, and be willing to supply the two starter wines. 

To save the burden on the host, one of the guests or organisers supplies the other bottles of wine and the wine glasses. You need two glasses per person as you usually have two wines to compare.

The comparison might be a pair of wine both using the same grape, or similar style but a French or European contrasting with a New World wine, such as USA or South American or Australian or New Zealand. Often one wine will be cheap and/or recent, the other will be older and more expensive. You end by voting which you preferred. If you keep your own notes, you can go home pleased to have tried a good wine and seen how much better it was. Or, you will have preferred the cheaper wine and be glad to know you can save your money and get the same or more enjoyment.