Columnist Chris Wyatt proudly shows off an onion grown on the grounds of Patterdale Hall. (Submitted photo)
The Patterdale Hall Diaries | The entourage effect
- Published: June 27, 2024
By Chris Wyatt
May 26, 2024
It’s been a beautiful few days weatherwise. Plenty of mowing and walking dogs in the woods.
Betty’s tumors have multiplied incredibly rapidly, and she is now covered in them, unfortunately. It seems like we will have weeks to months left with her rather than years, so a focus on keeping the old dog happy is now a priority. She really does love a sniff around the woods at Patterdale Hall and Karen is now strong enough to walk her. As Karen healed, little Betty declined. She is a wonderful little old dog — clever and brave, and we will take her down the deer trails for as long as we can.
It’s the season of great growth. I think I need to put some early squash in. We have a range of squash seeds gifted from friends; my absolute favorite is delicata but I will definitely be planting some birdhouse gourds so that we can make, well, birdhouses out of them. I like the fact that you can eat the skins on delicata squash — it’s a great way to keep fiber high in my diet which is essential for the management of my diverticulitis. The other squash seeds are red kuri but they are a winter variety and so I will hold off planting those.
May 30, 2024
There has been a remarkable change in little Archie’s behavior out at Patterdale Hall.
If Betty is with us then Archie is a nightmare, he growls at everything and shoves his snout in everything, he is looking for mice and shrews. However, if I take him out to the hall alone, he is a lovely little dog. He sits quietly by my side while I read and happily trots to heel while I roam the woodland. He is, in fact, “a good boy.”
The only other time Archie has been “a good boy” was after he got hit by a car and had his pelvis shattered. Then he was on the opioid tramadol and other sedating medications. He was absolutely lovely when he was on opioids — usually he is an intense little dog. He is currently upstairs barking at the shadows of leaves on the wall. Idiot.
Anyway, I’m going to embrace the new, good Archie and will take him with me alone more often if he is going to be normal. We still cannot let him off leash; there are multiple packs of coyotes and he’d be down a groundhog or rabbit hole in seconds.
We have a friend in Scotland whose Patterdale Terrier was a runner, so they got her a GPS collar. She ran, and they ultimately found her stuck eight feet underground in a rabbit warren. She had to be dug out with a backhoe. I’m not going through that with Archie; he stays on the leash.
Delicata squash seeds have been planted. I had to revise which bed they were going in as the one I had selected had become a gigantic ant nest. Ah well, we have plenty of other options. We are not short on space.
June 5, 2024
Early summer is upon us, and the weather has been glorious.
I have not been spending nights at Patterdale Hall — Karen’s ankle is not 100% and probably never will be — but that may change soon. I really do fancy spending more time out there. It is beautiful.
There are plenty of critters there at the moment: mama and baby deer, coyotes and, rather wonderfully, turkeys — big ones. As an Englishman I am constantly delighted by animals that are not wild in the U.K., and seeing big flocks of turkeys is fun. These were all hens, but I have seen a couple of massive males — very impressive birds. There is absolutely no way they would fit in our oven.
I’m thinking of things to keep me occupied today.
It’s going to storm so I may hang out with Archie and read. I got to hang out with Bob and read yesterday, which was lovely. He was reading several of Lenin’s pamphlets and I was reading “Tales from the Yawning Portal,” which is a collection of Dungeons and Dragons adventures.
Bob’s reading is way more serious than mine. I really don’t like reading serious things after being immersed in cellular neurophysiology for thirty-three years. My reading is entirely for entertainment, unless I am at work, when it is almost entirely current research publications. “Tales from the Yawning Portal” is a needed and welcome respite from studying oxygen-chemoreception. However, I did read a great research paper the other day.
There has been a psychedelic renaissance recently and compounds like psilocybin have been found to be effective in treating drug-resistant depression. My previous Ph.D. student, Ryan researches this at Miami University and, this week, published a paper in The British Journal of Pharmacology identifying a compound in psychedelic mushrooms that is antidepressant but not hallucinogenic.
This means that, by using the whole mushroom, you would get an entourage effect of multiple antidepressant compounds that would be more effective than simply using psilocybin alone. It’s exciting stuff and you should ask him about it. He is currently working as a server in Sunrise Café since he doesn’t get paid in the summer and, as a visiting assistant professor, he gets paid peanuts. He is a wonderful human being; tip him generously.
*Originally from Manchester, England, Chris Wyatt is an associate professor of neuroscience, cell biology and physiology at Wright State University. He has lived in Yellow Springs for 17 years, is married and has two children and two insane Patterdale terriers.
The Yellow Springs News encourages respectful discussion of this article.
You must login to post a comment.
Don't have a login? Register for a free YSNews.com account.
No comments yet for this article.