Blog 67. And it rained all day…

“And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock”. 
So wrote St Matthew nearly two thousand years ago, but it is still apt: it has rained cats and dogs all day, it is dark and windy outside, all the lights have had to stay on, the central heating is thrumming away and, by golly, are we glad we are not back onboard our boat.  We are confined to barracks, and very happy to be inside.

England is still in its second lockdown, but it is different from the first time.  For a start, the children are still at school and that makes the weekdays significantly quieter (“thank you God!”); secondly, the weather is worse as we descend into winter, making confinement indoors more common; and finally, I would say that people – particularly students at university – are becoming just a little bit more lax about the whole thing.  When I was in The Big City last week to visit the hospital life appeared to be almost normal: families were wandering the streets or enjoying the park, children were playing.  It was, as I have said in an earlier blog, as if we were in a national holiday not a national emergency.  Some people still make a significant effort to swerve around you, but most just keep a sensible distance.  All in all, I think we are all getting tired of the whole thing now.  Notwithstanding a recent peak in readings (which I think may be stray data) the number of daily positive outcomes to tests is finally starting to flatten off for the UK as a whole, though there are some regions (eg the Midlands) where the rate is still increasing.  The rate of daily deaths, while still increasing, has eased off and remains (thank heaven) at a much lower level that the number of positive tests.  As far as I can discover, the younger people represent the majority of those testing positive and are mainly recovering without hospitalisation; the older generation – those over, say, 70 – are the ones in hospital and, sometimes, dying.  Statistically, the number of deaths from CV19 in the UK yesterday was 462 and the graphical plot is following a perfectly symmetrical bath-tub curve with the declining deaths plotted from April and May; we are at about the same level of daily deaths as we were in mid May.  51,766 people have died from the virus to date, yielding a probability of it killing someone in the UK of 0.08%; this is still less than the number of people killed by Hong Kong flu in 1968 (80,000).  There have been 1,344,356 positive tests to date which, if we ignore the number of “false positives” in the tests yields a probability of catching Covid 19 in the UK of about 2%.  There is very positive news about a vaccine becoming available, though the prediction that it will be coming on line before Christmas seems highly optimist to me; the infrastructure is, however, gearing up for mass immunisation and volunteers are currently being sought to man the facilities, provide marshals and so on.  I gather that two separate vaccinations will be required and there are some unpleasant side-effects, so I daresay that will discourage many from seeking the jab.  I will certainly have it though, from asking around, it looks like I will be the only person in Britain who will!  I am hopeful that, after receiving the vaccination, I will be given a boiled sweet for being a good boy, and a distinctive badge that excuses me from wearing a face covering or indulging in social distancing (ever the optimist).

“And where, pray, do you think you are going?”
“Um, I thought I would just recategorise the screws in the workshop”
“You will not. Back inside. I’m not having that wound opened up again. Go and do the jigsaw”
So went the conversation last week when I attempted to leave the house for the garage/workshop. Jane is very much On The Case as my carer, and has no intention of allowing a repeat of my recent accident. It gives her something to focus her attention on, I suppose, and I see my very minor injury as a worthwhile sacrifice as a means of diverting Jane’s mind from her own troubles. For poor Jane’s leg is still playing up and this, along with the foul weather, has rather restricted her gardening and her exercise régime. She is, however, gaining some relief from my oily massages, delivered with just my left hand and now increased to once a day instead of once every other day. Many years ago we visited the zoo and I remember watching a tiger pacing back and forth across its compound, clearly very unhappy with its confinement. Well, that is what Jane is like now: she hates inactivity. Unfortunately, she can only walk without discomfort on the level and, as we do not live in Holland, that makes finding a good walking route difficult. We did manage a pleasant stroll along our nearby canal the other day and the autumn colours were beautiful in the rare sunshine; the only snag was that the rest of the Barsetshire population thought it was a good walking and cycling route too. Indoors, all our freezers are totally full with all the baking products and food that Jane has produced and she is now seeking new outlets. I dread where her energies will be directed next: painting the bathroom has been mentioned and (Oh no!) she has hinted at getting down the Christmas decorations from the loft. On the plus side, Jane had a telephoned consultation with a cardiologist last week and he has told her to stop taking the blood thinning tablets and beta blockers, pending a proper assessment of rhythmic heart data. Instead, she will have to carry a portable recording device to record the next heart “episode”, then download the data to the consultant for analysis. She has yet to receive the device and my suggestion that she will wear it round her neck like Twiki, the little robot in Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century, was not well received. What did that robot keep saying again? “Biddybiddybiddy”, I seem to recall.

Now here is an interesting conundrum, a good discussion topic for when you hold your next dinner party. You have won the National Lottery: a not insubstantial amount, let us say £10 million. Would you give some of it to your friends? Most people would say ‘yes’ (though there may be the odd one who says, “stuff them, I’m off to the Bahamas”) and share their good fortune. The question then moves on to how much you would give each friend. Clearly this would depend on how many friends you have and how generous you feel, but let us say you decide to give them £10,000 each. And now we come to the crux of the conundrum: would you distribute the money equally, or according to need; how would you define “friend” as opposed to “acquaintance”; would you consider one friend to be an older or better friend than another? For example, it would seem unfair to give a large sum to a friend who is on a high salary or generous pension already and is very comfortably off, whereas another friend may be as poor as a church mouse and have a huge mortgage with few prospects after retirement. Difficult isn’t it? Overlaid on all this is another consideration: that the friends may think you have been stingy in your generosity: “He wins £10 million and all he can give me is a measly £10,000”. This last is analogous to you going into a pub after you have won the aforementioned lottery and deciding whether to buy everyone a drink: do so and some will think you are bragging and throwing your money about; fail to do so and some will say that you are a stingy so-and-so, tight with your new-found wealth. You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I do not have the answer to any of these questions, but the topic does make you think and the thought process does pass the time on a wet day in lockdown. One thing I will reveal is that, if I did, perchance, win the National Lottery then I would not tell anyone, though I daresay it might be hard to keep it quiet after buying that fort in the English Channel.

I am as frustrated as Jane because I still only have one hand, so my usual pottering and woodworking has been curtailed, but I managed to rearrange my workshop the other day when Jane was out shopping (received a severe reprimand and was banished to the house again after she noticed blood on my dressing from the re-opened wound). My injury is coming along, though I still have to wear a polythene bag over my hand when showering to keep the dressing dry, which is a nuisance. I am on the third dressing now. I seem to have a lot of bad luck with my hands and they have collected a fair share of wounds and injuries. The series started with a car accident 48 years ago in which the windscreen and/or road shredded the tendons in my hand and left me with a permanently stiff finger (yep, same finger) and I have collected lacerations from Stanley knives, chisels, saws and turning gouges ever since, like trophies. My experience is as nothing however, compared to my best friend whom we will call Christian. His hand injuries (also gained from a car accident) left him with permanently mangled bones in his hand (though, mysteriously, it is fully functional) such that I refer to him as Hand Major, while I, with a mere stiff finger, am referred to as Hand Minor. Following his accident, Christian’s period in the Royal Naval Hospital, Stonehouse, in Plymouth provided his friends and me with hours of evening entertainment. He lay there in his bed with his hand held upright in what appeared to be a lobster pot while we, ostensibly there to cheer him up, indulged ourselves in chatting up the many nurses in the Sick Officers’ Block. Periodically, he would make a pitiful groan in an attempt to regain our attention and some sympathy, but we just ignored him most of the time. As Christian’s recovery progressed and he was allowed out of bed, a young man’s restlessness reasserted itself and he allied himself with a Royal Marine officer, who was also recovering from something (saving the world, probably), and the two of them started to make mischief. They had acquired a couple of enormous syringes (I dread to think what their true function was) and found that they made excellent water pistols. At first, they deployed them from the Sick Officer’s Block lift, lowering it between floors and squirting water through the lattice lift gate up the skirts of nurses walking past on the upper floor. They then moved on to attacking their visitors. One afternoon another friend and I were leaving the Block after a visit and were soaked by Christian and his bootneck chum firing their syringes from the conservatory on the first floor. Well, we weren’t having any of that so we stomped back into the Sick Officers’ Block and up the stairs in pursuit of the “invalids” who (giggling like a couple of schoolboys) scuttled into Christian’s room and barricaded the door We were rattling the doorknob and suffering verbal insults from the other side when along the corridor came a delightful little Staff Nurse in her nice starched uniform and black stockings (very attractive as I recall). She addressed us thus:
“I presume you are officers”.
With a modest swagger and a gesture towards the single gold stripe on our cuffs, we confirmed that we were.
“Then kindly behave like officers! This is a hospital!”
We retired rapidly with our tails between our legs. As we descended the stairs we could hear her try the doorknob on Christian’s room.
“Open this door!”
“Root! Nadgers!” and similar insults came from behind the door.
“Open this door AT ONCE”, she said.
“Oops, sorry Staff…” came from behind the door, along with the sound of moving barricaded furniture.
We did not stop to hear the rest.
One of the many qualities by which we used to judge officers was “presence”: the ability to command respect and to be an effective leader. That Staff Nurse definitely had it, and she scared the pants off me. I never did manage to get her telephone number or discover her name. The difference between the Royal Navy and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision.

As a footnote, Christian aka Hand Major, recovered fully and went on to be a full Captain in the Royal Navy, a much deserved promotion, the ratbag.

Promotion and success in life or a career are interesting topics and not necessarily the same thing.  I was musing on this the other day, for no other reason other than that I had nothing to do except ponder on Life, the Universe, and Everything (as the author Douglas Adams would have it).  Quite a few years ago I was chatting to my late mother and I commented, philosophically, that I had enjoyed my career, but that I hoped I had not disappointed her and my father by not making promotion to Commander.
“You did better than we thought you would, hinny”,was her forthright Tyneside reply. “When you joined the Navy we all reckoned you would be back home in three days”.

Do you know, after all these years I still don’t know if that was a compliment or not?

14 November 2020