Well, that’s it then: the road back to normality. Allegedly. Much to my surprise, after my diatribe in the last blog, the prime minister has set out a tentative plan for easing restrictions and he has not based it on unrealistic infection targets or other numeric data. Clearly, the prime minister and members of the Cabinet read my blog. Having repeated time and time again that relaxation will be based on meeting certain measurable criteria, the government has contrarily based the plan on a simple timetable of dates – and ‘not before’ dates at that. I find that a bit odd, but presumably the person who came up with the strategy thought they would get rid of the hard bit – the ‘data based’ part – in the advanced publicity and hoped that we wouldn’t notice the oxymoron. Never mind: at least we have a plan, albeit a very tentative one that is hedged with many caveats. For posterity it may be worth recording the plan (I was taught never to use two words when one would do, and to avoid ‘buzz’ words, so I refuse to call the plan a ‘road map’). Briefly, the schools go back on 8 March in England and we can meet one person outdoors; we may be allowed out of our homes and meet other households outside on 29 March; self-catering holiday accommodation may be used from 12 April; indoor locations and hotels may open from 17 May; virtually all restrictions lift from 21 June, when a separate review also reports on the way forward for social distancing. The plan deliberately has five weeks between key dates so that the effect of each relaxation can be assessed, and the government is at pains to point out that these are the earliest dates by which things can happen, despite any unexpected falls in infections and deaths that may occur in the meantime. As some wag pointed out, the UK is going to be one of the first nations in the world to complete a comprehensive and successful inoculation programme – and the last to remove restrictions and get the country’s economy going again. There are 115 days of continuing restrictions before there is even the hope of any serious relief from imprisonment on 21 June. I really don’t know whether to be pleased or not. I suppose we at least have dates we can look forward to, but the five weeks between each stage (or ‘step’ as the government prefers) seems a bit over-cautious given the recently proven success of the vaccination programme at preventing hospital admission and reducing deaths. There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. Ho hum, plus ça change.
Right on cue with the announcement of schools reopening from 8 March we have the school authorities and teaching unions sucking their teeth and complaining that it will be impossible to do because of the need to conduct tests on pupils as they return. One chairman of school governors was quoted as saying,
“We will need an army of people to test 800 pupils three times in a week. Since teachers have not been inoculated we will certainly not want them to get close to the children . . . “ [my italics].
What? Teachers get up close to children? What can they be thinking of? We should call in the army to do it – they are paid to take risks. Already some primary schools have dictated the wearing of masks for children as young as five, despite this being contrary to the advice of the Department of Education and definitely not a requirement, in or out of school. At a time when children have lost an entire year of their education it is so heartening to see these professionals adopt a firm “can do” pragmatic approach to the problem. I read in the press today that a review was looking at extending the school day and shortening the school holidays in order to help pupils catch up with their education. Yeah – good luck with that one: the leader of the headteachers’ union has already stated that such ideas were “gimmicks” and would be “misconceived and unhelpful…grinding out more hours from tired children”. Unhelpful to whom, one wonders.
I was reading a book the other day about day-to-day life in Britain during WW2 and it provided something of a contrast to today’s situation. If there was an air raid overnight, then the children were excused school the next morning, but had to attend school as normal for the afternoon. If the building had been damaged by bombing then teaching still went on unless the damage was severe; the school staff ‘made do’ because they were thoroughly professional and their children’s interests were paramount. Men who worked as volunteers, such as air-raid wardens, firemen or civil defence rescue workers still had to go to work the next day, even if they had been up all night. Everyone seemed to recognise that these things were necessary in order to survive: they undoubtedly had a ‘can do’ spirit: “Keep Calm and Carry On” was the slogan, I believe. Today, we have about 50% of the country in opinion polls stating that they want lockdown to continue or to be even more stringently enforced – safe in the knowledge that the sun is shining and they will be paid ‘on furlough’ by the government whether they work or not. We also have teachers who – apparently – are terrified of going near their children despite research that shows the profession to be no more at risk than the general public. There can be no doubt that the government has succeeded in terrifying a goodly hunk of the British public; let us hope that it is just as successful in convincing folk that it really is safe to get back to normal after this Summer. Somehow I think it will be harder to back out of this hole than it was driving into it.
As I write, positive test results, hospital admissions and deaths related to Covid 19 continue to fall. Figures for that last 24 hours in the UK are: infections, 9,985 (dropping 16%); hospital admissions, 1,142 (dropping 20%); deaths, 323 (dropping 30%). Let us hope that the decline continues. Nearly 19 million people have received their first immunisation (about 28% of the entire UK population).
If you read my report about power outage in Texas (Blog 81) last week then you may be interested in a small follow-up. A friend of mine has kindly forwarded to me a piece from the New York Times, which reported that some Texans are on uncapped flexible tariffs for their electricity, the prices charged being dynamic and governed by demand. At least one man faces an electricity bill of $16,752 for a few days of supply, amounting to his life’s savings. Our tariffs are capped in the UK, but the situation should make us have a hard think when considering renewing our electricity supplier contracts (I will be going for a Fixed Price).
The memsahib and I were watching one of those thrillers made in Scandinavia the other day. You know the sort of thing: all cold bleak landscapes, incomprehensible languages and subtitles, lots of coffee and sex, yet with excellent plots and fascinating insights into life in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland. And as I watched, an interesting thought occurred to me: why do houses in Scandinavia have doors that open outward, particularly the external doors? In Britain, the external doors open inwards. Even the internal doors open inwards into a room from the hall or landing. But apparently in Scandinavia the doors open outwards, which is totally illogical, for you would expect snow that had piled up outside to prevent the door from opening. I cannot remember what the door situation is in North America, but I seem to recall that the main doors opened inwards (like in the UK) though there was often an outer screen door on a spring (presumably to keep out insects) that opened outwards. Doors in France, Italy and Australia open inwards, as in Britain. Not sure about Fiji, or Pitcairn Island, but perhaps those places just don’t have doors, only palm fronds. This little conundrum started me thinking about other different conventions. In Britain, the windows open outwards, but in France (not sure about Italy and other Mediterranean countries) the windows open inwards; I think that that is almost certainly to accommodate external shutters that can be closed in the warmer countries to keep out the heat. In Britain (and I think the rest of Europe) light switches are ‘down’ to switch on; in North America the convention is the other way. And don’t start me on driving on the wrong side of the road. It is fascinating that we all have developed different ways of doing things. I thought so much about these practices that I completely lost the plot on the “Scandi Noir” we were watching and succeeded in causing Jane to lose it too, which did not go down well. Still, the intellectual exercise passed the time satisfactorily one evening and I throw the thought of Scandinavian doors out to you to consider at your leisure.
Jane is b-o-r-e-d and it is beginning to show. In previous lockdowns she had the garden to occupy her (even in November, when she put her plants to bed) or she could go for walks. This time it has been a much greater ordeal, and we still have 45 days of solitary confinement to go until 12 April, when we might be able to get down to the boat. That said, we did get out for a country walk earlier in the week, parking the car in the village of Giffords Barton and walking down the beautiful avenue that leads to the Elizabethan manor at Much Minging. It was absolutely delightful. The weather was dry and mild, Jane’s exercise régime has been helping her leg enormously, and we felt we simply had to get out of the house into the fresh air. I must say, it did make a difference and improved our mood significantly: it was a lovely walk, crowd free, very little traffic, and it was a joy to hear the birds singing and to look at the blue sky. The snag came when we made the journey back across fields, rather than on the main road. We had anticipated that things might be a little wet underfoot and so were wearing the full Exped Rig (Rig No 7) as outlined in Blog 44, but as the route would take us across green pasture as opposed to muddy tracks we thought the walk would be reasonably simple. Alas, no. Every stile was waterlogged, just as it had been on Christmas Day (Blog 74), and negotiating each hazard was something of a challenge, particularly for Jane who has an aversion to puddles, mud, stepping stones, stiles, barbed wire and brambles. The end, when it came, was entirely predictable. I climbed over a stone stile that, in that quirky English way, consisted of a vertical stone slab like the sides of a monolithic barrow, hopped my way around the enormous lake on the other side by sliding through the mud and hanging onto trees like Tarzan, and reached what could tolerably be described as terra firma. Tarzan’s companion, the inaptly named Jane, on the other hand, was made of more cautious stuff. Very tentatively and delicately she edged her way round the lake, paused at each foothold on the sloping bank of mud as if to give gravity every possible chance of making her slip, then finally achieved her goal by sliding majestically sideways into the swamp and sitting with a loud ‘splat’ in six inches of mud. Just to make a good job of it, she then rolled over in order to get her upper body done too. And, dear reader, I was very shocked, for Jane said a very rude word.
I managed to get her up and onto dry land eventually (the two of us skidding around in the quagmire was like a scene from a Laurel and Hardy film), but the seat of her trousers and most of her torso were covered in mud that was so extensive and pervasive that it had even soaked through to her knickers. We slip/slid the rest of the way to the car, Jane muttering the whole way and looking like a street urchin from Oliver Twist. Of course, I could not allow her to sit in the car in her filthy state and she had to make the journey sitting on three shopping bags that we conveniently had in the boot (she declined to remove her trousers). I must say, I was also covered in filth from boot to thigh, so that even Wellington boots would not have protected me. We had to strip off in the kitchen when we returned home and bundled all our gear straight into the washing machine. What an adventure and what larks! I think I will be remembering Jane sitting in that mud for many years to come, the experience being so shocking and, indeed, traumatic. Of course, it was not at all amusing and I most certainly did not laugh at the spectacle. Splat.
I wrote in Blog 80 about the dangers that can be caused by ambiguity in language. Similar misunderstandings can be caused by abbreviations. The armed forces are dominated by abbreviations, with glossaries unique not just to individual services like the navy, army or airforce, but also to different branches in each service. No one ever teaches you what the abbreviations stand for when you join; you are just expected to know what they mean by some sort of osmosis process, being shouted at if you get it wrong. As there are several layers of abbreviations floating in parallel universes in not only the armed forces, but also the civilian world too, there is considerable scope for error. Such a misunderstanding happened to a friend of mine some years ago after a spell at university. In the olden days (ie in the last century when I joined Dartmouth) all career naval officers completed an initial two years of General Naval Training. We learned such useful life skills as mooring with two anchors using a swivel piece; worming, parcelling and serving Extra Special Flexible Steel Wire Rope; and taking a fix without producing a cocked hat (another time perhaps…). After that, officers were trained or educated in their chosen specialisation, most engineers (such as I) joining the Royal Naval Engineering College to read for a degree, then to be trained on an application course for their chosen sub branch. I say ‘most’ engineers, because those who had exceptionally good ‘A’ Level results at school were identified early and earmarked to read for their degrees at Cambridge University. There were only two or three of these chosen each year: the cream of the crop. While we hewers of food and drawers of water were being lectured in Plymouth in thermodynamics on Friday afternoons or in stress analysis on Saturday mornings, these very clever young men on full naval pay were attending the odd lecture in Cambridge as the mood took them, or navigating a punt on the Cam with some delightful little piece on the English Literature course (or whatever). But we bore them no grudge: the truth is, we forgot all about them. Anyway, after three years our colleagues with their BA(Cantab) had to return to the navy and reacclimatise themselves to naval ways again. The navy recognised that some adjustment would be required, and so some prodigal sons were initially appointed to the Naval College at Greenwich for the Junior Officers’ Staff Course, which provided a rounded education and a gentle embrace back into the fold. Such was the fate of my chum. On the first day of the course the students were told that each would be required to give a lecture to the rest of the course on an allocated subject, and my chum was given the topic of CND. After his three years studying in the heart of élite British academe he considered the task to be a mere bagatelle, and threw himself into the research determined to prove his erudition. The college library yielded a mass of useful material on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but he was quite well up on the topic anyway after his period in a civilian university. He compiled copious notes for his impending talk and a whole stack of vugraphs (remember those?) to support his script. Weeks later, the day of his lecture dawned and he strode into the lecture hall with great confidence and, perhaps, a certain air of panache. About 150 of his peers and several senior staff officers faced him in the audience. He was, nevertheless, coolly confident that he knew his stuff. The Course Officer introduced him:
“Gentlemen, we now move onto our next lecture, which I am quite looking forward to. Lieutenant Bannerman is now going to talk to us for forty minutes on the subject of CND: Commodore Naval Drafting. Over to you Bannerman.”
As I say, these abbreviations can lead to misunderstandings.
TTFN
26 February 2021
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 