Blog 86. Fifty Two Weeks In

Ta Daah!  My boat is back in the water after nearly four months of being laid up ashore.  We have seen photographs, sent by our secret agents in Dartmouth, showing APPLETON RUM bobbing happily alongside a brand new pontoon in the new floating marina.  This is wonderful news and we still hope to get down there next week to give her a reassuring pat on the poop deck and some words of reassurance that we still love her.  More next week on the exciting tribulations of driving over 100 miles on British roads; I can hardly sleep for the excitement. We move to British Summer Time on Saturday – a new (and later) dawn is beginning.

So here we are: one year ‘in’ for the United Kingdom and still in lockdown though, admittedly, this is Lockdown Number 3 as opposed to Number 1.  We were given a brief parole last June – just a short taster of what life used to be like –  before being plunged back into confinement and misery. 126,445 people in the UK have died with Covid 19 since it all began, yielding an overall probability of dying from the disease in the UK of just 0.18%.  This probability drops to a mere 0.06% this year, now that the vaccination programme is in full swing.  The figures are not available for the number of deaths caused by neglected treatment of other ailments; for suicides; for the increase in mental illness; for the untold anguish of those who have been died alone, apart from their loved ones.  Was it – is it – really necessary to confine an entire country for the sake of a disease with a less than one percent fatality rate? Jane tried telephoning the hospital in the Big City the other day to enquire after her heart monitor (prescribed in November 2020), and was simply cut off after the initial recorded spiel about Covid 19: no discussion.  As I write, daily deaths in the UK are down to 63, still dropping at 31% weekly; hospital admissions, 354 (dropping 20% weekly).  Excess deaths are now below the 5-year average for the time of year.  About 29 million people have been vaccinated (56% of the UK adult population) and the programme is set to achieve its next milestone of all those over 50 being immunised (or offered immunisation) by 15 April.  Meanwhile, in Europe, the continent is suffering a third wave of infections which – it is predicted – will be coming our way.  Will that be a problem in our – now – much more robust state of immunity?  It is hard to say, for the government continues on its metaphorical line of stick and carrot: of lights at the ends of tunnels followed by dire predictions of more deaths and more mask-wearing.  This has been the official stance for some time now and, frankly, it is becoming somewhat tedious.  We are frequently encouraged by phrases such as, “just a little bit longer” or “we should be out by Easter when all the at-risk groups have all been vaccinated”, but these exhortations are then immediately dampened by a cancellation of all foreign holidays until at least July and predictions that we will still be practising social distancing well into the Autumn, if not into next year.  It is worse than torture.  Down here at the coalface we are still twitched that a neighbour will report us for entertaining friends in the back garden (none will come anyway), or for taking the car to go for a country walk out of area; but, looking out of our window, there seems to be a lot more cars moving around than there used to be.  Bearing in mind that the law says we must remain in our homes except in exceptional circumstances – such cases roughly being only to exercise, to go food shopping, to go to work or to go to the doctor – one wonders where these cars have come from or are going after 2000, when the supermarkets have shut.  We live in a cul-de-sac with only eight houses ‘upstream’ of us, yet at times the traffic flow (including at night) is like the M5 on a Bank Holiday.  I may exaggerate slightly, but you get the gist.  The press says that it is those naughty old vaccinated people who are breaking the rules, but I have seen no evidence of that among the people I know (or maybe I just don’t get invited to those sort of parties); either way, I think the cracks are starting to show and people are becoming a bit more lax.  The government remains adamant that it will not relent from its published timetable for coming out of lockdown, and perhaps it is right to be cautious and to place an embargo on foreign holidays; but I see signs of it moving the goalposts yet again for the long-term emergence: before, it was, “wait until all those over aged 50 have been vaccinated (April 2021)”, then it was, “wait until all adults have been vaccinated (August 2021)”, and now – the latest one – is, “wait until the whole world has been vaccinated (God knows)”.  Good grief: like the Hotel California, we will never leave at this rate.

The European Union (EU) has made a complete dog’s breakfast of its vaccination programme and, like a drowning man, is thrashing around looking for someone to blame and someone to drag under with it.  Surprise, surprise, it has selected for scapegoat its erstwhile member, floating happily in its lifeboat of vaccinated passengers, the United Kingdom.  Encumbered by its bureaucracy, the EU failed to streamline its approval process for the vaccines, failed to invest widely and speculatively, was slow to set up contracts with the pharmaceutical firms, laborious and unimaginative in negotiating terms, and dogmatic in insisting that the whole process be dealt with centrally, instead of member states acting individually. Unencumbered by EU or most other traditional restraints, the UK invested very early and very widely in vaccine research, eventually coming up trumps with the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine: a joint venture between Oxford University and the global pharmaceutical firm Astra Zeneca.  The company undertook to supply the vaccine to the world at cost and a rapid contract was agreed with the UK government. The UK started its vaccination programme in December 2020, initially using the alternative Pfizer vaccine, but then moving on to include the Oxford AstraZeneca serum after it had received medical approval.   This successful process was like a red rag to the EU bull (particularly the French), and its first response was politically to discredit the AstraZeneca vaccine as unsafe (since rescinded); its second response was to restrict the vaccine to certain age groups (first the elderly then, in a remarkable flipflop, just the young); the third response was to claim that AstraZeneca was favouring the UK contract at the expense of the (later) EU contract; its fourth response was to threaten to invoke a law intended for use in time of war or conflict, and block all exports of the vaccine to the UK and some other countries.  A crack unit of the Italian police made a dawn raid on the AstraZeneca laboratory in Italy yesterday to find – ah ha! – a batch of vaccines earmarked for (oh dear, how embarrassing) Belgium.  Paradoxically, and bizarrely, the EU has done such a good discrediting job on the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine in Europe that up to 60% of its citizens are declining to have it and Germany, alone, has 1.5m doses unused in storage (which begs the question of, ‘so why ban exports of a vaccine that you have plenty of and which none of your people want?’).  Meanwhile, Europe is suffering a severe third wave of infections and its people are suffering and dying – all because of political posturing and bluster.  Thank God we left that poisonous organisation that puts saving political face before saving lives.

I walked into the kitchen to see how breakfast was coming along and was brought up short by the sight of the chopping board, on which rested what appeared to be two large rabbit droppings.  I drew closer and recognised that they were – in fact – two single dates, all the more prominent for being alone on the vast expanse of the beech board.
“Tell me that’s not our breakfast”, I asked of the Head Chef.
“It is.  It’s still a fast day.  One for you and one for me”, was the reply.
In a small saucepan on the hob bubbled, what looked like, a teaspoonful of berries.  That was the second component of the feast.  The third component would be a tablespoonful of yoghurt.  The two of us later sat there in the Garden Control Tower (aka the Breakfast Room or conservatory) gazing at our bowls: the contents looked jolly nice and, on tasting the repast, they tasted very nice; but was that it?  Apparently it was: two mouthfuls then gone.  We wondered then what to do for the rest of the day.  The diet continues, you see: five days normal food, two days on 800 calories.  Notwithstanding this little episode, the programme still hasn’t been too bad or onerous, but both of our weights have plateaued and we just have to slough on through the doldrums before we pick up the Roaring 40s once more.  I have lost just over a stone (actually 15 lbs) since January, though most of that was in the first month; I feel very much the better for it so I think it has been worthwhile, though I am developing an aversion to broccoli.  The daily exercise bike workout is still going on, though calling it a  ‘workout’ may be somewhat an excessive description for thirty minutes of pedalling at 85% full power.  Never mind, it is thirty minutes more exercise than I used to get.

My search for quality sartorial elegance has had some success, though not in the trousers department (Blog 85).  Thwarted by the dearth of decent cavalry twill trousers, I directed my attention to my upper half with the aim of obtaining a new waistcoat for my Harris Tweed ensembles.  I already have a mustard coloured waistcoat and a green check one, each matching nicely with two appropriate sports coats; however my Donegal Tweed coat with the slight red thread would benefit from a complementary maroon or red waistcoat and so I searched accordingly.  Yet again, there was some difficulty in finding a suitable item of the right colour and quality, but I was determined not to be beaten.  I finally struck success when I found Tom Sawyer Waistcoats (www.tomsawyerwaistcoats.co.uk), based in Ipplepen in Devon.  The small family firm had a good range of waistcoats and I ordered one in maroon immediately; it is being manufactured as I write.  I will let you know how I get on with the end product (I know you will be interested).  I see that the firm also makes cravats and I could do with some new ones; the oldest I have was bought during a run ashore in Gibraltar in 1971, so is getting on a bit now.

Speaking of sartorial elegance, the memsahib tapped her way into breakfast the other morning wearing high heels, tights, a very smart dress, a matching necklace and lipstick, her (longer than usual) strawberry blond hair beautifully coiffured and curled under.  My jaw fell open.   Boy, does she scrub up well, though my remark of,
“My God.  You’re a girl!”,
did not go down terribly well.  I couldn’t take my eyes off her over breakfast.  In fact, so often did I stare at her that it invoked the order,
“Will you stop that!”
I immediately averted my eyes, lest I be accused of sexual harassment or even sexual assault (you never know where you are as a privileged white man in 2021).  On enquiry, she revealed that she had been inspired by my own determination not to let appearances go in lockdown and so had decided to break the monotonous routine by occasionally dressing smartly: a practice she intends to repeat once a week at random.  For my part, I gulped down two cups of black coffee thinking that, perhaps, I was dreaming and in need of waking up (I have never inspired anyone in my life); but, no, it was not a vision, it was my wife.  Cor, I say!  Alas, at midnight the golden carriage turned into a pumpkin and Cinders put aside her frock, her shoes and her jewellery to become a thing of shreds and patches once more: she bounced into breakfast the next day wearing her jeans and gym shoes.  Never mind: I can wait another week.

26 March 2021

Blog 85. “Hi Tweety; So Long Jerry”.

Spring is trying to arrive in Melbury though, because of a storm last week, I had to lash down our newly painted garden furniture (Blog 83) and secure the entire outfit to the house using a large ring bolt and a double sheet bend. The narcissi are up and blooming, primroses and celandine decorate the verges, and trees are starting to blossom. I have been detailed off to mow the lawn, twice. A Great Emergence is upon us. It is also nesting time, and Jane is monitoring the birthing preparations of the garden’s birds with all the maternal instinct of a mother hen. We have great tits, blue tits, long-tailed tits, goldfinches, sparrows and a robin. Plus the odd blackbird and pigeon. There are four nesting boxes (lovingly crafted by self), each with its own peculiar characteristics and features according to the target species. It is fascinating to watch the birds reconnoitre each box, perching on the top, looking in the hole, glancing around, doing a quick internal view, then disappearing off again. The newest bijou residence, in gleaming white pine with modern additions and neat joints, is apparently rejected in favour of a much older box, knocked together over five years ago and covered in green, yet popular every year. The robin box has never been touched. The blue tits also seem to prefer the sparrow box, with its entrance hole on the side. We have no idea where the goldfinches, sparrows and robins nest; they appear to spurn our efforts as far as we can tell. In May we should see the result of courtship and homemaking: mother bringing food to her chicks and then the tiny fledglings appearing at the nest box entrance and trying to fly: the latter always happens on one single day and we always try to be there to witness it.

One window opens and another closes.  Just as we are contemplating meeting new feathered friends, I have to report that our furry long-tailed friends may no longer be with us: I refer to the shed-eating mice (Blog 83) which, I think, are no more.  We laid two spring-loaded mouse traps loaded with the best Cheddar in the shed and they remain untouched.  Of course, they might be Welsh mice who prefer the Caerphilly, but there is more: the poisoned bait in the rodent Green Mile box is no longer being taken away or showing signs of regular depletion.  I think the little critters (or nasty rats) have been defeated.  The shed will breathe a sigh of relief (if a shed can sigh) and we can mark that down as another problem solved, but we are sorry that we had to take such drastic action.  I think that, even if we had found a way to catch the mice (or rats) and transport them to some sort of rodent Devil’s Island, they would still have found a way to come back (they home, you know, as do snails and slugs).  Goodbye Jerry (or was it Roland?).

I am still on the search for a decent pair of smart trousers (Blog 79).  All I want is a pair of cavalry twill trousers, 100% wool, 20 oz cloth, made in Britain, belt loops, no elasticated waist, flat front and no pleat. Can I find a pair?  No luck so far.  I have tried looking at the internet sites of what I thought were respectable British  tailors or gentlemen’s outfitters such as Lewins, Charles Tyrwhitt or Moss Bros and was horrified by the result: such trousers as were for sale were modelled by skinny young men with a month’s bum fluff on their faces, wearing cotton drainpipe trousers without creases that ended above their ankles, as if mummy had failed to allow for their growth.  Worse, many of them wore no socks.  No socks! Can you believe that?   I even tried Gieves & Hawkes, the naval outfitters of Saville Row, and came up with the same result. What on earth is the tailoring business coming to?  What has happened to the British gentleman?  Finally, I did find a site of a gentlemen’s outfitters of Jermyn Street in London that sold just what I wanted.  The price for a pair was £175.  I will repeat that: one hundred and seventy five pounds sterling.  On top of that price you had to pay a further £15 to have the inside leg measurement adjusted to your requirement and, of course, postage and packing.  Someone is having a laugh here.  The supplier nearest to my requirements (at a price I could afford) was a country-wear outfitter in Yorkshire (the supplier also made plus fours – I was tempted, but I don’t play golf); alas the trousers came with a single pleat in the front and that is not flattering to my streamlined profile.  I shall keep looking; after all, what else is there to do?

We are trying to get out more for country walks now, despite the pain of Jane’s leg.  Last week we ventured over into Wiltshire for a walk – a practice discouraged by the police, but perfectly legal – and parked near a spot on the Kennet and Avon (K&A) Canal.  From there we walked to a little hamlet called Huish, nestling in the southern slopes of the Wiltshire Downs.  We had been before.  In the days when we had a narrowboat and cruised the K&A Canal, we once moored, at random, near where we now had parked the car.  Feeling the need to stretch our legs after standing for so long on the boat, we glanced around the beautiful countryside and saw, in the distance, the tower of a tiny church – apparently in the middle of nowhere.  Curious, we set off towards it along the deserted country lanes and found the small church of St Nicholas, on its own, in this hamlet of Huish.  There was only one house and a farm nearby and the site was so peaceful and tranquil that we went into the churchyard to rest and absorb the silence.  As we entered, we stumbled over the first grave in the churchyard and found, to our great surprise, that it was the grave of the wife of the late film star and actor, David Niven.  We were completely taken aback.  If you have ever read Niven’s autobiography, The Moon’s a Balloon (highly recommended),  you will know that he married a woman called Primula Rollo during WW2 when he was serving in the British Army.  After the war he took her back to his home in Los Angeles, but she died shortly after arrival, in 1946, after falling into the cellar during a party game. He must have arranged for his wife’s body to be brought back to the place where she was born, there to lie peacefully with her ancestors (I think the Rollos were, or maybe still are, local gentry).  The discovery of the grave was remarkably touching and sad.  On this return trip, Jane and I sat, once more, on a bench in the churchyard, in the lee of the church, and just immersed ourselves in the sunshine and tranquility.  It was absolute bliss to be out of the house.

Yesterday we drove to the nearby village of Abbots Rusk and went for a new walk around the area, taking us to the nearby village of South Vauxhall.  Entirely coincidentally (of course), we happened to meet a couple of our friends there who had planned to take the same walk, so we strolled together. He walked with me two metres apart, and his wife with Jane, same distance, the quartet marching like a brigade of British Grenadiers in square formation.  It was a sunny Spring day and quite mild.  Amazingly, Jane and I had never been to Abbots Rusk before, despite it being only about five miles away, but we found it to be a lovely place: picturesque, historic, friendly and (dare I use the cliché) unspoilt.  We walked mainly on the country lanes and what little traffic there was actually slowed down to pass us and the drivers gave us a friendly wave: something we very rarely encounter elsewhere.  Our stroll took in two manor houses and culminated in a long walk – maybe a mile – up a straight, broad, grassed avenue leading directly to the second manor that stood majestically at the end, gazing down the swathe.  I could just picture myself owning that place and having friends around for the weekend, taking a sherry before dinner and a port afterwards; perhaps a morning ride before breakfast down that avenue, wearing my cavalry twill jodhpurs…I have no idea who lives in that manor house now, but I have my eye on it for when we win the lottery.  If we get it I will take bids for who wants to come for the weekend.  Bring a stout pair of shoes and wear tweed.

Thinking of manor houses and the nobility, the Navigating Officer in HMS NONSUCH, my last steamer, was The Honourable Percival Calthrop (not his real name) and he was a lovely down-to-earth man despite being the son of a Lord who (as far as I could make out) owned half of Scotland.  I should, perhaps,  explain for the benefit of any reader who is not British that the title, ‘The Honourable’ is bestowed on the sons of Barons and on the younger sons of Earls.  Percival decided to buy an ordinary modern house, partly for rental income, but also as an investment for when or if he married.  While on leave, he mentioned to his father, Lord Calthrop, that he had bought a house on an estate, but the poor old gentleman must have misheard him, for he responded in a very concerned manner:
“But my dear boy, how on Earth will you be able to afford the servants?”

Of course, yes, England is still locked down despite the continuing success of the vaccination programme: over 25 million people have now received their first dose and all those over 50 are now being called forward.  The number of deaths in the UK in the last 24 hours is currently down to 95 (still dropping 34% weekly) as are hospital admissions (426 yesterday, dropping at 26%).  As anticipated in my last blog, the active testing (as opposed to just testing those with symptoms) of all schoolchildren has increased the number of tests taken and the number of positive results has increase correspondingly, so that curve has almost flattened.  I still think we should exploit the success of the immunisation programme and start opening up earlier than planned, but the government is adamant about sticking to its declared plan (the British government never listens to me).  There is currently something of a brouhaha going on because the Metropolitan Police broke up a meeting of women holding a public vigil in London, despite the Covid lockdown, to protest about the recent murder of a woman on Clapham Common.  The protestors seemed surprised and outraged that this should happen while not, apparently, considering the fact that the virus takes no account of moral causes when it comes to spreading and infecting people.  I am no fan of lockdown, masks or the ban on public demonstrations (a scientist has pointed out there has never been a single case of anyone being infected on the beach or in the open air), but it seems to me that if you have a law, then it should be enforced without grace or favour.  The police were criticised for being far too lenient with BLM protestors last year (also demonstrating unlawfully) and so – this time – took a harder line when the Clapham Common passive vigil turned into an active rally, possibly hijacked by political activists.  While some police officers in this epidemic have undoubtedly been over zealous (as narrated in these blogs) the British police force, overall, is in an invidious position: they are damned if they do enforce the law, and damned if they don’t.  Interestingly, a recent opinion poll, undertaken to test the waters on this incident, found a majority of people in favour of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.  Mind you, other polls have shown that the British public simply love lockdown – provided, of course, that it is not applied to them or to their causes.

I see that P&O Cruises will accept passengers later this year, provided they can prove that they have had the requisite two doses of vaccines and accept regular testing. However, social distancing and mask-wearing will still be practised onboard.  Now there’s a treat: that will be fun.  Sign me up.

Well, the repairs on my boat in Dartmouth are now finished and she now has a new paint job, and beautifully polished sides and propellers (according to the photographs).  She will be back in the water on 26 March and we hope to visit her – just for the day – when travel is allowed on 29 March.  The new floating marina is now said to be almost finished but, as far as I can discover, APPLETON RUM will not initially be moored in her proper berth (perhaps it isn’t there yet), so we have that to look forward to.  New buildings are going up on the site and, eventually, there will be a facilities block, a restaurant, a hotel and several riverside properties.  It should all be rather nice, if a little busier than hitherto.    Travelling down to Dartmouth should be quite an adventure, as we have not moved further than 20 miles from our house (except to Huish)  since October.  Jane is already drawing up plans for a little al fresco lunch or picnic, to be taken en route: it will be just like those days in the 1960s when the whole family would drive off into the hinterland every Sunday in the family car, taking a picnic hamper, a tartan rug and raincoats. I must remember to ask Jane to add Gentleman’s Relish to the shopping list.

Déjá vu.  Illusory feeling of having already experienced a personal situation [F = already seen]. Concise Oxford Dictionary. 
I mention this apposite French term to introduce the news that, yes, I have been let loose in the kitchen again, a voluntary act with the best of intentions but, sadly, with disastrous consequences.  It was all because of my naturally generous and helpful nature, overlaid with waves of guilt that Jane always does the food while I languish in an armchair reading an improving book or doing the jigsaw while sipping a Horse’s Neck.  It was the one of our fast days (a day limited to 800 calories as part of the 5:2 diet).  We are still doing the diet, by the way,  as part of my drive to recover the slim figure that I once had some time in 1972 (vanity of vanities; all is vanity…) and, overall, it hasn’t been too bad.  On this particular evening supper was Lamb Sag, a concoction comprising spinach, onion, spices, tikka masala paste and a minute quantity of lamb, supported by cauliflower rice.  I had offered to help.
“Y-e-s”, said Jane doubtfully, in that tone that mothers use when their toddlers ask if they can help with the pastry or the meringue. “That would be lovely”. 
I could almost see her mind desperately considering one option after another to identify the task with the least risk.  Finally, the mental bell rang.
“You can slice the onion”.
“Excellent”, I said. 
I like chopping onions, you see.  It is a dynamic thing that involves knife skills and I completed a knife skills course back in 2015, or whenever.  I can do ‘the fist’ and the sharpening and, though I say it myself, I am a dab hand with the Cook’s Knife.  I plonked the onion on the chopping board (still labelled “Vegetables Only” after that time when I prepared the fruit salad on it) and prepared to carve.
“It has to be finely sliced”, said the Head Chef, watching me nervously.
“Precision work”, I thought.  “Oh yes, I’m up for that”.
I peeled off the skin with a flourish, chopped off one end, cut it in half, and started as I had been taught: fine slices up the onion axis, then make ‘the fist’ and finely slicing across the grain.  Chop, chop, chop and not a drop of blood to be seen.  A fine pile of onion shavings lay on the board and, with a discreet cough, I drew the Head Chef’s attention to it.  I awaited my One Minute Praising, as advocated in all the best management books.  It would be a long wait.
“I didn’t say finely chopped, you clot”, she said exasperatingly.  “I said finely sliced.  Look at it! It’s like a pile of wood shavings”. 
I pondered.  I hate it when she’s right.  In truth, I had become a bit carried away.  Time for a stout defence as part of a damage limitation exercise.
“Well it is finely sliced.  It’s just that it’s been finely sliced in two directions”
She sighed.
“You’re hopeless.  Give it here”.
“Right”, she said briskly, starting on a new tack.  “You can do the cauliflower rice.  You can’t cock that up”.
I don’t know if you have ever had cauliflower rice.  Contrary to what you may think (cauliflower not being the most universally loved vegetable), it is actually very nice and is served as an alternative to rice when you wish to avoid carbohydrate.  It basically consists of  raw cauliflower florets that are shredded into fine particles in a liquidiser, then heated up in a frying pan with a little seasoning.  It is very palatable and simple to make.  Or so I thought.
Finding the cauliflower in the fridge was easy (I had adult supervision), as was hacking it into florets and discarding the white stalks.  I moved to the liquidiser: something mechanical.  Excellent.  Now, we have an extremely expensive, rinky dinky, mega powerful Vitamix liquidiser bought in a moment of drunken weakness at a BBC Food Exhibition years ago.  Vitamix is the king of all liquidisers.  I sometimes think it would liquidise steel bolts if you gave it the chance.  It is the sort of liquidiser that DeWalt would produce, and paint yellow.  I love it for that reason.  I plugged it in and warmed it through.
I am not totally inept in the kitchen department.  I knew that if if I bunged the complete cauliflower into that machine it would just whirr mightily and convert the whole thing into fine dust, like flour.  No, a more delicate touch would be required to yield the little fluffy particles of cauliflower rice, like rice grains, that we desired.  I activated the machine and wound it up to full power so that it screamed like an F35B Lightning about to take off from the Royal Navy’s latest aircraft carrier (I forgot to mention that the noise it makes matches its macho capabilities).  I think Jane said something to me, but I didn’t quite catch it.  Into the whirring and screaming abyss of the machine I dropped a single cauliflower floret.
“BRRRRRRRR…RUP!”,  said the machine and simultaneously I cottoned on to what Jane had been shouting:
“Put the lid on!”
You would be amazed at how many molecules there are in a single cauliflower floret.  Assisted by the angular kinetic energy imparted by the Vitamix, this single piece of vegetable disassembled into its component parts and distributed itself liberally all over the kitchen. It was the finest illustration of Brownian motion – the phenomenon of molecular excitation in a gas when heated –  that I had ever come across. Tiny bits of cauliflower were in the sink, in the toaster, on the floor, over the bread bin and (worst of all) all over Jane as she was dismembering the lamb.  The work surface looked like a street after a hailstorm.  I switched off the machine. There was a palpable silence. “Best I downplay this”, I thought.
“Oh dear”, I said. ”Bit of a mess here”. 
Jane was typically more forthright.
“You idiot!  You are supposed to be helping me”.
I ineffectually started dabbing at the mess with the washing up sponge, but she clearly didn’t trust me with that either, as she took it from me and started dragging kitchen utensils to one side to track down every last crumb.  Twenty minutes later, we were finished (I had remained in order to give moral support and point out bits she had missed).
“It says in this recipe that the meal only takes ten minutes to cook!”, said Jane. ”We are now into forty minutes and nothing is in the pan yet”.
Amazingly, I was allowed to continue with the maceration of the cauliflower, such process going well after the essential addition of the Vitamix lid.  After heating the (excellently prepared) cauliflower rice in the frying pan I was dismissed to select a suitable programme on the television to watch while we ate – it was one of our relaxed “meal in front of the television” days.  I left the kitchen and headed for the drawing room with lively anticipation.  As I was half way up the hall a voice followed me,
“….and it had better not be that blasted Tora, Tora, Tora either…”
Damn.  I revised my television programme ambitions accordingly.  As I took up the remote control I could have sworn I heard someone laughing nervously in the kitchen, a sort of hysterical ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ sound, but it must have been my imagination.  One of the television channels was showing His Finest Hour.  I thought that would be just about right.

18 March 2021

PS. By the way, the Lamb Sag with Cauliflower Rice was excellent, it really was.  The next morning I found bits of cauliflower on my pillow, where it had fallen from my hair.  Gosh, what a meal that was.

Blog 84. Still On The Naughty Step

It is census year in England (I think Scotland does its thing next year) and I have just completed the form online. Yes, yes I know the census date is actually 21 March and I was jumping the gun a bit but, let’s face it, under the present situation we won’t be anywhere else but home on that date. I suppose one of us could die in the next ten days or so, but I’m hoping that that is unlikely. The assessment being online is, itself, a sign of the times as is the question (which used to have two simple options), “What sex are you?” The race question was also a bit odd in its choices and one black MP stated that he was baffled by the choices of ‘Black Caribbean or Black African”, for he was born in Northampton. The memsahib was also a bit miffed, as there was no option of “White Caribbean” – the Caribbean was where she was born, as was her father, and her grandfather, and her great grandmother… ad infinitum). Never mind, a 10-year milestone has been reached.

I consider the censuses to be very important because I use the results a lot in my hobby of genealogy and they are a key source of information when tracing your ancestors.  Although the first census in England took place in 1801 it was very sketchy and the results have been lost anyway.  The first significant census in England took place in 1841 and we have held one every ten years ever since, except in 1941 when the British had more important things to direct their energies towards.  Poring through old census forms (which can be done online) can be fascinating.  For a start, the later ones (only the results up to 1911 England Census are currently available) usually have been completed in your ancestors’ own handwriting, so that in itself is a bridge across the gulf of time.  The occupations of our forebears can be interesting too (one of mine was listed as a “Cordwainer”) and it can be disconcerting to see, in these diplomatic times, some people recorded as “Imbecile”.  The addresses sometimes read like something out of a Dickens novel (“No 5 Back Glum Street” was one I seem to remember).  Finally, the families were huge and this is reflected not only in the number of children listed, but also in the column that records, rather sadly, “Infants no longer living”.  Complementing the census results are the central records of Births, Marriages and Deaths that started (in England) in 1837, though you have to send off and pay for the related certificates to get full details of the parties involved; again, the certificates are a rich source of history that record professions or trades and, in passing, whether your forebears could write (“X – her mark” is not entirely uncommon) or were born out of wedlock (more common than you would think in the straight-laced Victorian era).  Before 1837 there are sometimes parish records from the churches, but they are not as comprehensive as certificates and, irritatingly, will often list just a female’s first name as if the woman were unimportant (a reflection of the times).  Taken overall, genealogy can be quite fascinating as it excites not just the senses of history, curiosity and sociology, but also the fun of being a private investigator.  It is very addictive and can be done from your armchair at home.  Better still, now you can submit your DNA and it will flag up others, often in other countries, who share your great great-great-grandparent or whatever.  My ethnic background is 69% Scottish, 3% Welsh, 21% English or North European and 3% Scandinavian, lending weight to the argument that we are all part of the Family of Man (on the basis of the result, I wonder if I will be able to vote in a Scottish Independence referendum?). I did a quick bit of research for an old friend of ours, who also comes from Tyneside and who subsequently became hooked.  She took the DNA test, and – would you believe it – we turned out to be distant cousins, though we have yet to find the common link.  Oh yes, those winter and spring evenings can just roll by.  You can start researching online, entirely free of charge or commitment, with www.familysearch.org which is run by The Church of Latter Day Saints.  Alternative and more sophisticated funded sites are the British site  www.findmypast.co.uk (subscription from £80/year) or the bigger US company, www.ancestry.co.uk (subscriptions from £120/year).  If you prefer not to record your tree on the internet, privately or otherwise, then you can buy software to record it on your PC.  I use FamilyTree Maker.  Why not have a play?  You might find you are related to the British Royal family – it is how I found that the memsahib was the 1st Cousin, 31 times removed, of William the Conqueror.

Now here is another of my ethical dilemmas for you to consider at your next dinner party – if such a happy occasion should take place in our current circumstances before we all die. Imagine, hypothetically, that you are a bloke born into a family that runs – I don’t know – let’s say a rag and bone business. The family is a well established firm in the trade and has been doing it for years. Your grannie runs it. She is much respected locally, is still fit, and still very much in charge; but she’s getting on a bit and your grandad’s quite ill in hospital. Your dad will be taking over the family firm soon and you and your brother and cousins all work for the company. It is truly a family affair. You have all had your ups and downs over the years, as families do, and tragically, your mum was killed in a road accident when you were only a little boy, so you were brought up by your dad and your grannie. One day you meet this beautiful girl from out of town and fall in love with her. She is fascinated with the family business, which she thinks is actually an environmental recycling agency (which it is, in a way) and she thinks she may be able to help and offer a few words of advice if she were part of the firm. She seems a really nice girl and the family welcome her to the fold, culminating in a big fancy wedding for the two of you. Like the rest of the family, it is expected that you will both continue to work in the business. But after a while your wife becomes a bit disenchanted with it all: the pokey flat you have been given next to the business isn’t good enough; some of the rough men in the scrap yard were rude to her when she tried to tell them what to do; the money wasn’t up to much; she even had to take her turn at driving the rag and bone cart and mucking out the stables; your grannie wouldn’t let her wear the family jewels at that Rag and Bone Convention the other day and, what’s more, that cow of a sister-in-law hurt your wife’s feelings before the wedding and made her cry. Your wife thought that this was an environmental recycling agency, not a grubby rag and bone business, and she doesn’t like working there. No one ever asks how she is, they are so busy collecting rags and scrap iron, and there is no formal training course. The local press is being horrible too: they love finding things wrong with rag and bone men. You are getting a bit fed up. Even your older brother, who will one day run the firm, is being a bit too ready with the brotherly advice. You and your wife decide to leave and do your own thing, maybe move to where your wife used to live and people are more understanding. You approach your dad and your grannie and explain your problems and intentions. Now your dad’s a bit of a stuffy and old fashioned sort of chap, but his heart’s in the right place: he does a lot for charity and the disadvantaged poor kids in the area when he’s not helping with the firm. He’s saddened that you want to leave the business, and so is grannie. No one has left the family firm since Great Uncle Teddy, who went off and consorted with the Nazis. However, dad and grannie both love you and your wife, and they want what’s best for you.
“Well, son”, says dad, “I’m really sorry to hear it. The thing is, I won’t be able to pay you a wage if you don’t work in the scrap yard – the shareholders won’t wear it.”
“That’s all right Dad”, you say, “the wife and I just want to be independent, to move far away from the rag and bone business and stand on our own two feet”.
“So be it son”, says dad, “but you’ll always be welcome here at home. We all love you”.
And away you go with your wife to, let’s say, Tinsel Town, where the sun always shines, the people always smile, and there is not a rag and bone business in sight. A friend of your wife lends you a nice big house to live in; you still don’t have a job, but you can live off your late mother’s money so, what the hell. It just so happens that in Tinsel Town, where your wife comes from, they know absolutely nothing about the rag and bone business – the last firm like that operating there went bust nearly 250 years ago – but the people of Tinsel Town are fascinated to know more. Like your wife they, too, think it is all about environmental recycling. A local television station gets in touch and asks you about the family business. People are interested: there might be money in your story or, at least, a job for your wife who wants to get back into the saddle again in her old profession.
“Really?”, say the television people, “a family business through and through? How quaint! How fascinating! So that’s what rag and bone men do! Tell us more. Tell us about your family. Why did you leave the family business?”
And here, at last, is the moral dilemma for you to consider. Do you pour out your heart to your new fellow citizens; describe that an environmental recycling agency is really a rag and bone business in which you and your wife had to get your hands dirty and drive the horse and cart every Thursday; in which the rough men in the yard were firm with your wife because she wouldn’t take their advice and wear a hard hat; in which she and you were just a small cog in a big machine and no-one asked after your welfare; in which you both felt under-valued; and how that miser of a father and awful grannie wouldn’t keep paying your wages now that you no longer worked? Or would you just smile politely and explain that the rag and bone business wasn’t for you, and you were in Tinsel Town to turn over a new leaf and start a new life in something different? What would you do? Go on television and whinge, or get a job and stay loyal to your family? Your call.

Lockdown continues to plod its weary way in England.  I have found that every day has some characteristic that identifies it (other than the name): Monday is dustbin day, clean the floors, change the towels and University Challenge and Only Connect on the television; Tuesday is supermarket shopping and ironing; Wednesday is start blog and a fast day; Thursday is wood whittling or hobbies and the second fast day; Friday is finish blog, return to normal diet, FaceTime with friends and (ah ha!) end of weekly prohibition; Saturday is hangover, nice meal and pudding; Sunday is air bedding, laundry, pre-luncheon sherry, roast joint and more pudding, alas with weekly prohibition on all things alcoholic and sweet starting at 2359.  As an overlay to this exciting cycle of events (which I commend to you as an antidote to boredom) we now also have Jane’s exercise régime to fix her leg: two days of short healthy walks then three days biathlon of mixed exercise bike and holding up a wall for half an hour followed by ice packs; as her routine is on a five, as opposed to seven, day cycle it makes for a heady mix of challenges when combined with my weekly drudge.  Occasionally I allow Jane to chop an onion, stir a pot, clean the bathrooms and flick a duster around as light relief.  How we are are going to cope when (if?) lockdown lifts I have no idea: there are just so many demands for our time.

Schools went back on 8 March though teachers and most of the poor little blighters are being forced to wear masks (how do you teach anyone in those conditions) as well as having to endure regular Covid tests. Positive test results, hospital admissions and deaths continue to plummet in the UK, standing at (in the last 24 hours): positive results 6,753; admissions, 532; and deaths 181 (dropping at 36% weekly). About 23 million people (43% of the adult population) have now received their first vaccination. It is anticipated that positive test results may increase after the resumption of school attendance because – statistically – the more active tests you do then, proportionally, the more positive results you will get (as ex President Trump pointed out last year). England is still on the Naughty Step.
“Can I get down now?”
“Certainly not”.
“Well can I go and have tea and play with Johnny next door as we’ve both been vaccinated and are now immune?”
“You cannot. Back on that step at once. It’s not time for you to get down yet.”
The next milestone is 29 March, when we may be able to venture a little further from home in order to exercise, meet one other household in the garden, or play tennis – but only if we eat our greens.

That talk of teaching children while you, and they, are masked reminds me of the days when we had to wear respirators in the Navy as practice for encountering nerve gas or biological warfare. All British warships can be closed down and hermetically sealed to enable them to transit a radiation cloud or area contaminated with chemicals, gas or airborne biological agents: the ship is pressurised within and ventilated via special filters developed to take out the nasties. Just in case there is a breach in the citadel (as it is called) some of the the ship’s company also have to wear special biological suits and all carry anti-gas respirators (what used to be called gas masks). The filters for these respirators (and in the ship’s ventilation system) have been developed over decades of expensive research; they are proof against all known types of gas, nerve or biological agent. It is for this reason that I am sceptical that they can be replaced (as at present) by a couple of bits of cloth across your nose and mouth, held on by elastic, but I digress. The anti-gas respirators cover your whole face, of course (agents can be absorbed through your eyes too), but they can be a bit soporific and impersonal, and speech is a little muffled. A chap I know was a lecturer at the Royal Navy’s NBCD (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical and Damage Control) School in Portsmouth and he recounted how – at one time – he required officers taking the course to sit in some of his lectures while wearing anti-gas respirators, in order that they become accustomed and comfortable with their use. He said it was most unnerving to be faced by the resulting sea of black masks in the class, all whistling rhythmically as each student breathed. One day, he was writing on the board when there was a clatter and bang behind him. He turned to find one officer in the class collapsing.
“Strap me”, he thought,”the poor blighter’s fainted”.
He dashed up the aisle to help the unconscious man only to notice that no-one else in the class had moved to assist: like the collapsing man, they had all fallen asleep. The practice of students wearing respirators in class ended after that.

Not many people know that you can be poisoned through your eyes as well as your mouth or nose. When I was serving, officers received regular lectures on three main topics: The Threat [from the Soviet Union], Drugs and Alcohol, the last two being fundamentally important in our role of looking after our people. I was serving ashore at one point in the Ministry of Defence and received a telephone call one day from the establishment’s Petty Officer Regulator (what we used to call the Navy Police). He said that, according to his records, I was overdue for the Alcohol Lecture, and could I attend a session in a few days time? I duly turned up along with a clutch of other quite senior officers, and we sat through an hour of being told how bad alcohol abuse could be in the Navy, and what new things the boys (and now girls) were up to. I won’t go into the details of the whole lecture here, but the bit that always sticks in my memory was when the Petty Officer came to the bit on ‘current practices’. He started off by observing that we were all senior officers of considerable experience in the Navy, and that we had probably encountered just about everything that Jack could get up to. We all nodded sagely, for it was true: Jolly Jack never lacks imagination or ingenuity when it comes to booze. The Petty Officer then went on to describe the latest practice: you take a port or liqueur glass and you turn it upside down; into the shallow dish formed by the upturned base of the glass you pour a small quantity of ardent spirit, such as slivovitz , sambuca or vodka; you then lift up the glass (still upended) and cup the base over your open eye, as if bathing it with Optrex.
To a man, the whole audience cringed.
“Why on earth would you that that?”, we all asked.
The Petty Officer explained that the process was an instant hit: you were immediately drunk because the alcohol was absorbed rapidly by the cornea of the eye. He had tried it, purely in the interests of professional research, and he said the pain was excruciating.
“But where is the pleasure of becoming gently and progressively intoxicated?”, we asked, “the various phases of confidence, eloquence, bonhomie and masculinity; the swaggering Casanova emulation and general well-being?”.
The Petty Officer shrugged. He was baffled too.
That lecture was in 1997. God knows what sailors are doing with alcohol now.

I don’t know what led me to do it: boredom perhaps, or maybe a desire to do something daring and dangerous during lockdown, like those people who go parachuting or white-water rafting in retirement.  After months of my nagging repeated concern for her health, Jane finally agreed to go to the doctor to get him to sort out her hearing, which has been deteriorating in one ear for at least a year.  As a precursor to any tests, she was told to drop olive oil into her ear to get rid of the wax in there and – naturally – I was asked to deliver the potion in the appropriate hole.  She lay on the pillow and pulled back her hair to reveal the target area.
“What a delightful little ear”, I said. “Such a treat, as I rarely get to see it”.
“Just get on with it and stop mucking about!”, was the stern muffled directive from the pillow.
It was then that I did it.
I put my tongue in her ear.
Incredibly, there was a short hiatus (what we engineers call ‘lag’) then an almighty shriek as she shot up and, seemingly, bounced off three bulkheads before she found the bathroom and her hand towel.
“How horrid!”, she cried, scrubbing her ear vigorously. ”EEURGH! You horrible, horrible man.  Just you wait!”. 
But she was too late, I had already legged it down the stairs.

Come to think of it, re-reading that first paragraph, maybe I won’t survive to 21 March and Census Day after all.  But it was fun.

12 March 2021

Blog 83. Whatever Happened to the Little Wurlitzer?

The mice are eating the shed. Yes, the very same shed that – almost a year ago – we laboriously painted in blue and cream, kicking over the paint can in the process (Blog 37). As it contains garden implements, the shed falls under the purview of Mrs S: it is on her slop chit. I rarely go into into it other than to access the lawn mower, for it is full of creepy crawlies, bits of greenery and dirty soil, and I am a fastidious and sensitive person. However, on this occasion I was called out to examine the damage and led – almost by the hand – down to the site. The shed door was opened and the memsahib silently pointed at the entrance. Hovering in the air was the unspoken question of,
“…and what are you going to do about this?”.
You see, the shed might be Her domain, but repairs to the fabric of the house and outbuildings are His domain, decorating work falling between the two domains as a joint Whole Ship Evolution. I looked at the shed: whoa…the rodents had certainly had a go at that. The door sill, previously a good hunk of 2×2, was half gnawed through across the diagonal; the door bottom had been got at, and the little devils had started on the door frame too. The attraction of the shed to the little critters was the bird seed stored in there – originally in an old plastic gash bin and sack, but more recently in a large galvanised steel dustbin. Last year the mice ate into the shed through the floor, leaving a small hole. I stopped that by covering the hole with a mild steel plate. Now, the little devils were trying to get in via a more direct route, namely through the door (literally). Jane had tried spraying the gnawed threshold with Roundup systematic weed killer: a novel solution that I thought might actually just work. However, it appears that our rodents are made of strong constitutions (it must be all that bird seed that they eat) and so the weed killer did not prove effective. Clearly a more robust campaign must be waged, so we drove off to our local ironmongers and armed ourselves with lengths of angle aluminium and a rodent trap. The angle aluminium was screwed over the threshold, door bottom and frame (try eating through that lot Jerry) and the trap was unpacked ready for use. We should have bought old fashioned spring traps that you bait with cheese but, in a mad fit of modernity and compassion, had instead bought one of those plastic box-like traps in which the mice are tempted inside by poisoned bait and (presumably) die quietly, but content. I ripped off the packaging to reveal the rodent equivalent of the Green Mile, which was black and sinister and came complete with a key which, the instructions observed, should be kept separately. I was a bit bemused by that: have mice got so clever that they can operate a key? Anyway, I opened the box to discover inside – well – nothing actually. The poisoned bait was not included. So we had just spent £10 on the equivalent of a piece of black Tupperware. I ask you! What was the point of that? We had to go on Amazon and get a delivery of poisoned bait, which successfully cancelled out the green savings we had made by shopping locally. Oh, I forgot to mention that we also removed the galvanised steel dustbin of bird seed and stowed it outside, and Jane took the opportunity to vacuum out the entire shed to remove all traces of residual seed, soil and various creepy crawlies. Let us hope that all that works. So, the trap is in place now and when I looked today the bait had been stolen, which I don’t think is supposed to happen, but it should still do its job. Examination of the shed interior revealed that the rubber mat is now being eaten, so the rodents must still be in there, the cunning devils. This is getting like a film in the Alien series: the creatures are no longer outside, but are somewhere here within. Where will they strike next? I haven’t actually mentioned to Jane what occurred to me and, no doubt, to you: it might not be mice, but instead, the bigger rodents with the long tails. Best not mention the ‘R’ word.

I observed in the last blog that Jane was b-o-r-e-d and, alas, that situation has manifested itself inevitably into the urge to occupy herself – and me. I will swear that in a previous life she must have been a Chief Boatswain’s Mate or possibly the First Mate of a tramp steamer on the Shanghai run. I could see it coming but, like the snowball rolling down the hill and gaining size and momentum, there was no stopping it. Having cleaned all the bathrooms several times, then removed the protective old newspapers and grease from the top of the kitchen cupboards, her eyes turned to the outside and fixed on the patio table and chairs. Her assessment was that that furniture really was in need of a good clean up and chamfer off, followed by a repaint to cover the patches where the previous coating had fallen off. It was true that the six-year-old aluminium furniture did look like it was suffering from alopecia, but – in my view – the solution did not bear thinking about. In vain I put forward cogent and well-argued reasons why we should leave it alone: the difficulty and expense of finding a paint suitable for covering aluminium; the need to scrub it all down thoroughly first; the awkwardness and mess of painting any lattice framework…But it was to no avail. Her face adopted that very familiar stubbornness and firm resolve and she finally came out with the killing blow:
“Well, I shall paint it on my own then!”.
This was, of course, code for,
“You – The Husband – are failing to accept your responsibilities as Mr Repair and Mr Shared Decorator so I must, perforce, undertake this task without help (though I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman…)”
Of course, I gave in. I know when I am beaten.
So, one day I ferreted around in the garage loft and found a tin of green Hammerite metal paint which I offered up for sacrifice. I tried a rear guard action by pronouncing that it was not really suitable for aluminium, but that was dismissed out of hand. And so we started, each to a chair. I don’t know if you have ever used Hammerite: it is an excellent paint for metal, being particularly versatile as it requires no primer and can be applied over rust. However, it is also quite thick, so must be applied with a very loaded brush which, naturally, gives it a tendency to run; also, if you paint over it then the process pulls off the previous coat. Soon, we were in the thick of it (if you will pardon the pun). As I had predicted, and may have pointed out to Jane once or twice, painting any lattice-type structure is a nightmare because of the requirement to get into all the cracks and crevices. Soon there was green paint almost everywhere, though at least we had had the foresight to cover the patio with a tarpaulin. The final straw came when Jane discovered that strands of her hair had fallen out of her Alice band and had brushed against the newly painted chairs, delivering a green streak to her strawberry blond tresses. She was not best pleased, as she had to cut the contaminated bits off. Finally, we were done: all six chairs painted and only the table to be done; another tin of paint ordered form Amazon; the prospect of a fun-packed weekend; Jane with hunks out of her hair and looking like Wurzel Gummidge the scarecrow. What more could we ask? It’s all go here. Oh dear, we seem to have run out of paintbrushes. How sad.

I am hanging on to the hope that the emerging garden will keep Jane occupied in the forthcoming weeks.  The garden is her pride and joy and, when operating at maximum cultivation, will keep her off my back for hours and hours.  The lawn is the only part that I deal with apart from being called in as a contractor on an ad hoc basis to dig deep holes (usually standing on several plants in the process) or to hack the top off trees and bushes. Our lawn is only a small patch of grass, but I am determined to obtain a golfcourse-green-perfect showpiece.  Alas, after eight years, the prospect of achieving my goal is not looking good.  I have done all the right things: the weedkillers, the fertilisers, the scarifying, the aeration, the top dressing; the grass is healthy and weed free; but it still lacks that final refinement that you see on a golf course or bowling green.  I think we have the wrong sort of grass, but it is too late to change that now.  I suppose I must be pleased with what I do have.  At least we are not troubled by moles, which is a problem faced by many proud gardeners.  I have read of several methods used to rid lawns of these pests, none of them – as far as I can tell – fully successful.  Besides, there is also the ethical question of whether we should be depriving poor Mr and Mrs Mole and their offspring of their cosy littles burrows.  In considering that, I am reminded of the saga of the General’s lawn in Aldershot.  As related in Blog 68, an old friend of mine worked as the Contract Director for a facilities management company in Aldershot after he left the Royal Navy (all Ministry of Defence establishments are now privatised for catering, administrative services and estate management – soldiers no longer paint coal outside the Guardroom or type on an Imperial typewriter at a desk covered with a War Office blanket).  He told me the saga of the lawn at the official residence of the Officer Commanding, General Sir Ponsonby-Smythe MC (not his real name), which was plagued by moles and their mole hills.  My chum was summoned by the General one day and asked to provide a quotation for bringing in a specialist contractor to rid his lawn of the nuisance.  My chum duly did and, of course, the quotation was for several thousand pounds.
“Stuff and nonsense!”, said the General,  “I can’t afford or justify that.  I bet I could do it cheaper”.
So he did.  He called in the local gun club and offered them free refreshment and free target practice for the day.  The shooters duly turned up, bearing a collection of weapons ranging from large bore to small bore (though, thankfully, no automatic assault weapons, which are illegal in the UK).  They set up post on the edge of the lawn and bided their time, waiting for Mr Mole to appear.  Finally, he did, whereupon the entire gun club let loose with their weapons, blowing Mr and Mrs Mole to kingdom come.  Unfortunately, they also shredded and obliterated 80% of the General’s lawn at the same time, reducing it to a mini version of a Flanders field on an off day in 1917.  The cost to re-lay the lawn by far exceeded the original pest control quotation.  Still, it got rid of the moles.

After a long career in the Royal Navy, my chum had some small difficulty adjusting to working with the British Army as a contractor.  He made the mistake of believing that, as one of the three British armed forces, the army would fundamentally be the same as the navy, except they would be dressed in green and shout a lot.  This was not the case, for the British Army is more like a collection of small armies (regiments), each with their own history, their own distinctive uniforms their own mottos and their own ethos.  Put six British Army officers in a room and no two will be dressed alike.  There is even a hierarchy among the regiments, with the Household Cavalry at the top and the Royal Bermuda Regiment at the bottom.  In the early days of his second career my chum was astonished when a battalion of the Blues and Royals was redeployed back from Germany to Aldershot and looked, with metaphorical pursed lips, at the 1960s barrack block that he had allocated for its use.
“Oh no”, their Commanding Officer said, ”that simply won’t do”.  He looked at a more modern barrack block nearby.
“Which regiment is in that one?”, he asked.
My chum looked at his plan.
“Ah, no, that’s occupied.  That belongs to the Royal Logistics Corps (RLC).  They moved in last month”
“Right”, said the CO of the Blues and Royals. “We’ll take that one”
And, do you know, the RLC was hoofed out of the new barrack block and into the older barracks, and accepted it without a word of protest.  They knew their place.  The British Army: they’re not at all like us.  And as for the RAF, well…

I suppose I have to say something about lockdown and Covid 19, as it has become a tradition and – indeed – was the raison d’être for starting these blogs (it keeps me occupied and demonstrates to you that there is always someone worse off than yourself).  Positive test outcomes, deaths and hospital admissions are still dropping and the figures for the last 24 hours are: positive tests, 6,385 (dropping at 32% per week); deaths, 315 (dropping 34% per week); hospital admissions, 725 (dropping 28% per week).  About 18 million people (40% of UK adults) have now been vaccinated and the programme is currently addressing  all those over 60.  It has been proved conclusively that the vaccination programme is reducing the impact of the epidemic, and those who have received the jab are 80% less likely to be seriously ill or require hospitalisation.  It has also been demonstrated that, contrary to early trial results, the Oxford AstraZeneca serum is slightly more efficacious than the Pfizer vaccine and that both vaccines reduce transmissibility significantly.  It all begs the question of why we are all still locked up in these circumstances – particularly we senior folk who have been immunised – but the government is firm in its resolve not to budge from the published timetable.   It will be interesting to see how the government would respond to a situation in which there were still significant infections, but very few deaths and few hospital admissions: would it stick to the policy of accepting that Covid 19 is now endemic and would have to be lived with?  Or would it extend the existing misery and isolation?  I suspect that some sections of our hierarchical society will not relinquish the power they have over us quite so readily.  On Monday 8 March I can sit on a park bench and enjoy a flask of coffee and a sandwich with one person outside my household.  Whoopee!

Oh dear, we are wishing our lives away at the moment.  Every day is pretty much the same and, unconsciously, we wish each day over so that we can get closer to the next Covid Relaxation Milestone.  As I have said before, with God’s grace Jane and I may have only twenty years left on this planet (it is a sobering thought) and already we have lost 5% of it to misery, lockdown or both.  The thought of yet another year of restrictions, bringing the wasted time to 10%, is profoundly depressing and extremely annoying.  We, and most other people in the country, have done all that is asked of us and have been promised much, yet here we are, still confined to barracks.  At the beginning of all this, almost exactly a year ago, I remember thinking that the British people would just pay lip service to social distancing and lockdown, and the police would not enforce it.  I have been astonished to be proved wrong and to find that we Brits have embraced the whole concept wholeheartedly and even created quite a few zealots and informers in the process.  In Scotland, the First Minister gives her countrymen a good kicking on a daily basis and imposes some quite stringent measures, yet – so I am told – they all admire her for it.  This masochistic tendency is beyond me to explain.  I do wonder how much longer the British people will continue to put up with it all, especially if (say) a fourth lockdown were imposed.  We can only hope that a few stalwarts in parliament will finally stand up and say, “enough is enough”: the vaccine works, let’s run with it and get back to normal.

I have commented before on differences in life under Covid compared to previous life: more people around, folk dodging to avoid you on the street and falling into a ditch, morons walking around in the open air with masks on, that sort of thing.  Another characteristic must surely be the increase in litter on the streets.  Litter, like graffiti, is anathema to me.  I can never understand why people would want to soil their own nest.  Do they throw beer cans and take-away cartons onto the floor of their own living rooms, and scrawl on the walls?  Perhaps they do.  In a previous life I was a warden for the National Trails and this required me to walk part of the Wessex Ridgeway and the Thames Path once a month to monitor and report their condition.  I could be five or six miles from the nearest road or civilisation, in the heart of the English countryside, but would still find litter – often a discarded water bottle or an empty energy drink can: someone had actually walked or ridden all that way, presumably because they loved the environment, but thought nothing of just throwing their rubbish away when they longer needed it.  My theory was that the empty drink receptacles had been dumped by mountain bikers or marathon runners who thought they were still in an organised race or marathon in which “someone else” would pick up after them, but I could never prove it.  Today, the top item of litter is the discarded face mask: you see them everywhere, on verges or in gutters, all too contaminated for anyone to even consider picking them up unless they have gloves or the right tool.  I wonder if they will be found by archaeologists in centuries to come, who will say,
”Ah, this must have come from the Great Covid 19 Epidemic.  Our  family is still using the lavatory rolls that my Great Great Great Grandmother bought in 2020.  She was never one to go short, so I’m told”.

BOOMPA! BOOMPA! BOOMPA! In almost a flashback to WW1, when the guns of the Somme could be heard in England, so the guns of the Royal Artillery have been heard here in Melbury all this week. All through the day and into the evening the guns have roared. We must be twenty or thirty miles away from Tidworth and the gun ranges of Salisbury Plain, yet still we can hear the field guns. Or, I suppose, it might be tanks from the Royal Tank Regiment. It is not intrusive or irritating, just curious on how far sound travels; and I suppose it is reassuring that all that expensive ordinance works. What baffles me slightly is how the army has such a large practise allowance that they can blast away for a week, night and day. When I was serving in the navy the live shell allowance was distinctly parsimonious, so live firings were quite an occasion; missile firings even more so and dramatic. Heh ho – at least the Pongoes are out there in the cold and mud enjoying themselves, rather than sitting in the barracks watching television two metres apart. Keeps ‘em out of mischief,

There is a television channel in the UK called Talking Pictures TV that I am very fond of.  It is dedicated to old films, particularly the old black and white films of of the 1950s and 1960s when men were men, women were grateful and every Briton had a stiff upper lip and wore a jacket and tie.  Excellent times.  Recently the channel has taken to screening the shows which, in my childhood, appeared at the Saturday Morning Pictures – a screening for children at the local ABC cinema on (guess when) and very popular.  A seat downstairs was 6d and upstairs, 9d,  the latter seating arrangement (if one could afford it) providing the opportunity to lob missiles over the balcony onto the paupers below.  Films included The World of Charlie Chan, Rocket Man and Zorro to name but three.  There was always a sing-song at the beginning of the show that had the refrain, 
“We are the boys and girls well known as, 
Minors of the ABC, 
And every Saturday we line up….”. 
Sorry, I was getting a bit carried away there.  Anyway, I was thinking of this when someone was talking about the cinemas opening again after Covid, and pondering that cinemas aren’t what they were.  Gone are the grand auditoria, the big screen, the Wurlitzer, the curtains, the usherettes with the torch to show you to your seat, and the girls selling ice cream from little lit-up trays hanging from their necks; instead we have multiplexes with small dark caverns that you stumble into, no regulation, no projectionist, people talking, people noisily munching sweets or popcorn and sprinkling them liberally over the floor.  It just isn’t the same.  In the 1960s we would go to the cinema as a family and watch a great epic like Pollyanna or From Russia With Love: it was a sense of occasion that you sometimes had to queue for.  Now, the cinema is just a mundane pastime that you go to to be deafened or annoyed.  There used to be a lot of enjoyment in a cinema and the back row could be a den of iniquity if you were lucky.  I remember a friend of mine telling me if his experience in the 1960s.  He had joined the navy to train as an artificer (now called “technician”) and served his four year apprenticeship at HMS CALEDONIA near Rosyth, in Scotland.  The cinemas there could be quite an adventure.  The usher would patrol the back row on a regular basis, shining his torch to ensure that there were no improper goings on.  On one occasion, apparently, his torch highlighted a white item on the floor that proved to be a pair of knickers, so he picked them up and held them in the torchlight. He addressed the girl sitting nearest him,
“Are these yours?”, he demanded in a stern Scottish tone.
“Och no”, came the innocent female reply. “Mine are in my handbag”.

Like I say, the cinema isn’t what it used to be.

5 March 2021

Blog 82. Splat.


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

Blog 81. There’s Never a Python Around When You Need One.

It was the water-jet flosser that started it.  You must have come across one of these things: they are battery-powered devices that you fill with water and then use to pressure-wash your teeth before brushing them.  They obviate the need to floss your teeth or fine-clean them using those little TeePee brushes.  They take a bit of getting used to, but they are very effective and save quite a bit of time and hassle if, like me, you otherwise have to use three different sizes of inter tooth brush and tend to break the brushes in the process anyway.  I yearn for the old days when I just brushed my teeth by hand perfunctorily, night and day; now I am a prisoner to my electric toothbrush, which forces me to clean for exactly two minutes each time, and to my dental hygienist who harangues me twice a year if the slightest bit of plaque is left on my teeth.  Anyway, to get back to my story.  Jane and I were doing our separate things in our small en-suite bathroom one morning, me cleaning my teeth and she climbing into the shower and grumbling about people being in the way (“people” = one person, me).  The water-jet flosser, while worthy and effective in so many ways, is somewhat wanting in the ergonomic department and the controls are not of the best (I write as an engineer).  It just so happened that I accidentally pressed the ‘ON’ button as Jane was pontificating about the crowded bathroom and a thin stream of cold high-pressure water may possibly have shot out and hit her between the eyes.   Fearing immediate retribution, I immediately apologised profusely and explained the delicacy of the controls.  However, in my terror and nervousness (always present when Jane is at the First Degree of Readiness), my disabled finger (see Blog 67) gave a twitch and sent out a second stream, this time onto Jane’s, err, chest area.  I’m afraid that triggered the conflict.  Now, a word of advice: if you are going to engage in a fight (intentionally or accidentally) then always ensure that you have the biggest weapon and the best armour.  In the Blue corner was me: partly dressed and brandishing one small hand-held makeshift water pistol firing a 0.5mm jet of cold water, magazine ¾ empty; in the Red corner was Jane, naked, brandishing a large shower spray firing a deluge of cold water, magazine unlimited.  No contest really.  In the melée that followed I was totally soaked, the bathroom was awash, and Jane was no wetter than she was to start with.  Eventually an armistice was agreed, though my explanation that the whole thing was an accident caused by my disability was rejected.  My protestation that I was traumatised after being discriminated against as a war veteran (sort of) and one who was digitally challenged was also dismissed.  I was given the job of mopping up the floor and replacing the sodden towels.  My clothes were soaked and had to be changed.  Sometimes you can see how wars are started.

I am going to break with tradition and write something that some readers may consider to be insensitive or hurtful (no change there then): from the moment we were born into this world, it was inevitable that we were going to die – not ‘pass away’, not ‘go to sleep’ , not ’cross the bar’ as we sailors would have it; we are all going to die.  Some of us will die in great pain or while disabled; some of us may die earlier than we would wish; some of us will have to watch our friends, children or loved ones die and the mental pain and bereavement will be almost unbearable.  We will also get ill in the course of our lives and that may be a very unpleasant, painful or debilitating process.  These two things, death and illness, are facts of life and we should face up to the fact. 
Why then, in the present Covid 19 epidemic, is it the apparent aim of the UK government to try to eliminate illness and death, specifically to eliminate all Covid 19 infections and Covid-related deaths entirely?  I refer of course, to the fact that – as predicted in Blog 77 and Blog 79 – the government has moved the goalposts in terms of the criteria for lifting lockdown and returning to a normal life.  The original approach to tackling Covid 19 was a sensible and pragmatic one: to achieve a situation in which the UK hospitals were not so overwhelmed by Covid patients that they could not function properly.  The stance recognised that, in the majority of young healthy people, Covid 19 could be very unpleasant, but would be overcome after bedrest at home for about two weeks.  As part of the overall strategy, the newly-developed vaccination programme prioritised that section of the population that was most likely to need hospital treatment or die in the event of being infected, namely the older people and those with underlying health conditions, and the programme has been a great success.  So far so good, and infection rates and deaths from Covid 19 are falling rapidly.   Now, the government has allegedly changed its plan.  The aim now would appear to be not solely to ease pressure on the hospitals, but to achieve a far more ambitious goal of achieving fewer than (it is speculated) 1,000 Covid 19 infections in a UK population of about 67,000,000 people. The acceptance that some people would catch the virus, but overcome it naturally while acquiring herd immunity, is apparently no longer valid: it must be stamped out entirely.  I am certainly not medically qualified, but it does seem to me that that goal can never be achieved.  Like all viruses, this one has mutated to several different forms already and it will continue to do so.  We cannot even stamp out the Common Cold or influenza.  The existing vaccines have, or will have, various degrees of effectiveness on each mutation but, in any case, they do not guarantee complete immunity even from the original strain; they may merely reduce the severity of the infection if you catch the disease.  The truth is, we are stuck with this virus just as we are stuck with a whole host of others such as HIV, measles, chickenpox, pneumonia and – yes – influenza: all potentially lethal diseases in certain circumstances.  We are going to have to live with Covid 19 and accept that it is now endemic.  We cannot continue to live like this: locked up and isolated; neglecting those who are ill from other causes; leaving whole generations uneducated;  miserable and distrustful of others; separated from our loved ones; and – significantly – not making money to fund our very existences.  By all means lift lockdown in stages and on the basis of data rather than according to a timetable: that is very sensible.  But let us be pragmatic and philosophical in our approach and set reasonable criteria for a return to normality: we cannot eliminate all illness, and the suggestion (by one scientist) that people should not be going to work if they have even a cough is not realistic or practical.  We cannot lock ourselves away forever.  It will be interesting to see what the prime minister proposes in his review and broadcast to the nation on 22 February (a relaxation to allow us to sit on a park bench with a member of our household and a flask of coffee has been mentioned – I can hardly wait.)

Having said all that, realism, practicality, common sense and – dare I say it – irony are not strong qualities in 2021.  The chairman of the UK accounting firm KPMG has been suspended after his staff complained that he had told them not to stop moaning about the pandemic and to get on with life – strong words that must have really upset the poor little snowflakes.  Elsewhere, a member of the City of London’s governing body has come under fire for saying that staff at the Barbican Arts Centre should stop feeling sorry for themselves as at least they still had their jobs.  Meanwhile, in Wales, a board member of the supermarket chain Iceland has been sacked for making tongue-in-cheek comments about the Welsh and their language.   Even the highly successful and entrepreneurial founder of Pimlico Plumbers in London has attracted some criticism for telling his staff, “no jab, then no job”.  These are all symptoms of the modern belief that everyone has a right not to be offended.  Good grief: I am offended almost every day, sometimes by watching or listening to a current affairs programme on the television or radio, by reading opinions or letters in newspapers, or (rarely) by people I meet in real life; I do not demand that the people who offend me be sacked or eliminated.  I have said it once and I say it again: I would never last five minutes in today’s workplace.  And as I have also said before, “Get a grip out there for God’s sake”.

In a recent survey in the UK, 49% of workers said that they would look for another job if their bosses did not permit flexible working hours after the current epidemic.  Given that 10% of the UK working population is currently unemployed or is “furloughed”, the option of changing jobs may not be available to them.  We are very cosseted in the 21st century, and times have moved on since we stuffed children up chimneys to clean them or since wives with turbans around their hair beat their laundry on stones in the stream by the Harton Dye Works.  This, on the whole, is a Good Thing (though, note, that we never had any graffiti when boys were put down the coal mines).  The downside, however, is that we have become – well – soft, and blind to the hazards of life that still exist: people fall off cliffs, then relatives complain that the local council did not put up railings or signs telling people not to walk off cliffs; folk go on safari then seem surprised when their nearest and dearest is eaten by a lion.  To illustrate my point, let me relate a story told to me by a naval Surgeon Commander.  He had been attached to the Royal Marines at one point in his career and accompanied a group of reservists who were to undertake jungle training in Belize.  They had been told to rig hammocks to sleep in as it was not wise to lie on the ground at night; they were also advised to keep themselves well covered up in their sleeping bags because of the various creepy crawlies that abound in a jungle.  One marine reservist had a particularly fitful sleep, not least because he was hot and uncomfortable: he tossed and turned all night and flung his arms out to cool off.  Eventually he woke fully and could not get back to sleep; his arm felt heavy and had gone to sleep, and he flexed it to get the circulation going.  What followed was an experience that, no doubt, stayed with him for the rest of his life.  He looked over is shoulder down at his arm and there were a pair of eyes looking at him from six inches away.  He focussed further down, and his arm was not there.  A large boa had swallowed his entire arm and was working its way up to swallowing the more difficult bit, namely his shoulders, head and the rest of him.  Of course, he went ballistic and screamed the place down (wouldn’t you?).  The rest of the team rallied round, killed the snake, and cut the thing off him. In the light of a torch, they found that the boa had digested his combat jacket and the epidermis of his arm, and the stomach acid was making inroads on the dermis itself.  The man had to be given tranquillisers to calm him down as well as pain killers to ease the trauma.  My doctor friend did not say whether the man’s arm recovered.  Now that, I put it to you, is what I call being traumatised.  Compare that to the experience of students at Exeter University who were recently advised by the president of their debating society of a list of resources that they could consult if they had been traumatised by a university debate with the motion: “This house regrets the rise of the snowflake generation.”  You never have a pet snake around when you need one, do you?

As I write, the number of Covid infections in the UK has dropped two thirds since January.  Positive outcomes to Covid 19 tests over the last 24 hours stand at 12,027 (dropping 20% weekly); deaths from Covid 19 over the last 24 hours stand at 533 (dropping 28% weekly) and the number of hospital admissions in the last 24 hours was 1,490 (dropping at 24% weekly).  This reflects falling statistics in much of the rest of the world, so may not be entirely attributable to our lockdown and vaccination programme, though I hope it is.  About 17 million people (over 25% of the population) have been vaccinated and the immunisation programme is currently tackling those aged between 60 and 69.   There has been much debate about the concept of a “vaccination passport”: a document that would confirm that the holder had received the Covid 19 vaccine and which would permit them to enter cinemas, theatres, restaurants etc or to travel abroad.  The attraction of the “passport” is that it might enable the country to open up, and people to work and socialise early, as well as encourage the take-up of the vaccine; the disadvantage is that the concept goes against the principle of civil liberties and might be discriminatory. I am inclined to favour the idea, but then I am biased because I have had the jab and would do almost anything to get back my freedom to roam at will without a mask again.  Many things in life are “discriminatory”, such as having to have a driving licence to drive a car or having to have a medical degree to practise as a doctor.  I have to have an international vaccination certificate for  Hepatitis or Yellow Fever before I can go to certain countries; how is this any different?  Perhaps a compromise would be to introduce the “passport” for a temporary period in the transition to normal life, but then drop it after a pre-defined period.

Jane and I are still hale and hearty after our first (Oxford) vaccinations.  I had some very mild cold-like symptoms for three or four days, but I sorted that out with a couple of paracetamol; Jane had no reaction at all.  Here in Melbury our climate has moved on from the cold spell reported in the last blog and is now going through a fickle mild phase (something to do with warm air from the Mediterranean and the Sahara), with mixed sunshine, strong winds and showers at 10C.  Jane has brought some of her seedlings, saplings and shoots inside and they are now taking up residence in the Garden Control Tower where they are leaving little muddy trails on the windowsills.  She talks to them and gives them a drink every day. Yesterday, in the sunshine, she was back in her beloved garden doing Things (I am not sure what) and so she was very happy.  I have finished my major project of making a large model ship for the grandson that I will never have and am now pondering on what to make next.  The garage workshop now boasts a fan heater, a kettle and the makings for tea, so is rapidly developing into the Man Cave that (almost) all males aspire towards. Meanwhile,  Jane wants a sink in her garden shed, despite the fact that (a) there is nowhere to put it, (b) there is no water supply and (c) there is no drainage; I think she will have to whistle for that one, but I may offer her the use of my kettle.

Imagine a world in which you get up in the morning and it is freezing cold.   It is pre-dawn and so you turn on the lights, but nothing happens.  Muttering about another power cut, you wrap your dressing gown around you and pad through to the bathroom to clean your teeth, but no water comes out of the tap and the lavatory won’t flush.  The landline is down and so is your computer access to the internet.   A bad dream?  A scene from some dystopian science fiction television series?  No.  It is what has happened to some people in Texas, where the state is suffering heavy snow and very severe weather that has cut the electrical supply.  People have died from carbon monoxide poisoning as they huddled in their cars with the engine running to get warm; others have just died in the street from the cold.  Part of the reason for this situation is the dependence on electricity as a main source of energy and the vulnerability of that supply to weaknesses in distribution: as a huge country, the USA delivers a lot of its electricity on overhead power lines, which are vulnerable to severe storms; moreover, apparently Texas is supplied by its own electrical power grid, independent of the rest of the USA, for historical reasons that might loosely be summarised as wishing to remain semi independent as the Lone Star state, and to avoid control from the federal government. While the UK does suffer power cuts from time to time, they are seldom long-lasting or life-threatening except in those rural districts where, like in the USA, overhead power lines dominate the distribution system for economic reasons.  We are very lucky in that regard.  Now, I mention all this because two items of energy-related news have appeared in the UK press over the last few weeks.  The first is that the UK government intends to phase out the use of gas boilers to heat new homes by the mid 2030s (ie in fifteen years or so);  the second is that a study has claimed that open fires and log-burning stoves are said to triple indoor air pollution, with the result that the UK government intends to ban the sale of coal, wet wood, and certain types of fire, from this year.  It is amazing that huge swathes of the older UK population, including me, are still alive and healthy after being warmed all our lives by these sources of energy.  Putting aside the enormous psychological and thermodynamic advantages of warming one’s backside on a solid-fuel fire or stove, the new UK policy puts an enormous dependency on electricity for our heat, light, communication, water, sanitation and power.   In other words, there is a great danger of us putting all our eggs in one basket.  Our electricity grid is already in urgent need of an upgrade in order to cope with the impending huge demand from charging electric cars (and now electrically-heated houses), a situation aggravated by the shutting down of obsolete or coal-fired power stations and a much delayed nuclear power programme.  Soon, if we are not careful, the lamps will – indeed – be going out all over Europe and it will be us, not just the Texans, who are freezing to death or washing ourselves with baby wipes in the absence of water.  Lest you feel I am being anti ‘Green’  in that prophecy, I should point out that I consider the avoidance of pollution and minimising man’s contribution to climate change to be very important and worthy goals; however, they have to be tempered by the pragmatic engineering problems of how to generate enough electricity in a small island when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing.  An old friend of mine once said to me,
“Take away the modern public’s iPads and iPhones, their social media platforms, their Xboxes and their Netflix, and they will burn babies in the power stations if that’s what it takes to get the electricity back on”. 
And you thought I was a cynic.  It is a somewhat blunt viewpoint, but I hope you will concede the point he was making about our modern world, being ignorant on how electricity is produced and the practical limitations of Green policies. Let’s hope those babies in Texas are safe.

I hope you noticed that I did not write “Texas, USA” in that last paragraph? I was very tempted to do so in retribution for all those irritating American films that bear the caption “London, England” on scenes of our capital or “Rome, Italy” on scenes of the coliseum. But that would have been childish and petty, wouldn’t it?

Now this is interesting (stop moaning at the back).  I see from The Times that a computer expert in Japan has developed an on-line mapping program that allows people to report anti-social behaviour in their local area.  The dorozuko (road tribe) has become particularly popular at this time because so many people are required to work at home, and all noise can be a distraction.  So far, the system has drawn reports about “children running around and playing in a group making strange cries”, “noisy neighbours and smoke” at a barbecue, and the racket from skateboards, bicycles, street football and barking dogs.  The site has, apparently, proved very popular with the Japanese as a guide to where not to live or rent, and has attracted many favourable comments.  It might even act as a deterrent to noisy neighbours.
I am thinking of moving to Japan.  Now where’s that vaccination passport?

19 February 2021

Blog 80. Pull The Ladder Up, Jack…

“Someone seems to have got out of bed on the wrong side this morning”.
So went the breakfast greeting from my dear wife earlier in the week as she bounced into the Garden Control Tower in her new plimsolls. I grunted in reply. I had woken at 0500 and tossed and turned, as you do, snuggled up to Mrs S, was told to get off, rolled to my side of the bed, then nearly fell out. Then I remembered that we had discussed a possible strategy for this vulnerable and delicate time in her day that involved me simply getting up and leaving her to sleep in peace, bringing up a warming cup of the oolong several hours later only when summoned. So I got up, washed, shaved, dressed and repaired to the Breakfast Room (aka the Garden Control Tower) for a cup of black coffee and a glance at The Times. And that is where I made my first mistake of the day.
“Social Distancing Likely To Be In Force Until At Least The Autumn”, screamed the headline. I could hardly believe it. Here we were, in our third miserable lockdown, the UK economy in its worse state for three hundred years, half the population in a state of hysteria, yet with infections, hospital admissions and deaths plummeting like a stone because of a highly successful vaccination programme; and the prediction now was that we would still be faffing about with masks and two metres in September. Oh Brilliant! And I suppose the whole lot will start all over again in the Winter as the first sniffle comes along and that will be another Christmas ruined. Hrrmph.
That was the start.
Then I remembered that I had a parcel to collect from the Royal Mail sorting office, which was open from 0500 – 1230, so I thought I would take a break in that direction. It is an interesting characteristic of our national postal service (though it is actually a privately-run company nowadays) that, whereas all other delivery services or couriers, such as Amazon, will leave parcels with a neighbour or in the back garden, or will redeliver on another day, the Royal Mail insists on putting a card through your letterbox if you are not in, requiring you to pick up the parcel at the Main Sorting Office, which has totally inconvenient and anti-social opening hours. Theoretically, you can go onto the Royal Mail website to ask for a redelivery, but as the postman never fills in the reference on the card that he or she puts through your letterbox, that option is not available. Anyway, as an escape from The Times’ gloomy news I took the car out and drove through the cold, dark and deserted streets into town, waited five long minutes while a lorry took three attempts to reverse into the Sorting Office, searched for a parking slot, then dived out into the freezing cold to collect my parcel. On the door of the Sorting Office was a notice that said,
“Covid Restrictions. Office Opens at 0800. Sorry For Any Inconvenience”.
This was my second mistake of the day.
I was practically spitting blood. A return home, another cup of coffee, more gloomy news from The Times, a return to the Sorting Office at 0801 and final docking back home had all preceded the memsahib’s discerning assessment of my mood, given at the start of the paragraph. After I had snarled my way through breakfast I was offered some further advice:
“…and don’t take your bad mood out on me!”
And, behold, I was immediately calm for verily, I feared exceedingly, and said to myself, ‘what manner of woman is this, that even the wind and the sea obey her?’ (With apologies to St Mark).

Well, this could be the end of civilisation as we know it: the French have waived their law that prohibits employees from eating their lunch at their workplace. The last bastion has fallen. The reason, of course, is that well-known excuse for just about everything bad or inefficient at the moment, the Corona virus. If there are no restaurants open then, ergo, French workers cannot eat a proper lunch – hence the relaxation of the rules. We can gloss over the fact that the French actually have (had) a law that bans workers from eating at their workplace. For the benefit of those who have not been to France, I should explain that the whole of that country except the hospitality industry shuts down at noon for about two hours, and the natives go out for a proper sit-down lunch, perhaps with a small glass of wine. During this period businesses shut, parking charges are suspended, and the good people of France shake off their work problems, socialise, and generally relax in a civilised manner. They eat a proper cooked and delicious meal (ie not [usually] burgers and chips) which is served to them by harassed-looking, yet thoroughly professional and efficient, waiters or waitresses. The same procedure is followed in schools, where the children receive a balanced meal with not an Angel Delight or a Cabinet Pudding in sight. Odd and distinctly parochial though it may sound, I had never been to France on holiday before 2005. I had, of course, frequented the ports of Toulon, Marseilles and Cherbourg in the course of my service with the Royal Navy, but the odd beer in the red light district, a haircut run-ashore, or an expedition to buy a bottle of ink did not really count as cultural visits to the country of Britain’s nearest foreign neighbour. My reluctance to visit before 2005 was twofold: first, there was the natural English aversion to France, England’s natural enemy (or has been since 1066); second, and the main reason, was that I could not speak a word of French. My schooling, while excellent in many ways, did not include languages because I was a 13+ entrant to Grammar School, and that was the system’s punishment for me being a late developer; Grammar School 11-year-olds were taught languages but, as a late entrant at 13, I was taught instead how to draw the curve of interpenetration in engineering drawing, a rare skill no longer taught anywhere. On travel, I have always had the philosophical view that, for reasons of politeness and good manners, one should at least try to speak the language of a host country and so any holiday plans involving France (or any other non-English-speaking country) always reached an impasse. Up to 2005 we took all our holidays in Britain, where the language was intelligible (except for that time in Wales), the accommodation expensive, and the weather predictable (usually grey and wet). I must have had some sort of epiphany in 2004, because at that time I decided to teach myself French and I have never looked back since. Behold, the half was not told unto me: what a beautiful country, with lovely food, empty roads, perfectly decent people (even if they are French) and a totally different culture and approach to life. I have heard it said that the British eat to live, but the French live to eat. That is somewhat simplistic and trite, but not a bad summary. And when I say ‘live to eat’, I don’t mean that all the French are porkies; I mean the quality of the food, even in little roadside cafés is usually excellent. The French can even make a salad taste good. I do hope that the country reverts to its proper lunchtimes when all this is over – if it ever is in my lifetime.

Language and communication are so important, don’t you think?  I have commented before about the misuse of English and the need to avoid ambiguity that could lead to misunderstanding; saying “disinterested” when one means “uninterested” for example, or “infer” when one really means “imply”, such pairs having totally opposite meanings.  I was reading, some time ago, of an incident involving the emergency services that illustrates my point about the misinterpretation of language very well.  Someone had dialled 999 and, in a panicked voice, asked for the Ambulance Service.  He was put through and the conversation apparently went something like this:
[Emergency Operator]: “Ambulance Service.  Can I help you?”
[Caller]: “Oh my God! I’ve killed my friend.  I’ve killed my friend.  We were out hunting and there was an accident.  I’ve shot him. Help, for God’s sake, help.  There’s blood everywhere…”
[Emergency Operator]: “Calm down, sir.  Calm down.  It may not be as bad as that.  We’ll send an ambulance but, for the moment, only you can save him. Now, listen carefully.   First, make sure he’s dead”
[Caller][in a more stable voice]:”Right, right…I’ll do that…yes”
The operator heard footsteps as the man went back to the casualty.  Then there was a loud BANG and the caller came back on the line.
[Caller]: “Right.  I’ve done that.  Now what do I do?”
I suppose in a case like that, the breakdown is not just in communication, but in fundamental intelligence.

One way of characterising older and wiser citizens (apart from the sigh as they sit down) is by their conversations involving their medication or pain such as,
“I’m on the blue pills…”,
“Ha! I was on those last year. Now I’m on the green pills. They’re much better”
“Oh I need the blue pills for my leg. I get this ache just here…”
And so it goes on.
However, a further characteristic has now been added in 2021: the conversation regarding their Covid 19 vaccinations:
“Have you had yours yet?”
“Oh yes, I had the Oxford-AstraZeneca last week…”
“Pish, pish – I had the Pfizer two weeks ago…”
“We haven’t had ours yet. We aren’t yet 70”.
“Oh dear…”
As most of our friends are older than us (we hope that some of their wisdom, though preferably not their age, will rub off on us), the above has been a typical conversation on email, Facetime or whatever passes for a conversation nowadays. I am pleased to say that such dialogue has now moved on to a new level for – at last – I have been ‘done’ (vaccinated, that is, not gelded). Jane received the Oxford jab locally on Friday and I received mine at the racecourse of the Big City early on Saturday. The disparity of locations may be explained by the fact that Jane received a text from our local surgery and a local appointment shortly after; coincidentally, on the day she was vaccinated we both received letters from the central NHS Authority authorising us to log in online and book appointments at a nearby National Vaccination Centre. I opted to take the last option (having heard nothing from our surgery), a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush. Saturday dawned for us at 0630 on a dark and freezing morning and one of us leapt out of bed with great eagerness for what the day would bring; the other had a hangover after having consumed too much Crémant de Loire the previous night. The Big City Racecourse is located high on a hill north of the city itself and is very exposed to the elements. When we arrived for the 0820 appointment the temperature was -4C with a brisk easterly wind lowering that to about -8C by the chill factor. A whole host of volunteers, together with a clutch of firefighters from the local brigade, had turned out to greet me, which was most gratifying. It was some sacrifice, for I have to tell you, dear reader, that the conditions up there were perishing. The action took place in a large marquee that shook and crackled so much with every gust of wind that I could hardly hear what was being said to me. I was checked in at three separate desks and sterilised my hands at four separate stations. I was issued with an NHS standard facemark to be worn instead of my own. Wherever I sat, the seat was wiped down afterwards. Marshals (guides, not the US-variety) were everywhere to steer me in the right direction (very necessary as my spectacles had steamed up), and full credit to them for turning out in such inhospitable Arctic conditions. Finally, I got to sit down and be vaccinated with the Oxford-AstraZeneca serum, the most mundane part of the entire event. Afterwards I was directed to a high-backed easy chair such as one finds in the lounges of Old Peoples’ Homes to ‘recover’. My question of,
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a cup of tea…?”
was ignored, but I was given the precious card stating that I had been ‘done’. Alas, there was no badge and not even an offer of a boiled sweet for being a good brave boy.
I was released into the void after fifteen minutes (presumably to make sure that I didn’t die on them) clutching a leaflet entitled delicately, “Covid-19 Vaccination – A Guide for Older Adults” that depicted smiling grey-haired stalwarts looking cheerful or sitting in wheelchairs. That’s it then; booster dose on 1 May, when the sun will be shining, birds will be twittering in the trees, and all will be right with the world.

Incidentally, vis à vis these early morning expeditions in the (electric) motor car, my Nissan Leaf has the feature whereby one can tell it to get its interior warmed up in time for the humans to enter.  This can be done on a programmed schedule, or on spec.  One simply sends a signal to the car on getting out of bed and, on departure, scuttles across to the garage, unplugs the car, and climbs into a warm cosy environment, steering wheel and seats hot, ready to depart into the frozen landscape.  I just thought I’d mention that if you are still driving that dreadful fossil-fuelled gas guzzler.  What’s that?  You’re going to keep it?  OK – you know best, I suppose, but what would that precocious little Swedish girl say about it (has she gone away yet, by the way)? 

The UK remains in its third lockdown but, as stated earlier, the number of infections, hospital admissions and deaths from Covid 19 are all plummeting.  At the time of writing, deaths in the last 24 hours stood at 621, dropping at 26% a week. 14 million people (28% of the adult population) have been vaccinated and the government has achieved its target of immunising those over 70 by 14 February.  Vaccination of the Batch 5 people, aged 65 – 69 (including me), has now started.  I am sorry to report further instances of police over-zealousness, this time of an incident more local.  The granddaughter of friends of ours works temporarily in Iceland, a frozen-food supermarket in a nearby town.  She was familiar with two elderly women who were regular customers, coming in weekly on the bus from a town 6 miles away to order their groceries and arrange to have them delivered.  Last week the bus duly arrived and the two old dears alighted – to be met by the Barsetshire Police who asked their business and whence they had come.  On replying, the ladies were promptly given an on-the-spot fine of £200 each and told that they should shop in their own town.  There was no warning or discussion; no attempt to explain; just ‘bang’, “you’re nicked”.  I think that that is totally out of order and, moreover, an illegal fine.  As I stated in Blog 76, the actual UK law on Covid 19 makes no restrictions on distance travelled, or time taken, to shop or exercise: what it says regarding shopping is “…you must stay at home…except to obtain essential supplies…”. If I were in those ladies’ positions I would refuse to accept the fine and let the police prosecute me in the Magistrate’s Court – if they could.  But then, two old ladies are such an easy target and unlikely to complain.

I see that the Europeans have decided to avoid using the Oxford vaccine because “it is less effective than the Pfizer and has unpleasant side effects”.  This is contrary to trial results, experience in Britain over the last three months, and the recommendations of the World Health Organisation (WHO).  It would appear that, because  our continental cousins have been unable to organise themselves and obtain sufficient of their own stocks of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, their strategy now is simply to discredit the remedy used by their hated arch-rival, Britain, and sow seeds of doubt in the minds of any Britons already unconvinced by the efficacy or safety of the vaccine.  More fool the Europeans, and what a childish and pathetic strategy.  The European Union has also extended its previous policy of preventing the export of vaccines from Europe in order to retain the material for its own use, this time at the expense of an order placed by Canada. One could not find a more clearer case for establishing strategically important manufacturing capability on one’s own soil, and so much for Whole World cooperation.

I was baffled by reports of the number of British people returning to the happy homeland in the current circumstances because it was my understanding that we were in lockdown, the fundamental requirement being “stay at home”.  As I described earlier, two people here were recently fined for travelling a mere 6 miles to a nearby town to buy a a packet of cornflakes, a bag of frozen peas, some corn plasters and a bottle of milk (or whatever).   How, therefore, is it that some people are returning from the Bahamas (where they spent Christmas, how nice) or Dubai (where they had many pictures taken as they sunned or inebriated themselves).  It turns out that these people are “Social Media Influencers” and so their trips were essential and permitted because it was “work”.  Yeh, right.  Look: I write this blog mostly every week and post it on the internet, which I suppose is a kind of social media.  Not a week goes by without me offering an opinion or sage advice in the hope of influencing my readership.  Do you think I could do a bit of crowd funding to pay for the memsahib and me to travel abroad?  To Fiji, perhaps to soak up the atmosphere and report on the quality of the restaurants and the sartorial standards there…The offer is on the table.  What’s that?  You can’t afford it?  No, neither can I.  Social Media Influencing indeed: a bunch of overpaid, over-indulged, over-exposed and over-suntanned air heads who should never have been permitted to leave the country in lockdown.  Stick them in a B&B in Workington in quarantine for a fortnight, eating pease pudding and saveloy from the local pork shop, and let them tweet, or whatever it is they do, from there.

So, here we are: 13 February 2021and the eve of St Valentine’s Day; bitterly cold in Britain and the Thames frozen over at Teddington; the wind blowing a hooley at -4C; no snow here in Barsetshire, but the windows are rattling and it is distinctly uncomfortable outside.  Yet the snowdrops are up, the hamamelis is in flower, and Mrs Shacklepin has started painting her toenails for the forthcoming Spring and Summer (always a good sign).  She is also preparing Beef Wellington for our celebratory dinner tomorrow.  What more can you ask as the counterpoint to my opening paragraph?  Oh yes, I forgot, I have had my first Covid 19 vaccination.  Just pull the ladder up, would you Jack?  I’m all right.

Brrrrr, it’s cold.

13 February 2021

Blog 79. Still in Isolation

Earlier in the week I fell foul of my own sage maxim outlined in Blog 75 namely, “never trust instruments alone”.  For this, I blame the influence of that latter-day Eve, Jane, who had enchanted me with her siren song on health.  It was Day 3 of my quarantine with CV19 infection and still no symptoms.  Over breakfast, I was discussing with her (or rather hailing the masthead, as we were still far apart) that I thought the heart monitor on my new exercise bike was reading too high: the alarming figures it displayed did not match my observations from measuring my pulse on my wrist.  She suggested I try measuring my pulse using her rinky dinky wrist fitness monitor (are they called a Fitbit?) and she slid it forward across the gulf between us.  Regular readers will recall that this device was the beast that kept telling her that she had had an awful night’s sleep when, in fact, she had completed a deep dive to 500 fathoms and had resurfaced, free of barnacles, as if a new woman.  I put on the bracelet, ignoring the helpful advice of my dear wife telling me, “you strap it to your wrist” (thank you dear, I managed to work that out). I tapped the Heart Beat option and, after a minute or so, it came back with the totally unsurprising news that the old positive displacement pump was still going and that it was ticking along at idling speed of 72 beats per minute.
 “Try the pulse oximeter, try the pulse oximeter”, she urged.
“ And what will that do?”, I sighed.
“It measures your oxygen level!”, she said conclusively, as if that were the knock-down drag-out final answer.
“Well, I’m breathing.  That must be a good sign”.  
She looked at me in that way of hers.
“OK, OK”.  I tapped the option.  Back it came with a reading of 93%.
“So what does that mean?”
“I don’t know”, she said.
This reminded me of a time when we went walking with friends near Dartmouth and were ascending a very long, steep road that reached far into the sky, disappearing into the clouds (or so it seemed).  We paused to recover at every lamppost and my friend, a very keen fitness fanatic, said,
“When we get to the top, you must time how long it takes for your heart to return to normal speed”.
Knowing nothing about the subject, but always being willing to take advice on matters fitness provided it required no effort on my part, I took this onboard.  When we eventually reached the top of the hill I duly stood there with the rest of the party, gasping and heaving (some gasping and heaving more than others). I monitored my pulse as advised and finally came up with the recovery time.
“Right”, I said to my friend who, I noted, had recovered quite some time ago. ”My recovery time is six minutes” (or whatever it was). “Is that good?”
“I don’t know”, said my friend. “It’s just something you should do, I think…”
Ever since another friend, a personal trainer, told me you could eat as many scones with jam as you like after taking exercise, without any detrimental effect, then subsequently vehemently denied the statement, I have been a bit dubious of what these fitness experts tell me;  this further piece of evidence added to my scepticism.  Why, I read the other day, that these people get a ‘buzz’ out of running for several miles, and travel abroad to take part in marathons. Are they mad?  Why on earth do they think we invented motor cars?  There is definitely something wrong there.  I tell you reader: beware these fitness addicts: they live in a parallel universe and wear jock straps and sports bras.

Post paragraph note: I wish I hadn’t mentioned those scones and jam; I feel hungry now.

I thought afterwards that I would pursue the business of the blood oxygen level (I had nothing else to do) so I went on the internet – that well known source of gloom, doom and misinformation – and discovered that, at 93%, my blood-oxygen reading indicated that my body was fighting an infection.  Oh dear.    I immediately felt off-colour.  Then I remembered reading an article somewhere about buying an oximeter for monitoring your health.  Excellent! An opportunity to buy yet another new gadget and monitor my deterioration at the same time, thus killing two birds with one stone.  I reached for the trusty iPad: ah yes, there was an oximeter on Amazon for £26, much recommended and bearing a CE kite mark.  A ‘Must Have’, I suggested to the Head Nurse and ordered it forthwith.  It came the next day.  You have probably seen these things: they are like a big clothes peg that you clamp on your finger; you press a button and it tells you your heartbeat and blood oxygen level, all very nifty.  I clamped mine on and waited in trepidation: 72 beats a minute and 98% blood oxygen level.  Perfectly normal, the British Standard Healthy Human in fact.  I immediately felt well again.  Jane, of course, felt that she should be in on all this, so she tried it.  Her reading was 32 beats a minute and 97% and this immediately gave her cause for concern (and so it should have – she apparently was fading away even as I sat there looking at her).  We took the risk of me taking her pulse in her wrist, but she had none.  I think she must have been alive as she was still standing there and giving vent to her concern that she must be ill.  I took her pulse from the carotid artery in her neck and used my watch in the old fashioned way, like Hattie Jacques in Carry on Nurse:  seventy beats a minute.  Still nothing wrong with her, but – mark you – there is something odd about someone who never has a pulse in her wrist, can rarely yield a blood sample, and whose body defies precision medical equipment recommended by the ambulance service.  I think she may be from the planet Venus and should not to be trusted.  I also think that, maybe,  I need to get out more.

My first day in purdah dawned with a knock on the bedroom door at 0745, shockingly fifteen minutes before “Turn To”. I had been awake for an hour and was gasping for a cup of tea, but I had been ordered not to contaminate the kitchen utensils or crockery, so lay rigidly in my bed awaiting room service. My original plan (see Blog 78) had been to take to bed the little handbell used in our household by the Sick and Dying to summon help in time of need, but the Head Nurse saw (and heard) me surreptitiously picking it up the night before and I was challenged before I even reached the stairs:
“Just where do you think you are going with that?”
I resisted the involuntary urge to protect my bottom with my hands.
“Well, I thought I would take it into the bedroom in case I needed a paracetamol or a cup of tea or something…”
“You will not! Kindly put it back, please. This is my opportunity for ten nights of undisturbed sleep and natural wakening. I’m not having you ringing that damned bell at six o’clock in the morning”.
I replaced it, abashed.
Anyway, to return to the present, there was a knock on the bedroom door, but no tea. I tried calling, “Enter!” but, strangely, no one came in. So I padded across and opened the door. Outside had been erected a little trestle table and on it was my tea, with Jane standing behind it in her fluffy No 2 dressing gown (Gown, Officer’ Wife, Size 10, Arctic).
I adopted my best Pathetic Sick Person stance and passed the back of my weary hand across my (un)fevered brow.
“Why, thank you darling”, I said, while thinking she really was taking this isolation seriously: surely she could have held her breath as far as my bedside table and back. I awaited the customary concerned enquiry; the sympathetic look, perhaps; the yearning in her eyes that said she had missed my masterly presence last night, and would be devastated if it were gone forever.
“Well, thank you very much!”, was the greeting from the Concerned Enquirer. “Turning on that hall light at a quarter to seven! It woke me up! I had only just managed to get of to sleep at five o’clock”.
I was mystified. I had done no such thing. Indeed, I had not been downstairs that morning, and I said so. Then I realised what it was: the hall light comes on automatically at 0645 (fifteen minutes before “Call the Hands”), the better to light my way as I proceed to make the early morning tea in more normal times. I explained this and she grunted in response before retiring to The Lady Boudoir in a dudgeon while I returned to my dungeon.
“Hmmm”, I thought, “this is going to be a long ten days in semi-isolation”.

Everyone is concerned about me.  Periodically I receive a telephone call from the Test and Trace Team, who ask how I am coping then mention, casually, the swingeing fines that will be imposed on me if I cross the threshold; this is followed up by text messages on alternate days  saying the same thing.  Concerned friends have called, asking after my welfare.  It is all rather touching (I didn’t think anyone cared) but, the truth is, dear reader, I am one of the lucky ones and am loafing.  Apparently the PCR test is pretty accurate and the likelihood of me being a ‘false positive’ is not great; however, as far as I can gather, around 20% of those people tested positive have no symptoms at all.  I guess I am one of the latter, but the mystery of how I caught the virus while Jane remained untouched, remains a mystery.  Maybe it does not affect Venusians.

There are perks, of course.  One must always look on the bright side.  I am now excused all duties and have, for my personal and individual use, (a) the electric blanket; (b) the bedroom television with access to Clint Eastwood films; (c)  the en-suite bathroom and shower; (d) the en-suite lavatory with seat left up; (e) the electric toothbrush and (f) the power to go to sleep or to get up whenever I want.  It is quite heady stuff.  Jane, for her part, has the spare bedroom (negative electric blanket and Warm Man); the main bathroom, shower over bath, lavatory seat in lowered position; and the downstairs lavatory, ditto lavatory seat status, designated The Lady Toilet.  No contest really: no wonder she’s grumpy – she misses me, bless her; I can tell.  As I write this, by the way, it is Day 9 of quarantine and I am still perfectly healthy; it must be the way she looks after me.

My isolation ends at 2359 GMT on Saturday and Jane has a bottle of bubbly on ice to facilitate the celebration.  I did suggest that Jane sneak into my bed at 0002 GMT on Sunday in a sort of pretend lovers’ tryst to spice up the ennui, but she said she would be asleep at that time.  She had a twinkle in her eye when she mentioned Sunday morning but, when I enquired further, it turned out that she was looking forward to me making the early-morning tea again.  That’s married life for you.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that we completed our month of ultra-strict diet on Monday and, at Weigh In, I had lost 5.7 kg, or 13 lb in old units, during January.  We have reverted to to the 5:2 diet now, with the “2” bit (two days of only 800 calories) kicking off next week.  We had cottage pie on Monday night followed by, in Jane’s case, a choc ice.  That meal was divine.

Well, the new robot vacuum cleaner has arrived from Austria, having been ordered on 31 December. I think it must have come here under its own power judging by the delay though, to be fair, the tardiness was because of Brexit and the resulting paperwork involved. The machine works an absolute treat. The old one lasted for about 15 years before giving off its last spark and refusing to move further than one foot from its charger. This one really is whizzo dizzo and it talks to you occasionally to tell you to pull your finger out and empty its dirt bin. Jane is very taken with it, not least because it is relatively quiet after its predecessor, which used to wind up like an RB211 on take off. The new one is an iRobot Roomba 980 and I have called in Marvin to make it feel part of the family.

The rapid implementation of the Covid 19 vaccination programme appears to be having a good effect, such that the rate of positive tests is now dropping at 25% a week, as is the rate of hospital admissions (22%).  Weekly deaths are also falling, currently at 13%.  The overall absolute figures remain at a high level, however, and there were 1,014 deaths in the UK in the last 24 hours.  Evidence has emerged that vaccination reduces transmissibility by nearly 70%, which augurs well for the lifting of social distancing, but the government – perhaps rightly – is a little wary of relaxing lockdown earlier than March or April.  Concern that the scientists and the government may be moving the goalposts on the criteria for lifting restrictions (Blog 77) continues and the matter has been raised in Cabinet.  I see that the Isle of Man has not only come out of its own brief lockdown, but has removed all social distancing measures entirely: pubs and restaurants have opened, theatres are putting on plays and life has returned to normal (the island has its own government and is not technically part of the UK).  Of course, the Isle of Man closed its borders some time ago and remains closed to any visitors.

Looking back at my early blogs from Spring last year, I see that I was conscious of every week of lockdown, counting off the weeks like a prisoner doing porridge.  Almost a year later I sense that we are all becoming inured to the situation now, taking each day as it comes with dull lifeless eyes and grateful for any crumbs that the government throws to us.  We are beginning to suffer a kind of Stockholm Syndrome.  That is why I think that, when all this is over and the POW camp gates are thrown open, we will still  want to stay inside the compound, wearing our comfort face nappies and afraid to go out or go near anyone.  Rehabilitation will take quite a while, I fear.  It is interesting that, in the Isle of Man, the Manx government has asked residents to be tolerant of those of its citizens who may choose to continue with their own social distancing measures such as wearing masks. I infer from this that some Manxmen are emerging from their holes with considerable caution.  I will not be following their example when the time comes.

The late naval author John Winton once said that a typical wardroom argument in HM ships took the form of a flat statement, followed by a flat contradiction, followed by personal abuse.  I think that that could now be expanded into many sections of society ashore today, and we are beginning to see a lot of it at the moment: the strategy of playing the player not the ball.  This is evident in all areas of social interaction, but is none more obvious than in our present situation with Covid 19.   Putting to one side the arguments of the conspiracy theorists who think that the Corona vaccine contains a microchip that will be used to monitor and control us, there do happen to be members of the scientific community out there who disagree with the current strategy to tackling the virus.  Their qualifications may be just as good as the official government advisors and their arguments may be just as valid.  There may also be members of the public who are perfectly capable of reading the government statistics, analysing them for themselves, and coming to a different conclusion from the official line.  At the very least, the matters they raise should be heard, examined and debated and, if appropriate, rejected based on logic.  What we have instead  is that anyone (appropriately qualified or not) who challenges the True Faith, founded on the shrine of Lockdown and celebrated by the communion of The Face Mask,  is personally vilified, labelled as a crank, and their advice or views are dismissed out of hand.  Worse, learned papers are simply suppressed without peer review or are deleted from history as being inconvenient.  No attempt is made to examine any evidence put forward, to talk about it sensibly or to consider that – occasionally – these people might just, possibly, be right; instead we have the 21st century equivalents of the witch hunt and being burnt at the stake to cries of ‘heretic’.    It is as if we have learned nothing from the Ancient Greeks who took pride in practising debate, rhetoric and logic, and brought us democracy: we, as the human race, are the poorer for this current narrow minded zealotry.  

Of course, in writing that last paragraph, I freely admit that it is contrary to the views that I put forward early in the epidemic in Blog 44, in which I advocated One Official Strategy and declared that this was no time for fannying about with debate.  But then, there you have it: the perfect balanced argument.

Now tell me: why can I not buy a decent pair of trousers anymore? The ones on sale either have ‘stretch’ waists to kid the owner that he is not really putting on weight, narrow bottoms like the drainpipe trousers of the 1960s, or a truncated fly opening. Of all of these drawbacks, this last is probably the most irritating. I first came across the phenomenon on a third-party basis some years ago when I was in a public lavatory, pointing silently at the porcelain as we men do. I was considerably disconcerted when I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, the bloke next to me undoing his belt and starting to drop his trousers. “Oh my God”, I thought,”It must be my hairstyle that attracted him”. Thankfully, the disrobing stopped there and the bloke carried on as if things were perfectly normal. I tackled a friend on this and asked if he had had a similar experience. He explained that it was because some trousers now came supplied with only half the length of fly zip; consequently, undoing the whole garment was the only way to – you know – gain full access to the equipment. Now I find myself in possession of just such a pair of trousers with half a fly zip and it is, indeed, a lengthy operation to perform what used to be a quick and easy natural function. What is the mindset on that? Are the tailors saving money on zips? Come to think of it, the shirt tails aren’t as long as they used to be either, but perhaps that is in order to serve those members of the male community who choose to walk around with their shirt tails hanging out like errant and defiant schoolboys (I suppose it does hide their pot bellies).

The Beast From the East is expected to return this weekend after a relatively mild spell in the south of England (14C at one point). I use the term ‘England’ advisedly because poor old Scotland has not had much respite from the freeze (-12C last week in Altnaharra in the Highlands). Although we are a relatively small country we still encounter quite a difference in weather between the extreme south of England and the extreme north of Scotland (about 700 miles). I remember when we lived near Glasgow and I had business in London. I left a very cold and flooded Scotland to fly south and found, in London, people sitting outside pubs and restaurants in the sunshine and in their shirt sleeves. A few years ago I was asked to give a lecture to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) in Thurso (about as far as you can go north on the mainland) and I opted to do it in April when I thought the weather would be reasonable. Thinking we would make something of a holiday of it, Jane and I stayed with friends who very kindly put us up in Cullen (home of the Cullen skink), roughly two thirds of the way up Scotland and due east of Inverness; I reasoned that the trip to Thurso from there would be a half skip and jump. How wrong I was. The rickety train journey from Inverness to Thurso, on a single rail track with a passing place in the middle, took forever and passed through just about every type of winter weather system going. At one point the train ground to a halt in the middle of a wilderness that would have done justice to a scene from the film Braveheart. We wondered what the problem was, but then I saw the guard walking along beside the train carrying an enormous crowbar. He and the driver then set-to on the points, which had become frozen and jammed. This little DIY job seemed to work and we were eventually on our way, but in order to make up the time the train driver decided to miss out Thurso from one of his stops and carry straight on to his final destination in Wick; passengers for Thurso (including us) were dropped off at some tiny halt in the middle of nowhere to await a minibus. We unhappy few huddled in the tiny waiting room (which, thankfully, was heated) for over an hour while day grew darker and the sleet and snow lashed at the windows like something out of an Agatha Christie murder mystery. Eventually an old minibus taxi turned up and we piled in to be driven across the highlands, the vehicle frequently veering across the road as gusts of wind blasted across the heather and glen. We made Thurso eventually and it was freezing, but the lecture went well: I suppose me turning up was the only excitement the engineers of the IMechE had that year. Thurso: nice place, nice people, but go in July next time. Cullen, after that, was positively tropical (or so it seemed).

The snowdrops are coming up and Jane was out in the garden yesterday, talking to the other plants and making a mess.  Daylight is increasing at two minutes every day.  Soon, I am sure, we too will be blossoming out into the human beings that we once were.   Roll on Spring.

5 February 2021

Blog 78. “Unclean, Unclean…”

Well that’s a bit of a bummer.  Apparently I have Covid 19.  Yet, by some fluke, Jane is uninfected.  There is, of course, nothing wrong with me or, rather, I have no symptoms whatsoever.  It all started with Jane complaining yesterday that she had a headache, aching limbs and generally not feeling tip top.  I dismissed the headache (which we both have had, off and on, all month) as a known side-effect of the low-carbohydrate diet that we are on, and I would normally have glossed over the rest of Jane’s symptoms as the outcome of her known long-term chronic valetudinarianism; however the aching limbs did sound worrying.  The two of us participate in a long-term Covid study being undertaken by King’s College in London which asks us simply to log in every day and report whether we are well or not.  I suggested that she duly report ‘sick’ on the App and back they came, asking her to arrange a test, using the study as authority, with the option of taking a friend.  We managed to arrange a test within the hour and duly piled into the car for the drive-in experience, repeating the process of last October.  That was at 1400 yesterday; by 0800 this morning we had the results.  Jane’s email came first: it was negative. 
“Told you so”, I said with great relish, “Nothing wrong with you”. 
Ten minutes later my email came in; it was positive. 
“What?”, I said, “WHAT?  But, but….I haven’t been anywhere”. 
I haven’t mixed with anyone.  I haven’t even been out to exercise.  On the odd occasion when I have left the house I have simply sat in the car in a supermarket carpark.  The only person I have mixed with is little Miss Negative, and she has not been anywhere other than the supermarket, once a week, where she wears the obligatory mask and disinfects the trolley and her hands religiously.  I think my result may be a ‘false positive’, but we can’t afford to take any chances: if Jane gets ill then I will starve to death, my corpse found three months later on the kitchen floor with a withered hand reaching out for the can opener.  The long and short of it is that Jane and I must isolate from the world now for ten days.  I looked at Jane and she at me.  She made the decision for me:
“I’m moving out”.
“Oh fair enough I suppose”, I said resignedly, “I suppose it was the whistling that finally tipped the balance…”
“Not out of the house, fool”, she said, “Out of the bedroom.  I’ll move into the spare room”.
“Whoopee! So I get the television and en-suite bathroom?”
“You’ll need them if symptoms develop and you have to take to your bed”.
“Oh.  I hadn’t thought of that”.
We cannot easily isolate during the day, but we have pulled out the leaves of the dining table so that I sit at one end of the table while she sits two metres away at the other end, like Lord and Lady Muck taking tiffin in Shacklepin Towers, but without the footman to serve the food.  The frequent bleach disinfection process of door handles, remote controls and switches has been reinstated with a vengeance and I have been banished from the downstairs loo (now re-designated The Lady Toilet, seat down, lavatory paper dispensing from the top of the roll).  A no-touch policy has been introduced and we are swerving around each other like two like-poles on magnets.  It seems a bit daft seeing as how we slept together last night, but there you go. The windows have been thrown open and I am writing this in a freezing gale like Captain Scott scribbling down his final words in Antarctica after failing to reach the South Pole. Oh well, I wondered what we should do to pass the time this week.

I must say I was very impressed by the process that was triggered by my positive test result.  Within five minutes of my bad news I received a barrage of texts and emails telling me (us) what to do and asking with whom I had been in contact recently (no-one) so that they could be contacted.  It was all very slick given the negative press the government has been receiving over the last ten months.  The vaccination programme is a further instance of a UK success story: over 8 million people (roughly 13% of the UK population) have received their first injection and we seem to be on track for immunising everyone over the age of 70 by mid February.  Jane and I, at 69,  are in the next phase after that.  An unseemly row has broken out now because the EU was slow to place orders for their vaccines, slow to approve them for use and slow to start immunisation.  The organisation insisted that the task must be undertaken centrally, and not arranged by individual countries of the Union, with the result that the Union’s immunisation programme has been as sluggish as a suet pudding, and just as wobbly.  The UK placed orders with Pfizer three months before the EU, and approved the vaccines just before Christmas.  The EU is now demanding that the laboratory  in Belgium stop fulfilling the UK order and divert the output to the Europe instead, threatening to stop any exports.   Moreover, the EU is demanding (note that pejorative verb) that the laboratories making the Oxford vaccine in Britain should stop supplying the UK and should send the output  to Europe.  You couldn’t make this up.  It makes me so glad that the UK left that poisonous organisation on 31 December last year.  Closer to home, last week in Wales the First Minister defended his order for vaccination teams to slow down their rate of injections as “it would use up all the stocks of vaccine allocated and leave the teams idle”; someone pointed out to him that the best place for the vaccine was in a vulnerable person’s arm, not sitting in a vial. Statistics-wise, the number of positive test results remains high, but continues to fall, as does hospital admissions; daily deaths in the last 24 hours (measured by date of death) stand at 1,239 and is also falling (https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths).  The media is taking enormous delight in reporting that the total death toll from Covid in the UK now exceeds 100,000 and implies, with relish, that every single death is Boris Johnson’s fault (“The Prime Minister has blood on his hands.…”).  Oh, for heaven’s sake!  Overall, we may possibly have turned the corner, but it will be a long waiting game.  A review of lockdown in England will take place on 22 February (don’t hold your breath) and it has been declared that schools will remain closed here until March at the earliest.

The issue of educating our children in the present circumstances is a thorny one, not only because of the months of schooling lost, but for mental health reasons.  A high incidence of mental health illness in the young has been reported, probably as much because of concerns over failing examinations as the inability of children to meet and play.  Parents have also reported serious difficulty with trying to balance working at home with home-schooling of their children. I am not sure how parents who cannot work at home manage with childcare, though key workers can send their children to school as normal.    I believe A-Level and GCSE examinations this year have been cancelled and pupils’ results will, instead, be assessed by their teachers – a process that could be likened to someone performing their duties to their own entire satisfaction.  It has been suggested that universities lower, or abandon some of, their entry standards to facilitate the admission of disadvantaged children.  This may be a fair proposal provided the universities do not lower their graduation standards at the same time – a very real concern:  I, for one, do not want to cross a bridge, fly in an aircraft or sail in a ship designed by a so-called engineer who has not been educated to a proper standard, nor do I wish to be treated by a half-trained doctor.  I understand that home-schooling for state school pupils varies, but know of one report where the pupils receive only two hours of on-line tuition a day.  In contrast, our neighbour’s children, who normally go to private school, receive on-line tuition from 0800 to 1600.  In Portugal, the socialist government has banned private schools from giving on-line tuition because Portuguese state schools cannot match it, the motto apparently being that if we all cannot fit into the lifeboats, then none of us will be allowed to abandon ship: a strange philosophy. 

It is a funny old thing being under close arrest, or lockdown as governments prefer to call it.  Some of us are content in our own company and can cope, but there must be many – particularly those without a partner or spouse – who face very real challenges or mental issues.  Imagine being stuck in a high-rise flat on your own in a big city, perhaps with a noisy neighbour upstairs, no job, and the only exercise being in a crowded urban park.  Add to that the possible overlay of being old, computer illiterate, with no friends and no relatives.  It must surely be hell for them.  Logic dictates that if we isolate ourselves then the spread of an infection must surely be inhibited (though I refer the honourable reader to the exception that proves the rule, moi), so one can follow the argument that a lockdown is necessary for the good of all.  However, if you look at the UK government’s own statistics ((https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases ) you will see that infections in the UK actually peaked on 1 January 2021 and were already falling when this lockdown was implemented on 5 January.  This is very curious, but suggests that the previous Tier system of focussed regional restrictions may have been producing fruitful results before the present extreme universal isolation measures were brought in.  In a similar vein, some pundits have blamed the increase in infections on the UK’s relaxation of restrictions on Christmas Day (hence the, “blood on his hands” reports), but the data does not support that: infections were rising steadily in the UK from about 28 November (when the second lockdown was still in force) and the statistics show no spikes on or after 25 December.  I have taken the exceptional step of including links to the UK government statistics on the Office of National Statistics (ONS) website in my blog this week, just to counter any thoughts you may have of “Horatio on his hobby horse again”.  The pressure on our hospitals and their staff is indisputable, as are the deaths that continue; I merely suggest that a more targeted isolation régime, with some compromise with normal life, might balance the Covid deaths with the deaths from neglected medical conditions and the cases of mental illness.

Working from home is a relatively new experience for many and, of course, it is a process that can only be practised in limited cases by white-collar workers.  Some people have sworn by it, predicting that it is the way of the future and that many city offices will close; others are not so sure.  A recent report by two top finance companies has suggested that the practice is “fraying at the edges” and will not last after the present epidemic.  Certainly the concept sounds good: no need to dress, no commuting, no timetable.  You set your own agenda within the bounds of producing a defined output.  In practice there are problems: you miss the company of colleagues, socially and professionally; problems that once could be solved by wandering over to the next desk for a chat now have to be tackled formally and lengthily using email or video conference; motivation can be hard (I recently heard on the radio of people who did all their work in bed and never got up except to prepare food and drink and use the lavatory); personal standards fall; there are domestic distractions; you never get away from the job.  I experienced the last drawback in a very minor way when I was serving in my last ship, HMS NONSUCH.  There was an Engineers’ Office deep in the bowels of the ship where I had a desk and where I normally completed all my paperwork, but many other officers simply worked from their cabins.  I thought I would try that, and have the correspondence brought up to me on a regular basis.  I lasted a week. I found I could not resist tackling the paperwork in my IN tray, often drafting letters or writing reports up to midnight, and I could not force myself to take a break.  More currently, my son who normally works for the government in London, has been working from home since March 2020.  I asked him how he was getting along and he reported that his day started at 0600 and he was still participating in video conferences with ministers and others at 2200; he said he felt exhausted, and I am not surprised.  He does have a critical job, so his experience may be an extreme case, but I am sure the drawbacks can be applied to many home workers.

Previous generations would often have their future trades or jobs chosen for them by their parents, and would be pushed into them with the help of some nepotism.  I know of cases, even in my generation, of friends who ended up in a career that way: girls thrust into nursing or secretarial courses, boys pressured into joining the Navy.  Some of us, however, have the luxury of choosing our careers and being contented with our decision (the secret, probably, is to decide the job you want to do while at school before your parents decide it for you).  We generally choose the type of job we want to do and, if we don’t like the way it is panning out we move on.  Mid-way through my time in the Royal Navy I decided to leave and become an engineering consultant in industry.  The job was academically challenging and very rewarding, but after three years I could bear it no longer: I left and rejoined the Navy, taking a pay cut in the process.  The reason?  The job was destroying my soul.  Do you remember what it was like when we took our school or university exams in the gymnasium or hall, each of us sitting at desks far apart, total silence, and writing all the time for hours?  Well that was what it was like being an engineering consultant: you came into work at 0830, you sat at your desk, you took out the paperwork for whatever project you were working on, and you completed calculations or wrote reports all day until 1700, with thirty minutes off for lunch.  There was no office banter or chatter, no formal coffee break and every minute of the day was recorded against a contract; you felt guilty even visiting the lavatory or reading a technical journal because it was using the client’s time and your own project’s resources. The only break I received was getting out on visits for meetings with clients.   I was used to the mixed social and professional life of the Navy: Management By Walking About, working all hours but enjoying myself in the process, socialising with shipmates and encouraging my workforce.  Hence the return to the True Faith, despite the drop in pay.  The moral of the story is that all work and no play makes Jack a very dull boy (and can, in extremis, give him or her mental problems).  By the way, my return to the Royal Navy did my career the power of good in a personal sense (I had learned a great deal), if not a professional one (damn, I had always fancied that Vice Admiral’s hat).

With the exception of minor war vessels and submarines, the Commanding Officers of HM ships always relax and eat in their own cabins and are the only officers to have en-suite facilities and their own separate dining cabin.  Other officers, of course, eat in the Wardroom and the Captain only enters that mess by invitation.  This is a traditional practice that dates back beyond Nelson’s time and is based on the premise that it is easier to command and make unpleasant decisions if one is not too chummy with one’s subordinates.  It makes for a very lonely life for a Commanding Officer, however, and they all seem to develop a particular aura, some in the manner of a Roman emperor.  Of the ships’ captains under whom I served, some were unpleasant; many were unreasonable; all were very demanding; most were eccentric in some way. None was “nice”. Yet all were professional, first-class leaders for whom I had the greatest of respect.  I believe the Masters of merchant ships are often imbued with the same characteristics, despite – in their case – messing with the other ship’s officers in the saloon.  Yes, working alone does have its problems.

The Diet is still rolling along or, in Jane’s stated case, not rolling along fast enough.  She has started fantasising about steamed puddings and jam roly poly now.  Just to give you a flavour, we had soft- boiled eggs with asparagus soldiers for breakfast this morning (crikey, isn’t it amazing how rapidly your digestive system passes that asparagus through your body) and, for luncheon, we had miso soup with slices of mushroom and spinach.  The latter had the colour and consistency of Irrawaddy River water, and it appeared to be flavoured with debris removed from the strum box of the starboard stern gland bilge pump, but it all tasted very nice.  We end Phase 1 of this diet (ie the really strict bit) at 0800 on Monday 1 February, when we have the Weigh In.  We will see how I got on after just under a month.

The Archbishops of York and Canterbury have asked the nation to join in prayer every night at 1800 from 1 February to remember those have died from the virus and to pray for our recovery from the epidemic.  I won’t go all religious on you other than to say that prayer has worked for me at least three times and I think the proposal is worth serious consideration: we cannot come together in churches at present, but perhaps our collective voices may be heard from our own homes.  Alas, prayers or faith healing do not always work despite our best efforts.  I once heard of a chap who went to one of those mass faith-healing sessions, much favoured by American evangelists.  The preacher gave a long and very sincere sermon, alternately haranguing the audience for their sins then assuring them that if they prayed hard and seriously enough, then miracles could be performed.  After an hour or so he called for two people in the audience who were afflicted in some way to come forward and be healed.  Two men volunteered: one was crippled in one leg and walked only with the aid of crutches; the other had a very bad stutter.  The preacher called them up onto the stage, but asked them to go behind a curtain so that they could concentrate all the better on their prayers.  He then called on the audience to join him in prayer for healing the two men, to concentrate hard and urge God to show His power and help the afflicted.  He prayed for about ten minutes, frequently crying out for mercy and kindness and encouraging the audience to work with him.  He then turned his attention to the men behind the curtain and called out:
“We pray for your recovery!  You, with the crutches: throw them down”
There was an encouraging double ‘thump’ from behind the curtain.
“Praise the Lord”, said the preacher.  He went on,
“We pray for your recovery!  You, with the stutter: say something”,
And a plaintive voice from behind the curtain said,
“He’s fa – fa – fa – fallen over!”

You can’t win them all.

The day is drawing to a close on Day 1 of quarantine and I simply must purloin the little handbell that we use in the Shacklepin household to summon help or service from our spouse when ill.  After all, I am the one who is supposed to be infected, so I think I should have it.  I will give it a try tomorrow morning when I wake up to advise Jane that I am ready for that cup of tea.  I will let you know how I got on next week, virus willing.

28 January 2021

Blog 77. Who Fancies a Cruise?

On the face of it, Jane’s request was quite reasonable: could I make the breakfast smoothie tomorrow morning while she was exercising, so that everything could be ready for when she came down?  Her supporting instructions were comprehensive, exhaustive even: she had prepared all the ingredients and all I had to do was pour them into the liquidiser with 300ml of milk and some spices (jars on the counter) according to the recipe (also on counter), then blitz.  Before we went to bed she repeated the above instructions and underlined them metaphorically.  She even started to read out the recipe before I stopped her:
“Yes, yes, whatever.  I‘ve got all that.  Even I can follow a recipe Jane”, I said.
The next morning, when I went to make the tea at the usual un-Godly hour before dawn, I switched on the ice machine (ice cubes to chill the smoothie) and glanced at the recipe book, helpfully propped open by two spice jars: no problem, a piece of cake.
The minor ripple in the space time continuum began when I came downstairs, fully dressed, ready to embark on this exciting culinary exercise while Jane was hosing herself down in the shower and bracing herself for the daily door-propping-up manoeuvre that dominates her leg exercises.  I looked at the recipe book: 
“Take half a cucumber…”, it started. But then I remembered that she had done all the preparation already.  So I opened the Main Fridge and searched: no, there were no ready-assembled ingredients with a cucumber in there…I then went to the Auxiliary Fridge and searched there: nope, nothing there either…I wondered where she kept the cucumbers and pulled out the chopping board (forcefully labelled Vegetables Only in stern writing after that time when I prepared a fruit salad on the onion board).  Then I realised that I was reading the wrong recipe: it was not the Green Smoothie that I was supposed to be doing, but the Mango Smoothie (bottom of page).  I put away the chopping board hastily and started a second search pattern in the two fridges.  I could find no pre-prepared ingredients.  There was a tray with mixed unidentified fruit and half an orange that looked promising, and a bowl of cut-up pineapple, but no other candidates.  Tentatively, I removed the tray of fruit, but thought I should page the oracle to provide some helpful feedback that, contrary to assurances, the pre-prepared ingredients were not, in fact there.  I called the Head Chef on Alexa.  The conversation went something like this:
“Are you there?  Hello?”
“Yes?”, was the somewhat terse reply.
“These ingredients: there are no pre-prepared ingredients in either fridge”.
“Yes there are”.
“No there aren’t”.
“They’re in the Main Fridge in a porcelain bowl”.
“No, I’ve looked in there and pulled everything out.  Definitely no fruit apart from this tray of half an orange and other things, and a bowl of pineapple”.
There was a thump from upstairs (as if someone had just lost their balance) followed by an uneven clumping noise that suggested that a poltergeist was coming down the stairs.  The kitchen door swung open to reveal Jane, still in her knickers, muttering with growing volume,
“What did I say to you?”
I drew breath to reply.
” I said everything was in a bowl ready”, she continued before I could speak.
” All you had to do was add milk and spices.  You Never, Ever, Listen”.
The last sentence was set in italics and bold for emphasis.
I was standing with the Main Fridge door open holding the tray of obscure fruit and I pointed out, confidently this time, that there was, quite definitely, no bowl of prepared fruit.  Easing me to one side she reached in and took out what I had thought had been the bowl of pineapple chunks.
“Here”, she said, taking away the tray of fruit that I held in the other hand.  “All it needs is milk and spices.  It’s all prepared.  It’s all in there”
“You never, ever, listen” was her parting shot as she stomped back upstairs.
I looked at the bowl of yellow fruit.  I still thought it looked like pineapple, such assessment being driven by the fact that I thought a mango was green (which it is – on the outside).  I placed the bowl on the counter and re-read the recipe. 
“Add the juice of half an orange”, it said.  “Ah ha”, I thought, “I can do this”: only a minute ago I had seen just such half an orange in the Main Fridge.  There was an orange squeezer conveniently drying on the draining board and so I set to work.
“Add two centimetres of root ginger”, continued the recipe.  Easy, I thought, I even know what it looks like.  I opened the Auxiliary Fridge and there were three twigs of the stuff. 
“Oh, we’re on a roll here”, I thought, but which one to use: the oldest perhaps?  Better check.  I called Jane again on Alexa (getting good at this),
“Hello, are you there?”, I said in mollifying, oleaginous voice.
“Yes”, said a world weary voice, grunting as if propping up a door.
“I’ve found the root ginger”, I said, not without a certain pride in my initiative. “Which one would you like me to use?”.
“What did I say to you?”
“Errm….”
“What did I say to you?  I said EVERYTHING is already in the bowl: the ginger, the zest, the mango, the lot.  All you have to do is add the milk and spices!”.
“So I don’t need to add any ginger…?” I said in my little boy voice.
“NO!”
“Right. Right.   Sorry to have bothered you”.  There was another thump upstairs as if someone had fallen over again.
I looked thoughtfully at the freshly squeezed orange juice. 
“So I won’t need that then”, I decided, “best get rid of it and clean up the evidence before she comes down”.  So I drank it off and just managed to get the squeezer washed and cleaned before she appeared for the final time in all her awful majesty.  There are no prizes for what she said,
“You Never, Ever, Listen”. 
No dear.  Peace be upon you.

As a footnote, the smoothie was delicious.  The next day I heard her rummaging in the Main Fridge muttering, 
“I could have sworn I left half an orange in here…”, 
but I was all right: I had buried the orange peel deep under some smelly rubbish in the bin where she would never find it.

Of course, we are still in lockdown and daily deaths from Covid are still greater than April last year, currently 1,401 in the last 24 hours.  Positive results of tests are still plummeting for the country as a whole, however, and the time lag between infections and deaths seems to be coming into play so that daily hospital admissions and fatalities may be flattening.  Inoculations are continuing apace, currently at 400,000 a day, and 5.4 million doses have been administered to date.  Almost all the over 80s in the UK have now been done, with the focus now on the over 70s.  Everyone I have spoken to who has had ‘the jab’, no matter where they are in the country, has reported a very slick and well-organised vaccination operation so I think we should mark that down as a success story and something to be proud of.  The government has stretched out the gap between the first dose and the second from the recommended three weeks to three months, the laudable aim being to concentrate on getting as many people partially immunised as soon as possible.  Unfortunately, the vaccine manufacturer, Pfizer, has cautioned that the vaccine was never tested for that extended gap between doses and such an approach may render the vaccination programme less effective or even useless; the debate continues.
To my dismay, I am beginning to sense that the government may be about to move the goalposts with regard to the immunisation programme and the current restrictions.  In Blog 75 I praised the Chief Medical Officer for his pragmatism and what looked like a recognition that once everyone at risk had been immunised, then hospitals would not be overloaded and society could return to normal, accepting a certain amount of risk and – essentially – living with the virus just as we do with other illnesses.  Now, there seems to be a drift towards wanting to totally eliminate the virus in the entire population before there are any moves towards relaxation.  Heaven knows when that situation will be reached, if ever; if we are to wait until all 66 million British citizens have been vaccinated then it will be September at the very earliest before we reach that stage.  That is totally ridiculous, in my view.  Next, they will be imposing lockdown to stop the spread of the Common Cold or the flu.  The experts are also saying that, even when we have had both doses of the vaccine, we must still isolate, wear masks, and avoid contact with others. The reason given is that an inoculated person might still be infectious.  I don’t follow that: surely if you have had the vaccine then your body will overcome any potential infection so you won’t have the disease; if you don’t have the disease then you cannot infect anyone.  Dear oh dear, just as you see the light of hope on the horizon then the fog comes down. Are we downhearted?  No, but I’m starting to get angry again.  Give us some hope, for heaven’s sake.

A stiff drink might help my blood pressure, but we are still on The Diet and that includes no alcohol.  I can’t say I have missed it most of the time, and the meals we have had continue to be very palatable, if somewhat heavy on the green vegetables.  We are still losing weight, Jane’s weekly weight loss being only a fraction of mine, but then she was quite light to start with.  We are keeping on with this low-carbohydrate stage until the end of the month but then, sensibly, we will be coming off the extreme measures and moving onto a more steady régime: the gentle jog after the short sprint.  For the first time, after just over two weeks of The Diet, Jane has complained that she is hungry at the end of the day and that she could do with a glass of wine; it hasn’t affected me quite so badly.  It is curious, both physiologically and psychologically, that she should have lasted 18 days without any pangs; she now talks wistfully of Shepherd’s Pie and Steak and Kidney Pudding on a daily basis.

The 20 January saw the inauguration of the 46th president of the United States of America and ex President Trump retired to Florida, refusing to attend the ceremony.  For the first time Jane and I thought we would watch the inauguration on television but, my goodness me, how it went on.  I had no idea.  We kept changing channels in order to get warm (it looked freezing in Washington, and apparently it was), but every time we came back the ceremony was still going on.  We actually missed the swearing in of Joe Biden, but we did see the singing of the National Anthem by a lady known, apparently, as Lady GaGa.   She looked like the Widow Twanky to me, and I thought she sang a bit flat at one point (why didn’t they use a proper opera singer?), but she certainly made one heck of an entrance: very showbiz.  That’s America for you: modern, bold, and the land of the free.  I wish our cousins well under the new administration.

With a loud ‘clunk’ the mail fell through the letterbox and Jane immediately leapt up to retrieve it.  It is a characteristic of our confinement that the simple visit of the postman should inspire such enthusiasm and activity.
“Anything exciting?”, I asked.
“Regency Cruises”, she said in a disgusted voice, “they never give up do they?”
Indeed.  Who would contemplate a booking a cruise in the present circumstances?  In our case, not for fear of catching Covid, but rather for fear of cancelled bookings and losing our deposit.  Oh yes, and the small minor matter that we no longer have money for such luxuries.  We thoroughly enjoyed our cruise to Australia and back (Blog 1 – Blog 26) and would do it again if we came into a small fortune, but the likelihood of that is not great.  Glancing through the hefty glossy cruise brochure from Regency, I wondered – in my usual pessimistic way – just how many cruise passengers ever considered how they would get off a cruise ship in an emergency: very few, I would imagine.  Sure, you can pile into the lifeboats if you have the time, the weather is calm, and the ship is on a reasonably even keel; otherwise, however, you could be on a bit of a sticky wicket.  That assessment is just for the able-bodied of course: I remember in Blog 1 commenting on the very large number of wheelchair and walking-frame users onboard QUEEN MARY 2 and deducing that they did not have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting off the ship in an emergency, even if (as we were assured) a member of the crew were detailed off to assist each disabled passenger. In 2019 a cruise ship lost power in a storm off Norway and was drifting ashore.  The sea state prevented lifeboats from being launched and attempts were made to evacuate the 1,300 passengers by helicopter but, inevitably, it was a very piecemeal effort lifting people off the deck by wire, and only 500 were removed over a long period.  Fortunately, the ship’s anchors held and she eventually managed to restore power and make port under her own steam, but it was a close-run thing and – I hope – a salutary lesson to ship owners and cruise passengers.  In normal times I lecture on disaster at sea and I always tell the audience that, when they embark for a cruise, the first thing they should do is work out how to escape from their cabin in the dark or in smoke and to know their lifeboat assembly point.  I do the same thing on ferries and in hotels, and Jane thinks I am an old woman but, as I keep telling her, I will survive and she will go under.  The second thing that I tell the audience is that the ship is your best lifeboat and that they should stay onboard and dry for as long as they can (mind you, the trick is knowing whether the ship is going to sink or not).  There is a common tendency when abandoning ship to leap overboard, but that is one of the worst things you can do: if the fall doesn’t kill you then the shock of hitting cold water probably will, particularly if you are old or have a weak heart.  Once in the water you start losing body heat rapidly and hypothermia sets in, even in the tropics: you gradually become disorientated, lose the use of your limbs, ingest water and die.  You will die of exposure in any sea temperatures less than 37C, though it might take a while in warm climes (in 2018 a woman survived a record ten hours after falling overboard in the Mediterranean); however the sharks or barracuda will probably get you in that time, so the end result will be the same.  Yes, far better to wrap up very well and step, dry, into that nice lifeboat having, first, taken a seasick tablet because the change in motion will otherwise make you as sick as a dog.  Anyone for a cruise now?

I remember when I was the aircraft carrier HMS CASSANDRA in the Western Approaches and we received a distress call from a yacht that was in trouble.  She was reasonably nearby and the ship immediately worked up to full power and headed for the yacht’s position.  Main steam throttles were opened, the boilers roared and gauges quivered.  It was all very exciting.  When we were in range we launched the Search and Rescue (SAR) Helicopter and the beast clattered away in a whiff of paraffin while the sick-bay team under the Surgeon Commander sharpened their scalpels and prepared to receive casualties.  The SAR helicopter eventually found the yacht, but she had inconveniently beached herself in a safe, though isolated, haven and the crew could be seen strolling along the beach.  The helicopter landed and contact was established.  The yacht crew said they were all right, thank you, but the airmen weren’t having any of that: didn’t they know that an aircraft carrier and its entire ship’s company were, as they spoke, pounding along towards their rescue? They unceremoniously bundled the protesting yacht crew into the helicopter, citing safety concerns, and took them back to CASSANDRA for a health check. The disgruntled yacht crew were eventually landed somewhere, safe and dry and we all smiled smugly: job well done – please, no thanks.

Clearly my cooking skills at breakfast earlier in the week had impressed the Head Chef.  I know this because I offered to help prepare the dinner on Friday night (hoping that she would decline, so that I could scuttle off and watch Wheeler Dealers in peace), and she unexpectedly accepted.  Would I be preparing the sauce for the Prawn Korma with Cauli Rice, I wondered?  Peel a prawn, perhaps?  Well, no, she didn’t go that far: I was directed to pour the pre-chopped Cauli Rice into a frying pan and stir it while it was heated; and don’t let it burn, on pain of death.  Oh well, strong oak trees from little acorns grow, I thought philosophically.  Half way through this onerous and demanding task I was diverted to remove the Korma sauce and blend it with the hand liquidiser.
“But I can’t”, I said, “I’m doing this!”
“Nonsense”, she said. ”You can do both jobs. Women multitask all the time”.
“Well, I don’t know…don’t blame me if the rice goes brown…”.
I moved on reluctantly to parallel Task Number 2.
I was, of course, stick gathering.  You probably are not familiar with the term so I will explain.  At the Royal Navy Leadership School, where Senior Ratings are trained as part of their advancement, the students are set a series of outside tasks involving leadership, initiative and teamwork: get the whole team and a dummy across a chasm using an old washing line, two nails, three logs and a roll of sellotape, that sort of challenge.  Now here’s the thing: whatever the course going through, the instructors always found that there was one member of the team industriously beavering away on a a totally non-contributory task, trying to look busy whilst carefully avoiding any actual useful work – neatly rolling up a hose when others are fighting a raging inferno for example, or gathering up twigs and branches when others were bridging a chasm.  Stick gathering, in fact.  When that ‘stick gatherer’ was challenged and directed to stop doing that and, instead, do this, then he would invariably argue,
“But I’m gathering up these sticks, sir.  Very important job.  OK sir, but I must say that if I leave it then those sticks will never be collected…”
Anyway, to return to the cooking, I was actually quite flattered to be asked to do something mechanical that involved machines, and picked up the hand liquidiser with relish.  It was fortunate that she did not see me press the button and eject the business end of the liquidiser into the flask (wrong button, fool), but I managed to recover it (licking my fingers to hide the evidence) before she returned and I did a creditable job of blitzing the sauce, though I say it myself.  That the sauce looked like it had just been sucked from the starboard sullage tank after a particularly severe case of oil contamination could hardly be my fault: that was just the way it was.  As it happened, the meal was delicious and the team work that led up to it was most satisfying.  Oh yes: this week, smoothies and Prawn Korma; next week, who knows?  Sauce Béarnaise perhaps?

Be careful out there.

23 January 2021