Today was a brighter day than yesterday and our spirits were raised by meeting a couple of friends on our walk down to the park – to whom we chatted from a safe distance of 2-3 metres but as the news seems to get more dire by the hour, it is an interesting question for how much longer this can be maintained. In northern Italy, for example, (the UK is reckoned to be about 3 weeks behind) it used to be possible for one person at a time to have a walk with a dog but it seems that even this is now being adjudged as unsafe.

Our son and daughter-in-law managed to secure us our daily newspapers (which we have had to forego since last weekend) and this was a welcome treat. After some messaging with a friendly colleague from Waitrose we are setting up a system whereby we leave a bag containing pre-paid tokens for the newspapers hanging up outside Waitrose and, we are hopeful, that within a few minutes the tokens will have been taken as payment and the bag filled with newspapers ready for us to collect. Our son daughter-in-law tried to go the pharmacy to pick up some routine prescriptions for Meg and myself but the pharmacy as a whole was shut (whilst they are processing enormous backlogs?) and a neigbouring pharmacy across the road had a queue outside and people were only being admitted three at a time. From what we can tell the local supermarkets have been emptied of certain items that we would normally buy week by week (eggs, cheese, milk) so we shall have wait and see if any of these can be supplied by Ocado.

I want to pass on a seemingly bizarre tip but it seems to work very well. After Meg and I had consumed our coffee in the local park, we treated ourselves to a banana each. I was just about to dispose of the skin in a nearby rubbish bin when I stared down at my scuffed walking boots and suddenly remembered an old tip. I rubbed the (inside) of the banana skin over my boots and they did a marvellous job in cleaning and renovating them. I seem to remember somewhere that the same tip works exceptionally well for rubber (not plastic) car mats – I think that the natural oils in a banana skin are very akin to the natural oils to be found in both rubber and leather and hence they do a good job in cleaning and renovating them. I am constantly reminded of what things were like in 1950 when I first started primary school when absolutely everything was in short supply. At schools, our crayons were cut into two so that we could have half a crayon each. If you needed to go the outside toilet to do a ‘N0. 2′ job, the teacher would assess your size and need and then from a roll of Izal toilet paper which she kept in her desk grant you either one or two pieces of paper. Those days may well return in the current crisis!

Digesting the news from yesterday when the whole of the private sector was subsidised by having 80% of wages to be paid for by the government, it almost seems as though we are living in an Alice-in-Wonderland type world for measures like this were not even dreamed of by Jeremy Corbin and, of course. nothing like this was attempted in the Second World War. One does get the feeling that once a business has been closed down, how many will ever re-open? Even having 80% of staff wages paid for by the government is pretty meaningless if there are no customers or footfall of any kind.

In the late afternoon we had an hour’s FaceTime chat with two of our Waitrose friends which was absolutely wonderful. We may meet in the local park at a very safe distance if the weather is fine next week.

Each day has its own particular ‘timbre’ and today is no exception. Our morning was considerably lightened up by two events. Firstly, one of the very friendly staff in Waitrose has offered me whatever assistance I might need in the weeks ahead. Accordingly, I/we are going to devise a system whereby I can leave a bag complete with my newspaper tokens and she can deliver ‘The Times‘ and ‘The Guardian‘ into the bag without my needing to enter the store – this will be brilliant if we can get it to work. It shows how some people are full of the spirit of altruism of which more later. The second thing that brightened up our morning was meeting one of our ‘Waitrose’ friends in the park – we were able to sit on adjacent park benches at least a metre apart and exchange gossip over how we were coping with the crisis. I think we were both incredibly pleased to see each other as it broke up the social isolation for us mutually On the way home, we called by one of our immediate neighbours and had a brief conversation through a partially opened window. She was telling us a horrendous story of local groups of people who were going into Asda and engaging in all sorts of panic buying before disgorging the contents of their trolleys into their cars, putting on a new set of other clothes and headgear so they would not be recognised and then entering the store again for a second sortie.

In the afternoon, I managed to successfully make a PDF file of my claim to the insurance company complete with accompanying documentation. I managed to successfully edit the PDF file of a page copied twice in error and then used an online pdf compression program to reduce its size from 11Mb to 1.6 Mb before I submitted it. Whether or not, I will get any of our money back from the planned trip to Portugal in May I do not know but at least I have tried one line of attack before I take issue with the credit card company, which will be the last resort.

On a more reflective note, the crisis seems to be revealing a polarisation in our society between a group of largely uneducated, individualistic and essentially selfish individuals on the one hand and a more responsible, altruistic and community-minded set of people on the other. Perhaps ‘thus was it ever so’ but certainly the crisis is bringing it into sharp relief.

The Sky News video of conditions in the Bergamo hospital in Northern Italy which is already completely overwhelmed gave pause for thought, to put it mildly. They are saying that this might only be a foretaste of that is to come in the UK as we seem to be some three weeks behind Italy and the rate of increase in the UK seems worse than other comparable societies such as China, Italy etc. Without being melodramatic, I think I would die peacefully at home rather than eventually in the insulated, chaotic and impersonal settings that we see in the Italian critical care hospitals (which, by all accounts, are better equipped than ours)

Some photos to cheer us up

FF

Forsythia (in bloom at last) and a flowering cherry tree  in our garden -signs of Spring (but they both seem out of focus to me!)

Each day has its own particular ‘timbre’ and today is no exception. Our morning was considerably lightened up by two events. Firstly, one of the very friendly staff in Waitrose has offered me whatever assistance I might need in the weeks ahead. Accordingly, I/we are going to devise a system whereby I can leave a bag complete with my newspaper tokens and she can deliver ‘The Times‘ and ‘The Guardian‘ into the bag without my needing to enter the store – this will be brilliant if we can get it to work. It shows how some people are full of the spirit of altruism of which more later. The second thing that brightened up our morning was meeting one of our ‘Waitrose’ friends in the park – we were able to sit on adjacent park benches at least a metre apart and exchange gossip over how we were coping with the crisis. I think we were both incredibly pleased to see each other as it broke up the social isolation for us mutually On the way home, we called by one of our immediate neighbours and had a brief conversation through a partially opened window. She was telling us a horrendous story of local groups of people who were going into Asda and engaging in all sorts of panic buying before disgorging the contents of their trolleys into their cars, putting on a new set of other clothes and headgear so they would not be recognised and then entering the store again for a second sortie.

In the afternoon, I managed to successfully make a PDF file of my claim to the insurance company complete with accompanying documentation. I managed to successfully edit the PDF file of a page copied twice in error and then used an online pdf compression program to reduce its size from 11Mb to 1.6 Mb before I submitted it. Whether or not, I will get any of our money back from the planned trip to Portugal in May I do not know but at least I have tried one line of attack before I take issue with the credit card company, which will be the last resort.

On a more reflective note, the crisis seems to be revealing a polarisation in our society between a group of largely uneducated, individualistic and essentially selfish individuals on the one hand and a more responsible, altruistic and community-minded set of people on the other. Perhaps ‘thus was it ever so’ but certainly the crisis is bringing it into sharp relief.

The Sky News video of conditions in the Bergamo hospital in Northern Italy which is already completely overwhelmed gave pause for thought, to put it mildly. They are saying that this might only be a foretaste of that is to come in the UK as we seem to be some three weeks behind Italy and the rate of increase in the UK seems worse than other comparable societies such as China, Italy etc. Without being melodramatic, I think I would die peacefully at home rather than eventually in the insulated, chaotic and impersonal settings that we see in the Italian critical care hospitals (which, by all accounts, are better equipped than ours)

© Mike Hart [2020]

For a reason that will become evident shortly, the date of March 19th is always burned upon my memory. As it happens, on this date exactly 47 years ago, I was involved in a bizarre accident at my place of work, Leicester Polytechnic. I was with a couple of my students and I had just given a lecture on ‘Science and Magic as alternative forms of explanation’ (to Combined Science students). I explained that in some western cultures, a belief in magic was an alternative form of explanation (if malaria was caused by being bitten by mosquitos, then why should that one particular mosquito bite me? Answer – because someone was directing magical forces against me, whereas in the West we would tend to rely upon statistical probabilities). I ought to have known something was amiss because the handout that I typically gave to the students was peppered with strange black marks!  To make matters worse I had just said ‘Look – if I walk out into the street and get knocked down by a car then in the West we would explain this not as magic but just as a statistical probability‘) A quarter of an hour later, a Hillman Imp approached a T-junction at speed (as the driver had apparently ‘fainted’) although he had been to all all night party the night before. I was sent flying as the car hit me first, severely severing all of the muscles in my right leg and damaging the joint in my left knee. As it was a hospital ancillaries dispute at the time, there was no bed for me in hospital but I was sent home and told to take a couple of aspirins for the pain -ditto the following day until I was finally admitted for surgery some 2-3 days later. And when I woke up from the surgery, my penis was covered in rapidly hardening plaster-of-paris which had to be removed (by a male nurse – sex is the last thing on your mind when in severe pain) Talking of which, I endured three hours of intense pain after the operation and eventually when a nurse asked me how I was, I admitted that I was in pain. The nurse consulted my medicines chart as then said ‘O dear, we’ve forgotten to give you any pain relief!’ [I was angry at that point] So that was our NHS in 1973 – things have improvd since.

So what about today? I walked down to the park with my rucsack and a flask of coffee which was a bit difficult to manipulate with the rucksack in one hand whilst I poured the coffee and rummaged around for biscuits with the other. There was only one other dog walker in the park and it was raining and gloomy.

In the afternoon, I spent several hours attempting to claim a refund for a holiday to Portugal in May for which I had paid in January. After several fruitless quaters-of-an-hour hanging onto the end of a phone with recorded messages saying ‘all of our staff are attending to other clients in this exceptionally busy period’) I eventually found a website where you had to fill in all of the details of a claim on a form on the web, which you then had to ‘submit’ – although the form refused to submit. But I did find a telephone number and explained my dilemma to a friendly human at the other end who sighed and said ‘Yes, sir, all of our Expedia clients are experiencing the same problem’ Anyway, I got sent a 6 page form on a PDF for me to fill in, scan and send back so I am sort of making progress.

I have composed a little website with just three items on it that people may find interesting. One is a definitive document on everything you needed to know about COVID-19 (a 33 page document) well written and up-to-date from Harvard medical school. The second item is an article how to keep your immune system well-functioning. The third item is from an email which an ex-Winchester University colleague has sent to me which, as she had been a purser on a cruise liner which was afflicted by Norovirus,is full of practical hints and strategies. Here is the URL

http://covid.kesland.info

Hasta la vista!

I spent some time this morning going through contacts on my iphone reminding them of my email address and this blog reference so that we have an easy way of keeping touch with each. Also, one of my ‘Winchester’ friends had been a purser on a cruise liner in a past life and gave us lots of practical advice how to protect yourself against rampant virus – rather than reproduce her email here, I will forward it to anyone reading this blog if you drop an email note.

My good friend, Professor Dan Remenyi, has written a letter/article which he has submitted to his local newspaper and it is very stimulating to read. With his permission, I reproduce it here, together with a few thoughts that I had on the matter as well.

Where do we go from here? [by Professor Dan Remenyi]

We are indeed in a right mess. The government’s response to Covid 19 will destroy tens of thousands of small businesses and will cause millions of people to be laid off. The rescue package announced by the government which consists of, inter alia, a bundle of financial relief including a third of £1 trillion of loans will push the UK further into a financial chasm. Many small businesses struggle on a month-to-month basis and if they have to take out loans from the government in order to continue in the immediate term, their prospects of longer term survival may not be good at all. Providing loans may not be the answer to the problem.

All of this government action seems to be based on a computer model which has told our leaders that by requiring everyone to self-isolate and thus stay away from pub, restaurants and theatres, the potential death toll will drop from 250,000 to 20,000. Even without examining the detail of this model there seems to be a number of loopholes in the apparent logic behind the assumptions. I sincerely hope that the severe economic and social hardship so many of us are about to endure will really save so many lives and reduce the physical misery that is being caused to the nation’s health by this disease.

But this faith in computer models is to say the least surprising. It was a computer model that initiated the reckless financial behaviour which cause the crash of 2008. It was at least computer model thinking if not a particular model itself which led to the Boeing Company designing the 737 Max with its dodgy aerodynamics. In general modelling society to project what will happen in the future is a very or highly dodgy business. I am extremely sceptical of computer models and especially those which have such enormous impact on our society.

There is another issue behind our current situation which deserve some thought. In former times there must’ve been many strange diseases which struck society such as the Black Death or smallpox, the occasional outbreaks of cholera or the Great Spanish Flu of the earlier part of the 20^th century. When these catastrophes really got out of hand they caused mayhem on a large-scale. But they were slow to develop and our understanding of disease was very limited. The situation we are facing is quite different and we have a much greater understanding of what we are really facing and how we find ourselves in this situation. There is little doubt that one of the drivers of the current crisis is globalisation. Our ease of access whereby we can travel to almost anywhere on the planet within 24 hours must surely be something which we should now re-evaluate. The great potential we have to spread disease all over the world, surely, should now be considered as a real downside to worldwide travel.

I have no idea as to how we can even begin to think about controlling our appetite for global travel. I think that the genie may be out of the bottle. Freedom to roam the world, if you have the resources to so do, is now so deeply embedded in our culture. But as one commentator recently said on television, “This may not be the last time we will see a pandemic like this sweeps the world”. And if we were to convince the world that travelling far and wide was not ideal what would we do about the tens of thousands of aircraft (which would have cost hundreds of billions of pounds) and the jobs of the millions of people employed by the travel industry? 

We are indeed in a right mess!

[End of Dan’s article] – my response

How do I feel at the start of this period of 4 months(?) of self-imposed isolation?  Well, I suppose it is not unlike the emotions that people felt in the 1950’s when they were diagnosed with TB and had to spend 12 months in a sanitorium or eve as prisoners might feel at the start of a custodial sentence! I rather think it might have been like this is the world had been involved in a nuclear war and, after an explosion on the other side of the globe, you knew that something unseen but invidious was coming your way…

I started the day by texting my Pilates teacher, Helen, informing her and my fellow classmates that I would not be around for a bit and wishing them all well. Then I sent a message to one of my wonderfully friendly staff in Waitrose down the road to inform other staff members and some of the regulars of my contact details (mobile, email, blog) in case any of them wanted to keep in touch with us. I received a telephone chat call from my good friend Professor Dan Remenyi and we exchanged views on the state of the world we were in. Meg and I then set off for a pre-planned walk in a local park which is about 1km and a half away and we sat on a park bench drinking from our flask of coffee and ensuring that we were at least 10m away from any other park visitors (mainly dog walkers) Then we watched the Politics Today program starting at 12.15 on BBC2 before having lunch of our previously made Fish Pie.

The highlight of our afternoon was a good FaceTime video chat with our good friends Dave and Denise before we had our own tea. We have adopted a policy of keeping to strict meal times so that we minimise social contact with our son and daughter-in-law in case any of us are the unwitting bearer of virus. I had ensured that throughout the day each bathroom as ell supplied with a bar of soap (supposedly much more efficient at removing viruses than liquid soap

I had promised? threatened? a couple of Spanish stories – apologies to my friends in Bromsgrove who have heard them both before and repeated ‘ad nauseam’  The first relates to our last holiday in La Coruña. Northern Spain when I realised that we were short of a comb. So I walked into a pharmacy and announced ‘Buenos dias, señora – quisiera comprar un nuevo pene por favor‘ The assistant looked quite astonished until I realised that I had said ‘Good morning, madam – I would like to purchase a new willy, please’ To make matters worse, I went on to explain that I needed something that was just of the right size that was not too large but would just fit conveniently into my right hand. Too late, I discovered that I had mixed up the word for a combe which ‘peine’ with the slang word for a willy which is ‘pene‘ – well, it is easily done.

The second story relates to one of the local hospitals who phoned up about two days beforehand saying, ‘Good morning, Mr.Hart – what are you doing first thing on Sunday morning? Would you like to come in and have a gastroscopy (tube down the throat into the duodenum to check for nasties) I knew it was about two years since the last check-up so I thought I had better get it over and done with. I was ‘prepared’ for the procedure by a little nurse who announced me ‘Good morning Mr. Hart – I am Amparo and I am looking after you today’ Having established that she was, in fact, Spanish we continued chatting in Spanish but I was not at my best at 8.0am on a Sunday morning. The conversation took the following turn:

‘I know what I would be rather be doing at 8.30 on a Sunday morning’

‘Yes – me too’

‘What would you rather be doing by doing on a Sunday morning?’

‘I would like to be snuggled up in bed next to my husband!’

[Then it started to go horribly wrong]  – I replied ‘Yes. so I would I  – I mean not YOUR husband but I meant somebody else’s husband. No – I didn’t mean that – I meant to say ‘Somebody else’s wife’ No – I didn’t mean that either – I meant ‘Next to next t0 my own wife’

‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘Well’, I said hesitantly thinking about what I had just said (in Spanish) – ‘I think so’

“You don’t sound very sure to me!’ she said. ‘Yes, I said (weakly) ‘I am sure’

‘We wouldn’t want you getting mixed up between my husband, someone else’s husband, someone else’s wife and your own wife, now would we?’

‘No’ – I said. ‘So that’ got that little confusion out of the way then!  We giggled together…

Meg and I had intended to visit an elderly relative in North Wales next Wednesday but have called off our trip as the situation deteriorates.  We will now start our ‘self isolation‘ from Wednesday onwards but the Government announcements today may mean that we start on Tuesday, 17th March.

Today was an interesting day. I got to the pharmacy to pick up some medication at about 8.0am and then on to our local ALDI which had been pretty devasted the previous day – but the shortages were not as bad as I might have predicted. I did a ‘normal’ weeks shopping, my previous trip having been very light as we thought that we were going to be away. So we are stocked up with about 1.5 weeks shopping and have just learned how to utilise Ocado to have a delivery of supplies next Sunday (and for the foreseeable future)

Our local GP practice now has an online system – I learned how to navigate this to get a query answered about me medication for high blood pressure (I am 10mg Ramipril and I have learned this is an ACE type drug which latches onto the same receptors as the Coronavirus itself making any complication much more severe) I indicated that I had stopped my medication and the community pharmacist phoned me to say he had heard of the same report in The Lancet (medical journal) last week. If anyone wants the link, I will send it on to you! To cut a long story short, the pharmacist consulted with the doctors and they have issued me with an alternative Calcium Channel Blocker (Amlopodine) – I go into all of these details in case anyone else has the same medication issues.

Then onto my local ASDA to pick up one or two last-minute things before my self-imposed isolation – what a sorry sight (devasted, empty shelves, etc) I took some money out of my account using the cash machine to tide me over the next week or so. Now for a pleasant surprise – Holiday Inn in Chester refunded all of the money we had already paid for a three-night stay. However, it is going to be a long battle to get my money back from a holiday in Portugal planned for nest May – the credit card company say to contact your travel agent, the travel agent says contact the airline, the airline (Iberia) have written to say ‘Nothing we can do!’As all of these companies might go bust as people try to get their money back, they are all passing the buck onto everyone else. I am sure lots of you have similar stories.

This has been a long post – tomorrow I will regale you with two  funny (and true !) stories about my experiences with the Spanish language