My day started off very well in the wee small hours of the morning. During a restless period in the middle of the night, I decided to do my accounts and looked at when my credit card statement was due (although, as it happens, I only use this particular account for ‘holiday’ expenses and therefore had nothing owing on it). I was pleasantly surprised that Expedia, with whom we had booked our trip to Portugal which we could not undertake in the midst of the coronavirus lockdown. had credited me with the monies I had paid earlier for the hotel expenses. To be fair, Expedia had indicated they would do this within 30 days but I wasn’t informed that they had paid me back some money and therefore it was only by accident that I discovered that I had the credit sitting there since early May.  I then turned my attention to the flights element of the cancelled holiday, one flight provided by Iberia and the other by British Airways. The Iberia website implied that under the terms of the original booking no flight charges would be refunded so I have to make up my mind whether to spend hours pursuing this element of the holiday. The British Airways flight also offered me vouchers (as they have done to thousands of other people in the last few months) but to convert this back into cash I have to speak to a British Airways customer services representative in person (if I can hang onto the end of a phone line for hours).  I will have an attempt to do this on Monday morning but am not hopeful of success. According to information on the web, though, I should be able to claim a cash refund as of right. Knowing that I had a certain amount of credit under my belt, I spent some time looking at accommodation in both North Wales and in Yorkshire should we decide to give either side of our family a quick visit. However, I sent a message to my sister so that we can have a proper FaceTime discussion later this afternoon.

As you might expect, today was reasonably busy in our local park to the extent that we were displaced from our traditional park bench – however, whilst refreshing ourselves we encountered two of our closest friends and spent a few happy minutes in joke-telling and idle chit-chat. Then home to a somewhat delayed lunch and a preparation for the job in the afternoon. I needed to construct a little wooden framework around my Tilia Cordata at the point where the ground sloped away and the roots were in danger of being exposed. This having been done, I then used up my last remnants of some good topsoil and topped off the whole with a bag of forest bark chippings. I am hopeful that the mound of forest bark will help to keep the roots of the tree somewhat more damp and this might help to alleviate the yellowing of the leaves I have experienced to late. Having said that, it seems to be responding to my remedial work (including daily watering) so far.

I then had a couple of conversations with my sister on FaceTime and it appears that her lockdown period lasts until July 31st – even after that, she is still understandably nervous about exposing herself to any risk of the virus because with a compromised immune system and some congestive heart failure, the view of the rest of the family is that she would probably not survive. Although we had intended to spend a few days in Yorkshire at the very end of July, this might be somewhat too premature so we have resolved to leave things until August at the very earliest and then see how the situation unfolds. It really is hard to tell whether such fears on the part of the shielded part of the population are absolutely justified as, on the other hand,  the government are anxious for people to get out and ‘spend, spend, spend’ as soon as possible even though this may well trigger a second wave of the virus. So we will put all tentative plans for some mini-vacations to see relatives on hold for a few weeks more.

Well, today promised to be and actually turned out to be. a much more pleasant day than yesterday. This was just as well because we had an arrangement to meet some of our long-standing Waitrose friends in the park. We did have the excuse of a birthday to celebrate as well and we had made some plans accordingly. I had been busy renovating (if that is the right word) a special birthday gift which was unusual in the extreme – it was a lucky horseshoe (a real one, that is) that I had bought as a job lot through eBay in a rusty condition and I had then renovated it (the process involves soaking in white vinegar to lessen/remove the rust, following by brushing with a wire brush, a scrub with brillo pads and a final  ‘seasoning’ with WD40 and some silver polish). As it happens, I did exactly the same for our Oxfordshire friends and when I wrapped the present up,  I include the story, taken from the web, of why horseshoes are considered to be lucky. Of course, they have to be fixed the right way up so that your good luck does not fall out of them – I am amazed how many people actually know this (because I didn’t until a week ago) In the park, we had some delicious birthday cake. Then as a birthday treat, I read out the Gerard Hoffnung classic recording of a supposed bricklayer explaining to his employers how, owing to series of accidents involving bricks and a barrel, he wanted to report sick for work. For those who have never heard it, here is the URL of a soundtrack of Hoffnung’s speech to the Oxford Union (in the 1950s?). It is incredibly funny if you have never heard it before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOy2GuaP8Mo

This afternoon, it was evidently time to get grass mowing done as after our recent rains the grass seems to have shot up and badly needed a cut – it looks so much better now. As soon as this was done and I had my customary cup of tea, I received a call from my near neighbour who needed some assistance to get her hose pipe properly connected so she could utilise it in the garden. I managed to get connected OK at one end but we may need to acquire an extra piece of hose and connect the two halves together before we can use it fully in the garden.

We received tonight a long and detailed email from our closest friends in Northern Spain indicating to us why they thought it was not a good idea for us to visit as we had planned to in late September. This has given us pause for thought and Meg and I are having to reconsider what our holiday plans might have to be. In the short term, we know that we need to make some tentative plans to see Mike’s relatives in Yorkshire and Meg’s relatives in North Wales but after that, the future is a lot less certain. Certainly, the idea of transiting through an airport does not appeal so we may have to think of the days out we can have and the social contacts which we can sustain whilst the pandemic unlock down is occurring. It is quite difficult to think of what a sensible course of action might be that does not expose one and one family and friends to any unnecessary degree of risk.

There is talk tonight that Boris Johnson wants to reform the NHS again! Whilst the last reorganisation was judged to be a bit of a mess (to put it mildly) one shudders to think what happens if politicians do not want to keep the NHS at arm’s length but want to get involved in decisions that border on the clinical – for example, massive political pressure to cut down waiting lists may mean that the more easily seen and treatable are dealt with first (the ‘low-hanging fruit’) and more difficult cases receive less priority. Again, we shall have to wait and see what transpires  but the omens are not good.

Today was the day in which we had scheduled to meet some of our oldest Waitrose friends in order to celebrate a birthday. We had made a long-standing arrangement to meet in the park at 11.00 am, an event to which we were all looking forward, not least our friends who have been ‘shielding’ for weeks but were now (legally) taking the opportunity for some social contact. However, the best-laid plans of mice and men! Our friends were expecting a delivery from Waitrose and today, of all days, it was delayed by about an hour after the designated time. So the opportunity for our meeting was lost – and we would have massively rained upon in any case. But to make the best of a bad job, we are resolved to meet at the same time tomorrow so hopefully, it just a case of pleasure delayed rather than pleasure denied. As Meg and I were sheltering under a tree to escape a particularly sharp little shower, I was reminded of an expression that members of the acting fraternity used to use. In the days of touring companies, there was often a system whereby members of the cast would stay in what was termed ‘theatrical digs’ which were really just bed and breakfast boarding houses. There was typically a visitors’ book in which guests could write comments, appreciative or otherwise, and the actors who were staying there would add to the visitors’ book a line adapted either from a well-known play or even the Bible. As we were sheltering cold and hungry under the tree and wondering if we might see any of our friends who might give us shelter, I was reminded of the entry ‘We were cold and hungry – and you took us in!‘ Another one of these which sticks in my memory must have happened on a Friday evening when the guests were evidently served up with some fish that was probably well past its sell-by date. So the entry in the book became ‘This was the piece of Cod (rather the peace of God) that passeth all understanding‘ If the company felt they had been treated particularly badly in any set of digs and they knew they were not likely to return, then they would acquire a fillet of fish and nail it to the underside of the (typically wooden) breakfast table – there to rot for weeks afterwards.

This afternoon passed uneventfully, the rain putting a bit of a dampener upon things but we were looking forward to the concluding episode of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I only mention this because I have a sort of direct link with the very last scene of the book (and the film). Tess had just been executed for the murder of the man who had raped her as a young girl and severely abused her since her husband, Angel, had gone to seek his fortunes in Brazil.  Tess knows that she would be caught and executed and made Angel promise to marry her younger sister. In the final scene of the play, Angel and the younger sister are walking up ‘West Hill‘ which overlooks the prison in Winchester as Tess is executed. This became ‘West Hill Cemetery‘ through which I used to walk every day on my way from the railway station to King Alfred’s College (later to become the University of Winchester) So, as you can imagine, I feel as though I have a very direct connection with the closing scenes of the novel (which, I must add, is poignant in the extreme for those unfamiliar with it)

Sky News is reporting the results of an investigation they have made into the ‘chaotic’ testing regime which the government have bungled through. I quote just the main themes of their report below:

In their effort to release rapid data to show the increase in testing capacity, officials from Public Health England (PHE) and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) “hand-cranked” the numbers to ensure a constant stream of rising test numbers were available for each day’s press conference, Sky News has been told. An internal audit later confirmed that some of those figures simply didn’t add up.

It looks as though Keir Starmer has got his teeth into this emerging scandal and will subject the government to a necessary degree of scrutiny. In the 5.00 pm press briefing, the Sky News reporter referred to this ‘hand-cranking’ of the figures but the criticism was just brushed aside with the assurance that the capacity for testing was being ‘ramped up’ (whatever that means, but in an odd kind of way quite true!)

Today was a very different kind of day, as we followed none of our normal routines. Just after midnight, I exchanged a series of messages with my sister as we were evidently both poised over a keyboard in the wee small hours of the morning so we exchanged several messages until we both decided it was time to go to bed. Today was the day that was scheduled for us to visit some of our oldest friends in Oxfordshire who we evidently haven’t seen for months because of the lockdown. I went by a slightly different route which turned out to be an excellent one and we even arrived half-an-hour early as we had allowed for a certain amount of getting lost/fishing around/diversion time. We sat down for the most magnificent Spanish meal that had been prepared for us. These included some of our favourite dishes including ‘pimientos de padron’  (small green tasty peppers fried in oil and served with sea salt)- as it happens it was a favourite of our friends also. They acquired some plants from somewhere and grown their own so they were picked and cooked especially for us. We had that with serrano ham, a freshly prepared tortilla and salad many of the ingredients for which were grown in the nearby kitchen garden. We had contributed a bottle of Cava and a bottle of Rioja so we had the kind of meal which would not have been out of place if prepared by Spanish chefs in a Spanish kitchen. Naturally, each of the ingredients was delicious. We were then taken on a tour of the garden where all kinds of projects had been undertaken with the establishment of specialised new ‘gravel’ flower beds, a tour of the beehives and a look over the magnificent vegetable garden which could easily have graced a TV cookery programme. So we had a really enjoyable day and set off for home which should have been a straightforward journey. Instead, on the M40, we had to cope with a breakdown, three lanes of traffic being channelled into one whilst a central barrier was being renovated and a torrential downpour. All of this meant that we had one of those ‘creeping along, stop/start at 5mph experiences’ for half-an-hour which I am afraid is not particularly uncommon on the M40. Nonetheless, we arrived home enervated by the wonderful experiences of the day We had made our friends a special gift the identity of which I shall not reveal until tomorrow for reasons that I will explain tomorrow night.

If I read all of the various announcements correctly, then the government has spent or is committed to spending £190 billion to cope with the effects of the coronavirus and the subsequent lockdown and rescue efforts for the economy. These sums are eye-wateringly large and completely unprecedented – they amount to the largest state support perhaps for centuries and are the equivalent of 10% of the UK’s GNP. However strange though it might appear, these sums may still not be large enough to perform the necessary rescue. For example, when the furlough scheme ends and employers will have to pay the wages of their former employees for three months from the end of October, will the promise of £1,000 per worker be enough incentive to keep an employee on the books for three months if there is no demand for the services they are providing? One does have the feeling that when the furlough schemes actually do end (and the government is not paying the wages of the workers to stay at home and do nothing), will employers not simply declare many of them redundant and the levels of unemployment will soar?

Boris Johnson’s latest attempt to excuse the attack he made on the care homes recently when he accused them of ‘not following procedures’ seems to be backfiring again. The Prime Minister was arguing in the House of Commons today that nobody knew that many people might not exhibit symptoms of the virus but still be infected and help to transmit the virus. However, as many in the media have pointed out the warnings were clearly there but not heeded so it seems. Finally, in the view of many Tory backbenchers it appears that doling out huge sums of money is making the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Richi Sunak, line himself to be the next Prime Minister and they are quite prepared to ditch Boris to get him instead. Interesting times indeed!

Today bands of rain were forecast to sweep across the north of the UK with scattered showers on the edges affecting the Midlands so we suspected that today was going to be one in which we had to dodge the rain showers. As it turned out, we were kept in the dry until we sat down for our elevenses which we then proceeded to munch through to alleviate the effects of the constant drizzle. However, as we turned to go home, we got into a conversation with a couple of friendly gentlemen (one of whom recognised us from our church attending days) It turned that these two were long standing friends who had both suffered from heart problems in the past. Apparently with a large group of fellow ‘sufferers’ they had been organised into a walking club which traversed many of the footpaths surrounding Bromsgrove. There had been at least 20 odd members of this fraternity and perhaps even more but they used to meet in the Scout Hut which is located within the park’s perimeter. Over the years, these numbers had dwindled somewhat and the lockdown, whilst the pandemic was raging, had put paid to any of these regular activities. But our two acquaintances had formed a duo and they still used to walk regularly as far as their strength would allow. One, in particular, had some interesting connections e.g. a son who had lived in France and who had been a professional ski instructor. I was reminded of the story of a particularly athletic fellow boarder and member of my year group in Bolton in Lancashire. This lad was a prodigious, natural athlete and in 1958 lowered the record for the 100 yards (for 13-year olds) from 13.9 to 11.3 seconds. He was also extraordinarily good looking which meant that he had quickly acquired a reputation for impregnating at least two of of the local girls and was subsequently expelled (for reasons that to this day remain unclear to me) Looking him up on Friends Reunited in later years I discovered that he had emigrated to Australia and become the equivalent of the General Secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen. His daughter, however, had become the national surfboarding champion of Australia so athletic genes must have had their play after all.

After lunch, the rain came down pretty hard but I knew that as we were due to make our lunch-date in Oxfordshire tomorrow, I had better get the car checked over. Filling with petrol under the canopy was one thing but bending over in the pouring rain whilst I checked the type pressures was quite another. However, I was glad I did so as I really cannot remember when was the last time we had checked the air pressure and I am sure that it needed to be done before a longish journey. A week or so ago, I was caught up in a national sample in a survey organised by Imperial College, London, to test the level and antibodies for Coronavirus in the population at large. I had previously intimated that I was willing to participate in the survey and had been sent some testing materials which arrived a few days ago. The test was relatively straightforward and involved taking a pinprick of blood from a finger and putting it in a special container, adding some moderating agent and then waiting for 10 minutes, and then observing the result. I tested negative for antibodies (what a surprise) and then had to fill in an online questionnaire and transmit the photo that I had taken of the rest result to the survey organisers. I also intimated that I would be willing to participate in further surveys if required – in the meantime, it will be quite interesting to see what the general results reveal (which I anticipate will be in about a month)

I thought it was interesting that three pubs who had recently opened had been forced to close again as one of the patrons of one of the pubs had tested positive for coronavirus. The publicans had conscientiously telephoned 90+of their patrons to indicate to them that a fellow drinker had tested positive and they should seek further advice and/or testing. Then Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, had the gall to claim in the Commons that this pointed to the success of test-and-trace whereas the pubic spirited publicans had actually done all of the hard work!

This morning after we had breakfasted, I thought I would pay another visit to our municipal tip to dispose of some ironwork – last week, we had an abortive attempt when the queue was some 20 cars long so we abandoned it. Today, I sailed through as there was only one car in front of me and although there was a degree of ‘social distancing’ within the tip site, it was easy to dispose of my unwanted items. Then upon my return, I spent some time getting all my wood-working bits, drills, screws etc. in some semblance of order. It sounds as though I lead a sad life! However I now know that when joining two bits of wood, you need a narrow drill for the pilot hole, a wider drill for the clearance hole and the PosiDriv bit that exactly fits the screw that you are driving, so one has to be organised. I have also experimented which of the various hand drills I have acquired seems to work best if you are not relying upon a cordless driver. About a year or so back, I acquired a block of beeswax for a £2 or so, so I use this now to lubricate my screws before entry (Some say you can just use soap, whereas to others this is anathema!) Although it sounds incredibly nerdish, I found the following video clip of how to drive in screws to join two blocks of wood incredibly informative (and I actually learnt quite a lot) Here is the URL for the practically minded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rEqVvW75Q4

This afternoon, the weather was quite bright and sunny so I busied myself applying my remaining dregs of creosote to some staves which I already shortened to peg size so that I can shore up my ailing Tilia Cordata – hopefully tomorrow if it is not teeming down. Having completed this little task, I then set about refurbishing and polishing a couple of items which I may well make into surprise presents – more will be revealed in the fullness of time. I have had to have recourse to a very old-fashioned remedy (sugar+olive oil or I suppose sugar+washing up liquid) as a means of removing ground-in dirt on some of the fingers and thumbs. It is not an unknown problem for me but I suppose I should always get used to wearing gloves, even light ones when doing any manual type jobs.

I see that Boris Johnson has tried to deflect criticism that the residential care homes have been huge repositories of the COVID-19 virus by claiming that they ‘didn’t follow procedures’. It seems a classic ‘throw sand in the eyes of the enemy’ tactic to disguise the fact that there have been multiple failings in the ways in which this government has handled that end of the pandemic. For a start, care homes were practically forced to accept inmates untested as the NHS went about emptying wards as fast as possible to prepare for the assumed wave that was going to hit them. Secondly, they were at the back of the queue when it came to PPE. And thirdly, nobody properly realised that agency staff moving from home to home would act as efficient vectors for the transmission of the virus. Let us see what the official enquiry says (whenever that is)

Next week, Meg is going to have a routine ophthalmology appointment at the Worcester Royal Infirmary (at which I was treated for bowel cancer two years ago now. Strange to say, I am not really looking forward to the experience of negotiating a hospital out-patient department – I am sure it will be full of masks, hand-gel and social distancing but I think I will regard any hospital appointment with some degree of trepidation from now on. I am sure that the risks are absolutely minimal but as we have got used to avoiding meeting people in any kind of  building for several weeks now and although not of a nervous disposition, one does wonder where the virus is still lurking in our community (and hospitals must still be high on the list of suspects)

We have a slightly different routine on a Sunday as I walk on my own to the newspaper shop aiming to get there by 8.30 so I can pick up my ration of Sunday newspapers and then be back in time for the Andrew Marr show at 9.00 am. Today was a day which was both cooler and yet brighter so walking even at speed was quite pleasant. We have come to expect Sunday morning in the park to be teeming with children and dogs and today was no exception – nonetheless, we managed to exchange a few words of greeting with some of the regulars. Sunday lunch was cooking in the slow cooker so there was no frantic last-minute preparation to be done. I had aimed to get several outdoor jobs done this afternoon but was somewhat thwarted by the weather. I managed to get the Weigela planted I had purchased recently but how exactly it will develop I am not sure. I wanted to buy a variety with deep red flowers but on the web, it stated that the flowers were clusters of creamy white – I went to check the label where it was stated that the flowers were indeed creamy white but ‘deep red in bud’ whatever that means. Both the nurseryman who sold it to me and I myself must have looked at the label hurriedly and saw the word ‘red’ and hence concluded the purchase. Too late now – I must look a bit more carefully next time. I also took the opportunity to get rid of a mass of creeping bindweed that was growing over a nearby plant and was so similar to it that you couldn’t tell which was which. I also dumped the two beech trees that I had tried to transplant from other parts of the garden and failed spectacularly – I ought to know by now that you really have to wait for trees to enter their dormant phase in the late autumn or really early spring before you attempt to transplant with any degree of success. I am also a bit worried about my Tilia Cordata (lime tree) that I relocated a month or so back – the leaves had suddenly started to turn yellow. However, the gardener who comes to do some routine maintenance once a month and is incredibly knowledgeable about plants thought the yellowing was not a virus (again!) but a reaction to the absence of water as it is planted on a slope and water runs off it very quickly. So another job I have to do is to creosote some more staves, cut them to length and create a kind of barrier which I can pile up with earth and/or compost to help to mitigate the effects of a slope. Anyway, it got a bit cold, blustery and miserable so I decided to cut my losses and come in for a cup of tea and a read of The Observer. There are always things to be done in a large garden and the gardening advice often starts off with a homily such as ‘Choose a nice day to ...’ – chance would be a fine thing. There’s probably better weather tomorrow.

An interesting political development is detailed in The Guardian scheduled for publication tomorrow. A group of health workers and relatives of coronavirus victims are requesting that Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s special adviser, be investigated by the Met and if they take no further action, then it is possible that a private prosecution may be mounted.  As one of the lawyers of the specialist legal firm which is backing the case has argued: ‘The broad consensus of public opinion is that he broke the law on public health, and the entire weight of the state has been deployed to prevent proper investigation and proper due process.’ The crux of the argument is that the Durham police only investigated Dominic Cummings behaviour whilst in Durham but the fact that a journey was initiated in London means that the Met could well investigate this case if it had a mind to. Probably nothing will come of this case – but it does add to public cynicism when those close to the centres of political power appear to be able to flout with impunity the laws with which the rest of us have complied.

As we have by now come to expect, this was another overcast and somewhat cloudy day, but no actual rain was forecast. As it was a little bit cooler and less humid, our walk to the park was more pleasant than usual. Outside the park, we were delighted to bump into of our ex-Waitrose friends who we had not seen for about a fortnight, so we had a fair amount of gossip to catch up on. She is probably going to make a trip to France later on this month and for our own part, now that the travel arrangements seem to be clarified somewhat, we are going to text our friends in Spain and may make some plans to get there in late September if we possibly can. Julie informed us that Bromsgrove High Street was like a madhouse so we are determined to stay away for a bit until the dust settles. The press is calling today ‘Super Saturday‘ and it remains to be seen how the majority of the citizenry respond to an alleviation of the lockdown measures today. The rest of the day was a little nondescript so we contented ourselves to having a lazy afternoon reading the weekend newspapers. Although I do not normally comment on TV programmes that we have seen today is a bit of an exception as I shall explain. In the late afternoon, there was another showing of the Disney version of ‘ The Jungle Book‘ and although we have seen most if before, Meg and I thought we would have a second look. Some of the CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) effects were stunning and we put up with some of the banalities of animals bursting into musical type song on occasions for the sake of the rest of the film. Towards the end of the film, the wolf pack were being taught to say ‘Now this is the Law of the Jungle — as old and as true as the sky;And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.’ On hearing these words, I had an intense mental image of the following scene. It was a dark basement of the church’s social club in St. Roberts, in Harrogate, Yorkshire in about 1953. The room was dimly lit by two or three candles, meant to simulate the flickering of a woodland campfire. The ‘Cub’ Leader (‘Akela‘ in Rudyard Kipling’s parlance) was reading aloud sections of the Jungle Book (including the lines mentioned above) to a group of eager, upturned faces who listened in rapt attention, their faces illuminated only by the candlelight. What made this scene so incredibly vivid in my memory was that ‘Akela’ was actually my mother (who led the Cub Pack before she went off to train to be a teacher in 1956) and I was one of the pack of ‘wolf cubs’.  I don’t wish to sound mawkishly sentimental but the imagery in my mind was so strong and although my mother died over twelve years ago, this was a wonderful memory to have of her, doing what she loved doing best.  Just as an aside, my mother was so desperate to become a teacher that although she was born in 1911 she doctored her birth certificate to make it look as though she was born in 1914 and would, therefore, appear to be three years younger than she actually was. One has to remember how rare it was for mature students to enter teacher training college in the mid-1950’s – the price that she had to pay was that she had to work for three years longer than she normally would in order to retire and claim her teacher’s pension. For anybody who wants to follow up on some of the details of my mother’s life, I include an URL which are the words that I spoke on the occasion of her funeral (https://marie.mch-net.info/marie.pdf)

More ‘Do as I say, not do as I do time‘ Boris Johnson’s father has flown to Greece in spite of Foreign Office advice not to do so. Nigel Farage has returned from the USA and instead of being quarantined for 14 days has been seen out drinking in a pub – for which he could be fined £1,000. Do you think this at all likely? (Actually, a conviction of a high-ranking member of the elite evidently breaking the rules might set an excellent example of the rest of the population!)

On these cloudy days, one never knows how the day will eventually work out. Meg and I were pleased to avoid any rain on our trip to the park where we engaged, as is by now customary, with several conversations with dog owners. The sequence is as follows – the dogs have been let off the lease but thinking that food might be in the offing, they come excitedly towards us on our park bench. This actually happened this morning and one enthusiastic spaniel caused Meg to drop her lemon-curded oatmeal biscuit – the owners then apologise profusely for having caused a nuisance as they see it and the conversation flows from there. (Incidentally, I believe that it is not unknown for second relationships and even marriages that may be initiated by dogs playing together and thereby drawing their respective owners into a conversation. Well, I know of two cases. one on each side of the family, where this or something similar to it has actually happened) When we were in the park, we got a disturbing telephone conversation from our son who had emerged from his study only to find two plumbers wandering about the house looking for a stopcock! What had happened was this – the loo in our en-suite bathroom was starting to fill exceedingly slowly so we sent a quick message to our local plumbers who only live about 400 metres away. We were informed that one or two of the sons would call round after 1.0pm but as the plumbers were in between jobs they decided to call around at about 11.30. Our domestic help had let them in but we had not told our son about it at that stage because we were going to wait until we got back from our walk so as not to disturb him. To cut a long story short, we now have a fully functioning loo (and I suspect it had been going dodgy for quite some time). After lunch, I was all geared up to do a bit of planting and one or two odd jobs in the garden, only to be thwarted by a thin drizzle of rain that persisted for a lot of the afternoon. So I busied myself with doing other things (getting my accounts up to date) before we FaceTimed our regular friends as we normally do on a Friday. They are desperately looking forward to a bit of ‘unlock’ time so we may meet them in the park early next week but, if not, certainly on Thursday to celebrate a birthday. On Wednesday, we are off to see old friends in Oxfordshire and I think the weather is going to be fine by then.

An interesting snippet of news from this morning’s Today programme (but not much-reported since) Apparently the Germans have offered to help us to adapt their own coronavirus test-and-trace app which has been used than 14m times – and works! In the meantime, we have spent millions on an abortive attempt in the Isle of Wight experiment (which proved fruitless) and current progress is not much better. So I am delighted to say that we have swallowed our national pride and accepted help from a society that seems to know what it is doing.

More coronavirus stories that have emerged. It now looks as though the government are resigned to dealing with several ‘mini-spikes’ and intends to deal with each of them as and when they occur (a bit like dampening down a forest fire) The Chief Medical Officer for Health in England, Professor Chris Whitty has warned that

‘If individuals, families and firms do not take them seriously the possibility of a second wave goes up sharply….The virus is a long way from gone, it’s not going to be gone for a long time….Nobody watching this believes there are no risks in the next step.’

There is a dire story that Israel was the model of how to lock down effectively but then entered an end to their lockdown and, as people have relaxed, they now have a second peak of cases worst than the first. And in Texas, a doctor has reportedly said that ‘we are heading for pure hell‘ as the number of hospital admissions has quadrupled in the last month.

Today was a cloudy day with occasional bursts of sunshine, interrupted by the occasional dark cloud scudding across the sky. In the park whilst we were having our elevenses as per usual, one of our closest friends happened by together with another friend from church. As they are both ‘golf widows’ for the morning, I took delight in telling them the only golfing story I know. It was our next door but one neighbour in Leicestershire whose husband happened to be the treasurer of the local golf club. Our neighbour was deeply resentful of the time her husband spent away from her (with good reason, as you will soon see!) and took it upon herself to fling wide open the doors of the committee room where her husband was meeting with fellow members with the exclamation ‘Peter! You shouldn’t be here -you should really be at home cooking my tea! The two sequels to this story are that (i) the golf club immediately threw out the husband and installed a new Treasurer (ii) When we subsequently bumped into Peter (as I shall call him) and we enquired after his wife, he replied ‘Oh, she’s died‘ and grinned from ear to ear. Meg and I often said to each other that if the local newspaper had run a headline which read ‘Man runs berserk- chops off wife’s head with an axe‘ we would have thought to ourselves, ‘Well, I suppose that must be Peter!‘

After lunch, it was evidently grass-mowing time and I hastily set to work trying to get everything done before the rain threatened at 4.00 pm in the afternoon (I find the timings of the Weather app on my iPhone to be incredibly reliable) After this had been done, I indulged myself to trying out my new 17″ spiral ratchet screwdriver to which I had treated myself – I am sure that in the days just before cordless screwdrivers hit the market, joiners used to use these all the time and it only seemed to take a quick ‘whoosh’ or two to drive a screw in. Looking on the side of its cardboard case, I noticed that in Spanish this type of screwdriver is known as a ‘destornillador de carraca‘ If you keep saying ‘carraca‘ to yourself quickly several times, I convinced myself that this was a classic onomatopoeia and that the screwdriver was named after the sound of the word. However, I turned out to be wrong because carraca is the Spanish word for a ratchet even if not a spiral ratchet. But is one of those words with several layers of meaning, one of which is an ‘old crock’ if applied to a car. You can sometimes be too clever trying to guess at the origins of words, by the way.

I read in the news tonight that the coronavirus infection rate has risen in 36 local authority areas- and that is before the liberalisation if this weekend. So am I being neurotic or merely prescient, by being perturbed by this rise in cases? It does look as though we are ending the lockdown too early – if you look at other European societies who are ending their lockdowns, they are doing it when the infection rate is running at a much lower level and with superior ‘test-and-trace’ regimes in place. The other members of my family have been laughing with a kind of gallows humour at how one manages to have a full class of children in September with teachers maintaining a two-metre distance from the children and with breaks organised in such a way that no years of children overlap. As one teacher explained on Radio 4, how do you organise breaks in a 7-year entry – do you organise it in such a way that the breaks extend over a three hour time period? The problem is that the current lot in government have never run anything properly (often coming up through the ‘political adviser’ route) and have literally no idea how to organise the logistics of anything. When told of practical difficulties, the teachers are told they are being obstructive or even worse!