Today, we were a little delayed because I had promised our University of Birmingham friend that I would scan a copy of my 1990 paper to which I referred yesterday so he could have his own copy of it. The scanner failed to work and I assumed that it had lost its drivers after the recent MacOS update so subsequently went on the web to attempt to update these. In the event, I didn’t need to because of course it is  obvious to me (now!) that the scanning sofware cannot find the scanner if you have neglected to attach it onto the USB bus (which I had!) Working against the clock, I discovered that I had missed out p. 311 (on a series numbered 309-317 (numbering derived from its position as an Appendix in a re-submitted Ba(Hons) In Public Administration) so I resolved to sort out the problem later on when I got home. When ‘later’ came, I could not find the original of p.311 but I did have two different pages numbered 314. So the error had been dormant in the original document where it had remained undiscovered for some 31 years but at least I managed to get it sorted out in so I can give my friend a copy.

Today was a mild, not quite spring-like day so we popped straight into the park so that Meg could make contact with her park acquaintances whilst I shot off on my own to collect the daily ration of newspapers. We had the normal jolly chat over a range of issues but my University of Birmingham friend wondered, after I had given him an updated copy of one of my statistical papers, whether I still had the original data set so that he could do some analysis of his own – regrettably, I had to tell him that after 31 years the data file (which would have been fed into a statistical program that we both used called Minitab) was not readily to hand! I suggested that we might make upside randomised figures but I am not sure whether even this would fit the bill.

Today is the on year to the date since the first lockdown was announced. The media has been full of ‘one year anniversary’ film clips of which the media is so fond as it gives the opportunity to recycle a lot of the footage that they have accumulated during the year. But to try to ensure that there is no celebratory atmosphere, Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer has warned of the potential dangers that are still to be faced. In his view, there will certainly be a new surge of infections and of course the interesting question is to what extent a more or less fully vaccinated population can withstand the onslaught from a resurgence of the virus which appears to be rampaging across much of Europe at the moment. A second major problem, related to the first, is the emergence of new variants of the virus which may well evade all of the efforts of the various vaccines to combat it. Of course, it is possible to ‘fine tune’ our existing vaccines to cope with these new variants (just like the ‘flu jobs, reformulated every year) but by the time they are developed, tested and ready for injection yet more variants could have arisen. And, of course, there may well be problems in the supply lines of vaccine which can cause some of the hiccups that we are experiencing at the moment. And, for good measure, he also highlighted the ‘very big job of work’ in preventing ‘lifelong’ problems related to the effect of lockdowns, such as increased deprivation and non-COVID health issues.

Believe it or not, I am not an avid follower of football but there was an obituary in The Times the other day recalling the life of a famous Leeds United footballer, Peter Lorimer. He was part of the formidable Leeds United team in late 60’s whose half-back line (Jack Charlton, Johnny Giles and Billy Bremner) were reputed to be one of the most formidable defences in the country. The point about Peter Lorimer is that he was reputed to have had the hardest shot in football and to test this out, Leeds United organised some trials so his formidable shot could be measured and it exceeded 100mph. Lorimer wss often deputed to take penalties for Leeds and when you work out that the average goalkeeper had ¼ second to respond to the penalty kick, it is easy to see why. I wonder, by the way, if any statistics were ever collected of how penalties that Peter Lorimer took were actually saved?

Our vaccination total has now exceeded 28.3 million. Meg and I are counting off the days until we receive our second dose of the jab which ought to further enhance our immune status. We have another two and half weeks to wait until our appointed time comes and in the meantime, of course, we have a lifting of some of the restrictions on the current lockdown to which to look forward and this will be on Monday next, 29th March.

Today is evidently the start of a new week and it means that there is exactly one week to go before some of the restrictions under the current lockdown are to be eased. From next Monday, it will be possible for six people or two households to get on with each other in an open space such as a garden. So we are hopeful that the weather will turn fine and sunny next week so that we can meet up with each other for extended chats not just on the pavement as we pass. We picked up our newspapers as per normal but on the way met with our University of Birmingham friend so we all walked to the park together. Once there, there was an aggregation (I hesitate to call it a crowd) of park regulars so we split into little groups discussing this and that. Although the morning started off quite fine, there seems to be a tendency for the sky to cloud over and it starts to get chillier rather than warmer as the morning wears on. At a certain point, we all realise we are getting a little cold so we all continue our journeys or strike for home. Actually, I owe our University of Birmingham friend a favour because he unintentionally did us a good turn. I had let him have sight of a paper I had written over twenty years ago which was unpublished but was quite an important piece of work because it analysed statistically the relationship between GCE O-levels, A-levels and final degree results across a couple of Business Studies degrees at the University of Winchester (and threw in some comparators from an earlier paper with a similar type of analysis done at Leicester Polytechnic some eleven years before that) Armed with the title of the paper, I used the Apple app ‘Finder‘ and located the paper in an archived folder which dated from a computer that I used to own with the brand name of Evesham. Having found the paper, written as a MicroSoft Word .doc document, my version of Word would not open it as it regarded it as too old and out-of-date! Fortunately, I have on my system a small, light ‘clone’ of Word which retains 90% of the functionality for about 10% of the size (not for nothing are Microsoft products known as ‘bloatware’) This opened it OK but could not cope with some of the clipart I used to decorate the title page but the rest of the text seemed to be there OK so I was delighted to be able to hand over a copy of the paper to our friend. At the same time, I realised where some of my archive material was that I had forgotten all about, so hence the gratitude to my friend.

In the late afternoon, after a read and a snooze, the weather seemed quite delightfully sunny so I decided to keep up a good habit and give the car a wash. The more regularly I do this, the easier the task seems to become and of course there is no ingrained dirt to have to shift. Regular readers of this blog will be relieved to know that Miggles, the local good-looking cat that has semi-adopted us turned up at the start of the proceedings to make sure that I was doing the job correctly. He then wandered off, bored with watching me and went in pursuit of mice, birds or whatever to stalk. Being unsuccessful in this venture, Miggles strode into view as I was finishing off the car to give it my efforts the nod of approval and check that I had washed the car to the relevant standard.

We seem to be in a strange place viv-a-vis the. vaccines saga. The UK is progressing very well with up to 30 million now vaccinated (which is over 50%) But the EU seems to be threatening to withhold supplies of the AstraZeneca virus manufactured in continental Europe  despite the complexity and interconnectedness of the supply chains. At the same time, there is a great loss of confidence in this vaccine after a degree of ‘bad mouthing’ by European leaders which has resulted in stocks of this vaccine not being used as some members of the European public do not wish to have this particular inoculation. But the figures show that some 12% of Europeans have received their first job whereas the comparable figure for the UK (when the figures were collected) was over three times this proportion at 40%. In the meanwhile, the Americans have concluded a large study amongst 32,000 volunteers which shows over 70% efficacy in preventing an infection in the first place and with an astonishing 100% absence of a severe form COVID once inoculated. Another very large cloud on the horizon is the increasing third wave across many European societies which may well ‘wash over’ these shores in the autumn and is rapidly putting paid to any prospects of a holiday in parts of continental Europe.

Today started off in an ‘interesting’ way, computing wise. As part of the WordPress suite that I use for writing this bog there is an ‘plug-in’ called Jetpack. Apart from collecting statistics about your website and much more besides, this plug-in monitors whether your site is ‘live’ and sends you an email if anything is amiss. I received an email from the Jetpack system telling me that this site was ‘down’ which, indeed it was. After about an hour, I sent off an email pleading for help to my webspace provider – as it happened Jetpack informed me, again by email, that the site had been restored to working order after a downtime of some two hours. What had gone wrong, I really do not know but it is rather nice when ‘errors’ correct themselves. Of course, it could have been a fault at the server end and ‘nothing to do with me’ but that is one problem less to worry about.

Today is the official Census day and later on today, we are going to complete it ‘en famille‘.  Census Day is always interesting for Meg and myself because we were recruited as census numerators in 1971 (50 years ago!) What we had to do was to go round the houses on our patch – about 200 houses I think, and distribute the census forms to each household. We then had to call back one week later to pick up the census form and, as far as I remember, we had to do some basic checking on the doorstep to make sure there were no gross errors. When we got the census forms home, we had to do a more detailed checking and then had to transfer some basic information onto special sheets which we had to mark with an HB pencil. These were to be read by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and it enables the census authorities to get some basic information (numbers, age, sex of individuals and where they lived) very quickly – we are talking about a week or so. Meg and I were probably recruited as we were social science students and had been taught about the census and how it operated in our course. We had a course in statistics which had two components, the first being conventional statistical theory and operations and the second was called ‘Social Statistics’ and it was a fascinating course. We had a certain amount of demography in the course and learnt how government statistics were collected and used – it really was an incredibly useful course (and I don’t even think it was examined either) As part of our census enumerator role, we had a brief training course in which it was stressed that we should leave no building unvisited and indeed, I did pass a ‘deserted’ Anglican Church only to discover it had been converted into a mosque and hence was eventually caught up in the census exercise. If we encountered a ‘difficult’ situation on our patch, we were encouraged to use what persuasive skills we had to extract whatever (basic) information we could, rather than submit a nil return. On my patch, I did encounter a hippy commune who railed against the authority notions they discerned in the census questions such ‘Head of Household‘ and ‘Relationship to head of household‘ After a period of negotiation, I was very pleased with myself that I got the whole commune enumerated with each describing themselves as the ‘co-spouse’ of the other – the members of the commune were delighted to describe themselves this and I was delighted to get the data.

And so we come to today’s on-line form. It took about 10 minutes or so for each of the four of us to complete and I thought that technologically it had been made as fool-proof as possible. I am sure that the amount of information collected has been scaled back somewhat compared with other censuses that I remember – but I suppose the government already holds an extraordinary amount of information on each one of us anyway. After submission, I got an email acknowledgement so I know the form is truly lodged. We were also asked to comment upon any particular features of the form so I did add one comment, at the suggestion of my daughter-in-law. The question on religion assumed that you had ‘some’ religious affiliation or ‘none’ and there was no way in which a humanist could identify themselves as such on the form. In fact, I suspect that they have had this battle with the census authorities for some time.  We were speculating what the role of ‘non-completion’ might be and I an wondering whether it will be quite high on this occasion. Ten years ago, the non completion rate was about 6% (higher amongst some of the BAME community) and I would venture to speculate that despite the threat of large fines and the legal compulsion to fill in a census form, the non-completion might be 10% or more on this occasion

Today was full of little hints of the spring about to come. We are noticing that flowering cherries and flowering hawthorns are starting to bloom nicely and in a few days these flowering trees might be at their best. Similarly, the forsythia in several people’s gardens is similarly in full bloom so I am inclined to have my camera at the ready so that I can capture these flowering images at their best. Today is also the date of the Spring equinox and I have discovered why it is not always on March 21st. The explanation is that each year is 365¼ days (hence we need leap years every four years) and the spring equinox occurs 6 hours later than the previous year. A consequence of all of this is that the equinox can occur on either 20th or 21st or 22nd of March in any particular year. But after a pleasant walk into town, we collected our newspapers and then on into the town where we met, as usual, with a couple of park friends. Then we made for home, knowing that the afternoon was going to be dominated by rugby.

This afternoon was ‘Super Saturday‘ in which there are going to be three 6-Nations rugby matches to round off the season (almost) The first game was Italy v. Scotland which was a bit of a non-match as Italy haven’t won a game since goodness knows when. The second match was England vs. Ireland in which the English seemed to be at the wrong end of every refereeing decision but in the end the Irish won very convincingly. But the match which was a cracker was the Wales v. France which both needed to win in order to win the whole championship. Wales seemed to have it won as they were 10 points ahead 10 minutes before the end. But the French displayed supreme pressure and the pressure on both teams was so intense that the game ended with the French one player down (red-carded) and the Wales team two players down (yellow carded) In the event, French won the game with a try in the third minute after the clock had ‘gone red’ which must make it one of the tightest finishes of all time.

Tonight was the night in which church services were resuming. We had to book our places with Eventbrite,  much as if we are booking a tour in a National Trust property or similar. In theory, there could have been up to about 45 places in the church but tonight there were about 33 – the places for tomorrow are, we understand, fully booked. Of most interest to the congregation, though, was the fact that we have a new priest allocated to the parish. How long the new priest will remain with us is a bit hard to say because it seemed as though he was ‘on loan’ from another English discuss altogether. Meg and I were very interested in the character of the new priest and were impressed – he seemed to have the right combination of a common-sense approach to liturgical matters whilst also exhibiting a dry sense of humour whilst he was introducing himself. Although we haven’t had the opportunity to speak with him yet (or nor will we, until lockdown conditions are released) but to ease his entry and show him some goodwill on taking over our parish, I left him a bottle of our own Damson Gin (which we hope does not get mixed up with communion wine, not that that is very likely)

As we suspected, today was the day when, as a nation, we crept over the 50% milestone of proportion of the adult population vaccinated. However good the news is from the UK, the news from continental Europe where the virus seems to be entering a third wave is a source of great concern. Many scientists are worried that the European infection rates will thwart our simmer holidays. In particular, exponential growth in cases in countries like Germany puts in doubt roadmap proposals to restart international travel by 21 June. It has been a record day for the UK as 711,156 vaccinations have been given and more than 26.8 million first and 2.1 million second doses have now been given in the UK since December.

On Friday afternoon, we had a Zoom call with one of our closest friends in Oxfordshire – in normal times, we often meet half way in Bicester for a ‘get together’ meal. We are looking forward to the magic date of Monday March 29th (a week on Monday) because, in theory, that is the date when according to the roadmap up to six people can legally meet in a garden or similar open space to have a meal or a social get together. So as soon as the weather gets nothing like reasonable, we will see if we can meet up in a garden to see each other face-to-face rather than relying upon technology the whole time.

Today was a bit gloomy but not excessively cold and we collected our newspapers and got to the park in plenty of time.  There we met with our University of Birmingham friend who I was especially pleased to see as I had managed to locate a couple of papers I had written that examined the relationship between GEC O-levels and A-levels and the final degree results. The analysis used a statistical technique called ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) and it is excellent at solving the problems where you lots of categories of input (e.g. score from a number of GCE’s put into bands) and corresponding output (class of degree) and you trying to establish the statistical relationship  between them.The papers were not written with a view to publication and hence had no references, literature reviews and the like – they were just straight analysis of the records of our students that were susceptible to a statistical treatment but they both came as very useful documents in policy terms when we were resubmitting our degree courses or attempting to prove that we were ‘adding value’.  Anyway, my friend is going to cast his statistical eye over them nd it will be interesting to see what he makes of them both.

Today is rather a strange anniversary for me as it is 48 years according to the date when I was run over by a Hillman Imp (whose driver claims to have fainted at the wheel) when I had just finished a lecture at Leicester Polytechnic and was on my way to another class. I will spare you all of the gory details except I was hit first and thrown out of the way, both legs being smashed up in the process. My two students were carried on the body of the Hillman Imp through some iron railings outside a residential home. My legs were put into a temporary plaster but the tendons to all of the muscles were severed – but it was the middle of an ancillaries dispute so there was no bed for me in the hospital either that day or the following day (I was told to take aspirins for the pain) The third day afterwards they did take me into hospital and when I came round from the operation I remember peering timorously underneath the sheet to see how many legs I had left. As it was, the answer was two but as they had told me that they had no idea what they were going to do until they got me onto the operating table and so there was a possibility I would end up legless. Enough of all of this – but 19th March as well as being the feast of St. Joseph is a date which I find it hard to forget.

Tonight was also the night when we decided to have a celebratory meal for the birthday of our daughter-in-law (last Sunday) and our son (next Thursday) so tonight’s meal was an occasion approximately in the middle. As we are still in lockdown and cannot go out for a collective meal, we treated ourselves to a fish-and-chip supper delivered to the house and we had quite a jolly occasion of it all, considering the circumstances.

We have now vaccinated  some 26.2 million of the population and record number in one day of 660,000 (nearly two thirds of a million in one day) Also, the record tonight seems to indicate that we have vaccinated some 49.9% of the population – and I wonder off the government will ‘explode’ with the good news once we actually hit the 50% proportion. At the same time, the situation in Germany seems to be going from bad to worse and is definitely at the start of a third wave of the pandemic. The Germans freely admit that they do not have enough vaccine to give more of their own population the vaccine that they need so the ‘politics of vaccination’ may start to rear its ugly head. The situation in Europe is  now sufficiently serious for experts here in the UK to wonder whether despite the success of our vaccination programme, a third wave in the rest of Europe might seep into the UK in the summer/utumn and we are certainly not out of the woods just yet.

There is quite some concern in official circles that the virus seems to ‘target’ the UK’s poorest and most deprived communities, and once entrenched the virus seems difficult to shift. Rotherham is one of those towns that has struggled to get infection rates down. Even when they do fall, they do so slowly, and cases remain stubbornly over 100 cases per 100,000 people – while the average area in England has 45. So it is become more and more evident that COVID-19 is almost ‘seeking out’ and then intensifying existing social and economic inequalities. The problem for these communities is that poverty strikes at the economic base, the educational system, the local health resources and these inequalities only seem to reinforce each other. The policy implications are clear (but unpalatable for a Conservative government)

Today was quite a mild, cloudy day but no rain was forecast. We are a little delayed as we often are on a Thursday morning as the Waitrose order had been delivered and we needed to put all of the provisions away before we set out on our walk. Having collected our newspapers, I could not resist telling our newsagent a joke that had been running through my head for the last day or so i.e. ‘ How does an agnostic, dyslexic, insomniac spend their time?‘ to which the answer is ‘They lay awake all night, wondering whether or not there is a dog‘ I know it’s a crap joke but it is a little quirky.  After we had picked our newspapers, we needed to go into the town to send off a condolence card following the death of one our oldest academic mentors and friends in Spain. – so we needed to go to the Post Office (now housed in W H Smiths) to get this posted. On our way, we passed a little ‘ecological’ shop that sells all kinds of sustainable products and we purchased a little bar of soap, complete in its tin. Actually, if the truth be known, I only actually wanted the tin because I had spotted it some time beforehand and I thought that it might make a suitable heatsink to help to keep an external disk drive cool. This is because according to my researches, disk drives might only have a life of about 5 years (although I have several considerably older than this) and excess heat is one factor that could well shorten their life. Having completed our little foray into the High Street, we made our way into the park and coincided as we almost always do these days with our University of Birmingham friend. We had two very long and interesting but not-connected conversations. The first of these was a discussion of a video that Meg and I had stumbled upon by the classicist Mary Beard on the subject of ‘whiteness’ (with reference to skin colour) in Roman society.  I said that I would hunt out the video link as we had only watched it recently which I did later on in the afternoon and then sent it on. Then we got onto the topic of the statistical connection between ‘O’-levels and ‘A’-levels  and academic progress in degree courses. I had researched and then written up a couple of papers, one dating to my time in the (then) Leicester Polytechnic and the second written when I was at King Alfred’s College in Winchester. We were so delayed by our extended conversations that it was terriblly late when we got home for lunch being practically 2.00pm in the afternoon so we had to raid our store cupboard for a tin of quality stewing steak which we employ when we need to get an instant meal in about two minutes. After lunch, I thought I would see if I could hunt out the couple of papers I had written and by some kind of miracle, I managed to locate them after about one minute of looking for them (one paper was 30 years old and the other was 20 years old so I impressed myself with my own efficiency – or good luck!) Anyway, I will pass these on to my friend to read to see if the findings from the students that I taught all of those years ago had the same degree of applicability to our friend’s students.

After lunch, I needed to make a lightning visit into town to return a defective disk drive back to Amazon (it worked for about a week and then refuse to format) I had got a QR code on my phone and so, in theory, I could go into one of the shops that are an agency which will scan my phone, print off the label and then return the item to Amazon. The first shop to which I went and which I had used before shut its doors about 10 seconds before I got there. So then I went off to a newsagents that I know had a system of Amazon lockers but they didn’t have the label printing facility. So I went off to a third shop but they were only agents for Hermes carriers and not UPS so my QR code was not recognised. They recommended me to another shop at which I also drew a blank. Frustrated I came home for a consoling cup of tea and consulted the web as to which shop in the area I could use for an Amazon return. I found an off-license that accepted my parcel back (and gave me a receipt) and the ironic thing is that this shop was the next door neighbour but one to the first shop I had tried. All I have to do now is hope that the refund systems within Amazon work the way they should (they have aways worked superbly well in the past, I must say)

It seems strange to start off this blog with ‘Day 366’ but I thought I would stick with the absolute number of days since we started this blog rather than using any other numbering system. Today is always a delayed start for us as we have to complete our shopping order ready for delivery from Waitrose tomorrow morning but we got going at last. At last, though, we got under way and caught up with some of our church friends after our way back from collecting the newspapers. They informed us (but I think I already had a note of it) that bookings for our church services was going to start tonight, organised by Eventbrite, so that is something I must get organised later on tonight. Having seen one set of friends we cut across the road into the park and saw our University of Birmingham friend who was wondering where we were, as were a little late this morning.  We chatted about this and that, thinking about how we were going to get our social lives organised in a week or so. For a start, our friend will be resuming a lot of his tennis activities as soon as these reopen on March 29th for outdoor sports but I suspect that my Pilates classes, being indoor, will have to wait a little longer. Last time we were ‘in between’ lockdowns we had a Pilates class with only four in it (one in each corner of the room) whilst our instructor occupied some open space near the door so we may go onto a similar regime this time around. Another friend who is a wheelchair-user hove into view and, as promised, I just happened to have another bottle of damson gin in my rucksack ready for her to enjoy.

We knew that this afternoon, we were going to have a ‘Zoom’ session with some of Meg’s cousins. So after lunch, a snooze and a paper read we were ready for the Zoom session which involved Meg’s cousin, her daughter and son-in-law in one house in Derby whilst another daughter and son-in-law were at their house in Cheltenham. We had a rather jolly time with quite a lot of discussion about how the nature of work would evolve in a post-pandemic world. We all agreed that the nature of work would alter radically and it may well be (I conjecture) that a pattern will evolve of 1-2 days in the office (around the water cooler!) to maintain social contacts and those things best handled face-to-face and with a corresponding 3-4 days working from home (if you have the space) I suspect that those who can, released from travelling time to/from work. may well decide to work 10 hour days and then see if it is possible to have a four day ‘working’ week and a three day ‘week-end’ or leisure time at least. The ultimate irony in all of this is that for the foreseeable future, one’s leisure time is likely to have a large internet component to it.

Tonight, when our  ‘Zoom’ session had finished, I decided to consult our church’s website to see what arrangements there would be for services this weekend. To my delight, there as a clickable link to the Eventbrite booking system which worked like clockwork and I managed to get two places booked for myself and Meg at the Saturday evening service without any difficulty. I presume that we have to show the QR codes that have been sent over the email to secure our admission into church on Saturday and I wonder if we will be scanned in – much like the coffee ships before lockdown. We have a new parish priest ready to take over the parish so we are all rather curious – I thought I might take along some damson gin for him to enjoy but I suppose it can always double for communion wine if pressed into service.

There is a massive row going on in Europe at the moment with vaccines at their core – it really does look as the supply of vaccines is being ‘weaponised’ and is to be used in the developing contretemps between the UK and its EU neighbours. It looks as though supplies of the AstraZeneca vaccine are going to be severely limited throughout the whole of April – so the long-term hope that we may start to think about vaccinating those under 50 seems to have evaporated. As always the argument is a complex one and hinges upon who promised what supplies of vaccine to whom and when and a lot of this is subject to legal agreements as well. But it appears that the government target of vaccinating all of the 50+ section of the population is still a government objective. Meanwhile, more than 25 million of the UK population has now been vaccinated and the point must be approaching (quite soon? within a day or so?) when we hit the milestone of 50% of the adult population having received at least one dose of the vaccine.

For the various numerologists who read this blog, you will notice that a particular type of milestone is recorded today. It is blog no. 365 which means that this blogging exercise has continued for exactly one year. As it happens, a lot of the media are talking about the first anniversary of the ‘lockdown’ (No. 1 that is) and it is rather a strange anniversary to celebrate as so many at the time thought that it would be for a month or so of some privations and certainly not a year. It is interesting that according to the ‘official’ account, the lockdown began on 16 March 2020, when Matt Hancock told the House of Commons that all unnecessary social contact should cease. Mr Hancock did say this, but it was not until 23 March 2020 that Boris Johnson told the country that people ‘must’ stay at home and certain businesses must close. Government ministers have previously described this second date as the start of lockdown. There is no official government definition of ‘lockdown’. So there is a certain degree of confusion, even now, when the lockdown is supposed to have started but today is 16th March and therefore the anniversary of the Matt Hancock (if not the Boris Johnson) announcement.

Today was a little on the dull side but at least the weather app on our phone indicted that the sun might make an appearance a little later in the day. We collected our newspapers, picked up some milk from Waitrose and then wondered who we might meet in the park. Eventually, we ran into a little gaggle of four of the regulars and we exchanged some details about what the various members of our families were up to, particularly as there is now the possibility that we might make some arrangements to see some of the more distant members in only  month or so now. When we have lived throughout twelve months of the pandemic, then another month seems quite a trifling amount of time. We all chat happily away until the standing around makes us realise we are feeling a little cold and want to be on our way as it nearly always approaching lunchtime.

This afternoon, we knew we were going to have a good time with video calls to friends and ex-colleagues. The first of these was a call to one of our Hampshire (ex University of Winchester friends) and we exchanged reminiscences about some of the earliest computers and software with which we cut our computing teeth (when we were younger, in the late 1970’s and then the 1980’s) We were recalling a particular type of computer (the Amstrad) which became massively popular as a fairly cheap consumer product. In fact the name ‘Amstrad‘ was brought to the market by Alan Sugar (of ‘The Apprentice’ fame) as the name ‘Amstrad‘ is derived from Alan Michael Sugar (Ams) and then ‘trad’ from trading. We were thinking about some of our earliest computing experiences and both of us expressed the desire to see the Museum of Computing which actually lives next door in Bletchley Park to the wartime code-breaking project to which Alan Turing contributed so much. We have made a tentative commitment to meet each other at the Museum of Computing when travel conditions allow- it should be approximately the same distance of travel for both of us and will certainly be a good day out. We then discussed strategies of decluttering our respective houses, in which our Hampshire friends seem to have made a considerable degree of progress whereas we in Bromsgrove have scarcely started. After this lengthy but really entertaining chat, we FaceTimed some of our ex-Waitrose friends here in Bromsgrove as the time is rapidly approaching (after March 29th) when we can make some tentative plans to meet with each other in some open space somewhere (our garden, their garden, or even the park) Next week, we might be able to see our way ahead to make some more firm arrangements.

The COVID news still proves of interest to us all. Although the infection rates and death rates are dropping dramatically in the UK (and vaccination rate seems to be holding up), the situation in Europe is still grim.  In about three quarters of European societies, the COVID rate is increasing although concentrated in Central and Eastern Europe. But Italy is feeling the need to go into a full national lockdown again, as from today, so that if is persists our little vacation scheduled for Rome late September might be put at jeopardy. Tomorrow might prove to be quite an interesting day as well for we are to be in touch (via Zoom) with Meg’s cousins in Derby and the time is fast approaching when it might be possible to arrange a visit (if only in a garden). If and when we meet, this might be quite interesting because Meg’s cousin is actually buying a house in Derbyshire near to her daughter and we might be at a stage when we can view it (if only from the outside)

Well, here we are at the start of another week and we wonder what this week will bring for us. It was a bit of an indeterminate day today with a fair bit of cloud but with a mild temperature and only the modicum of wind. As we walked down to collect our newspapers, we bumped into the friend of a friend outside the park and then, once inside the park,  a little gaggle of 5-6 of us (including ourselves) met and  exchanged pleasantries and then, as the weather turned cooler, we all made for home. We generally turn on the rolling news programmes on the TV when we return home and as anticipated, the airways were full of the reaction to the way in which the Metropolitan police handled (mishandled!) the vigil held by women on Clapham Common. One particular image has gone around the world i.e. a slight 5′ 2″ physics student pinned to the ground and restrained by several burley police officers. All of this, of course, in a vigil which was designed to honour the memory of a woman who had been killed by a serving police officer as well. There are more idiosyncrasies attached to this event as well. There just happens to be a huge bill being presented to Parliament today (the rather ungainly entitled ‘Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill‘) which is a portmanteau type of provision designed to gave the state and the police many more powers than they already have. Before Saturday’s vigil. the bill seemed to aimed at Extinction Rebellion type protests as well as the current concerns about what to do with the statues all over the country erected to ex-slaver traders and which many now wish to see removed. It has been pointed out in Parliament that there are several references to offences against property in the new bill but nothing which would address the concerns of the omen who feel unsafe on the streets of our cities and towns. A senior minister has defended plans to increase sentences for violence against statues, amid rising fury at the government’s failure to tackle violence against women – the Tory Police Bill, to be debated in the Commons today, will allow judges to hand down sentences of up to 10 years for damaging statues based on their ’emotional, symbolic value’. There are some who argue that in the UK legal system offences against property tend to attract high penalties than offences against the person but I haven’t managed to track down any evidence for this oft-quoted remark.

As it was a beautiful afternoon I decided to give the car a wash as it hasn’t had a wash for a couple of weeks. When we bought it new, we did have a special treatment to help protect paintwork against things like bird droppings (which can be a particular nuisance if you happen to park the car in the wrong place) Anyway, I was particularly pleased that the car seemed to get itself cleaned particularly easily today – I suspect the trick is not to let it get too dirty in the first place. I have had the same large container of car shampoo for several years now but it seems to do its job OK- one particular car washing aid I have which is particularly useful is a smaller size watering can with a very long spout (designed, I imagine, to water handing baskets and the like). This I use to deliver a small but constant steam of water to wet the car before I get going with a soft brush (and then a multi-fibre mitten).

Tonight, many European countries (Germany at first, followed by France, Italy and Spain) are pausing their use of the AstraZeneca vaccine over fears that it might be implicated in a number of incidents of blood clots after people have received the vaccine. This is probably excessively cautious as there will always be a certain (low) proportion of blood-clotting in the population as a whole, vaccine or no and so the epidemiologists have to ascertain whether there is (a) an excess of blood clotting and (b) whether there is a causal relationship with the vaccine in any case.

Tomorrow afternoon will be quite full of video calls. First we are going to have a natter with one of my Hampshire friends/colleagues. It transpired that we inhabited the same haunts of Manchester but separated by a few years so we never actually met whilst we were both working there. Then we will FaceTime some of our oldest ex-Waitrose friends as we do every Tuesday afternoon. They, like us, are making some plans as to what they might do in a few weeks time when the lockdown starts to ease. But the news from Europe is now grim. Italy, France, Germany nd Poland are now all in the grip of a third wave of the pandemic and their failure to vaccinate enough of their population in time means that the third wave is proceeding apace. Can we be isolated from this, I ask myself?

Today is a day when two events are taking place on the same day – the first of these is Mother’s Day (or more accurately ‘Mothering Sunday’) and the second is my daughter-in-law’s birthday. So we have masses of cards, presents and calls coming into the house associated with either one celebration or the other. I was a little puzzled why ‘Mother’s Day‘ appeared so early this year – I tend to think of it as a Sunday near to March 25th (the ‘Feast of the Annunciation’) but I find after a little more investigation that the date (in the UK) is the fourth Sunday of Lent. Therefore, if Easter is early, then Mothering Sunday will also be early so that is one little mystery solved. Today being a Sunday, we engaged in our normal Sunday morning routine. I get up an hour earlier and then stroll down to collect our Sunday morning newspapers, getting back in time for the Andrew Marr Show which I am hoping might be particularly illuminating this morning in view of the fuss that is taking place over the Metropolitan Police’s catastrophic handling of the vigil taking place last on Clapham Common to commemorate the murder of the girl by a serving police officer.  As I was making my way home complete with newspapers, I tend to take a banana with me to sustain me until I get breakfast. When I came to disposing of the banana skin I remembered an old ‘tip’ and decided to use the banana skin to give my walking boots a quick wipe. Although this sound odd, it is quite well documented that the large amount of potassium in banana skins is the beneficial agent when it comes to shine up leather. Incidentally, the same trick works with rubber car mats (not the cheaper plastic variety) – it appears that the natural oils found in banana skins are very similar to this occurring naturally in rubber products which may be drying out. This is all strange yet true – fortunately, at that hour in the morning, there was none around apart from the occasional jogger to see me cleaning my boots with a banana skin. On my journey down into town, I treated myself to a little concert on my trusty old iPhone – this time, I was playing J.S. Bach’s B Minor Mass and parts from the Matthew Passion. So all in all, I quite enjoy my little trips on a Sunday with a ‘free’ concert thrown in. We walked down to the park and there we met with some of our usual ‘park’ friends – as we all know what parts of the park we inhabit and congregate in, we tend to coincide more often than not. Needless to say, yesterday’s Rugby match (between England and France) was a great talking point. After a while, Meg and I struck for home and we bumped into one of our church friends who told us that we now had a priest to take services when we next go in a couple of week’s time. Nobody seems to know anything about him (not that that should matter at all) but it looks as though he has been installed in the presbytery already. Of course social contact with him and with fellow parishioners is bound to be limited until we are in further stage of lockdown.

This afternoon, as you might expect, was devoted to watching a 6-Nations rugby match – this time between Ireland and Scotland. It was a hard fought match and only decided in the last five minutes when the Irish clawed themselves ahead – it never ceases to amaze me how many rugby matches are decided in the last fine minutes or so of a game.

In the late afternoon, Meg and I decided to see if we could see anything that Mary Beard might have produced on the subject of ‘race’ in Roman society. We did find a well-illustrated lecture by Mary Beard which was fascinating and answered some of our questions indirectly. Whereas the far right in both Britain and America tend to look to antiquity for the ‘roots’ of white western civilisation, Mary Beard manage to dispose of the most facile of their arguments. She showed that how many statues although often displayed in museums as white marble, at least initially many of them would be coloured (garishly according to present day sensibilities) in which we can infer the skin tints and tones of ‘typical’ roman citizens. In short, there is quite a lot of indirect evidence that Roman society was relatively open and cosmopolitan and also with a degree of social mobility for some. For example, one gravestone found near South Shields shows that the person who had their monument erected for him had married one of his slaves who therefore became his wife (almost impossible to think of similar events happening in past centuries in the UK when slavery was still legal)