We did not have a tremendous storm last night but we did have a certain amount of rumbling thunder, some sheet lightning and quite a steady patter of rain which persisted until the small hours. So we were not surprised when we awoke to a day with a much fresher feel to it and the threat of a further shower always there. The morning’s post brought us some unwelcome news. It was from Meg’s cousin who is now living in Bolton and whose husband had had a stroke the bet part of a year ago. The letter informed us that her husband in a weakened condition had contracted a mild version of the COVID-19 virus but had died (and been cremated) some two months ago. We were shocked, but not absolutely surprised, and later on today we wrote a letter of condolence which we will post tomorrow. I consulted with my neighbour over a range of issues because after the lockdown we have to be very careful about what equipment we need to bring to our resumed Pilates classes. So far, we are thinking about Pilates mat, a bath sheet to spread on it,  small handtowel to act as a neck roll, some stretch Pilates exercise bands, a Pilates ball – I think that’s about it. Anyway, we have enough time to assemble things before the class resumes on 1st September. Before we entered the park, we called by the opticians ao that we could arrange for an eye test for Meg as she feels that her eyesight is deteriorating somewhat and this was a bit more difficult than you imagine involving a call to the manageress (who knows us quite well). However, we got there in end and got an appointment with the optician who knows Meg’s eyes well having treated her over the years. We also took the opportunity to call by our favourite High Street cobbler to get new ferrules put on our National Trust portable stool (what exciting lives we do lead!)

This afternoon, we texted one of the relatives of Meg’s uncle who lives in North Wales to check out whether a quick visit is feasible. As it happens, the coast seems to be clear so upon the strength of that, we went ahead and made a booking in a Holiday Inn that we know well and is very convenient for us (but we got the 3rd last room according to their website) Having got this all booked, we then made a further booking at a country club down the road at which we eat on the day we arrive and then made yet another telephone call to Meg’s uncle to check out it would be OK for us to call upon him and so he could note things in his diary. This leaves us one free day which we would normally spend on our own in Chester but on this occasion, we intend to make a trip from outside Chester to Bolton to see if we can see Meg’s recently bereaved cousin – as it is a trip almost entirely by motorway it seems to us to be an excellent idea to fit in this visit as we are in the vicinity. So now we have ‘all of our ducks in a row’ having made all of the arrangements that we want without any real difficulty.

As it happens, the predicted row over ‘A’-levels is underway. The government is evidently desperately worried not to let ‘inflated’ teacher’s grades become the finished product but as a result of applying some degree of standardisation the public schools and high performers seem to have come out of it best whilst the pupils whose marks have been moderated (downwards) the most just happen to come from the poorest areas, thus apparently ‘baking in’ the inequalities that already exist within the system.  (Thus was it ever so!) It is hard to say at this point whether the political pressure will eventually force a rethink but in purely political terms, a situation in which 39% of marks were reduced by one or more grades does not seem to a particularly healthy one for any government, even one with a large majority. We shall see!

Our mini-heatwave continues although there are indications that we may have a storm tonight and almost certainly tomorrow. Last night, as we were going to bed, there was evidently a storm not too far off with sheet lightning every few seconds or so but the winds and especially the rain passed us by. Again tonight, we have had a small intimation of an impending storm but the house is very hot and humid and we are all praying for a tremendous downpour to cool us all down. On the way to the park, we were delighted to bump into the friends who had invited us round for sandwiches in their garden at lunchtime. By way of (a small) recompense I have donated one of my specially prepared horseshoes, all the way from Yorkshire but duly de-rusted, cleaned up and polished up and with a little explanatory ‘runoff’ from Google which explains the story of the Irish saint, St. Dunstan and why horseshoes can be considered lucky. Now all our friends have to do is to find a fortunate spot in their garden or house to hang it, which no doubt they will. We spent some time completing our Waitrose order this morning which is due for delivery tomorrow afternoon. Also, our email has indicated that we are ‘booked in’ to the church service in St. Mary’s, adjacent to Harvingtom Hall as we were last Saturday so we are off to repeat the experience (and it is just possible that some other friends might join us as well).

In the afternoon, I texted my sister in Yorkshire suggesting that it might be that the time is right for us to make a quick visit to Yorkshire when I could see her and the rest of the Yorkshire extended family, particularly as it is going to be my sister’s birthday at the end of the month. My sister telephoned and we discussed a range of possibilities but it seems there still a range of practical difficulties. Other members of the family are either away/working/having house extensions done so the time is not apposite for a visit. My sister and brother-in-law have no desire to dine out in a village pub as we often do on the occasions of our visits so it appears that we had better wait until the times are a little more propitious before we visit. Similarly, we are conscious that we need to pay a visit to Meg’s aged uncle in North Wales who we were going to see at the very start of the lockdown (and had actually booked our hotel room) but which we decided, fortunately as it turned out, to cancel. We are going to text another member of his extended family to see how the land lies and whether it would be sensible/not sensible for us to make a flying visit for a few days to North Wales but again we feel as though we need to ‘play this one by ear’ on this occasion as well.

Tomorrow is the announcement of ‘A’-levels and the current arrangement is that in the absence of exams, an algorithm will be applied that takes account of teachers’ assessments. the results of mocks if taken and the past track record of the schools. But there was a debacle in Scotland where the Scottish government was forced to abandon all of the ‘awarded’ grades and then rely solely upon teacher assessment in order to avoid a situation in which approx. 40% of students finish up with less than their predicted grades. The UK government are suggesting at the very last moment a hybrid scheme where the student can choose between the provisionally awarded grade, substitute the results of ‘mocks’ if they are higher (which they rarely are) or volunteer to take an examine the autumn. Whatever happens, looks both messy and is going to cause a huge political row. My own view is that even though the teacher assessed grades might be inflated and lack a degree of credibility, then this could be viewed as a one-off compensation in view of the absence of proper tuition in the extraordinary arrangement that students have had to undertake under the shadow of the COVID-19 crisis.  But we shall have to wait until tomorrow and see what happens…

Another day in the current heatwave but fortunately for us, it is not too oppressive in the morning when we walk down. Today we met some of our old Waitrose friends in the park by prior arrangement or rather Meg did as I needed to go off and buy a few ‘essentials’ (such as getting a new watch battery fitted) on the High Street. We thought our friends might have told us of lots of exciting places that they had been to since the semi-release from lockdown on 1st August – instead, they have been getting some medical appointments in that had to be postponed over the last few weeks. So we had a rather hurried meeting today but at least we got a meeting before the weather turns really nasty which it might in the next few days if we have multiple rain and thunderstorms. This afternoon, I needed to consult with my neighbour before I started some much-needed edging and gully clearing in our communal area. As it happened, my neighbour and I are going to start our Pilates class together and we had to have some practical things to sort out. We also had several other bits of news to impart to each other, principally on the subject of actual neighbours and soon-to-be neighbours (as a large bungalow just around the corner from us has just been sold) so by the time we had finished our long chat it was ‘Tiffin‘ time i.e. mid-afternoon cup of tea time so the edging had to be given a miss for another day. Quel surprise!

Whilst not wishing to be a ‘car bore’, the various reviews of the new Honda we intend to purchase do all mention not particularly good acceleration for the model in question. However, I did by a series of ‘accidents’ arrive at a website that detailed most makes and models of cars with a plethora of information giving, in particular, what I found to be of most interest i.e. a table of ‘overtaking times’ such as the time taken in seconds to go from 80-120 km/h (which is 50-75 mph) which is just the sort of information you need if you entering a motorway via a slip road and have to slot into a lane of faster-moving traffic on the right-hand side. Armed with this information, I could then draw comparisons between my ‘intended’, a much faster beast from the same stable and cars that I had owned in the past. I discovered that whatever the motoring journalists might have written, there was no difference between my intended and a Mazda 3 which I had owned in the past and only 1.0-second difference between my intended and the faster beast. This leads me to conclude that motoring journalists get fixated on one or two aspects of a car which, whilst real, are not that important in the wider order of things. I also discovered an owner’s website in which owners reminisced about the much older, heavier, more powerful but less ‘zippy’ cars they had owned in the past and which made them more than contented with their present model, whatever the motoring reviews had to say. They also stressed that such things as cargo space are much more important to the average owner than to the ‘boy racer’ in us who is trying to get every smidgeon of acceleration out of his vehicle. And now, I promise I will leave that topic for good.

There are two disturbing COVID-19 stories tonight, no doubt related to each other. The first is that 1148 new cases have been reported in the past day which is the highest total since June – it does look like the start of a second wave of the pandemic. The second issue was a Sky News investigation in which it was shown that in a Manchester suburb (where infection rates are rising) 9 out of 10 establishments are not following the guidelines i.e. that a record of names and addresses of all of these who enter the pub is not being taken and if the video evidence is to be believed, then social distancing is being largely ignored. The requirements are only ‘advisory’ at the moment but the Scots are shortly to give these the force of law (and perhaps we will be dragged, reluctantly, doing the same but two weeks too late!)

Well, you can never tell how a day is going to turn out and so it proved today. We were somewhat delayed this morning because we have an arrangement whereby our oven gets professionally cleaned – we have this done every six months and evidently, the person whose business it is does not mind doing a job professionally that most of us hate doing periodically, so we are more than happy to have done for us. Needless to say, it is always interesting to see how other individuals and families have coped with the COVID-19 lockdown so we had a good chat about this. Then Meg and I left for our daily newspaper/trip to the park walk in what turned out to be quite a fine, albeit muggy day (the rains and thunderstorms are on their way, perhaps tomorrow, but it is a bit difficult to estimate precisely when) On our way home from the park, we came across one set of friends who were busy gardening and we managed to convey several useful bits of information about the church service we attended on Saturday last. Then three doors down we bumped into another set of friends who we had not seen for a few days so we exchanged news and gossip with each other. Then, on the spur of the moment, they invited us into their back garden for what I think the Anglo-Indian community used to called ‘tiffin’ but which was actually sandwiches which were rustled up on the spot, cake, tea and even beer. We have been saying to each other for a week or so now that we would like to invite each other into our respective gardens when the weather was set fair so this an actual case of ‘carpe diem‘ (seize the moment) a phrase popularised in the film ‘Dead Poet’s Society‘ which I know is a bit dated now. Altogether we spent some two and a half hours chatting and the time flew by but it was well to get the opportunity whilst we could because the weather is undoubtedly going to break and they were going away for a mini-break in a few days’ time. I think we managed to get the world set to rights anyway – on our way home we received an anxious message from other family members who assumed we had been captured by the white slave trade as we had left the house several hours ago and not returned. This afternoon, I was full of good intentions to clear up some of the clutter on the desk in my study but what with a good reading of the newspapers, coupled with a trawl through some of the car reviews I have collected over the days, it didn’t actually get done. Incidentally, reading car reviews is always a slightly frustrating experience, particularly if one is trying to compare performance characteristics (it’s a man thing!) when each review seems to be referring to a somewhat different specification or trim level to the one you have intended to purchase.

It looks as though the long-awaited thunderstorms are in the vicinity but it just possible that we may be on their outer fringes. The members of my family have a special app on their iPads that enables them to track the distribution of thunderstorms as they progress across the country – if they develop in intensity, we love to sit in our porch and enjoy the intensity of the storm. Evidently, we have to chase around and make fast all of our windows before the rain strikes.

It now looks as if the government’s ‘world-beating’ test-and-trace regime is having to undergo significant revision. Some 6,000 staff are being stood down (and many of them had nothing to do anyway) whilst a significant number amongst the remaining 12,000 will be deployed to assist the local authority public teams where the real expertise has been located all along – at least for a century! The Serco scheme is starting to look more and more like ‘contracts for one’s friends’ instead of a serious and professional attempt to hunt the virus down as is happening in other societies such as Germany (not to mention the far eastern economies of South Korea from who we could have learnt many a lesson)

Today’s date is the date of my mother’s birthday and although she died some 13 years ago, the date of your mother’s birthday is always something that is lodged in your memory (after years of buying cards and presents). As I walked down to Bromsgrove for the Sunday newspapers this morning, I was wondering to myself whether there was any saying or piece of advice that I remember my mother giving to me. There was just one piece of advice, given if we had a family argument or tiff over something, which was:  ‘Do not let the sun go down on your anger‘. Actually, over the years I think this is quite a sound piece of advice and so I did a quick Google search as it sounded vaguely biblical (as indeed it was as it was apparently said by St. Paul). My mother was always quite concerned with the political process – in fact when she died, I found an examination paper for some Local Government examinations she must have taken called ‘Civics’ and many of the questions were just as pertinent today e.g. ‘How does Central Government control the spending of local authorities‘ and questions of a similar ilk. Whenever there was a general election as there was in 1955, she felt it was her duty to go down to the village hall (for the village in which we were then living) to ask questions of the prospective candidates. As a local government officer, she always relished the opportunity to act as a ‘poll clerk’ as it was the only way in which a local government officer could earn a smidgeon of extra cash on top of one’s normal pay. Although she started off life as a Conservative, she increasingly voted Liberal (Liberal Democrat) in her later years and finished off stuffing envelopes for the Liberal party candidate. Eventually, as an inmate of a residential home in her later years, she caused quite a kerfuffle when she insisted that she be included on the electoral register and be given a postal ballot. I think that she felt incredibly strongly that whilst women had fought so hard for the vote, then it certainly had to be exercised on every available occasion. Although she could by no means be described as a feminist of any description, I think that she took her part in the political process very seriously.

In the park, we met with an elderly lady who was a regular visitor (in her wheelchair) to the park on an almost daily basis and she showed us a leaflet that she acquired from the local authority (and now available on the web) which details how the great and the good of Bromsgrove’s past were buried in Bromsgrove cemetery and how to find their graves. This is something we might do if at a really loose end! On our way home, we bumped into our Italian friend and continued our conversation of a few days back relating especially to family matters. And then a friend turned up for a Sunday lunch so we continued on our way in what was turning out to be quite a humid day. The weather has continued like this most of the afternoon and we are hopeful that there may be some dramatic thunderstorms (and rain) in the next few days to save me the trouble of watering various pot plants. I even watered my sickly Hornbeam first thing this morning to coax it back into better health.

The new cases of COVID-19 have topped 1,000 for the first time since June so this must be a source of concern. According to a headline on Sky News, ‘Boris Johnson {has been) told teachers and students must get weekly COVID-19 tests for the safe return of schools‘, which advice he almost certainly ignore. For a start, we have to have a much more reliable ‘Test and Trace’ regime rather than the present (private sector) disaster run by Serco and this looks like being a long way off. Apparently, even staff in care homes have only been tested once since the start of the epidemic and a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. There has been a hint dropped by the Government, though, that in the very last analysis pubs would have to be closed in preference to schools if there were to be a resurgence of the virus, which looks more and more likely.

Today turned out to be a different sort of Saturday for all sorts of reasons. Temperatures were again on the very warm side as we are in the middle of a ‘mini-heatwave’ and it is predicted to last for a couple of days more before breaking down into thunderstorms and rain (we hope!) This morning, Meg and I attended a service at St. Mary’s, Harvington which is completely adjacent to Harvington Hall. There is also a Georgian chapel built within the grounds and even an attic ‘church’ where mass was held in mediaeval times cleverly disguised so that it looked as though it was an extension to a children’s nursery – and priestly vestments could be quickly hidden away in the event of a raid searching out Catholic ‘heretics’. The service itself was delightful – there were a dozen of us and we were well socially distanced from each other, sanitised, masked and/or visored up. There was a very intimate feel to the whole experience and I suppose it must have been like this in the early days of the Christian church where congregations would assemble in each other’s houses and the priest would come to them rather than the reverse. We suspect we will repeat the experience next weekend as we rather enjoyed the aesthetics of it all. Harvington Hall is only 7 miles distant from Bromsgrove so we drove down to the park and hunted for an elusive car-parking space which we eventually found. We were delighted, though, to meet up again with an old acquaintance of ours who has two twin baby girls (growing up fast) and as we had not met up for a week or so, we had to catch up with each other’s news. She had started work again when the children went to a nursery but as a speech therapist, she found to be enormously kitted out with a lot of PPE since she was last at work and this coupled with a new boss made the whole experience of work seem very different to the pre-COVID-19 days. Then we met another mother complete with a dog (sort of a mixture between a poodle and something else) and her children who were helping to walk and train the dog which still a puppy. We exchanged some stories, as we typically do, and then made for home on what was becoming quite a humid morning.

The big political dilemma facing the government whether to press ahead with a forced reopening of the schools in three weeks time still rumbles on. Tonight, the position seems to be as polarised as ever. One the one hand, Boris Johnson and the rest of the government machine are arguing that it is only ‘morally right’ that children should receive the education that they deserve. At one level, it is hard to disagree with these sentiments and is evidently the case that the absence of any formalised education for so many months is causing real damage to the life chances (and the mental health) of a whole generation of children of school age. But the difficulty is this – we know that the incidence of the virus amongst school children is remarkably low. But what we do not know is whether the school population could act as a vector for the transmission of the virus to older people whilst they themselves seem unaffected. As well as school children, we also have to be aware of the Further Education colleges and other institutions catering for adolescents there is much more uncertainty. The crux of the argument is that the reopening of schools is actually the reconnection of several diverse networks and, once reconnected, the virus may well become much more rampant. A former chief scientific adviser to the government is of the opinion that the epidemic will almost certainly worsen once schools are made to reopen, despite the measures that they are undertaking unless compensatory mechanisms can be sought to offset these. The argument most often heard is ‘pubs’ or ‘schools’ – will any government dare to shut down all of the pubs and restaurants if it is the case that the reopening of the schools is generating more opportunities for the virus to replicate?

Today was a day in which I had to get going quite early as we knew that the Waitrose delivery van was due to deliver our weekly groceries sometime between 8-9 am and I had no real desire to be seen in my pyjamas (although I am sure the delivery drivers have seen far worse than this). Anyway, all of my ablutions were performed upon time and the groceries were duly received and put away before I made an order to secure a slot in three weeks time (it’s a way of gaming the Waitrose system to get the slots you require) Earlier in the day, I had emailed the chapel attached to Harvington Hall ay which we attended an open-air service last Sunday  as it was intimated to us that there might be space in the chapel, although it was small, if I made an application by email for the 10 am service on Saturday. I duly sent off my email and was pleasantly surprised to get a reply later on the morning inviting us to an ‘allocated’ slot this Saturday. When you send emails off to a general mailbox rather than a specific person, you are never quite sure it will be actually looked at but indeed it was so that will be a new experience for us tomorrow. This morning, we walked down to the park on what was quite a pleasant day only to have our elevenses interrupted by a short, sharp shower of rain which we think was completely unforecast. We took shelter under the branches of a large weeping willow which was fortunately only a few feet distant and the shower was over in 2-3 minutes after which we made our way home in brilliant sunshine.

Last night, as I was still having problems with the experimental implementation of WordPress I decided to be bold and take the bull by the horns and implement an entirely new version of WordPress. This I did quite successfully and easily but I made sure it was in a completely different folder to my other version and I also implemented the ‘Single’ edition rather than the ‘Multiple’ edition which allows you to have several sites going simultaneously so that you can flick between them. This had seemed quite a good idea at the time but I found it very confusing whether I was operating in a ‘Super Administrator’ role or a ‘User’ role because some things worked (or didn’t work) according to which mode you were in. So I decided to keep life simple this time and I managed to successfully reproduce the three pages that I had already composed in my experimental version. I now just had one more important problem to fix which I managed to do this afternoon. I particularly wanted to have the facility (as I do in this blog) to be able to choose the font face and font size direct from the editor menu (in the style of Microsoft Word) I eventually found the solution which was I needed to install a plugin called ‘TinyMCE Advanced‘ which enables me to do just that – so now I have things more or less configured just the way I want them so that I can carry on with more experimental pages as I have the essentials in place, including a menu to navigate between them. In a day or so, I will delete the original experimental version and stick with this one which I am calling my ‘Domestic’ version as I will use it primarily to communicate more domestic things such as gardening, woodwork etc. I believe that what I am doing the IBM personnel used to call around playing around in a ‘sandbox’ i.e. you can do whatever you like with experimental data sets or packages to gain knowledge and experience of them before you move onto a more formal implementation. Anyway, it is rather nice to know that if I make a complete ‘pig’s ear‘ of everything I now have the knowledge and skills to start off with a brand new installation.

After the lawns had received their weekly mow, I set to work constructing a little framework around the base of my hornbeam tree which is showing some signs of heat distress (i.e. leaves turning brown) So having constructed a little wooden framework around it about 6″ high, I then filled it with a bag of topsoil enriched with ‘Blood, Fish and Bone‘ fertiliser, gave it 10 litres of water and then protected the whole lot with a thick layer of forest bark. After several days of watering, I will be able to judge whether or not my efforts have been crowned with success.

On our way down to the park, we met our Italian friend who we have not seen for several days now so it was wonderful to have a general chat. We often chat about family matters and today was no exception. As we have shared interests in classical music, we often exchange stories. There are many stories told about Sir Thomas Beecham, who was somewhat misogynistic but also very witty. Two of his most famous asides were these. Once he described the sound of the harpsichord as ‘two skeletons copulating on a tin roof‘ whilst on another occasion he declared that ‘the British may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes‘. The opera story that sticks in my memory is a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in which the stage directions dictated that a swan should glide serenely across the stage and the leading tenor should step onto it and make his exit gracefully into the wings. On this particular occasion, there was evidently something amiss with the mechanism propelling the swan and after a few horrible grinding noises and a long delay, the swan shot across the stage far too fast to be caught and disappeared at the other end. What to do? With great presence of mind, the tenor leant forward to the orchestra and said in a loud stage whisper so that all of the audience could here ‘Pssst! What time is the next swan?‘ This defused the tension of the moment – the audience laughed and then applauded as it was the final scene in the opera. Would that we would all have the presence of mind to something appropriate when disaster strikes!

We have some assistance in the garden once a month and the husband and wife team are very knowledgeable – hence if I have any problems I don’t hesitate to consult with them. Today, I asked them to have a look at my fairly newly planted hornbeam tree of which the leaves have started to turn brown which could be a sign of drought or could be a virus. They were able to give me some reassurance that as the tree was planted on a slope then it was probable that the roots were not getting enough water so I need to do what I did (with great success) to my Tilia Cordata in which I built up a little rampart and then packed it well with good topsoil (and fortunately, I recently bought for myself a supply of the same for another planting job) so I know what is to be done in the next day or so. This afternoon as it was a bit gloomy and cloudy, I ran off several reviews of the new car that we anticipate taking delivery of in November, and in particular, I wanted to know how the internal dimensions compared with our present car. Although the new car will be 11″ shorter most of the internal space remains the same or, at the most, there is only 1″ of difference. For example, there is only 0.1″ difference in the front legroom between our present and the new car which is why in our test run yesterday it felt almost exactly the same.

Tonight, the fear is being expressed that if a second wave of the virus were to develop, the NHS should learn the lessons of this spring and not become just a COVID-19 service. 1 million operations were cancelled (heart surgery, cancer operations) and one cancer specialist hs argued that if left untreated, then there could be anything between 7,000-35,000 deaths in the next year. The ONS (Office of National Statistics) has already calculated that there have been 12,000 ‘excess’ deaths in recent months as treatment regimes have been cancelled or postponed to deal with the COVID-19 cases and as people have been reluctant to present themselves for treatments they would have done in more normal times.

Another cloudy and somewhat indeterminate day and we had been a little delayed for our morning walk because I was up late last night tweaking my WordPress installation to get it the way I wanted. It’s almost there but there are still one or two little problems to be ironed out. We needed to get home early and have a fairly early lunch because this afternoon we were due to go and look at the new car that we had promised ourselves. As you might imagine, the showroom was quite a revelation. Evidently, although we felt inclined to shake hands with the salesman, that was evidently out of bounds so we donned our masks, sanitised our hands and sat down to wait for our turn (having arrived about 20 minutes earlier by giving us some getting lost time) As it happens, exactly the colour and model that we would wish to have was parked in front of the showrooms, so we could have a quick preview of it before we started our discussions. Then came the test drive which was extraordinary in its own way. Because of the COVID-19 regulations that the garage had imposed upon itself, no one could accompany us so we jumped into the vehicle and drove off into the sunset (or we could have done) As we didn’t know the immediate environs of this new garage, we did not want to venture very far less we got lost but we were directed by the salesman to a road with some ‘speed bumps’ on it which is quite a useful way to test a car out, actually. We were delighted with our test run because the model we have chosen seems almost but not quite as roomy as our present vehicle and the boot, whilst smaller, was still pretty spacious. One particular feature of this model of car is what they call ‘Magic Seats’ which means that you can take the two back seats and then tip them up, cinema-seat style, and lock them into position which then releases a whole block of space which goes from the car floor to its ceiling (incredibly useful is we had to transport any largish objects, particularly tall ones, in the back which is more than likely.) We then completed the formalities, got sold a package which includes paint protection, interior leather protection, car mats, a boot liner and a full tank of petrol – all in all, we came home feeling pretty pleased with the excellent level of service we feel we will receive from this garage in the future. At the end of the day, we feel that the level of service provided by the garage is much more important than details like how fast you can go from 0-60mph (which always struck me as a vacuous sort of statistic).

Tonight, it was reported that both France and Spain had recorded about 1700 new COVID-19 infections apiece (about 800 in the UK) So it does look as though both France and Spain who came out of their own lockdowns a week pr so ago are now starting to appreciate the start of a second wave on infection by the virus. Does this mean that we might follow their trajectory in a couple of weeks time? According to the MPs on the home affairs committee, having no special border measures for people arriving from Spain and France during February and March, and only having voluntary self-isolation measures for travellers from Italy until March 13, was a “serious error and had a material impact on the number of cases arriving in the UK, and on the pace and scale of the epidemic”. And in the meantime, the epidemiologist behind the government’s national lockdown warned that reopening secondary schools could see the coronavirus reproduction rate increase “by as much as a half”. Of course, in a few weeks time, children will be returning to school and the interesting political question will be to ascertain what other measures will need to be put into place to counteract the negative effect that the schools’ reopening could well generate.

Today was one of those slightly indeterminate days when nothing seemed to go quite right! The weather was trying its best to be unhelpful as there seemed to be a layer of cloud as far as the eye could see, so there was a slightly ‘muggy’ feel to the day although we were spared any rain. Our morning trip to the park was uneventful with its normal quota of joggers (not very many). mothers with young children on little bikes (lots) and a few oldies making up the numbers. Social life in the park does show some signs of organisation, however, as every so often there is a grouping of individuals obviously meeting by prior arrangement and equipped with light outdoor chairs that are easily transported in the boot of a car and thence over the grass. We now equip ourself on our morning venture with a little folding stool which is primarily aluminium and hence extraordinarily light and we use this a miniature table which helps us when we are pouring the coffee from our flask.

At lunchtime, I engaged in a culinary experiment making lemon chicken. These results were fine but with a lemon type sauce, some raw slices of lemon skewered to the chicken thighs and a liberal helping of concentrated lemon juice from a bottle, we might have overdone the lemony bit (but I will know next time). This afternoon, I thought I would install WordPress in my newly acquired webspace and all seemed to be going well at first. But then it became apparent that a crucial component, the PlugIns which is an important part of WordPress functionality would not allow one to install any new Plug-ins. After fiddling about with very settings to no avail, I went on the web and found a YouTube video detailing the four things to be done in order to get things put right (none of these worked!) Having deleted everything I could see, then a complete reinstall seemed to be the answer except that the package would not allow me to do that in the vacated webspace (probably down to some hidden and inaccessible file components). It seemed that a complete reinstall into different folders might work and this seemed to get things half working but after several hours of fiddling (not helped by comments read on the web which said ‘I have tried for two weeks to make this work and it will not‘ I was left with a half-installed package in which some things work but others do not (for reasons that are beyond me) It all ought to be so simple, but in practice there seem to be hidden problems which I do not know how to resolve. I will try again tomorrow when I am a little less stressed and rested!

Tonight the big political battleground seems to be whether or not it should be ‘pubs or schools’ in about three weeks time as the reopening of the schools will add significantly to the levels of social activity. On the one hand, we have the likes of Isabel Oakeshott, a  very right-wing commentator on Sky’s review of the daily press saying that all schools should resume as fully open as possible for the sake of the most disadvantaged children who have been deprived of education for the last six months. On the other hand, there is a considerable groundswell of opinion from parents, teachers and healthcare specialists who indicate that opening up schools is not just about the infectivity of school children (which is indeed low) but the increased social interactions (mothers dropping children off to school and then going on to work) not to mention the non-teaching adults necessary to make a school run efficiently which all provide new avenues in which the virus can thrive. This particular argument will run and run – the government say that  ‘without a doubt’ that schools will re-open but I think a battle royal lies ahead (particularly if a school reopens and then some cases of COVID-19 rears its ugly head and what happens then?)