It is interesting who we meet in the park and today was no exception. A lady wheelchair user who visited the park every day had also noticed us frequently in the park so we struck up a conversation. She was Bromsgrove born and bred so she knew a lot about the local area, particularly as she had in the past visited our local library in order to research its history. She was very knowledgeable as you would expect about the park and its history and reckoned that it was her who gave our resident heron its colloquial name of ‘Henry’ – she also seemed to be able to identify each of the many trees which probably escapes most people. After taking our leave of her and on the way home, we got caught in a tremendously short shower. However, as providence would have it, a large overhanging tree provided some shelter and some of our ‘regular’ friends caught up with us and, as we had not seen them for several days, we exchanged news and gossip about things. As a result of all of this, we got home fairly late and it was rather too late to start cooking a full-scale dinner at that time so we had an easily prepared snack of cheese and biscuits which is always a good standby in an emergency. In the afternoon, I decided to give some of my papers a bit of a tidying up. Principally, I was as involved in downloading and reading some motoring correspondents’ reviews of the car we are going to have a look at on Wednesday. I was trying to find some statistics on the actual dimensions of the boots in our current and intended vehicle but the reviews would only glorify how many litres of space they both had. Evidently, other people had tried to ask the same question because eventually, I read an exasperated post from someone who evidently been on the same quest as myself with the advice ‘go along to a local dealer armed with a tape measure’ (which I probably will).

I have also been doing some preparatory reading about the themes and editors that I need to utilise when setting up a WordPress installation for the first time. Why this is quite important is that in the early stages of a project, one can make decisions that profoundly influences the rest of what is to follow so I wanted to make sure that I was not going to make any crass mistakes before I started. So this occupied the best part of the afternoon but at least I am a little more clear in my own mind for when I get started. Having been used to hand-coding all of my webpages using HTML, it will be quite a learning curve for me to utilise a tool where a lot of the decisions are automated for me but the results might look a little more professional and less ‘clunky’.

According to tomorrow’s Guardian: ‘In a letter to England’s chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser, nearly 70 clinical virologists say they have been sidelined by the government and excluded from discussions on how to respond to the pandemic.’  Experts say decisions apparently being made on ideological grounds and the whole expertise of virologists currently working in the public sector has been either ignored or by-passed in favour of private sector ‘solutions’ that often have found to be inadequate and, in any case, does not link any data back to the health records of individuals or any other NHS data systems. This means that the whole expertise of virologists working in the public health sector has been systematically ignored in favour of private-sector providers. This is a really serious case of what happens when pure ideology (‘private sector good, public sector bad‘) gets in the way of rational decision making and is a disturbing comment upon the ‘modus operandi‘ of the current government in dealing with the pandemic crisis.

Today was going to be a different pattern to our normal Sundays. I walked down to collect our normal supply of Sunday newspapers and got back home by 9.00 am. Then I made up our normal supply of ‘elevenses’ and we departed by car for a church service at Harvington Hall (a beautiful moated manor house originally built in the 1300s and then extensively rebuilt in the 1500s) which is only some seven miles to the south of us. As well as our comestibles we took with us a folding stool and a folding chair so that we could attend an open-air service which started at 10.30, although we had arrived by 10. A great deal of thought had evidently gone into the preparations for the service which is held in the gardens each Sunday and where we all suitably socially distanced! We think we recognised a few emigres from our normal church but as all of our faces were hidden behind masks it was possible to make some mistakes in greeting people. The service as very well conducted and although we had some cloudy moments, the weather was generally kind to us as well. We were greeted warmly (as was everyone) and we were invited to join a smaller band of the congregation for a service inside the actual chapel next Saturday at 10.00 am in the morning. We thought we would give this a go as well. By a strange sort of coincidence, there was a sort of linkage between the gospel reading and our own situation in the garden as the reading was the ‘feeding of the 5,000’ where the crowd was urged to sit down in ranks on the grass in order to be fed.

This blog is written using WordPress, the most popular blogging software in the world but it was only when I bought a couple of books to explore its potentialities that I realised that it was an excellent web-design as a blogging tool. I have a variety of web spaces for different purposes and on one of them, WordPress is provided as a ready-to-load add-in. I thought I would like to experiment and wondered whether to set up a second installation – but then realised that this could really mess up my existing ‘blog’ with a new one. So to cut a long story short, I decided to purchase a bit of extra space at a very reasonable price from a provider with whom I have been working for some 12 years and with who gives a completely individualised service in that they will help you set things up and then help you out if things go wrong. I knew how to set up a website with your own domain name attached to it so I knew the drill. This involves (a) writing a page-holder page for the new site (b) purchasing the name you want to have for the new website – I utilise an American firm which is cheaper than the UK firms (c) actually purchasing the webspace itself (d) going back to your domain name supplier to specify the nameservers for your site (e) configuring an FTP entry so that  (using Filezilla) you can easily transfer the relevant files back and forth. Fortunately, I managed to do all of this without a hitch and got things up and running in about 30 minutes, about which I was pleased. In a day or so, I will then activate the new WordPress installation and get playing to my heart’s content!

It looks as though we are deep into analysis time regarding what has actually gone wrong in the COVD-19 crisis in the UK contributing to the worst excess deaths in Europe. As the smoke of battle is gradually clearing, it is becoming more evident that there is no one really simple (and simplistic) explanation of the problem we have in the UK. But we are now pretty certain that we entered the lockdown about two weeks too late (probably doubling the number of deaths) and started to come out of the lockdown about two weeks too early. The upshot is that levels of the virus are quite extensive across the whole of the community and therefore it doesn’t take much to trigger new infections (and Manchester as a whole is now declared as a ‘major incident’ with multiple hotspots in the rise of the infection rates) Two continuing problems are the fact that the younger generation seems to be acting as though the crisis is largely over and the predominance of the virus in areas of high social deprivation (often correlating with poor housing, poor air quality, a population with low skill levels who cannot ‘work from home’).

It was a cooler and much more pleasant day today after the intense and humid heat of yesterday. I started off by getting my Waitrose order in place for about three weeks time and then Meg and I engaged in our traditional promenade. On our journey, we met up with an old Waitrose friend who we knew was going off to France with a lifelong friend and had just got back a few days ago. She seems to have a wonderful time there, so much so that she may be returning in a couple of weeks time or so. All the flights and airport arrangements seem to have gone exactly according to plan and she certainly looked fit and rested after her first vacation for some time. It makes us wonder when the rest of us might enjoy the same because with the recent upturn in the incidence of infection travelling almost anywhere looks somewhat problematic. Upon reading my emails in the morning, I learned that one of my former colleagues from the Univerity of Winchester had decided to take an early retirement one year early to provide employment for a younger colleague and had communicated her decision to the rest of the group of us who meet regularly (we call ourselves ‘The Old Fogies‘ but this name may change!) My previous colleagues and I all sent emails of congratulation and support along the lines of ‘better go now instead of being declared redundant‘ but evidently Winchester, in common with universities up and down the land, are feeling the immense financial pressure imposed by the pandemic and are having to cut their coat according to their cloth accordingly (this is the politest way of putting it but least said, soonest mended as my old mother used to say).

After lunch and a good pore over the Saturday newspapers, we went for a little toddle around the garden where I did some gentle pruning of the plants I have located on my ‘high’ plant holder outside my study window. The Alstroemeria purchased recently from Waitrose is in full bloom about which I am delighted – I am hopeful that keeping it and its neighbours well-tended, watered and fed will keep it that way for the rest of the summer.

There seems to be one story dominating the media at the moment but presented in various guises. This stage of handling the end to the lockdown has got to be handled with a sure and deft political touch, not to mention intelligence and a high degree of political skill. The issue highlighted by the scientists appears to be we are just about at the limit for what, as a society, we can afford to be ‘unlocked’ with the amount of virus certainly circulating in the community. There seem to be two factors at work here but this is somewhat speculative. The first is that the younger elements of the population out ‘socialising; either in or near pubs do not appear to be exhibiting anything like the required degree of social distancing (some of the scenes of youngsters in Soho, London and in Manchester have to be seen to be believed) A second factor is the fact that many people are now meeting up within each other’s houses and the fact that this weekend is the Muslim ‘Eid‘ (equivalent to Christmas Day) has come at an unfortunate time. The massive political dilemma for the government is this – if the advice of the scientists is to be followed and we are already at the limit of what is sensible given the amount of virus in the community, then does a straight political decision have to be taken along the lines of ‘Either get the children back in their schools or the pubs/restaurants opening for business – but not both‘ This dilemma is particularly acute for the Tory party who desperately want the schools to be open so that young mothers can back to work but have traditionally also represented the interests of the brewers in the UK. So it comes to a straight political choice of ‘children’s education’ versus ‘keep the pubs open‘ You wouldn’t normally associate deft political skills with Boris Johnson (compared, say, to Nicholas Sturgeon) but if he doesn’t get the next week or so of trade-offs absolutely right, then this could put paid to his premiership.

And so for the hottest day of the year – it was certainly very warm as we strolled down to the park this morning but gradually got more glowering, overcast and humid as the day progressed (a thunderstorm would have been excellent but one was forecast only in the East). We always like to engage people in conversation in the park. not least the local authority workers who have to maintain it. Today, one of these workers had the unenviable job of emptying all of the ‘parcels’ of dog excrement that are put in special bins throughout the park. Notwithstanding all of this, we mutually sympathised with each about the trio of noisy teenagers who occupied a park bench and played execrable music at maximum volume before becoming bored and wandering off. We eventually got into a conversation about ‘Henry’ our resident heron with a club foot who still manages to sustain himself with presumably some kind of small fish who populate the pond and then we roamed over the kinds of animals we had all kept in our youth (this ranged from hamsters to rabbits to pigeons to ferrets) Without romanticising these categories of workers, I have often wondered how many people pass them by without a word of appreciation of how hard they work to keep the park pristine for us to enjoy.

As it was a Friday, it was ‘lawn mowing’ day and although I have a break in between the public communal areas (twice as large as our own formal garden) and our own formal garden, the humidity made the task not particularly pleasant. However, I did ensure that critical trees, plants and tubs received a good ration of water both first thing in the morning and also later on in the evening. I also had a chance to inspect some of the cuttings I had been trying to root and about 50% of them seem to have put down roots but I cannot necessarily identify what these cuttings are from (as I collected them from a walk down to Bromsgrove one Sunday morning some weeks ago) I was also pleasantly surprised to see that although my plum trees seem to have failed to produce any plums this year (unlike last year), the very aged damson trees at the end of the garden seem to be laden and producing fruit about a month earlier than they should. I am resisting the temptation to pick all of the fruit now but need to keep a careful eye on it so that it doesn’t get shed in any violent thunderstorms that might occur later in the year. The damsons get immediately processed and made into damson gin and then distributed to friends, families and anyone else I can think of!

The latest news on the ‘pause’ of the easing of the lockdown is disturbing, to put it mildly. As England’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty, speaking at the prime minister’s briefing on Friday, warned the data showed ‘we have probably reached near the limit or the limits of what we can do in terms of opening up society‘.He said it could mean ‘if we wish to do more things in the future, we may have to do less of some other things…The idea that we can open up everything and keep the virus under control is clearly wrong‘. Well, it could hardly be clearer than that. It is also interesting to note that other councils are considering following the lead of Sandwell and are considering introducing their own ‘trace-and-test’ regime because the service provided by Serco (the national scheme) clearly does not fit their needs and they have the best local knowledge (and the languages) to know what is going on in their own local areas.

Finally, a document released by Sage tonight is interesting (or frightening, depending upon your point of view). A document reveals that serious public disorder could “overwhelm all attempts” to control the coronavirus and “catastrophically” undermine the government’s recovery plans, scientists advising ministers have warned.

A paper written by a Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) sub-committee, and considered by SAGE itself on 2 July, said the current “volatile and highly complex situation” means Britain will face “grave challenges” in keeping public order during the COVID-19 pandemic. Any disorder could be “comparable or bigger in scale” than the 2011 London riots, the scientists warned, with military support likely to be required. And extreme right-wing groups are mobilising as never before. You read it here first!

A good fine day, today, as befits late July and there are promises that tomorrow may well be the hottest day of the summer. We had hoped that some of our friends might join us for tea in the garden late on in the afternoon but as it turned out they were both busy with other domestic commitments. As we were due to have a pest control firm to deal with our wasp’s nest we were felt that all had probably turned out for the best. In the morning before our walk, I busied myself getting the Waitrose order updated ready for delivery first thing in the morning. In order to do this, I have to mentally walk around the supermarket I used to frequent before the lockdown and then update my list accordingly. The Waitrose pattern involves selecting a slot done 12-14 days ahead, populating a shopping basket with a previous order and then updating it the day before it is due to be delivered. This might sound a little quirky but it seems to be the way that the regular customers get the best out of the system. After this, Meg and I enjoyed our normal walk to the park, only a little disconcerted that we met none of our usual friends and acquaintances for a chat. Once we got home. we acted on a text I had received from my Pilates teacher for classes to resume on 1st September. I was fortunate, I feel, to be one of the four enrolled in the face-to-face class (there were previously eight in our class) and the rest of the class will participate with us doing the exercises but via Zoom. How this is going to work, we shall have to wait and see – I had already taken the precaution of buying my own Pilates mat to take along with me.

It is that time, which comes round every three years when we are due to change our car. To be honest, we are not great car-enthusiasts, only wanting something that is ultra-reliable, gives us enough space for shopping and suitcases when we go on holiday (what is that?) and is easy to park. We are going to go for a Honda again as we have been more than satisfied with the Honda we have had for the last three years but we are going to go for a slightly different model because I particularly want a manual gearbox. I need to explain that I have never driven an automatic in my life and I do not intend to start now. Anyway, we have made an appointment for a test drive and have made an appointment to see one next Wednesday, so we will have to wait and see. We do not anticipate that we need to change until November (our changeover date) so we are getting things organised now in case we have to wait for our preferred colour which is sometimes the case. Enough of cars – except the YouTube reviews make them all sound wonderful but I am sure that there must be some quirks that are not to one’s liking.

In the late afternoon, our pest control man came round and did his stuff as we expected. This basically means that some extra strength powder is squirted from the end of a long lance into the wasp’s nest and the worker wasps get asphyxiated and then basically die as they do not want to enter the nest and so there is no work for them to do (so it was explained to us) If all is not well at the end of a week, then the firm will come to give a final fatal ‘puff’.

Boris Johnson had previously intimated that there 30 areas in the country where the virus was ‘bubbling up’. Tonight we learn that the whole of Greater Manchester, East Lancashire and some parts of West Yorkshire are in a semi-lockdown – people are being forbidden to meet in groups in each other’s houses. Whether this applies to parks and other open spaces, is uncertain. These measures are designed to combat a sudden rise to 846 new cases (the highest total for a month) and a sure sign that the virus is still out there in the community but I am sure the vast majority of the population will be confused by the absence of any particularly clear message or guidance this evening.

Today was a somewhat cloudy and blustery sort of day but with enough sunshine to make our walk pleasant and with the promise of more sunshine to come (although it did not quite materialise) We are hopeful of better weather tomorrow because we are hoping that some friends may be able to call around so that we can have a pleasant afternoon tea in the garden. We have been waiting for some better weather for some time now before we could have friends around but we need to make sure that we have a few sunny days in a row to ensure that we do not get rained off. In the late morning, we discovered that we appear to have an infestation of a wasp’s nest in the eaves of one of our dormer windows. As it happens, our next-door neighbour has just had to deal with a similar infestation and had negotiated a good price with a local company. So we got onto them and arranged for a visit sometime tomorrow. As this has happened a few years ago we know what to expect. An industrial strength pesticide will be inserted by a long lance into the wasp nest site and then they receive a blast which should put paid to them. Most of these firms work in the same way because the infestation might not be completely killed off (the oldest die but the younger and fitter ones survive – sounds familiar from somewhere) Generally the firm will come back within the quoted price to finish off the job if all is not clear after a fortnight. So we shall await our phone call tomorrow and see what happens.

There are a few interesting political stories that are springing to the fore this evening.  One of these, as reported by Sky News, is that No. 10 (Downing Street) is looking for a new spokesperson to smash the system of the lobby (a cabal-type group of accredited journalists who get privileged information on the condition that they do not disclose the exact source) The Sky news ‘take’ on this is that for a salary in excess of £100k the appointed figure will soon become a controversial and much-lampooned figure. If we look over the pond to see the variety of Press spokesman deployed by President Trump, they invariably leave because they find the demands of defending the indefensible, or the quasi-lying that they have to undertake quickly proves too much for them – unless they are already an outstanding political journalist, which is very unlikely. It goes without saying that they would have to be an ardent Brexiteer!

The second story is that a local council (Sandwell in the West Midlands) has got such little faith in the central government’s test-and-trace regime that they are actually setting up their own, independent of the centre. One has to say that at the very least, they will ‘know their own patch’; and will also have access to the prominent languages (other than English) which are present in the area. I would imagine that they can only be more successful than the Serco, sub-contracted, call-centre staffed outfits can possibly hope to be.

The third story is one that I heard on Radio 4 this morning – it was an interview with the European director of the World Health Organisation who was arguing, along with many others, that we are not so much dealing with a second wave of the pandemic as the dying members of the first wave, only to be predicted when the lockdown is eased. The analogy that I have in my mind is that once a major forest fire is brought under control, there are always a lot of little ‘brush fires’ along the perimeters of the original conflagration that have to be dealt with. Such is what I think we are actually seeing.

BBC2’s NewsNight this evening conducted an interesting investigation looking at how scientific advice had been used to justify policy in dealing with the pandemic. But nowhere could they find any evidence that the public would not tolerate a long lockdown and therefore it was prudent to delay the start of lockdown for as long as possible. It looks as though politicians and scientists had a ‘groupthink’ about how long a lockdown would be politically possible and ascribed this view to behavioural science – they then claimed to be ‘following the science’ for what was essentially a political judgement. We have been here before – one is reminded how elderly men in mediaeval times would minutely the bodies of typically young virginal women who had been accused of witchcraft for any warts or skin imperfections and then use these as ‘evidence’ that that was how the devil had entered the bodies of the young women thus providing the source of their witchcraft. You can always find what you are looking for if you have the right mindset!

Today was a much finer day than yesterday and although a trifle windy, so much more of a pleasant day for our daily walk to the park. There we met some of our old Waitrose friends by prior arrangement and spent a pleasant half-hour or so, mainly talking about cooking (about which I needed some advice from a much better cook). After they had left us, we got into a conversation with another couple of regular bench-occupiers talking about the ways in dogs (and cats) can occasionally dominate the house and make it their own (This is only theoretically true of Miggles, our adopted cat, as we never allow her into the house and, in truth, she is much more of an outdoor rather than than a lying-by-the-kitchen-hearth type of animal). 

I have been trying to get my head around the exact causes of dispute between the UK and Spain over the application of quarantine regulations for travellers arriving (or arriving back) into the UK from Spain. Often, though, the figures are not comparable but here are some data I have gleaned from various sources:

While the outbreak remains under control in many parts of Spain, certain areas – in particular Catalonia in the north-east, which includes the city Barcelona, and the neighbouring region of Aragón – have seen a huge spike in infections.

According to data from the Spanish government, as of Monday, the infection rates in the Balearic and Canary Islands were 9.22 and 7.06 per 100,000 respectively.

The same data showed infection rates in Catalonia, which includes Barcelona, was 132.4 per 100,000, and 28.21 in Madrid.

Latest seven-day rates: July 21-27 (per 100,000)

Austria    10.3. Belgium  19.0. Denmark  4.6. France 8.7. Germany 4.6. Italy 2.8. Netherlands 7.1. Portugal 14.9. Spain 29.7.  UK. 15.0

[Latest coronavirus news as of 5 pm on 28 July]

Europe is starting to see signs of a second wave, says UK prime minister

UK prime minister Boris Johnson today said Europe is starting to see signs of a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. He said it is vital that people quarantine themselves when returning to the UK from places abroad where there are outbreaks. Johnson mentioned the government’s recent reintroduction of a 14-day quarantine requirement for travellers returning from Spain, and added: “We will continue, throughout the summer, to take such action where it is necessary.” Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez described the UK’s new rules and recommendations as “unjust” arguing that in most parts of Spain the prevalence of Covid-19 is lower than in the UK. Some parts of Spain, including the regions of Catalonia and Aragón, have seen a large uptick in infections recently. The rate of infection in Spain as a whole is 47.2 cases per 100,000 people, compared to 15 in the UK, according to the latest figures from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

A growing number of European countries are grappling with recent rises in coronavirus cases. Today the head of Germany’s public health agency, Lothar Wieler said he is very concerned by rising infections. “We don’t know yet if this is the beginning of a second wave but of course it could be,” Wielder said at a press conference. Belgium’s prime minister Sophie Wilmès announced a series of new restrictions on Monday, following a significant spike in infections and warned of a potential second lockdown.

As you can see, the UK government and several other European governments are starting to get very concerned that we may be in the earliest stages of the second wave of COVID-19. It appears that after the lockdowns were eased, then rates have started to rise right across all European societies and the speculation at the moment is that is largely the younger population who are not self-distancing and using precautions such as face coverings. Of course, the number of travellers on would-be holiday destinations does not help the situation (August is the most popular month for holidays and we are only three days away from August)

Today was a cloudy, wet and windy day and enough to make one thoroughly miserable – however, the longer-range weather forecast indicates that a high pressure in on its way so the weather should improve dramatically later on in the week. Before our daily walk to the park, we received a wonderful text from the relatives of our old friend, Clive, who sadly passed away a month or so back. They gave us details of where his ashes were to be buried in a local cemetery and as soon as the weather improves (in a day or so) we will make a little pilgrimage there and pay our last respects to him. In the meanwhile, Meg and I undertook our daily journey to collect our newspapers and have a wander in the park but today we were confined to the bandstand of which we were the only occupants. We espied one other dog walker and a lady in the far distance sporting an umbrella but that was the sole occupancy of the park this morning. For once, we were fairly pleased to get home this morning.

Most of the afternoon, I spent on technical work for this blog. The first and important task was to install a new plug-in which would act as a spam filter and so far it seems to have done its job most effectively. Then I installed another editor which allowed me to change the font of these posts to make it a bit larger and more readable to smaller devices than a computer. Although the various bits of advice available on the web gave me the option of tweaking the underlying CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) this did not achieve the desired effect so I ended up manually changing all of the 130 pages to the font and size that I wanted. As with all repetitive tasks, you get it down to seconds at a time once you get into the swing of things.

The government’s reaction to recent spikes of the coronavirus in Spain is receiving a lot of media attention. A very common view, if not a consensus, is that the government has panicked and adopted a blanket policy of asking everybody who has holidayed in Spain to self-quarantine for 14 days upon their return. Luckless individuals are having to hope that their employers are ‘sympathetic’ to the necessity to quarantine but whether this run to paying two weeks of wages is another matter. I have a completely untested theory that the government is secretly worried about hundreds? thousands? of Brits getting abroad and as they are on holiday they will do anything except socially distance, with the consequence that many Brits might actually infect each other irrespective of whatever country they happen to be in and then come home to infect the rest of the population. But notwithstanding all of this, I cannot personally see why the government’s newly imposed quarantine arrangements should not apply if you have been to the islands of Spain rather than the mainland – after all, I would suspect that, at a guess, the islands are responsible for half of the UK tourists and that would help to minimise any degrees of risk.

Lastly tonight, a COVID-19 item which comes under the heading ‘you couldn’t make it up if you tried‘ The government has awarded Serco a £45m contract for test-and-trace – it has subsequently emerged that Serco has outsourced this to 29 other companies and that 85% of those recruited to run this service are not employed directly by Serco. We have been here before and it appears that the government does not appear to have learned any lessons from Carillion’s collapse and other privatisation failures, where outsourcing companies subcontracted the majority of work. This means that accountability for the new contract has practically sunk without trace and is another pure example of the ways in which contracts are being handed out to private sector companies whose experience in this field is extremely limited rather than resources being given to the local authority health teams who know the techniques for dealing with infectious disease and whose track record is markedly better.

Today was set fair with no particular rain forecast so we had a pleasant walk to the park. On our way home, we were recognised by one of our erstwhile friends from church who often used to sit in the pew behind us and chat when we attended the service every Saturday evening. Whilst we were deep in conversation catching up on all of our ‘lockdown’ news and experiences, we were joined by two of more regular friends so we had a very animated conversation between the five of us. We were given the news that services in the open air have re-commenced each Sunday morning at Harvington Hall, which is just a few miles down the road. Harvington Hall is not a National Trust or English Heritage House but is owned by the Catholic archdiocese of Birmingham, being one of the centres of medieval Catholicism in the Midlands and it boasts the finest collection of ‘priest hides’ (where Catholic priests used to minister to the local population but were successfully hidden in the house during the Reformation when they hunted by the authorities) So we are resolved to all go next Sunday as social distancing is quite easy in the open air and we hope to see many more of our acquaintances then, assuming of course that the heavens have not opened on us to dampen our ardour. Just after we got home, our son and daughter-in-law arrived back home from their stay in Dorset where they seemed to have a restful and interesting time away for the last few days. It is our daughter-in-law’s summer holidays but she still has a lot of school organisation and planning to do whilst our son is still carrying on working from home as he has done since the start of the lockdown.

The rest of the day was spent quite peacefully enjoying a Sunday lunch, reading the Sunday newspapers and looking forward to the summary of the latest cricket Test Match between England the West Indies broadcast at 7.00 pm each evening. I normally only glance at the business news in the Sunday newspapers but I did read an interesting analysis how the chain of Pret-a-Manger had really lost its way since it had passed from initial business to various hotel and restaurant chains who had then sold it onto private equity owners. The impact of the article was to argue that private equity owners are only interested in ‘sweating the assets’ and milking the last drop of business and this is one explanation why Pret-A-Manger and similar businesses eventually meet their demise. I also read with a great deal of interest the account by Tim Shipman, the principal political correspondent of the Sunday Times wh0 always seems to be able to write some incredibly well-informed stories. This week he thought that privately No. 10 (Downing Street) is secretly fearing another Trump victory that might bind us into an incredibly unpopular ‘chlorinated chicken’ deal with the United States as well as being bounced into a much more hostile stance vis-a-vis China that might not be in the UK’s long term interests. (Just in passing, it seems incredible that in these days of Brexit negotiations we are falling out with the EU, the USA, Russia and ambiguous relationships with the US. Who are we going to trade with successfully, I ask myself?) Turning to HuffPost for some inside reporting of the current Brexit negotiations state of play, I read that a government analysis in November 2018 predicted that leaving without a trade deal would cause a 7.6% contraction in the economy, while leaving with an “average” free trade agreement would cause a 4.9% reduction in GDP, compared to the UK continuing as an EU member. There are already reports that the red tape businesses will need to navigate as a consequence of leaving the customs union could leave the UK with a £7bn bill. Of course, there is still room for a deal if there happens to be quite a lot of compromise on both sides but this might be one of those situations where the negotiations really do go to the wire i.e. not decided until hours of the final cut-off date/time. How much negotiation will go in August when most of the continent goes on holiday goes on holiday is hard to say so it makes September and October really critical months.

According to the weather forecast, a heavy band of rain was due to sweep across the Midlands mid-morning and so it proved. We waited until this pulse of rain had passed overhead and done its worst before we set off on our daily walk and although the morning as a whole was still extremely cloudy, at least we didn’t get rained upon. As you might expect, there were very few people in the park today apart from a few intrepid dog-walkers but we did run into some of our oldest friends from down the road, with whom we exchanged a few stories and jokes. They were off on their daily walk as well but I imagine they are well used to the rain by now. Once in the park, I deployed our National Trust portable stool as a kind of mini-table. Why I hadn’t thought of doing this a long time ago, I will never know but it made life a lot simpler (as I have to juggle hat, rucksack, coffee flask, biscuit container etc.). Once we got home, avoiding any showers, we consumed our Saturday lunch-time treat (some really high-quality sausages from Waitrose) and then I set forth to our local garden centre in order to buy some bags of topsoil. I acquired 4 bags at the price of £3.99 each and, out of interest, I looked for the price of the same on the web where you would pay three times this price. (I remember being caught this way before when I ordered a bulk of forest bark from a local supplier only to discover I could have bought the same considerably cheaper and in easier to manipulate 80-litre sacks from my local Asda store) When the weather improves the £65.00 worth of bulbs I acquired for a fiver will be planted out in some rectangular plant pots of which I have a stock and then arrange them strategically around the patio area for a splash of late summer colour.

This afternoon my order for simple face visors arrived for both Meg and myself. These are very simple arrangements and come with several replacement face visors and cost only a few pounds each – they are as simple to don as would be a pair of glasses and will actually fit on over your own glasses. It is unclear whether these constitute ‘face coverings’ within the letter of the relevant law and their effectiveness is as yet, untested – however, one Swiss study found that the wearers of face visors in a Swiss hotel become infected whereas the wearers of face masks did not, Like many things in the current crisis, one has to use a certain amount of one’s own discretion in all of this.

The big political story tonight is the fact that the coronavirus seems to be rearing its head again in various parts of Spain and particularly around Barcelona. The British government has now changed its travel advice for visitors to Spain which means that returning holidaymakers returning from Spain will now have to self-isolate for 15 days. In an ironic twist, this might even apply to Grant Shaps, the transport minister, who is reportedly on holiday in Spain. This will be a massive blow to the Spanish tourist industry as I suspect, many people who had intended a quick holiday break in Spain (including ourselves) will now decide not to bother.

Today, various facilities such as swimming pools and gyms, are now free to offer their services to the public, all with suitable precautions. However, many local authorities are thinking twice about opening up their facilities at all. If the facilities had not been well maintained in the years of austerity, then it might not be economic to re-open them again if this entails considerable investment. So it looks as though a fair proportion of these facilities (a bit like restaurants on the high street) will never open again which has all kinds of implications e.g. for teaching young people how to swim which is a critical life skill upon which their life might depend at some time in the future. As with so many areas of social life, we will shortly discover how many local businesses and services have actually managed to survive.