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?)

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!