{"id":1334,"date":"2020-11-18T21:03:12","date_gmt":"2020-11-18T21:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=1334"},"modified":"2020-11-18T21:03:12","modified_gmt":"2020-11-18T21:03:12","slug":"wednesday-18th-november-2020-day-247","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2020\/11\/18\/wednesday-18th-november-2020-day-247\/","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday, 18th November, 2020 [Day 247]"},"content":{"rendered":"

It has been one of those dark, gloomy days all day today – although mild and blustery, the rain seemed to threaten nearly all day and did arrive in some force during the afternoon. Nonetheless, we enjoyed our normal walk encompassing both collecting the newspapers and ending up in\u00a0the park on one of our\u00a0favourite\u00a0benches. The leaves are now falling apace as\u00a0you would expect in November and, on occasions, can prove a\u00a0little hazardous. This occurs when you have a\u00a0large flat leaf (e.g. from a horse chestnut tree) which then becomes flattened \u00a0to the ground under the trampling of many feet – with the\u00a0addition of a little moisture, they then become slimy underfoot and can send you flying if you do not take care. (In case this sounds a little extreme, Meg and I remember a guest lecturer from our Scraptoft Campus, De Montfort University days when a fit 28-year old dashed down the path because she was a little late and fell over.) She picked herself up and carried on but in the course of her lecture, she thought she was experiencing some pain in her left arm and\u00a0shoulder. Later, as an experienced nurse, she returned to\u00a0work and had a colleague examine her only to discover she had been nursing a broken collar bone. As it happens this is\u00a0emblazoned on my memory – so I treat large\u00a0flattened slimy leaves with a certain degree of respect!)<\/span><\/p>\n

Today being a Wednesday, I treated ourselves to a (by now) traditional curry. I suppose that having done\u00a0this approximately once a week for the last fifty years, it has become engrained into my psyche but the only variation to a\u00a0traditional curry that I make is a sliced and diced apple ( or pear) in the summer with a handful of\u00a0sultanas and a tablespoon of brown sugar. One of my\u00a0former colleagues said to me ‘Ah – I see you make\u00a0curry by the Arabic method<\/em>‘ but of course, I do not really know, apart from the fact that I have always done it this way.<\/span><\/p>\n

This afternoon, I busied myself gutting the\u00a0last of my pile of newspapers and getting on with some filing. In the late afternoon, I\u00a0Skyped<\/em> one of my old Hampshire friends who, like me, has been keenly following the political news and the\u00a0American elections. We\u00a0exchanged commiserations with each other as to what might occur if Donald Trump goes absolutely rogue in her last few weeks. I did do a\u00a0Google search wondering whether an insane president can be bypassed and found that there is a procedure,\u00a0albeit cumbersome, in the 27th amendment to the American constitution. I think the difficulty here is that the Vice President has to agree\u00a0whereas the existing VP says he is looking forward to a smooth transition towards the next Trump<\/em>\u00a0presidency. Apparently, the Democrats did think hard about this problem when Trump emerged from his COVID-19\u00a0episode declaring he was a ‘young man’ and other\u00a0non-sequiturs\u00a0but nothing came of\u00a0their attempts to institute a speedier procedure to deal with the removal of an evidently incapacitated president. So far, I have not seen any resurgence of this question in the press but if Trump’s behaviour becomes quite bizarre, then perhaps even the\u00a0American system might be stimulated to act.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is increasing concern in the UK political system about how to handle the Christmas period. The latest thinking (or is a deliberate leak from Downing Street?) is that the lockdown which is due to expire on December 2nd i.e.\u00a0in about two weeks time, will be extended by another month in exchange but as a ‘reward’ we will be allowed to have five days of relative relaxation over the Christmas period. Public opinion may be divided on this – I have heard two\u00a0contradictory views on how to let a late 80’s grandparent\u00a0experience Christmas. One view is to to forget about COVID-19 and let the elderly person enjoy one last Christmas with their family even at the risk of\u00a0contracting the virus and then dying shortly afterwards. The contrary view is to keep the lockdown extended, over Christmas if necessary, if it preserves the life of the elderly person until at least the first few\u00a0months of 2021. This is quite a difficult\u00a0judgement call but I suspect that government will opt for a month extra lockdown until, in effect, the New Year but allowing a little bit of licence over the Christmas\u00a0period (although it will\u00a0undoubtedly come at a\u00a0price)<\/span><\/p>\n

The\u00a0latest bit of advice (a bit late?) is to keep windows open for at least 15 minutes at\u00a0regular intervals throughout the day in order to\u00a0dilute the virus micro-particles which can stay in the atmosphere for some time as micro droplets. I am not sure whether the full import of this advice has been fully\u00a0thought through –\u00a0but I do remember a nursing book, written in the 1920s that I had read when I was teenager\u00a0which\u00a0advocated flinging open the\u00a0windows of a ‘sickroom’ regularly –\u00a0perhaps they\u00a0were way ahead of their time?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It has been one of those dark, gloomy days all day today – although mild and blustery, the rain seemed to threaten nearly all day and did arrive in some force during the afternoon. Nonetheless, we enjoyed our normal walk encompassing both collecting the newspapers and ending up in\u00a0the park on one of our\u00a0favourite\u00a0benches. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1334"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1336,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334\/revisions\/1336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}