{"id":2060,"date":"2021-03-28T19:56:46","date_gmt":"2021-03-28T19:56:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2060"},"modified":"2021-03-28T22:15:53","modified_gmt":"2021-03-28T22:15:53","slug":"sunday-28th-march-2021-day-377","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/03\/28\/sunday-28th-march-2021-day-377\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday, 28th March, 2021 [Day 377]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today was the day in which the hour goes forward and we lose an hour of our beauty sleep. I had set the alarm to go off half and hour earlier than normal which is my normal Sunday morning pattern. Having got up,\u00a0washed and dressed, I then had to turn my attention to putting forward all of the clocks and time pieces which we have in the house, of\u00a0which there seem to be several. Thank goodness that things\u00a0like radios and computers themselves often perform this updating without human intervention but there are still some appliances (e.g. like the clocks on our cooker and\u00a0microwave) that do not and one has always to remember the instructions for that particular device. All of this got\u00a0done in plenty of time and I popped down to collect the newspapers, treating myself to my weekly ration of Bach on the trusty old iPhone (used as an MP3 player) before settling down to the Andrew Marr<\/em> s<\/span>how and breakfast upon our return. Then it was time for our daily walk to the park but there was a lot of rain ‘in the air’ as it were and we encountered \u00a0a fine drizzle. Once in the park, we met up with\u00a0our University of Birmingham friend but the frequency of our visits will shortly be\u00a0<\/span>attenuated because shortly as a keen tennis player he will be involved in participating in his\u00a0favourite sport now that participation in outdoor sports is permitted as from tomorrow. We had a very long conversation discussing our separate experiences in the use (and abuse) of statistics in the the classification of final degree results and, as we have come to\u00a0expect, our philosophies of how this should best be done showed a remarkable degree of\u00a0congruence. We left for home and met the husband of one of our\u00a0church friends and this was the start of another long conversation, equally fascinating, on the way of life of the Anglo-Indian communities in India and Pakistan. I said I would dig out my copy of Salman\u00a0Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children<\/em> which explores these themes in a rich and fascinating detail. Eventually we got home and gratefully accepted some ‘Coq au vin’\u00a0which our son and daughter-in-law kindly donated to us as a Sunday lunch. After this fairly long and extensive morning, we were pleased to have a good after-lunch rest and a good read of the Sunday newspapers.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

There is some more interesting COVID-19 news today. The most important headline is that, as a country, we have now\u00a0inoculated some 30 million and achieved a rate of 57% (for the first jab) However, there is a big push now towards getting the second jab of the vaccine into the arms of people who received their first jab over two months ago. One only hopes that the logistics of this have been properly worked out so that when we turn up for our second jab in just over two weeks time, the supplies of vaccine are relatively\u00a0<\/span>forthcoming, Boris Johnson has also announced that he will be able to say more on the subject of the\u00a0availability of\u00a0foreign holidays on April 5th. If I had to make a guess at this stage, it\u00a0would be that a trickle to flights to\u00a0foreign destinations may be allowed from\u00a0mid-August onwards. As Meg and I have a trip tentatively booked for Rome in late September, we are very cautiously optimistic but I still think the chances of this are only 50:50 at best.The most difficult\u00a0factor in this whole equation is how far the third wave has extended in various continental countries and the rate of vaccination in this countries as well (very much behind us, of course). After tomorrow’s milestone for the gradual relaxation of the lockdown, the next critical date if going to be 12th April (only two weeks away now) <\/span>This is the earliest date on which shops, hairdressers, gyms, nail salons, libraries, and outdoor attractions such as theme parks will be allowed to reopen. But no indoor mixing of different households will be allowed. We are due for a period of quite fine weather and one hopes that the population ‘en masse’ do not go mad and assume that all restrictions have now gone. There are some grounds for cautious\u00a0<\/span>optimism, however, as I understand that the majority of people in the country think a slow and\u00a0gradual\u00a0release of the lockdown is absolutely correct and although the libertarian wing of the Conservative party are pressing for\u00a0much earlier end to the lockdown, it looks as though wiser counsels are prevailing. It is being said in government that we cannot have a ‘third’ lockdown and therefore it is\u00a0critical that we get the current\u00a0timetable\u00a0absolutely correct. All that one can say is ‘So far, so good<\/em>‘ and at this stage let us hope that we do not get derailed in the few weeks ahead.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Today was the day in which the hour goes forward and we lose an hour of our beauty sleep. I had set the alarm to go off half and hour earlier than normal which is my normal Sunday morning pattern. Having got up,\u00a0washed and dressed, I then had to turn my attention to putting forward […]<\/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-2060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2060","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=2060"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2066,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2060\/revisions\/2066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}