{"id":2753,"date":"2021-07-19T20:33:40","date_gmt":"2021-07-19T20:33:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2753"},"modified":"2021-07-19T23:17:45","modified_gmt":"2021-07-19T23:17:45","slug":"monday-19th-july-2021-day-490","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/07\/19\/monday-19th-july-2021-day-490\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday, 19th July, 2021 [Day 490]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I needed to make an early start because I needed to be at our local Health Centre for (another) routine check – eyes this time. That seems to have gone OK apart from the fact that drops are put in your\u00a0eyes that expands the pupils which means that driving is not an option. I then took the opportunity to pop into Asda<\/em> to collect a few\u00a0things that only\u00a0Asda<\/em> sells, then went down the High Street In\u00a0Bromsgrove to\u00a0pick up some cosmetics products, called in at the newsagents to collect the daily ration of newspapers and finally popped into Waitrose<\/em> to pick up some\u00a0wine, beer and ‘party food’. When we saw our immediate next door neighbours the other day, we invited them round to share either a beer or a cup of tea with us in the garden at 3.00pm this afternoon. It was a question of seizing the moment, actually, because the fine weather\u00a0will not go on for ever and our neighbour has a part-time employment during the week and is seeing his own family at the weekends. So it was rather a question of ‘now or never’- any way our\u00a0neighbours came around and we had a really pleasant couple of hours discussing neighbourly type things such as the improvements we have made to our various gardens and our little projects for the future. As our parasol shade had been nibbled to bits by the local, hungry mice whilst stored in the garage, we had to relocate our garden table and\u00a0chairs into the shade provided by the leas of the house. But we had a wonderful time, particularly as I treated our neighbours to a zero alcohol\u00a0beer provided by <\/span>Waitrose<\/em> where the brewers have performed a magnificent job in keeping\u00a0practically all of the flavour of a conventional beer whilst\u00a0removing all of the alcohol. After our neighbours had left, I spent a certain amount of time in the late afternoon creating\u00a0drainage holes in the last of the (plastic) oak-barrel shaped planters I had acquired recently. Making drainage holes is actually s little complicated as first I make a small pilot hole with a bradawl, then widen it with a small hand-drill, then widen it a bit\u00a0further using a large heavy duty screwdriver and\u00a0finally finish off by using a pair of small\u00a0utilitarian scissors in which I keep the blades shut but a\u00a0circular motion which actually widen my drainage holes to the desired aperture size.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Considering that this is the first day of ‘Freedom’ when all (or nearly all) of the pandemic restrictions have been removed, the images and messages\u00a0have been as mixed as they come. One\u00a0could expect that the TV crews would be\u00a0present at night clubs where at 1\u00a0minute past midnight, everyone could in theory enjoy themselves and there were lots of shots of throngs of teenagers singing, dancing (and no doubt\u00a0exhaling billions pf\u00a0particles of virus) Meanwhile, the night club staff\u00a0themselves\u00a0were \u00a0all masked up! I heard some ‘vox pop’ from the city of Leicester where the virus has struck particularly hard and no\u00a0doubt to give a\u00a0sense of balance, we had one interview with a boutique owner who had thrown away her mask and hoped it would never return (‘because it made you look as though you were ill’) and\u00a0another with a local barber who was going to wear a mask himself and was going to insist on it for all of his customers (because he was frightened of the potential of the virus to bounce\u00a0back) The confusing messaging continues apace.Whilst\u00a0nightclub owners might have been\u00a0filled with joy on Day 1 of their ‘liberation’\u00a0their joy would\u00a0have been\u00a0short-lived as the\u00a0government announced that from the end of September all entrants to nightclubs and other crowded spaces would have to show evidence of having been vaccinated twice. What are the\u00a0manpower implications of policing all of this, I ask myself? Meanwhile, Boris Johnson has announced (from Chequeurs, where he is\u00a0self-isolating) that all critical care workers will not to have self isolate after being ‘pinged’\u00a0try the\u00a0Test and Trace App but\u00a0presumably they will have to give themselves a ‘Lateral Flow’ test every day. The Americans are advising\u00a0their citizens that none should consider\u00a0visiting the UK as the rate of\u00a0infections is now so high.It looks as though the UK infection rate is one of the highest in the\u00a0world and is mainly amongst the young, unvaccinated portion of the population. The infection rates are somewhat alarming – approx 45,000-50,000 per day (which is 10x. the USA incidence) and this rate may rise to as much as 100,000 now the end of lockdown has occurred. The one saving grace is that the rate of new infections is rising extremely\u00a0rapidly, the rate of admission to\u00a0hospitals whllst increasing rapidly, are at a\u00a0lower rate than when the pandemic was raging.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I needed to make an early start because I needed to be at our local Health Centre for (another) routine check – eyes this time. That seems to have gone OK apart from the fact that drops are put in your\u00a0eyes that expands the pupils which means that driving is not an option. I […]<\/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-2753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2753","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=2753"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2758,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2753\/revisions\/2758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}