{"id":2931,"date":"2021-08-20T20:08:54","date_gmt":"2021-08-20T20:08:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2931"},"modified":"2021-08-20T22:25:26","modified_gmt":"2021-08-20T22:25:26","slug":"friday-20th-august-2021-day-522","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/08\/20\/friday-20th-august-2021-day-522\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday, 20th August, 2021 [Day 522]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Friday has come around again and it is the day that our domestic help ‘does’ for us so\u00a0we always have a chat which takes up\u00a0little\u00a0longer in the morning than I suppose is good for us. We did have one\u00a0domestic help, sadly departed from us for at least two decades, whose name was ‘Pep’ Smith. The ‘Pep’ bit came from her initials and she was known as Pep to everyone, including even her husband. Anyway on this\u00a0particular morning I was\u00a0taking a shower in the downstairs shower room that we had\u00a0recently had constructed and I pranced gaily up the stairs in my birthday suit, totally\u00a0obvious to the face that Pep Smith was hoovering away downstairs. Anyway, so as to not seem\u00a0<\/span>impolite, I called out ‘Morning, Mrs Smith’<\/em> as I bounded up the stairs. I did not dare to look down the stairs to see if Mrs Smith was gazing after my departed form and I do not even know to this day whether Mrs Smith actually looked up from her hoovering but neither of us mentioned it to the other. It cannot be the first (or the last time) that a similar thing has\u00a0happened.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Meg and I decided as it was late in the day to go down to\u00a0Waitrose<\/em> by car to save a bit of time. When we got\u00a0<\/span>home, we just had a very light lunch of soup because we knew that later on in he evening we were\u00a0going to have a\u00a0family meal of fish and chips where we were going to discuss some joint financial thongs that we needed to discuss (quite\u00a0amicably) round the dinner table. Halfway through the\u00a0afternoon, we got the email that we had been half expecting. The\u00a0travel agent who had been\u00a0organising our little trip to Rome had written to say that the budget airline we \u00a0were using had decided to cancel the\u00a0flights both from Bristol and also from Birmingham and therefore the\u00a0whole \u00a0of the planned holiday\u00a0vacation was ‘off’. \u00a0We always knew that there was a 50:50 chance of this happening anyway so the news did not come as a great surprise. Anyway, at this point ‘Plan B’ swung into action. I\u00a0immediately\u00a0got onto the web to see what\u00a0accommodation was available in the Brecon Beacons \u00a0which has scenery similar to the Lake District but we have never\u00a0actually visited before. After a few minutes of\u00a0research,\u00a0I was lucky to secure\u00a0accommodation in a farmhouse\u00a0only three miles out of the centre of Brecon which offered us five nights for what seemed to be a very good price. On the basis of good reviews from ‘Booking.com’ (an average score of 9.2)\u00a0and some very good reviews, it now looks as\u00a0though we have secured ourselves a holiday even if not of the type we had at first\u00a0thought. To be\u00a0honest, even if it rains all the time (which it probably will) we can do our bit toddling around the sights and sounds of the Brecon Beacons before hunting out somewhere for a good lunch after which we will have our normal ‘siesta’ and\u00a0crash out in the B&B which is\u00a0equipped with a good TV and a kettle for late afternoon snacks. So at least we now having a holiday to which to look forward. In the last day or so, I have also made a more than tentative arrangement to shoot up the M6 to make a long delayed visit to Meg’s recently widowed\u00a0cousin who is\u00a0living in Bolton, Lancs. We are in contact with her daughter and will meet in her garden (if\u00a0fine) or house (if not) and the date we have chosen is Sunday, October 3rd which just happens to be Meg’s 75th birthday. So if all goes well on\u00a0this occasion, we can have a family reunion and a birthday celebration at the same time – hopefully the traffic will not be too bad at that time on a Sunday.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The COVID news does not look too good this weekend as the infection rate (and deaths) are up at about a rate of 11-12% over last weekend. I think the powers-that-be are worried that if the infection rate\u00a0accelerates up during the autumn, then we will not be in a good position when COVID meets the ‘flu infection\u00a0rates and we start another\u00a0period of time when yet another lockdown may well be on the cards.<\/span> So<\/span> far, I think we are living in a more or\u00a0less fool’s paradise where I suspect that things might\u00a0start to get a lot worse than might be imagined. Of course, a\u00a0crucial vector might be the rate of infection in the school based\u00a0population who might go and infect the older\u00a0<\/span>generations. What I learnt during the week was that even the doubly\u00a0vaccinated might still harbour enough of the virus\u00a0particles to act as an infecting (and\u00a0transmissibility) agent without their knowledge.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friday has come around again and it is the day that our domestic help ‘does’ for us so\u00a0we always have a chat which takes up\u00a0little\u00a0longer in the morning than I suppose is good for us. We did have one\u00a0domestic help, sadly departed from us for at least two decades, whose name was ‘Pep’ Smith. 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-2931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931","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=2931"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2935,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931\/revisions\/2935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}