YOUR life in YOUR hands

 

New Normal or lockdown or whatever, Second Week, Sunday

 

 

 

 

As far as I am aware the restrictions about moving from one location to another during the weekend is still in force, though it was difficult to believe that as I threaded my wobbly way past the masses of people who were thronging the paseo this morning.

     In many ways, it is difficult to blame people wanting what seems like a fairly innocent and safe pastime: wandering in time honoured fashion along the side of the sea.  On the other hand, I also regard every stranger as a possible enemy, and a deadly one at that.

     It is the fatal nature of the disease for many and the lingering serious complaints that are now being registered after surviving the virus for some, that make me question the absurd optimism of so many who live and act as though they do not really need a vaccine because they are so obviously immune.  And they are not.

     On my daily bike ride, I can judge just how seriously people take the fact that we are in the middle of the second wave of infection, and that we may yet see the totals for the first wave overtaken.  Most runners on the paseo do not wear masks.  A minority of cycle riders wear masks.  Some recreational walkers and dog walkers do not wear masks.  Some ‘regulars’ I pass every day have never worn masks, and some of those regulars are obvious OAPs and therefore in one of the most vulnerable categories.

     I have to say that a greater proportion overall of the people I pass now do wear masks, probably (but not unequivocally) a bare majority.  I have no idea what news broadcasts or newspapers these people glean their information from, but they are obviously very different from the ones that I see and read!

     Virtually everything that I hear about the virus frightens me.  Obviously you can’t live a life in perpetual terror, it’s too bloody wearing, but concern (to put it mildly) is never far from the surface: “hands, face and distance” is a sort of mental mantra by which I live my life!

     It looks as though one of the vaccines is likely to be rolled out within the next week or so.  This will be reserved for front line staff and those in immediate contact with virus infected people, but the rest of the vaccines should be available for the rest of us within weeks, though it will obviously take months for the population to be vaccinated.

     As soon as any of the vaccines start being used in the country, I think that will signal one of the most dangerous times in the pandemic, as people take from the application of a vaccine very different messages.

     From what I understand the vaccine will be delivered in two shots some time apart and, when an individual has been vaccinated they will be expected to continue the mask wearing, hand washing and physical distancing that they should have been observing up to the point of their vaccination.  This is going to be a hard ask when people are looking forward to the “freedom” that a vaccination is supposed to give.

     Even after the second shot, defences should not be lowered.  I wish the publicity campaigns that will be flooding our media outlets the best of luck, because they are going to need it.

     Why are we making an exception for the Christian festival of Christmas when we signally did not for festivals of other religions?  The relaxation of the rules for the Christmas period is a political decision and one that will cost lives.  That, together with the woeful approach of Johnson and his no-talent cabinet to tackling the pandemic lends further weight to my insistence that Johnson and co are charged with corporate manslaughter.  The blustering incompetent cannot put off the inquiry for ever, and when it starts taking evidence and delivers its report, then is the time for criminal prosecution to take place.

     In my adolescence, it took “thirteen years of Tory misrule” to show the corrupt, unfeeling incompetence of Conservative contempt for the ruled: it has taken Johnson far less than eighteen months to produce a ‘government’ mired in cronyism, corruption, arrogance, incompetence, dogmatic blindness, viciousness, petty mindedness and mendacity.  I am ashamed that my country is led by such a witless pack – and they should not be allowed to get away with it.  For once in his worthless life, Johnson must face up to his responsibilities, and if he is ‘disinclined’ to do so he must be forced to.

     And when you consider that in little over a month, this bunch of feckless liars are going to take us into the unicorn-filled lands of plenty of Brexit, the only realistic reaction is to weep!

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, my research about the war service of my grandfather progresses slowly.  I have discovered that he was a member of the Royal Field Artillery, in C Battery in the 173^rd Brigade.  What is more difficult is finding out exactly where he would have fought.  My grandfather did not have an easy war and was in some of the most bloody of the conflicts in France and Flanders.  I will persevere and find locations to add to the records that I have at the moment.

     As well as the horrors of being a combatant in The First World War, my grandfather also had to cope with the pandemic too, the Spanish Flu outbreak, which he survived.  We may have a rough year in 2020, but he had a succession of horrors for year after year!  We should be grateful!

 

Having now thoroughly depressed myself, I will turn to Netflix for some mindless amelioration! 

Indifferent day, indifferent thoughts

         

An odd day today, it is not warm, but it certainly isn’t cold.  It is overcast and the Med has a North Sea look with waves that are much larger than usual, though there is no wind and few hits of a storm.  The sea is an almost monochrome grey-blue and when I was riding along the paseo there was a sea mist which blended horizon and water and where the cold white breaking waves looked almost theatrical in their contrast with the surrounding drabness.  It looked bleakly beautiful and there were isolated figures on the beach which gave a cinematographic look to my vistas from the saddle of the bike and it was easy to enjoy the visuals because there was no cold cost of being out in the bleakness, when it wasn’t really bleak!

     As the restaurants and cafes are closed the emptiness of the streets echoes the deserted beach.  On an inclement day one can imagine oneself back to the strict lockdown of March or April.  As I typed that a solitary magpie swooped over the trees that I can see from my desk on the third floor.  Is that an example of the pathetic fallacy: linking a harbinger of bad luck with lockdown?  Or does it always have to be the weather?  If it is the weather, then the slightly other-worldly climate at the moment is doing its bit!

 

Toni and I have been bewailing the lack of restaurants and the fact that we cannot go out for a menu del dia, I bring that up because of the vote by the Conservative Party in refusing to continue the provision of free school meals during the holidays.   

     I made the mistake of reading what some of the Nasty Party’s adherents said in justifying their decision and I was transported back to the unregenerate days of Dickensian blaming the poor for their situation and not wanting to mollycoddle them so that they would be too weak to make the effort to improve their position by their own efforts.

     I have never, ever been a Conservative voter, and the last member of that benighted party for whom I had even a scintilla of respect was Iain Macleod (hated by the even further right wing of the Conservative Party as being “too clever by half”) and he had the good grace to die a month into Heath’s government so that he wasn’t further tainted by the steady descent to contemptibility that had started with Home.  I think that my ‘respect’ for him was coloured by the fact that I was very young and he seemed like an intellectual threat to the comfortable leftish-wing politics that the young teenage me adopted.

    So, in 2020 there is no character in the present government with even a shadow of the moral, intellectual and political nous of the late Iain Macleod and everything that they do and say increases my contempt for them.  Where are the people with the moral standing (!) of a John Profumo (!) in this cabinet of Political Caligaris?  The third-rate chancers that make up the U-turning incompetents that govern the UK make me ashamed to be British. 

     The USA, UK, Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, as well as many others around the world are forming a distasteful group of countries that seem more and more distant from any ideals of democracy and decency that I understand to be motivators for decent political government.   

     At least the people of the USA have the opportunity to dump Trump and return to some sort of joined-up thinking, whereas we have YEARS of Johnson and his rabble before he can be cast into the infamy of history.

     How many people SO FAR have been killed by the incompetence of Johnson’s government?  Given the Conservatives’ atrocious handling of the pandemic, what chance is there that the looming disaster of Brexit is going to be overseen with compassion, understanding and efficiency? 

     How many more hungry children will it take for Conservatives to act with simple humanity?

       Look to the history of the Conservative Party for your answer.