Today’s image was captured locally to us. We have walked out for a 5000 step step-about down to the bottom of our road and back home via a modern industrial estate reached via this footpath from Green Road. It is quite incredible how much more we now both notice and value what is about us. Even the industrial estate which felt largely adrift like a Marie Celeste had a quiet, attractive, natural ambience about it which refreshed our hearts as much as the cool evening drizzle refreshed our faces.
I have an analogy for you. We could all live very healthily if we ate porridge at every breakfast, baked beans on toast for lunch and nothing else for months on end. Not the best of diets but good enough to survive on. I love both, in fact the thought of that good old favourite of farty bum beans (a whole tin by the way) on a couple or three of well buttered slices of holy ghost is making me feel a tad peckish already and it’s not long since I had the porridge! I digress. My point is that what we can survive on can become wearisome simply because of its monotony and I am beginning to feel that way. We are quite happy, looked after, supported by wonderful family and neighbours and safe but life is getting a bit monotonous and although this is not getting either of us down as yet we are both finding that the effort to maintain our equilibrium is getting very tiring. Being strong wears you out. I have started to lust after a potter around an antique shop. I need to deal with that but its hard.
Today is the last day of the sixth week. I think we anticipated 12 weeks and so this is the halfway point. Well maybe not. All the signs are that going in to this crisis was like falling over a cliff edge and now we seem to be only fitfully and tentatively crawling our way out. In any case our PM has had his baby today so no doubt he will immediately organise for himself, by executive fiat, a 12 months paternity leave and we will not have the benefit of his presence in our affairs for some time. A similar act of convenience, if you will, to the government arbitrarily downgrading Covid’s official classification so as to avoid the consequences of litigation when they get sued for not providing PPE at the right standard. I cannot understand why this has not escalated into the national scandal it definitely is. We are becoming scandal punch-drunk and each successive scandal no longer has the impact it should. The Care Home tragedy is more than a scandal it is surely criminal neglect and we shall see what follows when the government, as they have promised in their daily briefings, begin to include Care Home deaths in the figures. It is going to be grim. We already have the worst death rate per thousand of population in the world. People seem to be losing sight of the fact that every death is the death of an individual, an individual suffering, frightened, in pain, without family near by, losing everything, knowing that whatever their condition this should not have been the way for them, alone or at most with a caring nurse’s cold gloved hand to hold. I literally shudder and tremble at the horror of it and for the first time in my life I know that I am experiencing raw anger, anger at those who have abandoned elderly, vulnerable people as worthless and expendable. How did my country get so low?
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