Dominic Cummings

Subject: Dominic Cummings 

With the appearance yesterday of that Machiavellian  figure Dominic Cummings on our television screens broadcast from the Downing Street Rose Garden one is left wondering about the furor of much of the press as they write their news column today. They are generally angry at the way he apparently flouted the instruction of which he was one of the co authors that we should all self isolate in our homes and only go out to shop for groceries and a little isn't exercise walking in the park.
His impromptu news conference was interesting not only for its setting but in the hesitant character he portrayed whilst explaining to everyone that the needs of his son came first and that with both him and his wife showing signs of the disease he wanted to place his son in the care of his parents in the North of England. His parents have a farm on which a separate cottage allowed for the continued isolation of his family from his parents. It seems to me that it was a logical thing to do and I would have done the same.
The problem comes when we consider that he broke rules which he himself was coauthor rules which whilst not part of any criminal act were an instruction from the government of the day for the people to obay.
When we break the law we can expect to be punished but these are laws not set down in statute and whilst the government edict carries weight it only carries weight if the population wishes to go along with it. His flouting of the edict punched holes in the governments need to separate us for our own best good and therefore he is guilty of misleading us. He is not the first notable person who decided to go against the instruction. The immunologist who has been advising the government on these matters and appeared regularly on television, Neil Furguson decided to visit his lover and the advisory medical officer in Scotland also went walk about. Both lost their jobs on the basis that that what is good for one is good for all.
So the 'common sense' approach which Cummings appeals us to judge him by should carry no weight if we are asking people not to attend funerals or be with a dying parent. It was not in the doing that he is found guilty but in breaking the rules and that has many consequences. He could have sort permission from the PM who being the ultimate official  in this country could have granted him passage but it seems in the makeup of Mr Cummings he balks at imagining anyone but himself as having any sort of a hold on his actions.
He is a maverick and disliked by many in the Westminster bubble and for that I applaud him, as I do for his attempt to break down the establishments way of doing business. He is a risk taker and a forward thinker and I advise anyone to read his blog before they take everything the press tells them as fact. His blog (like mine) is a well reasoned set of ideas which this country could benefit from  including the argument he made, many months ago that we should pre-arm our self against the threat of pandemics.
He is a churlish sort of man who demeanor and dress code strikes at the metropolitan class and it's this metropolitan elite, the soft underbelly of the democratic process who are most put out.
The media, who methinks thinks too much of themselves, are part of this university educated think tank and when it came to the dreadful scandal of what was going on in Residential Homes for the aged, their almost benign questions to ministers at the daily corona virus question time, carried little or no anger, little or no push back.  Their questions were batted away by which ever Minister was on duty and to my recollection there was never anyone from the press to call the ministers out and to say that simple thing "Minister your lying to us".  Suddenly these same people are all in a frenzy about a relative technicality, something which common sense should rule. It's not a breach of some criminal law but a bureaucratic diktat which admittedly so many of our mindless community need, as is the imposition of a serious response when they flaunt it by filling the swimming pools in support of some hedonistic need.
Sadly there's a great paucity of strong and meaningful criticism in the public arena. It's been replaced by a measure of genteel prodding here and there, much as amongst friends, which of course  they are.

Time

Subject: Time

As we watch the days and the weeks drain away, wrapped up in the cotton wool of our homes, insulated from the injustice others bring upon us, the question of what importance, if any, do we consider "time" to be.
Is time a period in and through which we live regardless or is it a period where we are given an opportunity to change and do things. Our lives are relatively short and much is made of success, which these days often means making money. The chap propped up in a chair reading is wasting his time unless his reading is defined by what he reads and the benefit it brings him. But what if he reads for pleasure or reads just to understand more of the world around him. Isn't that self indulgent and in our world of the email and the immediate response to someone else's problem shouldn't we pause to examine just what is time for.
Obviously it's method of measuring where we are on a time line of events. The activities in the past, irretrievable the ones in the future unobtainable for the moment,  and only the ones in the "now" have any real importance.
But what if time were allowed to hang, to be suspended from our itinerary, allowed to lose its importance as we merged those minutes and hours into a delightful indolence, where the heart and the head are allowed to merge and get to know one another.
The head always impetuous, always driving for results, the heart more inclined to sit back and see what happens. The French and the Italians have a way with time, long breaks in the middle of the day, a nap after a meal. Their love of food and cooking, their propensity to court a lady by conversation, not the lust of the Anglo Saxon.
Time then is something to savour and to study as we do when thinking on a personal level. Time is just as well spent doing nothing as doing something. The presbyterian ethic regarding their claim that "idle hands do the Devils work" must have something to do with the fact that a mind at rest has the opportunity to seek out many falsehoods, including the claims made in the name of religion.
Wrapped up in the fragrance and warmth of my newly laundered sheets  I have to ask where have all the tomorrows gone. It's a feature of this new timeless dispensation where we are never quite sure which day it is, each morning looking the same, we lay in bed contemplating the time in front of us. The implausibility of it, the shock, time has become ours and not theirs and we must not be scared to learn that wasting it is just as satisfying as using it.Time

See you in the nail bar

Subject: See you in the nail bar

As we struggle to find, light at the end of the tunnel in the fight against the corona virus interesting facts are being thrown up which might perhaps reveal new opportunities.
Oestrogen or estrogen is thought to strengthen a woman immune system and is thought to be the cause of far fewer women dying from the virus when compared to men. Perhaps in the evolution of our species this was part of the need to strengthen the child bearer through the difficult time of childbirth and would help explain how women usually live, on average an extra 8 years then men.  They gain this protective shield against many common diseases by inducing the bodies immunity system to respond when a new microbe or virus attacks us. One of the treatments against cancer is to reduce testosterone in the male by undergoing a course of hormone treatment, changing the balance between oestrogen and testosterone.
If oestrogen has the potential to improve the effectiveness of the immune system why isn't it given to young boys so that they too will be better prepared when viruses come along. It has the added advantage on making men less aggressive, not only sexually but in general, and a whole new social relationship could thrive and make the world a better place.
As the worlds population is estimated to balloon towards 10 billion by 2050 then a reduction  of humans on earth, would be no bad thing, especially since human labour will soon be relegated to junk status as artificial intelligence and robots take over. The statistical replacement factor of 2.5 humans will need to fall unless we are to see more and more people born into penury and a miserable life. A painless solution might be to extend the life of the male by making them more female through a weekly dosage of oestrogen, cutting down the birth rate as the sexual drive is lessoned, making the family affordable whilst corralling the male in the home with the vacuum cleaner and not in the pub with his mates.

If we can nudge Covid off course by tampering with our hormonal make up maybe there might be many other benefits, as yet unforeseen.  See you in the nail bar.

Travelling on a different track

Subject: Traveling on a different track.

What I don't understand is how gullible the politicians take us for. I have just been watching the daily news conference in which a visiting expert is announcing a fall in the cases of Corona virus recorded each day as if this is some sort of corner turned and a win, in our effort to reverse the death toll.
Yes of course the cases are coming down, we are all in lockdown, holed up at home, industry's closed, shops closed, holiday destinations and any means of recreation virtually closed, is it any wonder then that the cases and deaths are dwindling, as we sit at home paralysed, our economy paralysed and as we start the economy going again we also know that the the virus will also get going again and cases and the death toll will rise.
Perhaps after the initial panic and shock in February and the unprecedented reaction to covert 19, the natural response, to pull out all the stops and gain time to analyse what we had had and if there was a way forward. There was a lull and most people enjoyed the enforced break and the loverly weather which accompanied it. With the foot off the throttle we found new ways to entertain ourselves and perhaps find ourselves, out of the hurly-burly of normal life, a bit like boarding a large passenger liner to sail half way around the world with nothing to do all day but walk the promenade deck, eat three good meals a day and party into the early house. It was of course at the expense of the National Exchequer, the monthly make up on wages lost, a problem for the Chancellor. After all they had found the money to bail out the banks in 2008, why not us.
Of course reality is that soon the ship will dock and we are forced to descend to the quay side where the hustle and bustle of real life awaits us, of finding our own way,  much like finding our feet  as we go back to work.
It seems that until a vaccination is developed and this may take years, we are going to have to get on with living and dying with this scourge, always at our elbow. The upbeat announcements by the politicians don't get this message across instead they talk of the partial medical success's but not in any detail, the unsustainable cost, we talk of reversing the trend of the pandemic  but not of the toll on the economy.

The Churchillian phrases such as "we will beat them on the beaches" come to mind as people get back to work but so will the virus. The panic this time will be replaced with a pragmatic view that maybe a certain death toll is a price worth paying afterall, it won't be me and if it is me, the result won't kill me. Different graphs will be drawn, more upbeat announcement's, not of beating but accepting the death toll will be the set piece of the political sideshow as we human-beings re-assess our future, balancing the cultural and physical needs against the awful spectre  of the struggle going on in the hospital wards which may become merely an assist to making death as palatable as they can.
For those at risk the decision is quite easy, stay at home and develop a lifestyle around your home and garden, (if your lucky enough o have one). Always to be on your guard and recognise that the years you have left (because we are talking mainly of the aged) can be just as precious, it's that we are traveling on a different track to everyone else.

A lesson from the Germans

Subject: A lesson from the Germans.

Reading of the genius of the Germans as a fighting force against the Americans and the British in the Second World War one then asks the question, why have they risen not only to be once more to be the predominant economic force in Europe but have also handled the pandemic threat far more efficiently than most of Europe and particularly us in the UK.

What is it in the temperament of the Germans that they can be corralled into a concerted force, both for good and evil. Is it that in their upbringing they accept hierarchy better and therefore react faster, is it that individually they respond to crisis by accepting more readily the discipline required to act as a group and not as individuals.
They have the horrendous black mark against them, the incubation of fascism and their willingness to accept the demonisation of the Jews and Gypsies.  As a nation they turned a collective blind eye to what the extremists in their society were inflicting on the Jews, and it seems impossible to imagine the same state of affairs happening in the UK. There seemed a collective amnesia to what was going on in Germany and yet the propaganda broadcasts, put out  by the Nazi Party in the 1930s,  a jingoistic call call for Deutschland uber alies had its supporters in a country which saw itself badly treated by the treaty of Versailles in which, particularly the French wished to exact harsh reparations. There is no doubt in those troubled times, nationalism, not only in Germany but all across Europe was part of a political consensus at the time. And whilst true to a lesser extent in the UK, this island tempered its reaction by the bloodymindedness of its people.
There seems an innate unwillingness to collectivise and focus around any one thing over here and whilst it frees the country from the more extremist radicalism it does leave us exposed when any sort of unanimity is required.
The Germans have this unanimity in spades and when a direction of travel is decided the nation backs the journey wholeheartedly. The question of 'planning for the future' whilst apparently impossible in Britain, it's 'grist to the mill' in Germany.  A part of the disciplined planning which looks further than the next political election and takes the whole national good into account.
Perhaps we in Britain are never national in the way we see ourselves, perhaps we have been encouraged to see ourselves as self seeking individuals having been persuaded that society is someone else's business.
Reportedly the Germans, recognising the degree of unpreparedness that SARS had left them in invested in an over production of ventilators and the trained staff to use them. They were well versed in the need to test the population because they saw in the SARS scare the need to know who had the disease and who didn't and when Covid 19 showed up they had a strategy.
We on the other hand, being a Nation of grocers, were fixated on balancing the books, reducing the very services we would need when the next pandemic arrived. Our confusion is bred of a weakness to evaluate cost against the public good and meant that Boris dithered, first of all denying that it was as bad as it appeared and then having missed the proverbial boat he began to mislead the public as to what the government were doing. There were many examples but the example of the exclusion of the Care Homes in preventative measures is the ultimate test of an unwillingness to come to terms with what he was dealing with.
So what can the Germans teach us.  Not only their handling of the pandemic but in their organisation of much else. Their willingness to invest in the training of their young people to work in their factories to produce things and for the young people not to feel that apprenticeships are some sort of second class employment. Their willingness to invest in their own industries, believing the product they make can be sold world wide. The inclusiveness of shop floor labour in the management process, not a "them and us" syndrome which exits in this country, is fruitful not only on the shop floor but in the psychological health of the nation. It's going to be this psychological health which will differentiate between the winners and losers when the economic ruins of the pandemic are revealed.

A Faustian pact

 

Subject: A Faustian pact 

Our world is constantly changing and as it changes our values change also. That is to say our perception of our values changes since our sense of the world and what it means to us and to mankind changes through the information we are fed about it.
From the Tump election campaign to the Brexit campaign to our sense of what's important regarding global warming to what we know about the pandemic and the economic ramifications. We are awash as never before with data and statistics, data dressed up as information, data which tracks us constantly, our every move our every thought, our every proclivity. The news papers which we can now see the headlines as a collective, the right wing the left wing the ones who push the governments position and the ones who oppose but amongst those thousands of lines of copy where is the truth, it must be somewhere. 

Alexander Nix, the urbane boss of Cambridge Analytica denied any wrong doing in setting out to analyse the profiles of people when who belonged to Facebook and target them with information and misinformation to get them to follow a certain way of thinking by reinforcing their prejudice. As a bloke in a pub he was right to argue his case person to person but when he surreptitiously garnered his case behind the unknown digging and sifting through the data left behind as a character reference on their Facebook page and then manipulated reality to create an image which had only the the persons  proclivity to substantiate it then he was tampering with democratic freewill. The success of the Trump campaign, winning with fewer votes than Hillary Clinton but targeted towards states which were balanced to go one way or another or, in the Brexit case to heighten prejudice by sowing fear through misinformation, the use of profiling has reached new heights as a political tool.
Barack Obama was the first to effectively use profiles gained from Facebook and encourage them to vote for him but this was digitally face to face electioneering not the seeding of disingenuous information to fester in the mind and make demons of sections of the public like the immigrant population, the Hispanics and the Afro Americans.
The use of the Web and the platforms which have grown people using it as a gathering place to euphemistically shelter from the storm going on around them and meet their friends is more common today than meeting real friends for a cup of coffee and a chat. As with all friendship the guard is lowered and you easily commit yourself to the odd indiscretion, you reveal more than you would normally do and so a profile gathered over time exposes  the real you not the one you normally present to the outside world. This wouldn't normally be harmful, embarrassing perhaps but fundamentally harmful no. It's only when these profiles which contain the nuggets needed to identify you are then followed up with a plethora of nudges, winks and nods to stimulate an action be it buying a product or influencing you to vote one way or another does the ethical question come in are we manipulating people. To manipulate a person is seen as wrong, to emphasise untruths as truths is wrong and strikes at the basis of all we believe in. It may be the tactic of the second hand car salesman to mislead the buyer but it's wrong and is at the basis of the legislation governing the return of goods or cooling off policy.
In the case of democracy there no turning back, once your cross has been committed to paper, all the lies and the sloganeering  on the side of the Brexit Leave bus, which we now know to be false did the trick in tricking us into committing us to do something which was clearly based on incorrect information.
I'm not saying leaving Europe is right or wrong but the method of persuasion was clearly wrong.
The problem is no one is brought to book and made responsible. The truth is fluid, a malleable thing which in the hands of a charlatan is very dangerous. We live in dangerous times when our leaders can disperse with truth and submit lies. When our confidence in our leadership is so challenged that we begin to distrust everything and everyone, including ourselves. A Faustian pact if ever there was one.

When is a loss not a loss

Subject: When is a loss not a loss.

"We are loosing two and a half billion pounds a day" says the news jock on the radio.
These headlines are meant to bring to our attention the seriousness of our economic position  whilst we battle with the medical issue of the pandemic.
But wait a minute is this an actual loss of earnings or is this loss calculated by estimating how much we 'would have spent if we had been able to go out shopping, buying that latte in the coffee shop or yet another food blender. If we are adding up what we might have spent as a loss perhaps we have to adjust our thinking and say 'their loss' is 'my gain' since I still have my money in my pocket. If our manufactures can't sell their wares because their outlets are closed  but still have to continue to pay basic overheads, such as rent and fundamental maintenance costs we mustn't inflate this lass with a loss of earnings since that is an opportunity cost and until realised it is nebulous.
From the moment the pandemic closed much of the worlds economic business cycle the situation has become a zero sum game. The clock stopped at midnight and the accountants should have stopped their clock too and not extrapolated the loss to cover prospective earnings. Much of the fundamental costs, such as rates and rents have been frozen. The money borrowed by the property firm to lease or rent out, is a genuine loss of income only if the lender is asking for his loan repayment but if these loans are also on ice then the loss becomes static and in fact, like everything else ceases to be a loss other than as in a potential to earn.

There are sectors of the market place which has been kept open, notably the grocers to keep us fed. The money required to keep food in our mouths comes in the form of furloughed money from the government, a loan which is a debt and will have to be replayed through taxes when people can go back to work but the concept of loss is then transformed into one of money management through the taxation process which in itself is a form of transferring money out of our pockets as consumers and limiting our ability to consume, which to some is considered a loss.
Serious as this pandemic is for industry and commerce the clock has stopped for everyone across the world and the winners will be the ones to get their industries up and running first so they gain a competitive advantage.
The money go round has stopped. Stopping the clock should be a lesson to all of us. It's a moment to reexamine our compulsion to consume. To often live beyond our means splurging on credit, always on the assumption that we will, in the future have the money to pay for our extravagance today.
Perhaps a realignment of our thinking and our actual needs may produce a more balanced, less market driven consumptive circle, a necessary brake on our runaway spend, spend, spend.

When is a loss not a loss

Subject: When is a loss not a loss.

"We are loosing two and a half billion pounds a day" says the news jock on the radio.
These headlines are meant to bring to our attention the seriousness of our economic position  whilst we battle with the medical issue of the pandemic.
But wait a minute is this an actual loss of earnings or is this loss calculated by estimating how much we 'would have spent if we had been able to go out shopping, buying that latte in the coffee shop or yet another food blender. If we are adding up what we might have spent as a loss perhaps we have to adjust our thinking and say 'their loss' is 'my gain' since I still have my money in my pocket. If our manufactures can't sell their wares because their outlets are closed  but still have to continue to pay basic overheads, such as rent and fundamental maintenance costs we mustn't inflate this lass with a loss of earnings since that is an opportunity cost and until realised it is nebulous.
From the moment the pandemic closed much of the worlds economic business cycle the situation has become a zero sum game. The clock stopped at midnight and the accountants should have stopped their clock too and not extrapolated the loss to cover prospective earnings. Much of the fundamental costs, such as rates and rents have been frozen. The money borrowed by the property firm to lease or rent out, is a genuine loss of income only if the lender is asking for his loan repayment but if these loans are also on ice then the loss becomes static and in fact, like everything else ceases to be a loss other than as in a potential to earn.

There are sectors of the market place which has been kept open, notably the grocers to keep us fed. The money required to keep food in our mouths comes in the form of furloughed money from the government, a loan which is a debt and will have to be replayed through taxes when people can go back to work but the concept of loss is then transformed into one of money management through the taxation process which in itself is a form of transferring money out of our pockets as consumers and limiting our ability to consume, which to some is considered a loss.
Serious as this pandemic is for industry and commerce the clock has stopped for everyone across the world and the winners will be the ones to get their industries up and running first so they gain a competitive advantage.
The money go round has stopped. Stopping the clock should be a lesson to all of us. It's a moment to reexamine our compulsion to consume. To often live beyond our means splurging on credit, always on the assumption that we will, in the future have the money to pay for our extravagance today.
Perhaps a realignment of our thinking and our actual needs may produce a more balanced, less market driven consumptive circle, a necessary brake on our runaway spend, spend, spend.

Another perspective

Subject: Another perspective.

Today the Bundesliga, the German football league starts to play soccer again after a two to three month break. The games will be played behind closed doors in empty stadiums with the fans told to stay away. Our own football league has been debating and wringing its hands about the loss of revenue, claiming enormous losses through wage bills and ground maintenance. It's not only football but all sporting events are effected although the Formula One cars seem set to race to an empty on-field audience at Silverstone.
Theatres and out door Pop Concerts are also left stranded for the foreseeable future  it being impossible to visualise how social distancing can work in a Theatre or a Cinema, still less in a jostling crowd in front of a live stage act.
It seems to me that the great spill over audience and revenue stream generated by television could bridge the gap temporally. The shows on stage could be televised on a pay as you watch basis much like they do to swell the audience for boxing.

People wishing to go to the theatre or watch a football match could do so on the television and whilst I admit the atmosphere is lacking of fans baying their team on, at least the show in its modified form could bring in some funds to pay the wages.
The argument that you need to be part of the crowd or at least hear the crowd as atmosphere to the match, for me can be a distraction. I'v often turned off the sound watching a rugby international or a football match because I couldn't stand the biased commentary. I always avoided listening to Brendon Foster for instance, his commentary seemed to have been written beforehand and based on the form he expected from the runners. You would watch on the screen a less fancied runner break away and start to distance themselves from the pack of favourites but Foster seem oblivious of what was unfurling before him and only much later woke up, threw away his prepared script and started to commentate on what was actually happening on the day.
Football, rugby, athletics can all be played without the fans, the game is on the pitch, not the terraces and at least if televised in this way the clubs survive and we have an viable alternative to Netflix.
Of course the revenue from the 'ground attendance' is lost but the millions earned through advertising revenue earned from the captive audience will flow once again to the football league. Other venues such as Pop Concerts and even the Theatre could come to an arrangement with subscription television companies paying a fee in line with the advertising revenue. Perhaps a system where the broadcasters subsidised these entertainment outlets as a way to assist the subsistence of this source of creative talent, namely the actors and the artists who bring their talent onto the screen to create an audience. It's the audience the advertisers are after and a bit of forward thinking might make them understand that if part of the creative entertainment industry is allowed to perish the effect will be seen later and much much wider.

A matter of life and death. The alternate view

Subject: A matter of life and death. The alternate view.

Why don't we bite the bullet and let the population go back to work in tandem with  publishing  the full cost in life, accepting  the fact that the NHS will be overrun in its treatment of corona patients.
Can we not throw up our hands and admit defeat, that a large number will die and there's not a thing the government can do about it, given that the economy is also on the verge of collapse and when that happens all our lives will be severely affected.
The Swedish government have decided to go for 'herd immunity', something we were also pursuing as government policy and I initially was very critical of that policy because it seemed to me to be a very callous that more people would die perhaps needlessly.
But as the enormity of the situation unfurls and it seems that what ever we do, other than continuing to isolate people in their own home for as long as the virus is around, then we have to face the fact that the economy comes first and people will have to be discarded hoping that sufficient numbers survive for it not to be viewed a crime.
It's not much different from the policy of battlefield attrition in the First World War when generals on both sides, in full knowledge of the odds threw men over the top to run against withering machine gun fire in the hope that enough men would survive and a foothold in enemy territory was secured. The daily carnage was an acceptable fact of life in 1915 and perhaps we have to become too squeamish in accounting for death now
Perhaps immunity, and vaccines are our only long term weapons if we are to reengage in economic livelihood. Perhaps swathes of vulnerable people, the aged and the physically weak will have to be sacrificed, just as young men are sacrificed in war. It's a decision we made when we thought we were fighting for our lives and our national identity, why not now. If there is a thinning out of the frail and the weak so be it, otherwise those who do not succumb to the virus will succumb to a broken economy and the turmoil it will bring.
It's a question of choices. Perhaps if a frail old person contracts the virus, instead of prolonging a dreadful death drowning in their own fluids we should practice euthanasia,
mercy killing (I'm sure we already do) to remove the terror of dying in such a terrible way.
Life after all has greater resonance for the young and the medical and social construct we have built up, that there is no cut off point in life's journey, that we can keep people alive irrespective of the quality of that life, when in animals we would say that induced dying is more humane.
It's the manner of the dying which is so worrying and this surely is in the medics hands.
Evolution tells us that any society or group, stripped of its weakest, prospers. A pride of lions throw out the ageing Patriarch for younger more virile males, ensuring that the pride prospers. In our civilising, moralistic philosophy we assume, all life is equal when clearly it is not. We spend enormous effort in researching ways to extend life, a life  a few years ago which would have been acknowledged as a reasonable life span but now we battle to extend and extend. Perhaps this virus will force us to reassess our values and for us to be we less aghast when a person dies or chooses to end their life when their life has become simply awful.
Perhaps we have taken our eye off making death a part of life, of celebrating death and making the progression as easy as it can be.

Muscle wasting and exercise.

Subject: Muscle wasting and exercise.

Muscle wasting or atrophy as the medics would term it is a condition almost as bad as the corona virus in that it eventually debilitates a person so they can hardly move about and apparently muscles which have wasted away through lack of usage can not be rehabilitated it becomes a condition for life. The resulting lifestyle is extremely curtailed, walks which used to be part of everyday activity are no longer possible, even  progress down the shopping aisle in the supermarket becomes a chore and the pleasure of a walk along the cliff, a long lost memory.

Some jobs are sedentary, long hours sitting in a chair, at a keyboard fore instance lead not only to back problems but a loss of muscular strength through not using the muscles. People confined to bed through long bouts of sickness are a nursing challenge and demand lengthy sessions of physiotherapy to get any sort of mobility.
The pandemic has kept us all indoors, we are probably glued to the television for much of our waking hours and then  we go to bed 'to take the weight off our feet'. The damage to our muscular system is a slow progressive thing. Bit by bit we lose the strength we once had and find when we do exercise how difficult it is to do what we once found quite easy. The walk to the shop is not be as pleasurable as it was, breath more laboured we will miss the pleasure of noticing the things around us as we are forced to set our mind purely on covering the distance.
We can of course take measures to avoid all this if it isn't too late. The exercise mat, the Pilate exercises, the stretches and reps designed to get at those dormant muscles are in our armoury to defeat the decline but for many the thought of a regular exercise regime doing activities which, when I remember Jane Fonder, at at her peak as a fitness Guru made us wonder which world she inhabited as she did the splits or twisted her faun like figure ( she must have been past 50) into some impossible shape to show how lithe she had become. It seems a retrograde step to join the dog on the floor lifting a leg, much as he does for a different purpose. It seems an incongruently fashionable  part of  life these days, laying flat on your back in the living room, when the chair over there sits unoccupied.
For me the gym was always a place for the self absorbed. The sweaty aroma, the treadmills to nowhere, the grunting over bulked men and women bench pressing  huge weights. Part narcissistic, this insistence for keeping in shape to look good, or the mind blowing mileage covered by the marathon runner out training. When I was young I rode a bicycle everywhere, and thought nothing of doing 120 miles on a ride into the Dales. It was a trip which took in the beauty of the Dales and the enjoyment of dancing on the peddles as we breasted a climb, hardly out of breath. Those were the days when muscle wasting was unimaginable, our daily lives and the work we did took good care of that.
Now as I sit house bound,  propped up in bed, writing my blog, I sense  a new lifestyle a lifestyle in which muscles play little or no part,  other than to propel me to the bathroom.

Back to work you lot

Subject: Back to work you lot.

Is it that "absolute power corrupts". When I listen to Mark Drakeford the first minister of Wales, Nicola Sturgeon of Scotland even Arlene Foster leader in Northern Ireland, all seem so balanced and resolute in their dialog with the public when set against that of our own Prime Minister who seems to make much of what he says, on the hoof.
The nations of Wales, Scotland and Northern Island are all rebelling against the directive laid out by Whitehall regarding those who can't do their work from home, that they have, if they can, go to work, nicely shifting the decision from government to the individual. The call to get the economy moving again is understandable but to do so before making certain that the workplace is as safe as it reasonably can be is criminally irresponsible.
To 'wing it' is not a way to drive a government, especially when we have the crisis we have due to the pandemic. To have a "wish list" is not good governance, to inform the public that they too must "wing it", is a delegation of duty from a political leader who's job is to guide the country in much of what we do. By leaving the the work space safety measures up in the air and asked to rely on the employers judgement to put them in place and to inform his or her staff on what is meant as safe, begs a lot of questions.
Of course there is a cost to implementing these safety measures and it can be no surprise that many employers balk at spending on these measures since it hits their bottom line and outweigh any consideration based purely on expenditure which comes out of their profit. Many a leopard will have to change his spots for it to work.

This morning, the first day back to work for those who can't stay at home, the bus's were crammed full with the much publicised need to practice social distancing, thrown overboard by expediency and the need to get people back to work.
The only victory we have witnessed in this fight against the virus has been the success in lowering the R factor to below 1. Obviously this has been due to the almost total lock down imposed by the government and it's not beyond reason to think that this success will be thrown away as people are forced to break all the rules of distancing heralding another spurt in the virus bringing more deaths and overpowering the NHS.
It's  a corollary of the haste to get the economy moving before initiating a testing system to know who has the virus and also clearly and unambiguously putting into statute what is legally expected of employers in providing a safe working space and just as important, the ability of employees to raise their concern if unhappy with the arrangements and not get fired for saying so.

Reverting to an old norm

Subject: Reverting to an old norm.

We continue to experience one of if not the best Spring weather periods on record, a record which frustrates those who are constrained to stay at home and self isolate, because they can't get in their cars to be out and about enjoying it.
Each day the sun comes up into a cloudless sky, like an African dawn which I experienced when living in Johannesburg. Each day in Joey's was much the same as the other, pleasingly warm as we left the house to drive to work, temperature rising until midday and staying hot throughout the afternoon when at 4pm, like clockwork the skies would cloud over and open up with a short torrential downpour lasting no more than half an hour and th
en stop leaving the air clean and fresh for a pleasant sun downer around the pool, the smell of cooking meat on the barbecue and the snap crack as a cold tinned beer was opened. The weather was as regular as clockwork, a Highveld phenomena for which we were ever thankful.
The contrast in the UK was severe coming from South Africa, each day, each hour of the day different, a micro climate pushed by Atlantic sea temperature and the Gulf Stream air currents in the stratosphere interacting with the colder air streaming off the Russian landmass, we are continually buffeted my Mother Nature. Growing up in Yorkshire and then knowing no different we accepted each day as it came, we ignored the weather and got on with what we had planned to do that day. It was therefore easier for me to readjust to UK weather but for my family, they must have wondered what sort hellish place I had brought them to.
I'v often wondered at the seemingly almost fetish nature of people turning to the hourly weather forecast. It seems a 'must go to' event, some sort of ghoulish flagellation as a weather forecaster describes the tormented weather fronts, the highs and the lows fighting  it out in the sky above as to what weather we can expect, hour by hour, day by day.
It's no accident that the people who describe our daily dose of wind and rain, mixed with the occasional glimpse of the sun are employed for their upbeat sunny character, their demeanour  offsets the chaos behind them on the charts, its like some sort of pantomime act whipping up the audience to laugh at the zaniness of what's in store.
But now during the pandemic and the lock down the sun comes up each day bringing light and warmth, cheering us up to make the best of our enforced 'stay at home policy'.
I wonder if the very fact that we are staying home and not polluting the air around us with petrol fumes, the factories closed, the streets empty and mankind boxed up and out of the way, that nature and the weather, revelling in its new found freedom, uninhibited my mankind's foulness , seeks a new but actually a very old norm.

Online shopping

Subject: Online shopping

It's a strange life we lead these days and amongst the strangeness is the ritual of online shopping and the palaver when your shopping arrives on your doorstep.
Going on line with stores like Morrisons, Tesco, Sainsbury's you first have to obtain a slot when the store will deliver the groceries. It could be days or maybe weeks before a slot becomes available and so the old urge to nip out to buy something you don't have to fulfil the ingredients of a cake you want to bake is not an option. The food you would purchase spontaneously, the bread, the butter or sugar have to be on a list and be part of the preparation, at best in a few days time. It's not the wartime rationing our parents experienced but it is a consideration and a concentration towards food which has crept into our lives.
Shopping on line is also addictive as you sit, on an empty stomach examining the marketeers concept of how the contents will satisfy our craving for food.  Shall we take one or two and what about one of these. The mind goes into overdrive as it ranges over the meals you might want in the weeks ahead. Being a man who was not used to doing the family shopping and who knew better than to trail around after my wife as she examined each item, painstakingly considering it's use in the meals she planned, I on the other hand as a person now living on my own knew the basics of a basic diet and made the act of shopping a quick, in and out process, one of these or two of those and out to the checkout.
Now online I salivate at the sight and the range of food on offer. At the click of my keypad key I traverse the aisles, those look good and what about some of these. As your finger does the shopping and the mind becomes mesmerised by the number of options you seamlessly have only the bill reminds us as it surreptitiously continues to rise and you find yourself spending far more than you ever intended.
The stores seem to have taken this opportunity in our physical absence to down size everything, to shrink the size or limit the number inside the packaging. I seem like a Guliver these days handling smaller and smaller portions of what I remember used to be the size of an item. From washing powder to cornflakes the boxes either remain the same but with the contents taking up half the space in the box, or the boxes get smaller. Shopping in the store one felt the size and condition of the apples or bananas, online you are in a take it or leave it situation and inevitably you take it fearing the hassle of returning groceries and the stigma of being blackballed when you come to try for a slot to shop again.
The goods arrive at 10.00 pm, the doorbell rings and on opening the door the first crate is on the doorstep followed by another and another and another. Distancing is the name of the game as the driver and I do a pirouette, look at each other with different eyes now the virus in in our midst. Taking care to stand back the delivery man watches as I scramble to empty his crates and take the groceries in doors. It's a mad rush, conscious he is keen to be on his way to his next delivery at 11pm I  hurry and dump the bags on the floor of the hallway and wish our cheery van driver goodnight. The sorting then begins, frozen into the freezer, veg into the veg rack and the other stuff we will leave until morning as I retire, shattered to bed.
It's a right old palaver but at least we aren't like those millions of poor buggers who go to bed hungry every night and who see no end to their hunger. How their eyes would open and wonder at the Aladdin's Cave of goodies magically transported to our door. For them there is no magic to life, only a struggle to stay alive.

Living the life

Subject: Living the life

I'm not sure if I'm an oddball but I'm amazed at the way people these days fret at not being able to go out and mix. Fret at the slightest inconvenience to their so called rights. Luckily I don't have to go out to work and provide the bread for the table. Luckily I'm not yearning to be with someone else, afraid that my lack of presence will diminish the connection. I'm more like a passenger on a large ship watching the other passengers leave to spend their money ashore in some seedy port, knowing that my needs are met onboard and already paid for. Perhaps it's that parsimony in my nature, that Yorkshire reluctance to part with money which makes my time locked up at home, bearable. 
People talk of the psychological damage done in keeping people cooped up, no longer free to do what they want, it's as if they were in  Guantanamo Jail rather than surrounded by the things they know and use each day. The circumstances of being locked under some persecutory system such as an occupying army with its harsh rules or the imposition of food rationing and massive shortages of virtually everything. These are the memories of grandparents and the parents before them. There was no Tesco delivery truck, full to the gunnels with goodies delivered to your door, no Netflix 24/7, in fact no television at all to escape into. People of that era had fond memories of simple things, close relations with the neighbours in their street and a simple proclivity to count their chickens. They were self sufficient, well able to get on with their lives no matter what constrains came their way.

As I look across the street I don't see the bombed out buildings or the pain of losing a friend after a bombing raid, I see ship-shape houses, neatly cut hedge rows, tidy homes for tidy people. There no rattling of cans for coppers, the bank transfer copes with that. There no need to fear the Bailiffs except under extreme cases and there's always a charity to seek out to easy you by, so why do we hear of so much stress in a society which never had it so good. Have we invented fear for fears sake as if an ailment was a badge of honour, a measure that we counted or were counted.
Do the long list of psychological afflictions we are prone to these days make us feel exceptional, living as we are in a world where we have become simply a statistic. Mothers can recite long almost unpronounceable descriptions of a child's condition, a condition which years ago was not only unrecognised but unnoticed, if in fact it existed at all.
Have we created a fantasy world, a world where we demand our right to be what ever we want to be without knowing what that is.

He's now driving the bus

Subject: He's now driving the bus.

As I look out of my window this morning I'm reminded of Oscar Wilds Poem, 'Ballard of Reading Jail' in which he describes his limited vision, walking around the exercise yard as that "little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky".
There are no bars on my window but the outside world seems far away. A world which has become foreign, a world with evil portent of an enemy lurking in the air waiting to pounce and move into my airways and smother the life out of me. 

The cars in the street remain stationary as people consider Boris's statement last night, what exactly did he mean. Boris Johnson is famous for his avoidance of the truth and obfuscating the obvious, and last night he lived up to his image, waffling around by trying the impossible, saying 'it's ok to go back to work but warning that it isn't'.
For some, those hardy yellow jacketed construction workers and also those who work in manufacturing, it's ok to start today, as soon as possible please but the desk bound types who's  contribution is more peripheral, stay at home.
Are the lives of the document filling staff more  valuable or is it the case that their contribution is less important. The box ticking which describes much of what goes on in offices these days can be laid aside for another month or two whilst the real economy gets on with the job of making and building things.
Of course it could be a matter of valuing one group against another.
The decision makers assimilate more with the clerical than production. Often, especially if their expertise is financial, they come from the ranks of the desk bound class and the chaps down on the shop floor are usually viewed as less educated. It was always so and perhaps as we are asked to go over the top of the trenches and leave behind the safety, for the unknown, this image of that part of society which was forever expendable and would somehow do the job for us and make things safe.
How can he urge these workers back to work when he has failed miserably to provide significant testing, the mainstay of the German back to work policy. Testing in this country has been an unmitigated failure, unsure of who should be tested, the testing grounds stood empty because of that extra layer of bureaucracy, the email, telling the testers whether the person was eligible. The farcical shortage of analysing capacity by deciding only NHS labs could be trusted with the job, resulting in having to send the tests to America for analysis. The lack of adequate follow up on what the tests reveal, the hundreds if not thousands of staff required to trace the movement of people found to have been infected.  It's not by chance that " Dads Army" was popular over here, it's so reminiscent of the way we do things.
Go to work but we won't have the mass transport to get you there. This is not a blunder rather a lack of joined up thinking, an example of 'wing it and see' which has characterised Boris's life thus far.  Unfortunately he's now driving the bus.

A Brave New World

Subject: A Brave New World

Will the pandemic be a turning point for how developed nations work and produce goods. Will it accelerate the rise of robotics and a plethora of distance ways to work.
Will we take this moment of having our freedoms confined to reassess those freedoms, the freedoms to travel anywhere in the world, the freedom to consume way beyond our needs, the freedom to demand.
Since the end of the Second World War peoples lives have changed, mostly for the better, with the caveat that the wide ranging freedoms inevitably exact  a price, particularly by those who misuse this freedom. Perhaps the Corona virus has put paid to this freedom and in future we will always be looking over our shoulder trying to anticipate the danger we are in. Other people will become suspect, we begin to shun them for our own good and enter a world of cabals, isolating ourselves in the the confined space of what and who we know. The world of work might have to embark on a global or national wage, a sort of minimum on which people sustain themselves in loo of work. The question of unemployment or worse the inability to employ in a time of high skills when our education has failed to teach the young the skills  needed in this Orwellian world. To prevent starvation and revolution the concept of a minimum wage for life has raised its ungainly head and this and the fear of mixing because of the virus might be the catalyst for governments to break new ground with a new economic system.
In the third world, as it was called the general population was left to its own devises, far removed from us and our Keynesian proclivity for organisation this world of dog eat dog was something away over there and not over here. With the internet and the globally inspired mass movement of people for economic betterment is a fact of our everyday life as the potentially millions of disadvantaged people make the leap into the world of the advantaged. People who initially at least are far better equipped to live on merger wages not having cottoned on to mass consumerism they live according to what they have. It's almost impossible to imagine people raised in this country contemplating a thousand mile walk over mountains, facing harassment at hostile boarder posts. We ourselves balk at being held up for half an hour at a border, sitting in our air conditioned cars the music playing and feeding ourselves with hot soup in the thermos.
Will this pandemic and the economic distortions caused by it cause us to face reality. That the world as we knew it was founded on the giant Ponzi scheme of unsustainable credit. That trillions of dollars or pounds of 'unbacked asset free debt' has piled up just waiting for a crack in the dam wall of fiat money on the assumption that it was real.
As the economic Giants of this world reveal that they are bust and with them the people in the supply chains which feed them, the chickens come home to roost and we are maybe forced to adjust to an economic desert.
Global warming and the natural desert it heralded will be a thing of the past as industries which pollute the air, such as the aircraft industry and ones manufacturing  petrol driven motor cars fold, as the leisure industry fails to build up on people's fear of contamination, as government borrowing goes through the roof with 'Rating Agencies' rating the pound Stirling as junk and adjusting their lending rates appropriately.
Doom and gloom, yes and the outcome may be less acute but the underlining problems won't go away and perhaps we will have to adjust to a new austerity and lower our sights on what is possible.

Tidiness and its failings

Subject: Tidiness and it's failings.

What is it about being tidy, what is it about tidiness that separates those that are and those who aren't into two distinct camps, the one willing to go to all lengths to keep their place tidy whilst the other group don't care and more importantly don't see the mess.
When boy meets girl, initially the stars are aligned and so much of the character of the other, the prospective mate is not taken on board until the stars have started to wain and actuality resumes its place at the table. Tidiness is one bone of contention in many households and by tidiness I don't mean OCD, I don't mean the obsessive dusting or the need to continually align the pens and the picture on the wall, although I do feel a crooked picture has to be adjusted. It's not the all consuming, finicky, tampering with the environment inside the home, the continual adjusting but the world where the tidy person clashes with the untidy person, where a titanic battle to keep the cast off clothes in the basket, and prevent the unwashed dishes piling up making access to the sink impossible and all flat surfaces around to become cluttered with stuff. Where wardrobes lie virtually empty for sake of a place for the clothes on the floor and those lying over the back of a chair, where beds are unmade and become more like a badgers earth, somewhere to crawl into at the end of the day.

What is it in the psyche of a person who's vision is blind to mess and another who is mildly keen to keep on top of things. Is it up bringing and the discipline imposed from an early age. Sometimes the untidy person is rebelling against that discipline in their later life, or is it a lack of discipline toward tidiness which spills into the conscience at a later stage and represents a fight against the chaos in their lives and the one thing they can do to prevent it.

I know couples who practice strict duties, one cooks the other washes, one puts out the rubbish whilst the other dusts and tidies. This strict separation of duties provides a template by which the housework is accomplished and doesn't become an argument in the assumption that something will be done by the other when it isn't. The home is automated and the duties are not a chore since the benefits of having a partner in what they do is clearly recognisable to both. It's this recognisable element, this organised division of labour which makes a tidy home and often, a happy home.

The psyche of allowing everything to decay into a mess, where nothing has a place can be soul destroying to someone who appreciates a level of order, some visual accountability for things and where they should go.

Of course it's only when you go into partnership with someone and share your surrounding does the matter arise. On your own the mess is yours and there is no nagging need to change. The things cluttering the house are yours and each had or have a purpose. Having them out on display means they are still a part of your life whilst stuck away in a drawer they are forgotten and cease to remind you of the pleasure they once gave. Photos on the wall and books half read remind you of yesterday, a space fondly remembered, even cherished. The story on page 51 will reengage your mind in a moment, transporting you back, providing the hinge to open a door through which you pass, like Alice and escape. Things in their place have the habit of staying in place like the fixture you may have become, tabulated and indexed with no room for manoeuvre, your only saving grace is the order around you,  which is often imposed by someone else to fit their association of what life should be.
So let's relax the image and not chastise the person for the book or cup left on the side table, it indicates, if nothing else that life is alive and well and that perhaps if we visualise each other as having needs outside our own, well thankfully we didn't marry a robot.

A ship at sea

Subject: A ship at sea.

"At the end of this month" and so the announcement of a further measure to limit the flow of people who may carry the virus through our airports and into our society is made Other countries have for a month or more had in place vetting procedure for  incoming passengers believing they are a main source of the virus spreading  world wide. Some countries have placed a ban on all incoming foreigners advising  them they are not welcome and insisting that returning citizens isolate in specially designated isolation centres at their own cost. 

We on the other hand have deemed it ok for passengers disembarking at Heathrow and other airports in the UK to simply walk out of the airport with no checks. We in our wisdom decided that it was too much trouble to organise any sort of quarantine, the assumption being that the probability of catching someone with the virus was small and that the disruption to passengers wasn't worth he effort. The fact that someone with a full blown infective virus would possibly infect many people before they came down with the disease seems to have escaped them. It's a game of least done the better which has characterised our governments response to what was clearly going on around the world.
It wasn't as if they hadn't had plenty of examples of best practice from countries who are now to be getting back on their feet and allowing people back to work. At first we ignored the virus and suggested that Herd immunity was the best course of action. And then frightened by the rapidly rising death toll advised 'voluntary' isolation and distancing hoping that would work. Then when it didn't and the rate of infection began to rise exponentially, whist successful nations such as China, South Korea, Germany, even the Nordic countries (Sweden who went for Herd immunity)  notorious  for their 'go it alone' attitude imposed a total lock down, which worked if anyone here had cared to look. And now, at last they seem to have got around to realising we are, once more out of step in allowing our main incoming artery for the infection, passengers disembarking from aeroplanes be remedied by imposing self isolating quarantine but not, you will note until the end of this month, a good 20 days away and even then not enforced as it is in successful countries. Once more ineffective, the 'powers that be' are late and tawdry in their response. It's as if it's a game of cricket and it's seen as bad form to hurry or show panic, stiff upper lip and all that.
Testing in this country has become a farce as they tried to push up numbers by including testing kits sent by post to key workers but not returned. Even then, they failed the moderate target of 100.000, way behind what the Germans, with a capacity of 500.000 tests a week already  had in place, a testing regime which identifies who has the virus and who doesn't, allowing  the Germans to begin getting a healthy work force back to work  . As I write the Germans are ramping up their testing to more than a million per week whilst we still struggle with 100.000.
Hiding deaths in old people's care homes and leaving the carer's to stew without protective clothing is close to criminal and yet we still see the same old faces spewing out the same old lies.

The farce that parliamentary scrutiny has fallen into, with a government having such a majority that they can ignore any criticism and a jingoistic press, baying for a return to work, irrespective of the medical argument against it and you have the complete picture.

Of Blighty at sea without a certificated skipper and a crew who don't know how to sail the boat.

VE DAY

Subject: VE Day

So it's 'VE Day', (Virus Endurance Day) today. Victory in Europe was a day of great celebration, the end of the European war with its 5 years of civilian and military trauma pressured as we were by the German fighting machine which was, in the end, only overcome by its own brash self belief that it could fight on two fronts and invade Russia fighting over the vast Russian Stepps against an army controlled by a man who was equally as ruthless as Hitler.
It was said that the best generals, the most ruthless generals who pressed their men to the point of destruction were the German and Russian generals. On the Western front none of the generals, other than perhaps General Patten had this intolerance of others below them to win at all costs.

 Perhaps General MacArthur fighting the Japanese had the ruthless streak needed but in general the Generals fighting in Europe, Eisenhower, Bradley and our own Montgomery were not quite of the calibre of the German or the Russian top brass. Montgomery in particular was loathed by the Americans, a very good tactical man but lacking the talent to combine whole armies in a common purpose. An egotist par excellence looked up to by his men but hated by everyone else and it was only Eisenhower's supremacy talent for diplomacy that kept the allies around the table.
One of Eisenhower's best attributes was his ability to work with egotistical generals, to man manage people who saw themselves 'beyond the Pale', stunted by their own sense of their exceptionalism and cursed with an unrealistic sense of national importance.
The Germans with greatly depleted armies were able, with great tactical skill to hinder for another year the push through Germany from an overwhelmingly larger, better equipped, better supplied  force than themselves. German efficiency meant that they had to scrape the barrel, putting raw teenagers in the line, they held their positions in an orderly retreat and not a rout. With hindsight it might have been better for the Germans to have capitulated whilst the Russians were still distant. Germany would not have been divided and Stalin not able to play the part he did in usurping so much of Europe in what became the USSR.

How did they get there in the first place

Subject: Care Homes. How did they get there in the first place.

One of the tragedies to have come to light in this period of the pandemic has been the lack of attention given to what has been going on in our old people's care homes and what appears to be a lack of attention by the government in issuing the protective clothing to limit the spread of the disease. It's been a scandal made even worse in trying to avoid those deaths from being accounted with the totals coming out of hospitals. A cover up of the people dying in these homes because it didn't fit the picture the government wished to present, that we were better off than some countries in Europe.
It's just another example of the parsimonious nature towards spending and Government planning for the future regarding the running of Old Age Homes.
Care homes used to be the province of the state. Homes were run by Municipalities and through the Municipality the State covered the full cost of old people's care whilst they were in the Home. Privatisation started, as did much else with the Thatcher doctrine of Market Forces being better at running everything and the cost of a person living in a Home now runs into many thousands and often requires the old person to sell their home to meet the cost. Thus at the end of their lives people are faced with an escalating cost and great monetary stress when at their most vulnerable. Frail, often suffering from dementia, society conveniently turns its back on their old people as we became more and more like our American cousins who's fascination with wealth and exceptionality leave huge swathes of their society left out in the cold with little or no protection. Today we have a care industry, for that is what it has become, which  identifies cost and the profit before the care, or that fundamental responsibility society owes its old people.
Of course it opens up a can of worms when we compare ourselves with other societies, especially the responsibility families can play when it comes to looking after a parent.
To hear the anger in the voices of family members who complain about not being able to visit their parent makes me ask "why is the parent in a home in the first place and not cared for in your own home". Many societies take care of their older family members who remain within the family unit until they die retaining their dignity by acknowledging them as the father or mother who  raised and protected their children through their formative years and see it as a duty to care when their parents get old.
We in the West, particularly that Anglo Saxon section of the West have shuffled off that duty and handed it over to the Care Home. We shy away from mixing our own, newly formed family with that other, fundamental family, our mom and dad. Asian families, Middle Eastern families, and religious groups such as the Muslims continue to support the extended family and few parents of those groups end up in Care Homes.
So when we throw our arms up in disgust at the death toll in the care homes perhaps we should first ask, how did they get there in the first place.

Getting back to work

Subject: Getting back to work

People are funny. If I watch a comedy show, I laugh, if I watch a sad drama I cry if I see something spectacular I cry out in amazement but if I hear a politician spouting a load of rubbish I'm not allowed to cry foul, I'm  not allowed to argue or even shout in frustration at the screen because those 'who will be obeyed' feel it's an aspect of my character which is distasteful.
I know that political values vary from person to person but so does humour, as does what people judge to be sad or fantastic but with political judgement it's a field in which one treads with caution. It's particularly acute between men and women, on the one hand it seems second nature to have political opinions whilst on the other it's an anathema.

And so as Matt Hancock appears on our screens each night, in what could be called comedy, high drama, or plain villainy, (villainy without the background music to indicate the villain is amongst us), we watch and marvel at the bland skulduggery of the chap as he weathers each day the storm, quoting what he knows to be misinformation. He seems more drawn and downbeat these days as he realises his deceit and the damage he's done to countless lives in his post as Minister of Health during the pandemic which will ensure he goes down in history as a saint or sinner.
Of course it's not just him but all who are called to the stage to tell us about another political wormhole concocted, like the others on another set of porkies!
The next issue the government has to attempt is getting people back to work.
Casting our minds back to those early days of the pandemic when we were ignorant of the facts and there was little or no direction from the government as to what we should do as they themselves tried to make up their mind as to whether we should seek 'herd immunity' and that damning decision that testing was a waste of time and money.  It's no wonder we have little confidence in how the government will handle the move back to work having got so much else wrong.
If the government, in the absence of proper mandated rules and regulations, described the rules as guidelines rather than regulations, it will cut no mustered with employers unless they are told what is expected of them. In many firms in England there is a callous attitude towards the lower ranks of worker and the pursuit of profit is their only objective, putting safety well down the list of priorities. Already people being asked to work in potentially crowded, hazardous conditions afraid that if they point out the risk they will lose their job and therefore are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Only firm government legislation which gives the worker some sort of a say in the workplace  arrangement and equally protection for speaking out if they feel the risk is too great is acceptable but I wont hold my breath with Boris at the helm.

A tipping point

Subject: A tipping point.

And so now we understand that the virus is with us, for ever. The caution we currently have will no doubt slowly die as our assumption of what it means to catch the virus become similar to those we have for catching flue and instinctively forced into a recess of the mind. The assumption that 'we' won't die, it will be someone else who dies is also the way we get through the crisis points in our lives, that innate confidence that the crisis is someone else's crisis, not our own, carries us through.
One of the social concerns of this pandemic is that we begin to mistrust each other and start to see other people including friends and family as a potential danger, a carrier of the virus and therefore an enemy.

 If we begin to stigmatise everyone around us as a danger, to shun any physical contact including those physical mannerisms like a kiss or a hug, those signs of friendship like a handshake, then we are in danger of becoming emotionally stunted and instead become extremely risk averse.

The risk of being having a car accident is a statistical case in point. The numbers of people setting off each day, should induce fear if we stopped to consider the danger. We regularly visit parts of the world where disease is prevalent. We accept the danger of pollution and that it kills millions of people. Climate change is brushed aside and we continue to inflict our destructive life style on the planet, oblivious to the damage and the disruption our children will face.

Our response to this virus has been like no other. The world has been closed down at the behest of the scientist, the economy is in tatters and the picture of devastating unemployed will only add to man's inability to remedy his or her actions.  The question might be asked. "Is it correct to protect sections of society through a lock down, with its curtailment of over excited lifestyles if, by so doing the lives of others are ruined".
Of course there was a time when restaurants were not a must do destination, when travel was limited to relatively short journeys from home, when the only fast food outlet was the corner fish and chip shop.
The explosion of consumerist outlets and the people employed in them, are a relatively recent phenomena and it could be argued that their disappearance,  for a short time  is not too high a price to pay until you consider the people put out of work. Would our lives be forever stunted by not having a 'Chinese' or the more dubious refinement of 'Sushi' on our doorstep. Maybe Blackpool Tower rather than the Eiffel Tower, maybe the sound of a glottal stop rather than the helter skelter of an Italian conversation over a glass of vino in Rome.
Being released from the grip of hurrying thoughtlessly through our lives and missing that vitally important opportunity to find space to communicate with ourselves has to be a plus. To be able to look around and value isolation, as a time when we are able to do things which interest us. Time to value our own mental and psychological health rather than just the physical satisfaction of 'being there'. 
The herd is outside the gates gnashing its teeth at the loss of GDP but perhaps, for the first time in your life, time is on your side to consider who you are and what you really value.