The Coronavirals (starting at the beginning)

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Day 1. Stay at Home

Tuesday March 24th 2020

Good morning on day one of twenty-one (at least) in lockdown-lite Britain.

It was great last night to see Boris catching up with (half) the public mood.

We told him he shouldn’t be shaking hands. We told him to shut the schools. We told him not to visit his Mum on Sunday. We told him to make us stay at home. What shall we tell him to do next?

The sun is shining again this morning and (unaware of the shit show unfolding around them) the ducks are quacking. No ducks at your place? Get some, they’re great company and if things get worse they’re tasty too.

Big up to those whose work is truly essential in beating “this invisible scourge”. You are the heroes of the modern age.

But this is only lockdown-lite because millions of non essential workers will go to work today – not because they want to but because – for now – it’s the journey to work being non-essential that keeps you home, not the work you do. (That’s what we will explain to Boris next).

Here’s an example. It’s essential to protecting the NHS and saving lives that Pizza Hut is open for delivery and you can’t run a Pizza Hut from home. You could try but where are you going to get the flour?

New Zealand lockdown is the real deal. Check out that. Or even better Serbia. Full on curfew. Probably snipers on the tops of tall buildings. We will get there.

Two tips to start the day.

Don’t watch the Trump press briefing from last night. Scary!

Don’t stay in bed. Get up and go out now for your single solitary exercise. You will feel great.

I’m here all week. Next week. And the week after. And so on. I’ll try to think of some jokes.

Day 2. Zoom

I like to greet the sun each morning. And walk amongst the stars at night. I like to know the taste of honey in my life.

I’d like to fly far away from here. Where my mind is fresh and clear.

Flying high in a neon sky.

Just one look and then my heart went boom. The moon and stars came out to play.

You chased the day away.

My whole wide world went ZOOM.

Please learn to mute your microphone and how to disable the waiting room.
All over by Easter? When is Easter? Is Easter like the Olympics? Will the Donald just move Easter 2020 to 2021 but leave the name the same?

It’s a beautiful day Easter. For many people. Not just him. He is absolutely barking mad. This is the challenge of our generation. Who is the John Wilkes Booth of our generation? (that’s today’s JOKE).

Today’s tips.

1. Watch Governor Cuomo’s briefings from New York. His challenge is vast and stark. But he’s funny. And has his young daughter interning on the team for a dollar a year. Dude.

2. Try not to do things that create demand for non-essential services so non-essential workers can stay home and safe. Their bosses are playing fast and loose with their safety. Don’t you. Help them stay home.

Much love. X

(With thanks to Fat Larry and the Commodores)

Day 3. Mum

“My mother is not expendable. Your mother is not expendable.”

Governor Cuomo said that yesterday. Spot on. I’ll keep it in mind every time I feel the downward drag of solo self-isolation. It’s why we’re doing this.

I’m beneath the not very busy flight path of East Midlands Airport the UK’s largest dedicated freight operation, normally a really important hub for all sorts of inbound and outbound goodies. And a lot of unnecessary tat too.

Not much happening in the high skies over here at the moment but at 5am this morning a bunch of noisy planes came in (and woke me up). Hopefully they were carrying ventilators, masks, PPE and testing kits.

There are lower flight paths here. A dozen swans went by just now. Buzzards bothered by crows are overhead. The geese are noisy. The ducks are frisky. There’s a heavy frost. The sun’s on the up. I’m going for a run.

One tip today (and a last word on Zoom). Take a screenshot of yourself as you look on screen at the start of the meeting. Make it your profile pic and then once there are a few people in the meeting switch your video off and go and do something more interesting. I got away with it for 20 minutes yesterday.

Stay strong. Stay safe. Stay away from your mother. And mine.

Day 4. Hello

I’m moored somewhere lovely, somewhere many people choose to come for their walk, run or bike ride. Good choice. But fear walks, runs and rides with them. I can see it.

The chances that the person you are passing in the street or park as you each take your daily exercise has the virus and will give it to you are relatively slim.

Suppression is statistical. Keep your social distance sure, but there’s no need to be scared of each other one to one. We can still make eye contact. No harm in saying hello. Don’t be a stranger stranger.

Have you had a good cry yet? No? If ever there were a time for getting a little lachrymose it’s now. Or soon. Don’t bottle it up. Let go. Not too often, but now and again can’t hurt. Hopefully you’ll feel better for it. If it’s too much or too often don’t be shy of asking for help.

Three million Americans lost their job in a week and with it many of them lost their health insurance. Clap (or sound your horn as boaters did) for those working on the NHS frontline. Cheer for the very idea of having a health service free and accessible to all.

It’s the Friday of week one. If you can, ‘go home’ early today. You’ve earned a break this week. Good work. Well done.

I wasn’t going to mention Zoom again but please take care with your access settings. Zoom bombing really is a thing and some of the things we saw yesterday cannot be easily unseen.

Today’s tip is to get up with the dawn (about 5 am). Go to bed earlier. Tune your body clock to the rhythms of the natural world.

X

Day 5. Breathe

We’re all in this together but we’re not all in the same boat. Mine is a mess.

I’ve been at work all week, without leaving home except for exercise. Five full-on, dawn to dusk days of essentially non-essential keeping the show on the road. Thanks to everyone involved. It’s been fun.

So glad it’s the weekend though. A chance to tidy up, recharge the batteries, fill the tank. Literally. And empty the toilet. Maybe get up in the garden.

Three tips today.

1. Whatever home improvement you’ve planned for this windy first weekend of confinement sit down for a moment and call a friend you’ve not seen in a while. Use the landline if you can find it. (I can’t). They’ll appreciate it. So will you.

2. Try not to talk about the virus (except to that friend you’ve not seen in a while). If you find yourself starting, stop. Talking about it isn’t going to make it go away (it’s not going away just yet). Have a C-word swear box? All proceeds to the first big night out after all this.

3. Avoid the news as much as possible (though you will want to check on Boris every now and again of course) and listen instead to myhouseyourhouse.net

Pop by for a beer or a coffee and a chat if you like. You don’t need to know where I am. Anytime.

Happy Birthday Jo Barker. Happy Anniversary Mum and Dad. X

Day 6. Cats and Dogs

The clocks creep forward. Summer is slowly coming.

It’s not always easy to find positives but it’s not hard to keep looking for them.

‘Even as one day blends into the next see if you can’t find a silver lining, a few rays of a light’.

That’s New York’s Governor Cuomo again. He needs to find 140,000 hospital beds, 30,000 ventilators and 70,000 volunteers. In two to three weeks.

He says you go to war with what you have, not what you need. If you get any advance notice of the battle you spend what time you have preparing for it.

Or you send a letter from your sick bed that says no more than you said on Monday.

If this is Boris Johnson’s Churchill moment it’s the nodding dog from the insurance advert he’s channelling now.

There is ‘no hole in government’ that cannot be filled by the next ‘designated survivor’ in line and by the middle of next week it could be Larry the Downing Street cat at the daily briefing.

Forget herd immunity for a moment, beware the herd mentality that has us moving as a group, not making decisions for ourselves, not knowing where we are going, or why.

Don’t wait to be told what to do. Take responsibility. Get ahead of the curve as you help squash it. Anticipate what is going to happen next and what will next be required of you.

Prepare for it. Adapt to it. Do it now.

And hopefully this will all be over by summer.

Today’s tip? Dark clouds ahead. Look for a silver lining.

Day 7. It’s OK

If you’re lucky enough to be ‘going to work today’ you at least know it’s Monday.

Working from home, normal for some of us, is being touted as the new normal for all of us. But it’s not normal at all.

It’s the new not normal and it looks like we’ll be doing it for a while.

‘Six months? I didn’t say say six months.’ Yes, you did Doctor.

Over by Easter?’ I never said Easter. It was an aspiration.’

Ascension? Pentecost? Michaelmas? Christmas?

It’s only week three and we’re reminded starkly already of what we like about getting up and going to work.

The release of leaving one set of responsibilities and relationships behind for a while, even if we’re swapping them for others.

How much we like a lot of our colleagues. How many of them are our friends. And how much we miss them.

What we enjoy about the commute we thought we hated.

The becoming that other you.

It’s tempting to think we ‘pivot to online team management and virtual delivery’ get ‘back up to speed’, ensure ‘visibility to stakeholders’ and carry on ‘delivering benefit to customers’.

As normal.

You do have to do that, if you can.

But it’s not normal.

Our physical and mental wellbeing, being as happy as we can be during this weirdness, are more important right now than our output or productivity.

We are all going to respond to the new not normal in different ways.

We will all have ups and downs at different times.

It’s OK to want it all to go away. It’s OK to want space to work it out. It’s OK to want to slow down, or to take time off.

Don’t be afraid to ask.

Don’t be afraid to say yes.

It’s OK to not be OK.

(It’s not OK not to tell someone).

Today’s tip is for people working from home without a team to join online. Check out Akimbo virtual co-working.

https://akimbo.com/virtualcoworking

Day 8. Bored

Gaviscon Double Action. Eddie Stobart. The Green Group (dedicated to service). Maersk. GB Cargo. White van man. The Royal Mail. The Co-operative. Sparks Transport. DHL. Eaglemanns. A motorcycle at speed. Fresca (transforming supply chains). David Fox Transport. Dixons. Ribona. Great Day. M&S. Sharpes. Eddie Stobart. The NHS (hurrah). The Royal Mail. Ryder. Ryder. Ryder. DPD. Zenith. Hovis. FedEx. Wickes Costco. Warburton’s. UPS.

Bored? Already?

Mum says only boring people get bored and Mum is always right.

It runs in the family.

Things can be boring. People can be boring. Especially so (don’t say it).

Life? Never.

There is always something to entertain you. In supposedly boring school detention there was the clock. What fun to be had closing your eyes, holding your breath and guessing how long a minute is.

Even if you’ve finished all your household chores and garden improvements, read all your unread books, written your novel, learnt a couple of languages, there is still no need to be bored.

Watch the birds for an hour.

Stand by the motorway and count trucks.

But start by being interesting.

Today’s tip: Has there ever been a better time to get to grip with the dictation function on your computer? Or to learn to touch type?

Day 9. Dark

He’s doing a great job.

He’s getting A pluses.

Unbelievable ratings.

Monday night football numbers.

He has a friend.

A little older.

And heavy.

He went to the hospital.

He called ‘em up.

‘How’s he doin’?’

He’s in a coma.

A coma.

It’s a war zone up there.

Today’s tip: Get your hair cut two weeks ago.

Tune of the day: https://youtu.be/w1HU24bNbX8

Day 10. (F)Light

Swans in flight, low over the water, are one of my favourite sights.

They’re noisy. You can hear them coming.

I love the way they take off, stretching their long neck before them, slapping their wing tips against the water. Thwack, thwack, thwack.

It looks like they won’t get up, but they do.

Woosh.

I love the way they land, spreading their webbed feet before them, thwacking their wing tips against the water. Slap, slap, slap.

They come to a stop like the log coming off the flume.

Splash.

Planes fly high so they can fly faster, because thinner air offers less resistance.

Swans would benefit from that. If they could get up there.

They’re the Antonov 225s of the waterways.

Today’s tip? If you’ve saved a bit of money on movies, gigs, lunch at Prêt etc, why not invest a little of it in supporting a possibly struggling local artist or musician? Either directly by buying their work or by supporting something like the Nottingham Artist Fund.

*I hear them coming, but can I get a photo?

Day 11. Testing 1

A friend (he works in marketing) said we “need a high-profile death, a big name”.

Bigger even than Eddie Large.

I saw data at the weekend that said 70% of those dying are clinically obese.

Like the Donald’s ‘heavy’ friend. And poor Eddie. Both ‘central casting’ for COVID.

Eddie’s a standout case because, so far, the virus has been really good at targeting the rich and famous with the minor-symptoms-back-to-work-in-a-week version.

Mr Matt Hancock bounced back to the Downing Street podium Yesterday with a smile and his five-pillar test up-ramping plan.

Boris can’t be far behind him. They went off sick on the same day.

(Or can he?)

Roughly 165,000 people have been tested. ‘Only’ 33,000 of those have tested positive. Why are there so many negative tests? Is it just that four in 5 coughs and fevers are not COVID and doctors are playing it safe?

Because while there is a shortage of tests and NHS frontline staff are unable to get them, a negative test might be a ‘wasted’ test – unless you are an essential worker and it means you can stay at work.

If you’ve had ‘COVID-like symptoms’, even if you have self-isolated for 7 or 14 days, you cannot say you have ‘had it’. Not without a test.

Anytime until you have had a positive test, been ill and recovered, you might be infectious. Don’t drop your guard. You may yet get it for real. Even if you have had it for real, you can still pass it around, surface to surface.

Keep washing your hands.

Anyone testing negative will quite possibly need another test at some point. Particularly NHS frontline staff who will surely need repeat testing, maybe once a week for so long as they test negative.

It’s a big number but, allowing for re-testing, is even Mr Matt’s ramped-up 100,000 tests a day anywhere near enough?

Today’s tip: This weekend think of somewhere out of the way to take your exercise. Don’t go to the park (with everyone else). Get a map out. Find a footpath through fields if you can. Or explore your local industrial estate. And try to get some sun. There’s surely a national vitamin D shortage too.

Photo by israel palacio

Day 12. 2 Testing

I heard it’s like going five rounds with Mike Tyson (he bites your ear off in the third).

I heard that the breathing restrictions are like running uphill at mile 21 in a marathon.

I heard you can lose a stone in a week. Your kids will look like ghosts.

I heard it’s attacking the super-fit and the young, as well as the old and the fat.

And I heard it can kill you. Yes,you.

Why not you?

Even when they’ve heard all that why is anyone still saying they think it might be ‘better to catch it, get it over with’?

Because the want to get back to work.

Back to normal.

The government has floated the idea that once it has the ability and capacity for mass antibody testing, once it is able to introduce ‘community surveillance’, it will issue a certificate or ‘immunity passport’ to those who have had the virus because they also want you to get back to work.

How long before restaurants, bars, clubs and cinemas, schools, universities, shops and workplaces open up – but only for people who’ve tested positive with symptoms for the virus, been ill and recovered, or have had the virus without symptoms and have tested positive for the antibody – and who have the CV+ ID (real or fake) to ‘prove’ it?

Normal life resuming for those in the herd with immunity – many being those who didn’t take lockdown seriously (and took the family to Epping Forest for a day out) while the rest of us – who did everything we could not to get or spread the virus, the old and otherwise vulnerable – will continue to stay at home in lockdown after lockdown until there’s a vaccine.

That’s where society, communities and families will split. Right down the middle. Between those who’ve had it already – and lived – and those who have not.

Between survivors and the untested.

Today’s tip. Don’t be a dick. Don’t go to Epping Forest. Plant seeds at home. Gardeners’ World are doing a twitter thing from 10am. @GWmag.

Day 13. May?

Things will never be the same. After this we can’t go back to how we were before. We’ll create a kinder, fairer society.

Some say.

Not me. I have an alternative theory (I’ve many) that it’s just as likely that we will go back almost exactly to normal. And pretty quickly.

In a couple of years – assuming we are not all dead (no apologies for the optimism bias) – this will be a ‘remember when’ moment; like 9/11, the 1972 three-day week and the 2010 fuel crisis, the days after Diana died, WW2.

Even three months of ‘stay at home’ not-quite-lockdown won’t overwrite millions of years of selfish, self-centred. self-preserving genetic coding.

The movement tracking says 25% of people are already not following social distancing guidelines. I’m not sure ‘everyone’ is clapping the NHS. People are heading out into today’s welcome warmth and sunshine as I write.

Normally when you chuck the buckets and spades into the boot of your car one or two neighbours might be prompted to go to the beach themselves.

It’s way more infectious now.

Do it today and half your street will think ‘they are, why shouldn’t we?’

Don’t do it.

It’s going to be tough to keep it up if we’re locking down until the end of May or longer. Cabin fever can test the best of us, especially anyone who has discovered – or knew already – that their domestic set up (or last-minute tinder hook-up) is not where they want to be. Worse, not where they feel safe.

Another theory (or just an idea); when we get to the end of this first three weeks, we’ll be given 24 hours to re-set. One chance to get the hell out of or into Dodge. A national game of musical statues. Go!

He’s scaring the shit out of anyone watching* but the Donald is not going away. He’s getting into his stride. He’s starting to enjoy it. It’s what he does best. He’s going to save the day. Just watch. https://www.whitehouse.gov/live/

He “was never involved in a model – at least this kind of a model”. Luckily Dr Anthony Fauci has been and Americans are lucky he’s in room. He’s making the difference that DT will take the credit for.

No-one should be complaining about the rambling length of the daily White House briefing. So long as he’s at the podium talking bat-shit crazy stuff he’s not at “the great Resolute desk” in the Oval Office doing bat-shit crazy stuff.

*watch it all, not just the clips.

Today’s tips:

Listen to this short BBC profile of Dr Fauci https://bbc.in/39La1sC. Trump says he’s becoming a ‘big TV star’. I think he’s more important than that.

And this, also from the BBC, about how South Korea responded so fast and so effectively. https://bbc.in/34aKvfn

And stay at home.

(Not me obviously. I’m going to Skeg).

Day 14. Alone?

“We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return: we will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again.”

“Some sunny day.”

The papers are lauding the Queen for her echoing Vera Lynn’s optimistic wartime reassurance that this too shall pass.

The next line is ‘don’t know where, don’t know when’, but let’s not dwell on that.

Referencing the war, at a time when ‘our own Churchill’ has been admitted to hospital, reminded me of the real one’s “fight them on the beaches” speech, particularly this bit;

“I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.”

Replace ‘war’ with COVID-19 and ‘tyranny’ with infection and he could be talking about social distancing.

“Keep smiling through, just like you always do.”

You are not alone.

Today’s tip. Never surrender.

Day 15. Boris

Boris Johnson has met me four times.

Once at The Grapes, an Elizabethan riverside pub in Poplar. He’d been lunching upstairs. I’d been having a pint downstairs on the wooden balcony that hangs over the water at the back of the pub. He was the Mayor then. It was that most glorious of English summers, the Olympic one. London was the centre of the world. I told him I thought he was doing a great job (he was). He left on his bike wearing that helmet they made him wear against his instincts.

Another time in the City of London, near Bank or Mansion House, we waited at dusk for the green man, both with our bikes. We didn’t talk that time. He wasn’t wearing his helmet. He was wearing a purple London Underground beanie hat.

When we met early one morning in Angel he was wearing a tatty t-shirt and boxer shorts. I was doing something boaty. He was finishing up his morning run. He lived just around the corner. It was the morning after England had lost to Italy on penalties in Euro 2012. Nicola and Dave were asleep on board.

Most recently was at The Travellers’ Club on Pall Mall, “a meeting place for gentlemen who had travelled abroad, their foreign visitors and diplomats posted in London.”

One such friend and his wife hosted their wedding party upstairs in the Library. We bumped into Boris as we were leaving. He wasn’t Foreign Secretary anymore. It was after he’d left his wife and kids but before he got lucky and shacked up with Carrie.

He’s not as tall as you’d expect.

I look forward to meeting him again.

Today’s tip. Take care and take it easy if you can. It’s really not clear how this thing is going to play out. The numbers look better for the herd. But the personal pain is not over.

Day 16. Dogs

You saw the goats that are roaming the empty streets of Llandudno? Around here it’s teenagers, forced out of their homes by the day-and-night presence of parents, in their face, on their case and using up all the bandwidth zooming for work, quizzes and drinks.

Gotta get away.

The cops were here last night. The British Transport kind. Hot pursuit on foot along the towpath. Blues and twos. Everything.

The kids are trespassing on the railway line, going over the bridge to the tunnel mouth. Stupid idea, even when there are so few trains running.

They got away.

They’re getting away with all sorts.

Unconcerned about social distancing, these lads (natch) are happy bringing their bongs and beers out to places more normally occupied in these parts by middle-aged men with dogs.

But most of those guys have an underlying condition or two so the youth are owning the public space.

They’re lovin’ it. Getting gobby. Pushing it.

Are dogs the line not to cross?

We’ll take being told to stay at home, to avoid all but essential travel, not go to the pub, not see Mum and Dad for a while.

But don’t go telling us we can’t walk our dogs.

Today’s tips.

Don’t rely on the journalists virtually attending the government’s daily briefing. They have lost the plot, all asking the same, wrong questions. More interested in who makes the decisions while Boris is indisposed, than the decisions they have to make. Not interested enough in the data other than the headline numbers.

Crunch you own data. Ask your own questions. Why are there three and a half times as many cases per head of population in Sheffield as there are in Leeds? More virus? More testing? Or both?

Day 17. DIY

A few weeks ago, walking beside the river, I came across a car with a poster in the back window decrying ‘the heliocentric world view’.

Luckily for me the car’s owner was there to chat to.

He told me the flat earth is not actually flat. It’s more of an an upside-down saucer shape.

He has a geocentric world view; Earth does not go around the Sun, it’s the other way around.

He told me no-one has ever ‘circumnavigated the planet’.

“Not even Michael Palin?”

They have merely made it to one edge of the saucer and then walked around the circumference of the upturned side-plate we call home.

“Where does the sun go at night?”

“It’s just over over the edge running around the rim”.

“Where are the stars? How do we not lose our atmosphere?”

“There’s a dome”.

“Like in the Truman Show?”

“What?”

“Like one of those snow dome things you shake?”

“Just like that”, he said.

“What’s on the other side of the saucer?”

“What do you mean?”

“What’s beneath us?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you believe in chem trails?”

“I see them every day”.

“What about 9/11?”

“That was an inside job”

“And did we go to the moon?”

“We most certainly did not”.

I guess he thinks the virus was made in a lab. Or it’s all down to 5G.

He’d be stocking up on hydroxy-chloroquine if he could.

If it even exists.

Today’s tip. Make no plans for the weekend. There is zero chance of the lockdown being lifted on Monday. New infections are not increasing as they might every day now, it might well be having an effect, the smart move would be to tighten restrictions today – a lot – to take advantage of the four-day holiday (for the lucky ones) and shut down everything that can be shut down – Spanish style – until at least the end of next week. This government may not have the cojones for that.

Do It Yourself.

It’s what Bank Holiday Weekends are for.

Happy Easter.

Day 18. We Move

Four weeks out of the office, three locked down. Busy as ever. Pivoting online. Delivering virtually. All that crap.

Not key. Hardly essential. No need for PPE. Miles behind the frontline. Hopefully contributing a little. Not expecting a clap.

A long weekend is welcome though. Even with nowhere to go.

Not me. I’m allowed to move the boat to empty the toilet. Now you’re jealous.

I am fortunate.

I have a place to live that I like and that I’m not sharing with high-dependency / annoying kids / relatives / flatmates. I’ve no neighbours that I can’t escape.

I don’t have a garden but I do have the great outdoors right on my doorstep to walk, run and cycle in (for no more than however long it was they said).

I have the great outdoor toilet too. That reduces the need to move the boat, thereby reducing the spread of the virus, protecting the NHS and saving lives.

I’m surrounded by birds; swans, geese, heron, cormorants, egrets, ducks, coots, moorhen. It’s spring and they are all trying noisily either to shag or drown each other.

There are terns diving, housemartins feeding on a plentiful supply of flying food, pheasant making that pheasant noise, buzzards building a nest when not being harassed by crows, a woodpecker (pied), a Robin (red breast), and a Little Owl hooting at night.

I have a job that still requires me to turn up (though I suspect no-one should count any chickens on that front) and that remains enjoyably doable remotely (credit to my wonderful colleagues for that).

I’ve made some new connections and strengthened some existing ones already. You see another side of some people on video calls. They’re a great leveller. New leaders emerge.

Probably a few more weeks to go.

What’s not to like apart from it tanking the economy, ushering in rampant inflation that will destroy any savings you have, sky-high taxes that will stop you saving much anyway for a decade or so, and unemployment levels that might make tax rates the least of your concerns?

Like the government, I think I’ve got a few things wrong so far, but I’ve got a few things right too.

I’ll make more mistakes.

And I’ll keep posting here.

Enjoy the long weekend if you can. Have fun at home.

If you’re at work, we’re thinking of you.

Thanks for reading.

Today’s tips. There are some idiots about. And some people who are struggling. Try to help both; not everyone is as smart as you, not everyone is as resilient.

They say you know who your friends are at times like this. Don’t worry about whether or not they’re getting in touch with you. Just be sure to get in touch with them.

X

Day 19. Mitigation

It’s Jerome Adams’ moment in the harsh sun of the Coronavirus this morning. He’s the US Surgeon General (weirdly a role that means he’s a Deputy Admiral and wears a uniform).

He’s a person of colour, and he’s in the news for fundamentally sensible remarks he made in response to the fact that COVID-19 is killing people of colour disproportionately in the US.

The majority of people dying in New York City are Hispanic. In Milwaukee County blacks are 25% of the population but they account for 50% of cases and 75% of deaths.

He suggests it’s likely the ‘chronic burden of social ills and chronic health conditions’ is a contributory factor.

Only 1 in 5 African Americans and 1 in 6 Hispanics have a job that enables them to work from home.

People of colour are more likely to live in densely packed areas, and in multi generational housing meaning a higher risk of spread.

30% (thirty!) of homes on the Navajo Nation do not have running water.

People of colour are not biologically or genetically pre-disposed to catch the virus (nor are they immune as some daft rapper suggested) but they are more socially pre-disposed, more likely to be exposed to it, and more likely already to have diseases that put them at risk of severe complications from COVID-19.

His headline message was, “mitigation works” and said it’s particularly important, because they are at higher risk, for people of colour to stay at home if possible, to practise social distancing, to wear a mask when outside, to avoid alcohol, tobacco and drugs.

He said “Do it for your Abuela, do it for your Grandaddy. Do it for your Big Mama. Do it for your Pop Pop.”

All you’re likely to hear on the news this morning is the pretty stupid challenge he received from PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor (herself a person of colour) who suggested (within a very few minutes) that “many found his language (Big Mama etc) highly offensive”.

Jerome Adams responded well. He said he was using the language used in his family and community. But – yes – his advice applies to everyone. Dr Fauci backed him up. Judge for yourself here.

All this during a briefing in which Mr Trump said,

“The germ has gotten so brilliant. Not only is it hidden. But it’s very smart. It’s invisible.

There’s a whole genius to it. Brilliant enemy”.

Nuts.

And VP Pence said,

“To my christian brothers and sisters across the country let me encourage you to remember that Jesus said wherever two or more are gathered there he is also.

So you can worship, you can celebrate Easter.

And know that you will be blessed in so doing, and will be serving the nation”.

Nuts.

Today’s tip. Follow the Surgeon General’s advice to, “Call your friends and family. Check in on your Mother. She wants to hear from you right now”.

This page lists the latest post first. If you want to read from the beginning click here.

Day 20. Mettle

Happy Easter?

My phone says I did 36 steps yesterday, fewer than I do normally.

It’s a new phone. It thinks I normally do 126 steps.

I think this long weekend has come at a really good time.

If you’re working on one of the frontlines, in health, social care, or some other essential service you could probably really do with a long-weekend.

Hang on in there.

I think the rest of us needed a break too (and not just from Trump’s malignant narcissism*, though that was welcome last night).

Shifting to home-working, home-schooling, home-everything was quite exciting to begin with, even fun.

Home-worrying about not having any work, or a business, or a relative can’t be any sort of fun at all.

The novelty wears off. The curve is flat already. We see the downside.

It doesn’t suit the human condition to be cooped up.

It doesn’t suit the human condition not to be interacting regularly or randomly.

It doesn’t suit the human condition full stop.

It’s not an experiment. It’s a test. Of our mettle. Of our resilience. Of our capacity not to derail.

The chap six feet and three inches behind me in the supermarket queue said it was the monotony that was getting to him.

What’s getting to you?

I used to have a big garden. I often stayed home all weekend. I could easily lose myself in flowers and vegetables and rabbits and ducks for days without seeng anyone much. I’ve got plenty of chores to occupy me now. I wish I had thought to buy the tiles I need to do the bathroom.

I hope you’re in a good place. I hope you have enough space. I hope you’re making the most of the time you have with the people you’re not choosing to spend all your time with. I hope it’s strengthening your relationships, not deepening any cracks in them.

I hope you’re staying healthy. I hope you’re getting out. I hope you’re eating your greens. I hope you’re feeling some love. I hope you get an egg.

I hope you’re going to hang on in there.

Today’s tips.

If there’s someone you really should apologise to, try saying “I’m sorry if you feel I have something to apologise for”. See how far that gets you.

Read: Really good article HERE from The Atlantic about how Trump is is draining the last reserves of decency among us at a time when we need it most.

Listen: Jordan’s mix for Tom Ravenscroft on 6 Music on Friday (from 1.56).

“Get some exercise. Do some dancing.”

Day 21. Hope

Before the NHS became the national religion (sorry Jesus, time’s up) people would complain about it; waiting times in A&E, how long it took Gran to get a new hip, not being able to get an appointment at the GP, prescription charges.

Most of the complaining was done by people who had never used the NHS for anything more than primary care, except childbirth and death, and the dead tend not to complain.

Whereas anyone who has had anything serious dealt with by the NHS rarely has anything other than great things to say about it.

18 months ago, over excited at a festival, I fell over and hurt my shoulder, quite a bit more than it seemed at first.

It did take a while to get the extent of the injury recognised by my GPs, and a bit of time was wasted on physiotherapy and osteopathy. But once I’d negotiated my way into the Consultant’s room (where a simple test the others could surely have tried diagnosed the truth of problem in a few minutes), and then learned how to work the system a little (be very available, be very nice) I got into the MRI scanner and then theatre quickly and was amazed by what was done for me in there – not least because I opted not to have a General Anaesthetic so I got to watch it all ‘through the keyhole’ on TV, while the Anaesthetist plied me with ‘a little gin and tonic’.

Everything, everyone, on the day of my operation was first class and the after-care was brilliant too.

I imagine that’s how Boris feels with bells on, and you’ve got to be pretty cold-hearted (hello twitter) to doubt, in the short film he put out yesterday, the sincerity of his gratitude to, and respect for, the people who saved him.

I bet he had the fright of his privileged life. It must be a great leveller, intensive care. Definitely all in the same boat once you’re in there. Maybe he ‘gets it’ now, in a way that he might not have done before.

“Our National Asset”, as he put it.

The many, many times I’ve driven down the A42 I’ve looked across at a church standing on the edge of a quarry cliff and wondered where it is.

Today I found it on my bike. It’s in Breedon on the Hill. You can see for miles from up there. You can see Nottingham Castle and Belvoir Castle and the power station. But then you can always see the power station.

Even though I had made an early start there were plenty of people out and about. They might normally on a Sunday have been heading to the shops, or to a pub for lunch, to see relatives, or going to church. In all cases (apart from the shopping) especially so on Easter Sunday.

With all those things off the agenda (even the churches are closed) what does anyone expect people to do on a sunny Sunday other than go for a run, a walk or a bike ride?

When we are otherwise stuck inside, and we’ve been told to get some exercise, why is anyone surprised that parks, beaches, footpaths, towpaths and the like are busy?

Sure, sunbathing and bbqs are a no-no but why is anyone exercised by someone sitting alone on a bench watching the ducks for a short while?

Exercise comes in many forms, mental as important as physical.

Outside the Priory Church of St Mary (presumably quite pleased by the Resurrection) and St Hardulph (8c Northumbrian King Eardwulf, possibly buried here) three people, clearly well-known to each other, were chatting.

They were talking about how awful lockdown en famille is.

Ever the interfering busy-body I suggested that kind of language isn’t helpful, unless there is something really to justify it.

How lucky many of us are to be spending time we might not otherwise have had with the people we ought most want to spend time with, I said.

Negative language creates negative moods and is no help at all to people with plenty to truly feel negative about. Far better to have an optimistic outlook. Far better to encourage positivity in others, I added.

The chap asked if I was visiting the church to deliver the sermon.

A few minutes later on the narrow path descending the hill from the church to the village, through the remains of the bulwarks of an Iron Age hill fort, I met another couple.

Giving each other a wide birth we agreed on what a glorious day it was.

“You’ve got to look on the bright side”, the lady said. “And Boris is getting better too. It’s enough to give you hope.”

Today’s tips.

Stay positive. Help others to stay positive.

If you’re working online tomorrow, if you’ve a string of zmeetings©, invest a bit of time today in sorting out your lighting, backdrop (blurring out is a cop-out) and sound quality. It was a leveller last week and the week before. But it’s hierarchical now. If you want to be heard you need to look good and sound good.

Day 22. Again

Twenty-one days in lockdown.

Well done you.

But we’re not done yet.

Was the Queen’s ‘We will meet again’ a hint? Are we in until VE Day?

The same rules apply; social distancing, working from home (if you can), allowed out only to go shopping (infrequently), for exercise (once a day) or to aid a vulnerable person.

Except they’re not the rules. They’re the tweet.

Nowhere in the rules does it say you can only go out for exercise only once a day (or that you can only go out for an hour).

They say you cannot leave the house ‘without reasonable excuse’ including (but not limited to) shopping and exercise – for which no time, frequency or geographic limits are specified.*

Today’s tip comes early. Obey the law, not the tweet. Politely challenge any cop or ‘cop’ who doesn’t know the difference.

But don’t be daft.

Some people are saying they’ve ‘had it’, even when they’ve not had a test.

They might have been really ill, more ill than they’ve ever been before. They might have good reason to think it was the virus, but if they think that means they can behave any differently now, they should have another think.

It’s like pregnancy. You might think you’re pregnant, and you might turn out to be pregnant, but to begin with you don’t know for sure unless you’ve had a test.

If you think you’ve ‘had it’ and start to go about your business as usual then the next guy, who wasn’t quite as ill as you, thinks he can too, and the next guy, who was nowhere near as ill as him, thinks he can as well.

Until we are back at square one.

We’ve all (almost) made a significant collective investment in getting this far, creating the space for the NHS to be ready, reducing what the NHS has to be ready for.

Let’s not undermine that now.

Let’s stick at it.

Yes, lockdown is a monstrous pain in the arse for most of us, but it’s preferable to the alternative and, as my friend Stuart points out, if you’ve ever had to face a really serious challenge in your life, you know it’s not that big a deal.

Anyone can do it.

As the footballers used to say ..

We go again.

An appeal. (It really should not have come to this).

You don’t need me to tell you that the government’s failure to procure and provide adequate quantities of PPE is a scandal.

If you’ve enjoyed reading any of these (now twenty-two) posts would you please spare just £5 to help Gayle Bennett of Soul & Flare at Sneinton Market and the Nottingham Scrub Hub team of volunteers to make and provide ‘uniforms’ directly to staff working at Nottingham hospitals. Each set of scrubs costs £15 to make.

My facebook fundraiser for this is HERE.

Their Go Fund Me page is HERE.

If you’re a skilled seamstress (or seamstor?) with time on your hands, could you help make scrubs? The Nottingham Scrub Hub can be contacted HERE.

If you would prefer to help a more local Scrub Hub, you can find one HERE.

* The Law covering lockdown is The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restriction) (England) Regulations 2020. March 26th 2020. There’s a good explainer HERE.

Day 23. Waffle

Did you see the story of the pensioner whose friends got him a flight in a French air force Rafale fighter jet as a surprise retirement present?

When the pilot took the supersonic plane skyward at 47° his passenger, who had never before flown in a military aircraft, reached out for something to hold onto and pulled the ejector seat handle.

His ill-fitted helmet came off and his anti g-force flight suit came loose as he shot out of the plane.

His luck changed when his parachute opened, and he was only slightly injured when he landed in a field near the German border.

I mention it because rightly or wrongly (wrongly) it made me laugh when I read it, more so because at first glance I thought it said he’d won it in a raffle.

You will have seen this morning that Trump pulled the ejector seat on Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organisation last night.

Dr Ghebreyesus earned his PhD at the University of Nottingham where he also picked up the habit, when asked how he is, to reply with “not bad”, to the consternation of his friends back home in Ethiopia who tend to a more optimistic outlook.

He is a micro-biologist and malaria researcher. He was Ethiopia’s Health Minister and Foreign Minister.

Last summer he came back to Nottingham to speak at a University dinner I was lucky enough to attend. The next day, with his wife and daughter, he went to the Splendour festival in Wollaton Park.

His mantra throughout the pandemic has been “Test. Test. Test” and “If you tolerate this, your children will be next”.

Once he’d announced pulling the US’s funding of the WHO and the launching of a distraction, sorry, an investigation, most of Trump’s speech last night was a long, long list of businesses and business leaders that he says he’s going to be talking to on the phone soon.

Including Waffle House.

Will someone please pull his ejector seat.

I’m looking for mine.

Today’s tip.

Don’t forget to build up your dynamic ventilator reserve. And test, test, test.

Watch President Macron’s honest and impressive lockdown-extending speech HERE. You don’t need to understand French to be impressed.

HERE it is with English translation.

Day 24. Lemon

It’s said Shakespeare wrote King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and a good number of his sonnets while isolating from the bubonic plague.

More certainly, around the same time and not so far from here, Isaac Newton invented calculus, set out the science of motion, understood gravity and stuck a needle in his eye while trying to understand light.

When he was asked how he had come to work out gravity Newton replied, “By thinking on it continually”.

Plenty of time for that.

Hopefully now is a great time for scientific discovery.

Certainly it’s a great time for some artists.

And perhaps a great time to buy some art for your collection.

Or to start a collection.

Art made now, influenced by the special circumstances of now, perhaps by an artist forced by lockdown to work in a different, simpler, back-to-basics way.

You will have a fine momento of this peculiar moment, and you might be helping out an artist falling slowly through the cracks in the government’s business support schemes.

My momento is ‘lemon with bottle and satsuma’ (2020) by Bruce Asbestos.

Today’s tips. Only buy art because you like it, not because you think it will increase in value. Don’t give a hoot about what anyone else thinks of the art that you like or buy.

Day 25. Already?

If it’s Tuesday this must be Belgium.

The Donald is re-opening America, talking in the past tense.

Mission accomplished?

Already?

In 1971 Blue Peter buried a time capsule to be opened in the year 2000. I’ve still got the ninth annual, the one with John and Shep on the front.

The capsule contained a copy of the Radio Times and a set of decimal coins.

And innocence.

They planted a silver birch tree above it.

Yesterday I cycled to Kegworth a village under the flight path for East Midlands Airport – newly, hopefully temporarily, COVID-promoted to the European top 10 of airports.

A time capsule was buried there, under a big lump of rock, in 2000 “so our future generations in the year 2100 will have an insight into life as it was in the 20th Century”.

No idea what’s in that one but presumably it mentions the plane that crashed onto the M1 motorway near the village in 1989.

Forty-seven people died.

The same year ninety-six people died at Hillsborough.

Fifty-one people died when the Marchioness sank on the Thames.

Five people died in the Purley train crash.

All those numbers rightly shocked us.

These crazy days daily death numbers are read out with little sense of shock.

We are habituated.

Already?

I’m told kids are burying COVID time capsules – putting in face masks and sheets of toilet paper – so that future generations will know what it was like to live now.

I don’t think any of us yet know what it’s like to live now.

The future stretches out un-ending.

When does it start?

Belgium?

Today’s tip. Don’t bury your time capsule just yet.

Day 26. Fun

Hit it

This ain’t no disco

And it ain’t no country club either

This is LOCKDOWN.

“All I want to do is have a little fun before I die”,
Says the man six feet from me out of nowhere

It’s apropos of nothing he says his name is Boris
But I’m sure he’s Alexander or de Pfeffel or buddy

And he’s plain lovely to me, and I wonder if he’s ever
missed a day of fun in his whole life

We’re drinking beer at noon on Tuesday
In the virtual bar that faces the giant car wash

And the good people of the world
Are washing their hands on their lunch breaks

Hosing and scrubbing as best they can
In jeans and t-shirts

And they don’t drive their shiny Minis and Polos
Back to the phone company, the record stores, too

Well, they’re nothing like Boris and me

‘Cause all I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I’m not the only one

All I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I’m not the only one

All I wanna do is have some fun
Until the sun comes up over

Er .. Castle Boulevard?

I like a good beer buzz, early in the morning
Boris likes to peal the labels from his bottles of port

He shreds them on the bar then he lights up every match
In an over-sized pack letting each one burn
Down to his thick fingers before blowing and
Cursing them out, he’s watching
The bottles of port as they spin on the floor

And a happy couple enters the bar
Dangerously close to one another

The bartender looks up from his phone

But all I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I’m not the only one

All I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I’m not the only one

All I wanna do is have some fun
Until the sun comes up over
Er .. Castle Boulevard?

Otherwise the bar is ours, the day and the night
And the car wash, too

The matches and the port, and the clean and dirty cars
The teams and the zoom

But, all I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I’m not the only one

All I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I’m not the only one

All I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling the party has just begun

All I wanna do is have some fun
I won’t tell you that you’re the only one

All I wanna do is have some fun
Until the sun comes up over
Er .. Castle Boulevard?

Until the sun comes up over
Er .. Castle Boulevard?

Today’s Tip. Have some fun if you can this weekend.

*With thanks to Tallulah. And apologies.

Day 27. 888

The number of UK deaths announced yesterday was eight-hundred and eighty-eight.

In Wuhan, and everywhere else in China, 8 is a lucky number because it sounds like ‘fa’ meaning ‘wealth’, fortune’ or ‘prosper’.

888 is triple-lucky.

888 is used by Christians to represent Jesus, as Christ the Redeemer, in opposition to 666, the number of the beast.

888 is also what’s called a ‘happy number’, meaning that repeatedly summing the squares of its digits leads to 1.

888 → 64+64+64=192 → 1+81+4=86 → 64+36=100 → 1.

Lucky. Redeeming. Happy.

Or not.

Today’s tip. No more screen time.

Day 28. Ennui

A French word for something more than boredom.

A feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement.

There’s a lot of it about.

Are you feeling it?

Today’s tip. Don’t drop out. Stay tuned in. We owe that to our friends and relatives, and people we have never met, who are working hard on or near a frontline, have been or are now ill, have suffered, or will yet suffer, a personal loss.

Day 29. Tip Top

The indisputable leader of the gang.
He’s the boss, he’s a VIP, he’s a championship.
He’s the most tip top,
Top Cat.

Yes, he’s the chief, he’s a king,
But above everything,
He’s the most tip top,
Top Cat!

Only thirty episodes were made but that was enough for Top Cat, Benny the Ball and Officer Dibble to create an indelible impression on a kid of my age.

T.C. is the all-American hero of the piece, but he’s not a straight-up good guy. He’s on the make, on the take, loving a get-rich-quick-scheme, always ready with a phoney or a fake.

He lives in Manhattan. He speaks highly of himself.

I’m reminded of him.

Today’s Top Tip. Lose yourself for a couple of hours in the deep dark waters of Lukas Wigflex’s Sunday Mix for Crack magazine. Tip top.

https://bit.ly/3aqjGW2

Day 30. Leatherface

The physique.

The suit. The tie. The hair.

The lumbering, predatory gait.

The sociopathy.

Truly scary.

Shocking audiences worldwide.

“Who will survive and what will be left of them?”

Today’s tip. Don’t have nightmares.

Day 31. Economy

This is an interesting part of the world. The Trent and Mersey canal opened in 1777 to connect two of England’s great rivers with each other, and the heartland of the first industrial revolution with the sea and international markets.

Between the 1770s and 1840s the village of Shardlow was an inland port important enough to be known as ‘little Liverpool’.

This is an interesting part of the modern world too, even in an economic slump.

Perhaps especially so.

Yesterday evening I cycled the few miles up to the airport where the Airport Trail runs close to the perimeter fence. In places it cuts though clumps of trees. In places there is public art. In places it needs of a bit of TLC.

North of the runway it offers un-obstructed, close-up views of planes coming in to land.

Big yellow DHL planes full of stuff. Big white Amazon planes full of stuff.

Some of it is medical supplies coming in from Turkey, China, even Myanmar. The rest must be all the stuff some of us are buying online because we can’t think of anything else to do but shop.

For a long stretch, starting at a patch of grass set aside for picnicking plane-spotters, the trail runs between the airport and the gargantuan sheds that form the first phase of the East Midlands Gateway otherwise known as the SEGRO Logistics Park.

Over my shoulder right now trains loaded with containers are crossing and re-crossing the River Trent going back and forth to the docks at Immingham on the Humber.

The containers are transferred to trucks at a new rail hub at the Gateway, beside the M1, and in spitting distance of the big sheds and the airport.

The shift was changing at the Amazon shed. Workers were arriving by car, masked-up already. One by one, like lonely animals entering the ark, they made their way inside.

The wheels of international trade continue to turn in this interesting part of the world.

Today’s Tip. Keep buying stuff if you can.

Day 32. Opening Up

Thirty-two days ago (sigh) I suggested that Boris was following rather than leading the public when he put the country into lockdown.

The early adopters, the nudge-noticers, had been at home for at least a week already.

Now I think the public is leading the country out of lockdown too.

Not the same public.

Last in, first out.

You must have noticed.

You go out for your exercise, a lot of other people are taking theirs too – and a lot of it doesn’t look much like exercise. You zoom in for virtual drinks with a mate who already has the neighbours round for real ones. There are groups of lads out for bike rides. Some businesses are opening up. There is more traffic on the roads. The trains are going to start running again soon. Someone says they just booked a holiday.

Enough of us have had enough already.

The tide is turning.

The sun is out.

The government’s initial flip-flopping on which scientific advice to follow and then its persisting failure on PPE and testing have undermined its ability to call the tune.

Who’s even watching the daily briefings now?

Ready for more strong words with your parents?

Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Mr Ken Clarke (79) said on the wireless yesterday, “There’s a danger, if they go for ultra-caution, that everybody over the age of 70 will be advised that they’ve got to remain in self-imposed house arrest for the next year or two and I know very few people of my age who will put up with that.”

Nor me mine.

The government has to lift the lockdown or look like they’ve lost control.

Two more weeks. Max.

Today’s tip. Stop holding a daily briefing with anything more than the numbers in it. Lots of us are switching off, even the news channels are switching off, and those of us who are still paying close attention can draw our own conclusions from the numbers (would you like to see my spreadsheet?). Give it a rest until you have something new to say. We’ll still be here. For a little while at least.

PS. I (sort of) got the swans in flight picture for Day 10.

Day 33. Wit

If you haven’t liked something I’ve said, I didn’t mean it.

I was being sarcastic.

I wasn’t even talking to you.

I was talking to the journalists.

(While looking at the nice lady doctor.)

Pam Ayres (our true poet laureate) puts it perfectly ..

At last, we have a cure for all!
Ailments large and ailments small,
Good health is not beyond my reach,
If I inject myself with bleach.

Radiant, I’ll prance along,
Every trace of limescale gone,
With disinfectant as my friend,
Like him,
I’m clean around the bend.

Today’s Tip. Head on over to Blidworth Art Club on facebook NOW!

Day 34. Rain

Like the rise of veganism and the vinyl revival, the sense of the lockdown collapsing in on itself is real, but exaggerated.

Liam Gallagher’s presumably dreadful ‘Why me? Why not’ topped the 2019 LP charts with 29,000 sales. It was only number 26 in the all-formats chart (Lewis Capaldi was number one with 641,000 sales) which tells you something about the true scale of the vinyl revival (and the swagger of the people buying it).

Knowing a couple of people who’ve said they have adopted a plant-based diet might be a sign of a trend, but not of a dietary revolution. Greggs’ launch of their vegan sausage roll was a PR triumph but I’ll bet they are not selling anything like the 2,500,000 a week they do of the pig one.

Don’t form your opinions based on just what you see from your window. And certainly not on what you see on the TV news or in the papers. Journalists need to move the story on, even if the story has not moved on.

Yesterday on my puncture-interrupted ride out onto the Cloud Trail I saw the M1, the A50 and the A42. Normally busy on a Saturday afternoon, none of them had very much traffic on them. But empty road stories are so three weeks ago.

Most people, even shoplifters, are just like you. Not being dicks, staying home and all the other stuff up to and including saving lives.

Like you, they’re getting some exercise and outdoor time too. Don’t be too quick to judge, unless it’s a full on eleven-a-side game. In which case, judge away.

Reinforcements are on the way.

The British weather is about to have its say.

Today’s tip. Get out while you can.

Day 35. Normal

I’d been for a run. Had breakfast. Spoken to Mum.

I started doing some laundry. I have a small twin-tub washing machine. Like all good things it’s from China. It stands in the bath. It does the job. Yesterday I was distracted while filling it.

I was sitting on the back deck wasting time writing this blog. The engine was running to make hot water. Sub-consciously I had the idea the water would be hot enough and leant forward to press the engine stop button. It didn’t stop.

Try again. Still not stopping.

I think the stop button works by controlling a solenoid somewhere that does something to starve the engine of fuel.

I think.

I went inside to grab the manual. I heard the water pump going. Oh shit. The bath was a few inches from overflowing.

The thing about boats is .. water outside; good … water inside; very bad.

I turned off the tap. Phew.

The twin tub had popped its fuse. It’s done that before. I’ve done something similar before. (I’m an idiot sometimes). That time I left it to dry out for a few days and it worked again.

I’ll do that again now. Fingers crossed.

I don’t think the engine stop button not working was caused by the twin tub’s troubles; they are on different circuits. More likely a happy coincidence; one failure getting me off my arse in the nick of time to discover another.

There is a manual stop lever beside the fuel pump on the side of the engine. I lifted the deck board reached down and turned the engine off.

Oh shit. And another. Lots of oil beneath the gearbox.

It’s done that before. On my 50th birthday cruise the day England played Wales at Euro 2016 (Bale put a free kick through Hart from about three miles out).

That time I called out an expert who first filled the gearbox with fresh oil and ran the engine in search of the leak. But it didn’t leak again. It hasn’t leaked again. Until now.

Cleaning up the oil is a fun job. I used four toilet rolls!

Refilling is easy enough (so long as you have some oil).

It didn’t leak again. Fingers crossed again.

It worries me whenever boat things are maybe, and definitely, broken (and that fixing them might be expensive). It took most of the afternoon to deal with. I missed lunch. I was a bit stressed (but calm). I felt a bit more alone.

But none of it was anything to do with COVID bloody 19.

It was all wonderfully normal.

Today’s tip. Don’t be an idiot. Leave that to me.

Day 36. Generosity

Most of the time, but especially in times of adversity, there are people who look selfishly inwards and act in their own interests while others look outwards, understand that a little generosity can go a long way, that in the long run it’s the more profitable option, and that what goes around does indeed come around.

My friend Jamie is the latter.

Jamie won’t complain if you wake him up at half-six (today) needing to borrow his jump leads, his van, and him. He’ll be with you in two minutes and give you a start with a smile.

Yesterday evening, responding to a positive sounding rumour, Jamie and I rode up to a nearby village. A man living there makes cider for local festivals, but the local festivals are all cancelled so he has made his excellent ‘about 5%’ cider available to neighbours and passers-by at the end of his drive, free-of-charge.

That’s the kind of generosity that will see us through this adversity.

What do you have to give?

Today’s tip. Next time you need new curtains (from what I see on Zoom a lot of people need new curtains) buy them from Jamie and Amanda. They make the best curtains.

Day 37. Quack

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Day 38. Hatched

In March Carrie Symonds said she had ‘a baby hatching early summer’.

So why am I wearing a jumper?

Some daft journalist said in one of the papers that the arrival of Johnson’s sixth child “adds to the gaiety of the nation”.

You what? Gaiety? Not in great supply at the moment.

Maybe there was panic buying of gaiety back in ‘the spring’.

Relentless monotony? If you’re lucky, that’s plentiful and cheap.

Like petrol.

Six kids! Who needs six kids?

Especially when ‘the planet is on fire’. (Remember that?)

What would Greta say?

At least he is not ‘stealing anyone’s childhood’.

He’s a childhood factory.

Babies are distractingly cute though. It’s the adults they become you have to worry about. Like swans.

I never understood that ugly duckling song. These day-old cygnets, spotted this morning, are the cutest. Their parents will soon be wantonly killing the young of other birds.

Nasty bastards, swans.

Today’s tip. Try not to have six kids.

Day 39. Slowly

Lockdown days may all feel the same but change creeps slowly through the curtains every morning as we move through the solar season.

The Sun rises* a couple of minutes earlier each day. It was about half five today, May 1st, seven weeks since my last day in the office.

The spring equinox was a week later, a couple of days before the lockdown started officially.

Seven weeks from today, on Friday June 19th, the sun will rise at about half four, we’ll be on the cusp of the summer solstice, a day away from the days starting to shorten and the nights starting to draw in.

If we are indeed past the peak, truly passing ‘through some huge Alpine tunnel and can now see the sunlight and the pasture ahead of us’ let’s not move too fast towards them, let’s not ‘run slap into a second and even bigger mountain’.

It’s hard for businesses desperate to get back open. It’s hard for grandparents wanting to hug their grandchildren. It’s hard for people in small homes without gardens. It’s hard for people on their own.

It’s hard.

But at 27,000 deaths we’re already missing the ‘good outcome’ by a country mile. How much are we prepared to miss it by just because we’re a bit fed up with lockdown life.

Let’s be clear about where we’re heading, but let’s avoid any temptation to hurry there.

Restrictions are bound to be lifted a little bit soon enough, probably in relation to exercise and outdoor time first, and an exit plan will be shared next week. But whatever that says, there’s no need to push it or take the wotsit.

More shops are opening up, believing they have social distancing sorted, but do you really need to go to B&Q? Can that shoe repair not wait?

Your employer might re-open your office but is it absolutely essential to give up on working from home right away? Resist that urge if you can.

It’s taken seven weeks to get to the peak. Why not give it seven weeks to come down the other side?

Let’s make an optimist’s plan for Friday June 19th, for Lightest Night?

Let’s meet for drinks and a bite to eat. Let’s sit outside in the late evening sunshine, the ‘summer breeze blowing through the jasmine in our minds’.

Until then, if we don’t need to, let’s not do it.

Let’s go at our own slow pace.

Let’s learn from the Sun.

And the snail.

Today’s tip. Make the most of the extra daylight you have first thing in the morning and at the end of the day. It’s precious.

The Sun does not rise, or set. Earth turns on its axis to bring the Sun in to or out of view. Ask Aristarchus of Samos.

Day 40. Bridge 10

All around now the question, ‘What will you do when lockdown is lifted?’

I know.

This is Bridge 10, in Cliff Wood, on the Trent & Mersey Canal.

I like the wander of the water here. It looks nature-made, but it’s a man-made embankment that contains the navigation.

I like the sunlight and the rain that fall through the trees here and, whatever the weather, I always stop at Bridge 10.

I don’t know why. I don’t have to.

This simple, narrow, metal footbridge takes you to what’s called ‘the Ukrainian village’, a post WW2 settlement camp and still a cultural centre for the Ukrainian community. There are rope swings, archery targets, fire pits, an interesting memorial and an only-occasionally-open social club.

One time I was there a model railway club had hired one of the meeting halls and set up an amazing replica of so much of America that it took an hour and a half for their little trains to go all the way round the track.

Bridge 10 is only seven miles and five locks, just four or five hours cruising away, but lockdown puts it on another planet.

When lockdown is lifted I’m going to Bridge 10.

And stopping.

I don’t know why. I don’t have to.

Today’s Tip. Work out where your Bridge 10 is.

Day 41. Folly?

Not so far from Bridge 10 there is a twin-turreted building away across the fields that has often caught my eye but, until yesterday, I have never been to see it close up.

I’d thought it a folly. My mistake.

It’s Swarkestone Pavillion. From the canal and from the road, you’re looking at it from the rear. From in front, that it’s no folly is clear.

It was perhaps built by one of the first true architects, Elizabethan John Smythson (who worked, for his father, Robert, as a stone mason on Wollaton Hall). That would have been in 1632, two years before he died in 1634, the year that Swarkestone was visited by King Charles I. Alternatively, it was built by a local mason, Richard Sheppard, and surveyor, a Mr Wooldridge.

Either way it was built with some certain, but uncertain, purpose in mind. Maybe as a place from which to watch a game of bowls. Perhaps it was bear-baiting. Either way it is really pretty. And I should have visited it sooner.

In 1745 Bonnie Prince Charlie almost visited but, with support in the south in short supply, his advance faltered close by, on the northern banks of the Trent at Swarkestone Bridge, and he turned tail, retreated to Scotland and defeat at Culloden.

In 1968 the Rolling Stones did visit, to shoot photographs for the cover of Beggars Banquet. In the end a different cover design was chosen, but one of the images created for them by Michael Joseph at Swarkestone was used as the promotional poster for the album.

Today’s tip. Book somewhere nice to go and stay when this is all over. Swarkestone Pavillion is looked after by the Landmark Trust, who restored it, and, in normal circumstances, you can stay in it. It sleeps four.

Day 42. Snacks

I stuck my head out of the side hatch yesterday afternoon and these two were right outside.

They looked maybe four days old.

Fifteen minutes later they looked maybe five days old.

Away from the farm you don’t see yellow ducklings very often. They may grow up to be white ducks, though neither mum or dad (unless you know, who knows?) are white.

If they grow up at all.

At this time of year heron, hawks, pike and others have their eyes peeled for a tasty duckling snack.

Super-cute, camouflage-free yellow ducklings like these are paddling about with a target on their back.

Easy pickings.

The day before yesterday there were three of them.

Today’s tip. Don’t count your chickens.

Day 43. Opportunity?

It’s 5.30am. There is a burst of activity at the airport. A few planes are leaving. Just a few.

East Midlands Airport is part of Manchester Airport Group (it also owns Stansted) which like the rest of the industry, from Boeing through Airbus and Rolls Royce to British Airways and Ryanair is ‘challenged’.

Only a few months ago Ryanair was saying its growth plans would be held back because of delayed delivery of the 135 Boeing 737 Max aircraft it had ordered. It doesn’t need them now. Who does? 16,000 passenger planes are parked up.

Ryanair is making 3,000 of its staff redundant, British Airways has announced 12,000 job losses, Rolls Royce 8,000, many potentially just up the road in Derby.

Boeing, worth 1% of US GDP on its own, has suggested 15,000 jobs may go in the US. One million people work in the company’s supply chain. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has sold all of its shares in the four biggest American airlines. He says, “the world has changed”.

Manchester Airport Group is two-thirds owned by the ten Greater Manchester Local Authorities. In normal times that’s good news; they were expecting to share a £110m dividend payment in 2020. Instead they are having to borrow £260m to keep the business going.

EMA’s focus on freight at a time when not many of us will be flying on holiday for a while makes it more resilient than other airports. But freight doesn’t buy coffee or duty free. Freight doesn’t pay to park its car. No airport business case has enough flex to take this downturn for too long. So what next?

Has the world changed enough for there be an opportunity now, or soon, for the East Midlands Local Authorities to help Manchester’s out of the pickle they find themselves in by buying the airport?

Today’s tip. If you are working, book Thursday off to make it an extra-long Bank Holiday weekend and enjoy the best of the weather before it turns chilly again next week.

Day 44. Sides

On one side, the ‘let’s-keep-goings’ led by Boris, with his signature on the Union Flag two days ahead of VE Day. Wow. On the other the economy-firsters who don’t need a leader in the UK because they have Trump and the second amendment goons in Michigan.

Stage left Nigel Farage (it rhymes with garridge) on the beach in the rain, banging on about the invisible scourge of immigration or tapping his frying pan for the NHS with a wooden spoon but without any sense of irony. Why is he even still in this show? He should have been killed off at the end of series one.

Trump’s continually shifting position now has Quarter 3 being a “transition period” for the US economy. Just a couple of weeks ago it was going to be “amazing”. I was hoping those cardboard boxes would fall on him. He’d have been fine. They were so obviously empty.

Look at Sweden. Yes, do. Bars and shops are open. They trust the population to behave sensibly. They have not busted their economy. Look at Denmark and Norway. Yes, do. They have locked down and fewer people have died. But national comparisons are a waste of time. Unless they suit your argument.

“The cure can’t be worse than the disease”, (I wonder where he got that) says a man in the queue at Sainsbury’s, quoting rubbish numbers about the flu. “People die and kill other people in cars but we don’t tell them not to drive”.

True.

In Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, population 1.2 million, there have been 1,700 identified cases of COVID 19, not even 0.15%. If the numbers are out by a factor of 10 it’s still only 1.5%, one in 66.

The chance of the next person you pass in the supermarket having it is still slim, and of giving it to you slimmer still.

But the lady working behind the till, dealing with all of us, is clearly scared and prepared to talk about it. She’s not happy.

Nudge, nudge, or hit people with a big stick, they both work. But whichever way you scare the shit out of them, it’s hard to get them to not to still be scared when you want them to go back to work or school.

A deep shelter mentality has set in already.

It takes years to undo embedded prejudice. Ask an HIV positive person.

Do we have to take sides?

It’s not waiters and waitresses protesting for the right of restaurants to re-open. It’s people who own restaurants, and people who can’t be bothered to cook.

Economies recover eventually.

Grandma doesn’t.

Today’s tips. Take a leaf out of the Secretary of State’s book in terms of tone. Get the sewing machine out. Start running up bunting.

Day 45. Woolly

There were boats moving yesterday. Passing though. Not emptying toilets.

Loads of towpath tourists. A long way from home. A bit lost.

Guys fishing. Amazed there has not been more of that. It’s an addiction.

Cabinet reviews the lockdown today.

‘Stay At Home will be scrapped’ they say, but ‘unlikely any radical changes will be made’.

Only people who have not really had to stay at home can think giving up on it is not radical.

From Monday they say. As if.

From today. Nudge works in reverse.

Boris likes being popular. With you. With the Tory party’s business backers.

He doesn’t like being unpopular. Easy call.

Our new liberties will be dependent ‘on maintaining social distancing’.

But lots of people just can’t/won’t/don’t do it. You’ve seen that.

It’s why we were told to stay at home.

Today’s tip. A bike’s not for Christmas. It’s for life. Get pedalling this weekend.

Day 46. Woods

VE Day.

The rest of the world was black and white.

But we were in screaming colour.

The Second World War did not end on May 8th.

Today I saw here from the other side of the river.

A massive wrought iron viaduct I have never heard of.

Two hares having stand-up fisticuffs like a couple of kangaroos.

A woman in a mask buying cigarettes. Cigarettes. Mask.

Six million Lance Armstrongs.

One man’s extensive military memorabilia collection displayed all over his driveway.

Another throwing his garden open to the public this afternoon.

The war grave of a soldier who died in February 1945.

Dozens of scarecrows (what’s that all about?).

Hundreds of Union Flags, some of them the right way up.

Bunting. BBQs. Street parties of sorts.

Looking at it now it all seems so simple

We have taken back control. Lockdown is a busted flush.

(Except for the not having to go to work bit; people like furlough funnily enough.)

But keep an eye on the numbers.

Are we out of the woods yet?

A lot of people died between VE Day and VJ Day.

The Second World War ended on August 15th.

Maybe we’ll be in the clear by then.

Today’s tips. Have one or two too many this evening (it’s about time).

Listen to this (it’s been a while) https://bit.ly/2WCpVBk

Day 47. Holiday headaches

The trick to a stress-free airport and flying experience, even in the best airports (Copenhagen), even on the best airlines (Emirates), especially in the worst airports (Heathrow), especially on the worst airlines (British Airways), is to submit to it, to go with the flow, to allow yourself to be shepherded along.

Check-in. Security. Spoons. Gate. Seat. (Bloody Mary. Amitriptyline.)

Not this year.

The mutually assured economic destruction of a fourteen-day in-and-out quarantine means you need six weeks holiday to fly off for two weeks in the Med.

Monsieur Macron is slowly lifting the lockdown, and has excluded the UK from quarantine restrictions, but says it’s too early to say if holidays will be possible for the French let alone for visitors.

Low-infection-rate Devon and Cornwall don’t want you this year. Not even if you have a third home there.

Scotland will be full of mosquitoes.

Camper van prices are going through the pop-top roof.

Narrowboat holidays will too, once they let us move.

Do you have a tent? Do you want to share toilets and showers yet?

House swaps might have been the way forward, but people will touch things.

A travel-bubble with Ireland might work, but they cannot take us all.

How about we rollover instead? Re-open schools on August 1st, not June 1st, and scrap the school holidays this year? Have a three-half-term-term and a longer holiday at Christmas?

Stay at home.

Today’s tips. Apply for a new passport now, even if you don’t really need one. They are going to be like toilet paper when you do.

Pre-order the vegan meal when flying Emirates. They are good and you get served first giving you time to eat it and slide the tray under your seat before they come around asking what you want from the main menu (if the amitriptyline hasn’t kicked in already).

Day 48. Tutti Frutti

And what should they know of England who only England know?
The poor little street-bred people that vapour and fume and brag.

We are all living in our own bubble and the longer the lockdown has gone on, the narrower our perspectives have become, the less we have known and the less well-informed the decisions we have made.

I can write about what is going on around here, what I see when I go out for a run or a bike ride, what the few people I meet tell me, what I learn online.

But what do I know?

Hopefully the narrow clique of mostly fifty-something-mostly-white-mostly-men running the country (in its loosest sense) who mostly all went to the same schools and universities and live mostly in the same bits of London, are a lot better informed than me. But their perspective must have narrowed too.

What do they know?

They encourage people to party on their doorsteps for VE Day. What do they expect them to do next? Maybe not the Oops Upside Your Head thing.

They want people to stay at home on a sunny Bank Holiday weekend and yet they allow ice cream vans at popular day-tripping spots.

But they don’t want you to Stay At Home anymore.

They want you to Stay Alert.

To what? Authority ebbing away?

They’re ramping up the supply of slogans, while running out of things to say.

Aren’t we all.

Keep ‘em peeled.

Today’s tip. If you’re lucky enough not to be key, essential or frontline, make the most of the cooler weather, stay indoors, and tackle a couple of those jobs you promised yourself you would get done during lockdown. Time is running out, we will soon be exhorted (if you’re not already) to “Get Back To Work’.

Unless you work in entertainment, hospitality or travel. In which case I’d concentrate on turning your side shizzle into your main gig. Or looking for avenues new. The portfolio was diversified but all the eggs were in one basket.

Day 49. Change

Are we done? Who knows? Let’s change the subject.

This near-rural near-idyll is due to be transformed by HS2, Britain’s slow-to-arrive high-speed train set.

The route (Phase 2b) connecting Birmingham to Leeds runs up the side of the A42, passes close by the airport and, at the power station (that has not burnt any coal in a month), cuts between Redhill Marina and East Midlands Parkway, crosses the Midland Mainline and dives into a tunnel emerging into the Trent Valley, here, crossing the river and canal and running north through Long Eaton to stop at a station, currently and badly called East Midlands Hub, at Toton.

But will it?

The estimated cost of HS2 has risen from original estimates of 56bn to probably double that. With Covid 19 costing the UK north of £300bn there will be a renewed clamour for HS2 to be scrapped. If not the London to Birmingham bit, at least the rest of it.

Phase 2b survived a recent review with a suggestion that cost saving changes should be looked for. My suggestion is to move the East Midlands Hub to the power station site, right beside the M1, where it’s easier and cheaper to connect to the airport and to the existing train and tram lines into Nottingham.

We have all learnt now that meetings can work online, but we’re learning also that face-to-face remains the best way to do business and the only way to do everything else. Because human beings are social beings.

If tired, thin, old, diminished Boris is still determined to level-up the UK economy as he says he is he should accelerate not delay HS2.

And he should not worry too much about the money. So long as we can afford to spend £120bn on a new fleet of nuclear powered, nuclear weapon carrying Trident submarines, designed only to deter enemies we no longer have and to kill millions of civilians – or to never be used – we can afford HS2.

Today’s tip. Wait for the detail behind Boris’s statement. There are 50 pages of it. 38 will be published later today. 12 are in the post.

Day 50. Numbers

Numbers. Numbers. Every day more numbers.

At the outset, we didn’t know much about the invisible enemy.

Where was it? Who had it? How fast would it spread? Who was at most risk? How many would it kill?

We had to act as one. Apply the law of large numbers.

We know a lot more now. We can act more individually, according to our personal – and local – circumstances.

One of Boris’s boffins said last night that he estimates 10% of the population of London (a million people) and 4% of the rest of us (that’s another two and a quarter million) have had Covid 19 already.

That’s 3,250,000 people.

32,000 of them have – sadly – died. 1 per cent.

But it’s likely deaths have been undercounted. So let’s double that number for the sake of argument.

64,000. 2 per cent.

88% of those who have died have been over 65.

There are 10,000,000 over 65s.

So 56,000 of them have died.

About 1 in 180.

12% of those who have died have been under 65.

There are 54,000,000 under 65s.

So 8,000 of them have died.

About 1 in 7000.

91% of the under 65s who have died have had an underlying health condition.

9% of under 65s who have died were otherwise healthy.

That’s about 700 people.

About 1 in 77,000.

The boffin went on to say that perhaps 130,000 people are currently infected.

That’s 4% of all those who have been infected.

1 in 500 of the population.

An even distribution across the country would suggest 1,300 of them are in Nottingham.

But distribution has not been even. Nottingham’s infection rate is only a little over half that of the national average.

So 1,300 becomes 650.

Not enough to fill 8 double decker buses.

Where are they?

A good number are in hospital. A good number are in care homes. Let’s say half.

So 325 are in the community.

About 1 in 2000 of the people you might live with, run into in the street, on the tram, or at work.

And a one in 2000 chance that it’s you.

It’s time to be more confident than fearful. The worst is behind us. If we behave sensibly now it can stay that way.

If you’re older, have underlying health conditions (including obesity) remain extremely cautious. Wherever you live.

If you live in Nottingham, or somewhere like it, are younger, slimmer, fitter and do not have underlying health conditions, keep your guard up (stay alert), keep washing your hands and (if not already the case) think seriously about getting yourself – safely – back to the office or shop – and the pub – perhaps sooner than you might expect.

Today’s tip. I think the biggest return-to-work challenge is going to turn out to be shared toilets.

Words. Words. Every day more words. 50 days. 15,000 words.

Day 51. Bonkers

There is a quiet, dark country lane not far from the airport where people gather in their cars at night. They are not plane spotting. But this is not that story.

I’ve been thinking of Phillip Schofield a lot. Not because I watch mid-morning TV. (I’m not furloughed) but because I think making big meetings work on Zoom is like being on TV. Kids TV. You have to make it entertaining if you’re going to stop people’s minds and fingers wandering.

And like Phillip on kids TV, many people are working from what appears to be the broom cupboard under the stairs. Even Theresa May. Her video call set up is awful. Bright sunlight over her shoulder. Terrible focus. Too easily distorted features too close to the camera. As a former PM and Home Secretary TM has 24 hour armed security paid for from the public purse. I really wouldn’t mind if we pushed the boat out and got her a ring lamp.

Philip (Schofield, not May, though it would have been no surprise had he wandered into shot) hit the nail on the head yesterday asking Matt Hancock about seeing our parents.

“We have been separated from them for such a long time – are you actually asking us to pick a parent?”

“One at a time, Phillip, you can see one parent, and then you can see the other, and that’s fine.”

“Can I see my parents like ten minutes apart?”

“Yes, so long as it’s only one at a time that’s fine.”

“Don’t you see that this is utterly bonkers?”

“No.”

Poor Matt. Give him a break. He’s needed one for weeks. Furlough him into redundancy’s now expanded and extended waiting room. It’s just like the Zoom waiting room; you can’t see who else is in there, but you sense there might be a lot of you, all waiting to go back to jobs you might not have any more.

Poor Holly. She looks like she has lost the ability to smile. At least she has decent lighting.

A wag on twitter pointed out that for many of us which parent to see is an easy call. We’ll just see the one that’s not dead.

And who’s not going to hug – if only briefly – after all this time?

Social distancing is like the frictionless trade of Brexit. Impossible in the circumstances.

Today’s tips. If you want to see your parents and – more importantly – if your parents want to see you (do check), then see them. Make your own rules, Matt’s rules are bonkers. Use British Common Sense. Just like any other nationality’s common sense but with added arrogance and hubris.

Check out the new White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. She will go to any length to protect and promote “this President”, she will turn the tables on you in a flash, she is very well prepared.

And a competition. Spot the swan in flight in today’s photo, mark it with a cross and send your answer with a postal order for 45p to me at ..

Day 52. Cacophony

I have no idea what just happened.

While I was deep-sleep dreaming about stepping off the top of Scotland into clear, shallow water and onto a chain of islands, that may not exist, with my old bike on my shoulder and a small rucsac on my back, a great friend sailed by waving and what seemed like every animal and bird I have seen in the last two months gathered outside to noisily greet the dawn.

A chorus line of cows, sheep, swans, ducks, heron, moorhen, coots, rabbits and hares. Like in Snow White.

They have gone now. Maybe I was dreaming them too. But I don’t think so.

We can move our boats. Just short distances to begin with. In ten days mooring restrictions come back into force. Navigations will open ‘in full’ from June 1st.

I must move by D-Day.

Today’s tip. People I speak to on Zoom often comment on the noisy background bird song. I can’t hear it because I have high frequency hearing loss most likely caused by too many gigs. If you’re looking forward to going to gigs. When we get back to things being a bit like they were before, use proper ear protection. Not just foam ear plugs; invest.

On the other hand I can’t hear the (2-4-6-8) motorway (sun coming up with the morning light).

Day 53. Speedos

I met a fisherman at dawn on Wednesday morning. He said he had over-slept.

The golf course came back to life, but not as we know it, shortly afterwards.

But if you’re looking for signs of the lockdown having lifted a little, or a lot, I give you a pot-bellied slightly older guy, in just his Speedos, and his lady in her bikini, paddling by in kayaks yesterday afternoon.
Today’s tip. Be careful out there.

Day 53. Speeding

As the country unlocks, we all unlock, heavily reliant on social distancing to make it work.

But social distancing is like religion; some observe it strictly, some pay it a passing regard, some no notice at all. Others believe strongly that it’s all a waste of time.

If you are lucky enough not to have had to switch from staying at home to going to work at the start of last week, you may have time now to think about how, and how fast, you choose to emerge from the version of lockdown you have created for yourself.

Where will you go? What will you do? Who will you see? When?

What standards of social distancing will you set and expect?

Every time you allow yourself to do something that you didn’t allow yourself to do until now, or next week, or the week after, how will you feel about it afterwards?

Maybe you have a friend who’s a close-talker. Maybe your employer doesn’t get it right. Maybe you had to get a bus. Maybe you forgot to wash your hands. Will it feel like you’ve taken a risk?

My mail does not come to the boat; it goes elsewhere. I pick it up from time to time and get a call when anything official looking arrives. I had one of those this week. A bell rang. I’d been half-expecting it. The last time I drove into town I went by a speed camera just a little faster than sensible.

Is that how the emergence from lockdown will be? Whatever we think we understand from the numbers about the reality of the risk of infection, every extra or additional risk we take and every time social distancing is not observed, will we be waiting for the ‘speeding ticket’ not to come in the post?

Today’s tip. Don’t go the Peak District this weekend. Or the Lakes. Or the beach. Oh. Too late.

Day 54. Nottingham

I came across this view by accident this afternoon.

I imagined it to be where Morgan Freeman introduced Kevin Costner to his telescope in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves.

Because all of Nottingham is in this picture.

Ready to bounce back.

Today’s tip. Don’t be rushed into doing anything you don’t want to do. Especially if you’re a teacher. Or a parent.

Day 55. Masks

I’ve been resisting writing about masks. Partly because so much has been said about them. Partly because I would have so much to say about them. Mainly because I don’t want to wear one. Not really.

I’ve worn masks before. When I’ve been riding motorbikes on super dusty roads in Myanmar. When I’ve been blacking the boat. Or sanding a floor.

When I’ve needed to.

All along we’ve been told the evidence for wearing masks making everyone safer is shaky. We’ve been told that’s because you might over-use your mask, or take it on and off incorrectly. But it’s mainly because the likelihood of your mask meeting the virus, in most everyday non-care situations, is slim.

Mine protects you they say. Yours protects me. Not if there is nothing for us to be protected from.

If you’ve got symptoms you shouldn’t be out and about anyway, so you don’t need to be wearing a mask. If you’re wearing a mask to protect others in case you are an asymptomatic carrier then thanks, but the chances of that being the case are, in truth, super-slim.

Your mask will only make a difference if you’re going to get closer than social distancing ‘allows’.

If like a guy I heard in the radio yesterday you’re wearing one “80% for me, 20% for you”, then you’re crashing right up against the evidence of their usefulness, unless you’re intending getting in my face.

Also yesterday I saw a family of six, two parents and two kids on bikes, all masked, two more kids shut away in the bubble of their bike trailer. In the open air. In the countryside.

Later, even further from civilisation, two older people pulled their bandanas up over their faces as I cycled by a good five metres away.

That’s not how it works. There are not clouds of invisible virus to dodge your way through and around. Don’t expect everybody you pass by to be exhaling a stream of the stuff.

Were that the case we should have been wearing masks on the way in to lockdown. There is a stronger argument for that. We knew a lot less about how the virus behaves and how many of us were infected than we do now.

The advice goes so far as to say that in enclosed spaces where social distancing may not be possible wearing a mask makes sense. I get that. Let’s stick at that.

If I have to get the tram I’ll wear a mask. That makes sense. But I stopped using the tram at the beginning of February when I started social distancing without being told to. And now it’s my civic duty not to get the tram.

I’ll wear a mask to go to Sainsbury’s if needed. I can see that makes sense too. It’s respectful of the people who work there.

If I worked in food preparation or other hospitality jobs, or drove a bus, or worked myself in Sainsbury’s, I would understand the need to wear a mask at work. 

It’s a numbers thing. I wrote about that on Day 50. Most of us won’t meet very many people we don’t know each day and we will be able to social-distance (I’m thinking it’s a verb already).

Others will have loads of interactions with randoms some, many even, of whom won’t be social-distancers (and some new nouns).

But anywhere else I think masks shift the dynamic of how we have been dealing with this thing together.

As I put on a mask I am either saying ‘I don’t trust you’ or ‘don’t trust me’.

I’ve read that we will move to a situation where everyone wears a mask driven by peer pressure. But when we all think we should be wearing masks all the time we are assuming an ever-present danger that just isn’t there. We put fear first.

That will change our relationships and undermine the trust and sense of common interest we’ve built up. And in the wrong hands peer pressure can be ugly.

I’d rather stay at home than be party to that.

So, no, I don’t really want to wear a mask.

Not a surgical mask.

Not a fashion mask.

Not a mask with a pretty flower on it.

Not even a mask made from a sock.

Today’s tip. Decide where you stand on things. Don’t go with the flow. The crowd does not always know best.

Day 56. Tunnel

All this time passenger trains have been passing by, crossings the bridges, disappearing into the tunnels. Or vice versa. Not many of them. Slowly. Quietly. Empty.

As of yesterday, the passenger trains without passengers from Sheffield, Derby and Nottingham to London are running at near normal frequency again.

On Saturday Seth Godin wrote that, “bridges are monuments and create glory for those that find the resources to build them, there in the sky, for all to see” but that tunnels “allow all sorts of productivity without calling attention to themselves or those that build them”.

Not this one.

Red Hill Tunnel calls enough attention to itself that it’s Grade II listed. Here’s how Historic England describe it.

Rock-face ashlar. East entrance with castellated and machicolated parapet rising over a single central shield. To the right is a single octagonal castellated turret with corbel table and decorated with a single slit ventilator. To the right is a single smaller circular castellated turret with corbel table and decorated with single decorative arrow loop. Either side are single lower sections of wall with similar parapets. The west entrance with similar parapet to the left is a single similar octagonal turret and to the right a single similar circular turret. Either side are sections of stepped castellated wall terminating in single similar smaller circular turrets. All turrets being wider at the base.

It was built by by Thomas Jackson Woodhouse and Charles Vignoles for the Midland Counties Railway and opened in May 1840. The hill it passes through is the same hill HS2 will tunnel through.

It’s in the Park of Thrumpton Hall, a Jocobean house tucked away in a Trentside village all of its own right by, but somehow not over-shadowed by, the eight enormous cooling towers of Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station.

And all that extra decorative effort was a concession to the owner of the Hall.

How many travellers have spotted it, or its twin built alongside in 1875, as their train slows on the approach to East Midlands Parkway station?

And what chance, under the penny-pinching eye of the modern-day cost accountant, that the builders of HS2 will be able to make a similarly impressive mark on this out of the way bit of Nottinghamshire?

Today’s tip. Don’t take hydroxychloroquine except under medical supervision.

Day 57. Zyby

A month or so ago when lockdown started to bite I imagined giving up the zoomeranging and setting off to walk to Scotland. I figured it would be possible to do it without anyone much noticing if you zig-zagged along footpaths and bridleways and camped in out of the way spots. You might get the odd odd look when you went in search of food but there is a certain dignity in anonymous itinerancy that I think we all instinctively respect deep down. Wandering quietly away from the tribe or herd is an evolutionary animal instinct.

After work today I went out for a spin on my bike to think about what I would write today. There was the magpie chasing the buzzard that morning, the first goslings of the season, an enormous, dark fish rolling out, and splashing back into the water, interrupting the finance meeting. But even added up they didn’t seem enough. And what point were they trying to make?

Not far away, outside the sadly-still-closed micro-pub at Sawley Lock I met Zyby, short for something I couldn’t pronounce or try to spell.

Zyby doesn’t speak English. He’s Polish, from near Gdansk. His Polish is good, He lived in Russia for twenty years. His wife is Russian. His Russian is good. But seven years in England working in a car factory have not been rewarded with more than the smattering of the local language he used to tell me he left Stafford the day before yesterday and that he was heading for Liverpool.

In which case he had spent two days paddling in the wrong direction.

“Liverpool. No. Nottingham. Go water sport place. And to Humber”. That’s about a hundred miles.

His kayak was fully loaded with his camping gear and too heavy to lift out at the portage points that allow small craft to be carried around the locks without having to empty and fill them.

Something of Zyby, perhaps his smile, perhaps his hat, reminded me of a guy I met in Novi Sad in Serbia while looking for an out of the way spot. He let me put my tent up in his garden. The next morning I met and wandered for an hour with a frenchman who was walking to Jerusalem.

Sawley Lock is automatic, electric, you need a Waterways key to operate it.

Zyby doesn’t have a Waterways key.

I have a Waterways key (but not a spare) so I abandoned my bike ride, helped him through the lock and headed home to help him through the next one too.

As I opened the gate letting Zyby back onto the Trent, towards Nottingham and an out of the way spot to camp, a watching cyclist asked, “Why are you going to the Humber?”

Zyby just shrugged. And off he paddled.

In the right direction. For whatever reason.

Today’s tips. Be like Zyby. You don’t need a good reason to do fantastic things. If you want to walk to Scotland, walk to Scotland. Or Jerusalem.

Keep an eye out for Zyby in Nottingham today, and so on, to Hull. If you have a spare Waterways key I hope you know what to do ..

Day 58. Fast-forward

It’s happening fast now.

No new cases in London. (Or almost). No second spike in Denmark four weeks after easing lockdown. The towpath is like Skeggy seafront. Groups of kids were swimming in the lakes yesterday. Jim’s playing seven-a-side again in Belgrade.

If austerity kills people so does lockdown. You can’t claim one and not the other. (And vice versa).

MPs will go back to Parliament after recess, even if not all of them. Schools will go back on June 1st, even if not all of them.

We’re going back, even if not all of us.

Is the virus weakening, not strengthening, as it mutates? Have more of us had it than we think but brushed it off? Does summer stop it in its tracks?

Maybe pollen is a prophylactic.

Has it picked off the weakest amongst us, the stragglers, the outliers (with some other complicating factors in play too) but found it harder to get a foothold in the dense heart of the pack?

Has Cambridge University jumped the gun saying there will be no face-to-face lectures before September 2021 while Nottingham Trent says all campuses will be open this Autumn, offering “in-class teaching” and that it’s working with the Student Union (and King Canute?) to “rethink the social aspect of university life”?

100+ million people are locked down again in China’s Jilin province, but we look fast-forward not back.

There is good biological reason humans came to dominate the ecology of this planet.

Collectively we are robust and resilient.

We fight back. We beat the dinosaurs. We will beat this

Today’s tip. Raise a glass to Edward Mellors who has been appointed – alongside Sir Nicholas Serota, Lord Michael Grade and Baroness Martha Lane-Fox – to the government’s Cultural Renewal Taskforce that will help get the country’s recreation and leisure sector up and running again.

Day 59. Dividend

Boris turned the Mk1 Granada of state towards the curve, put his open palm on the rim of the steering wheel, spun it three times, pedal to the metal, burning rubber, rims scraping against the opposite kerb, all the time thoughts of the Sweeney swimming in his head, wishing the handbrake turn, not just the basic u-turn, was the one taught in Tory finishing school.

But that one is just too hard to do while clapping.

The NHS surcharge paid by migrants raises £900m a year, so it couldn’t be given up he’d said at PMQs on Wednesday. But Keir Starmer was only asking him to give up the £90m of it paid by NHS employees. (They’re untouchable now aren’t they? They probably won’t even have to give the rainbow back).

Yesterday, under pressure from all sides, he blinked and back-tracked. Maybe he had been distracted (again) waiting to hear about the Jennifer Arcuri investigation, hoping not to hear, “Get your trousers on, you’re nicked”.

But where do you draw the line? Has the migrant bus driver or refuse worker not been putting him or herself at risk too.

Why have a line? Let’s recognise the contribution of all migrants. Let’s create opportunity for more migrants to contribute.

Let’s stop calling them migrants. They live here.

Let’s have a Covid dividend that says anyone who was legally resident in the country – even if only temporarily – when Covid came to town (use March 1, the same trigger day as the job furlough scheme) can stay and enjoy all the enormous benefit and pleasure of living here.

No more them and us. Just us.

A generous and grateful government, one without attitudes and opinions first formed in the glare of 70s TV, would easily think of these things for themselves.

A generous and grateful nation would easily understand that we can afford it.

Today’s tips.

Everyone: Another pretty pointless Bank Holiday weekend lies ahead. Stay home one last time and make the most of the amazing Nottstopping festival of Nottingham fun and entertainment. You don’t even have to be in Nottingham. More here .. https://nottstoppingfestival.com

Canal & River Trust: Please don’t belatedly cut the grass on the towpath side. It doesn’t need cutting. It looks great. It’s full of life. Leave it.

Day 60. School

The Leader of a local council says primary schools should re-open and it’s time for teachers to “pay back a little”. Very poorly chosen words, but classic Kate, and having her foot in her mouth doesn’t mean she’s not right.

The unions, some councils and many parents and teachers say ‘not until it’s safe’. The ‘science’ the unions evidence says if you delay schools going back by two weeks, you halve the risk. But to judge ‘the science’ you have to look at ‘the maths’ behind it.

Loving the (mis)use of stats now we have some decent data to play with.

Under 40s (all pupils, a large proportion of parents, most teachers) are about as likely to die being struck by lighting as from Covid.

Under 65s (all pupils, almost all parents, all teachers) are about as likely to die from drowning.

If the risk is negligible, so the gain from delay is negligible too. With exceptions, it’s safe.

There will be some vulnerable kids, some kids living with vulnerable people and some vulnerable teachers, who will have to stay away a while. There will be some parents with jobs that make them feel it’s risky. But all that’s at the margins of the numbers.

For the vast majority of kids, fewer of whom have underlying health conditions, not many of them have smoked for 30 years, even the Welsh ones, going back to school on June 1 is safe enough. It’s safe enough also for the vast majority of their parents (most under 40) and for the vast majority of teachers too.

There are too many kids not being home schooled, many because they don’t have access to the teacher or the tech to make it possible, and many more because too many parents are not able to home school, because they are working, or are just not able.

Meanwhile too many kids are not being properly fed while missing out on free school meals. Too many kids are cooped up in garden-less flats. Too many kids are alone all day while parents work, or with parents or siblings who mis-treat them. Too many kids are on the streets at risk from all sorts of other harm. Including drowning and being struck by lightning.

Teachers know all of that better than the rest of us. They know kids are best off learning in school. They want to get back to school. They just need to think it’s safe.

The stronger argument not to re-open the schools, that it’s not safe, is the socially-distanced manner of the reopening; class sizes halved at least (something teachers always campaign for) with kids small-grouped in ‘pods’, unable to mix outside of them. School buildings sanitised to the extreme of art being removed from the walls. Rigid seating and movement rules. No sports, no assemblies, no trips. No fun.

Like masks, these are all measures being taken to guard against risk that is not, most of the time, even there, to prevent the spread of a virus that is most likely not, like young Rik’s pollution, ‘up, down and all around’.

They may do psychological harm that outweighs any risk of the virus and it’s easy to understand why any child, parent or teacher would not want to have any part in it (though the low pupil-teacher ratio may be a brilliant learning opportunity for some of the kids. Like being in posh school).

So I return to my previous suggestion, updated.

Delay the return enough to satisfy the teachers and their union’s thirst to follow the science. But send all the kids back, without extreme social distancing, just make sure they wash their hands, because we also follow the maths.

Create the means for teachers who cannot return to teach online as many as possible of the kids who cannot return and shorten the summer holidays by as many weeks as we delay the return from June 1st.

Deal?

Today’s tips. Don’t be too quick to judge a man and his wife with Covid symptoms for driving a couple of hundred miles to leave their kid with his sister (not his parents). What would you have done in the exact same circumstances?

Wherever you are in the world, do check out the Nottstopping festival this weekend.

Loads of info here https://bit.ly/36o59K5.
And here https://nottstoppingfestival.com

Join me at the festival if you want .. on Zoom anytime today from 9.30am.

Day 61. The End

Wuhan. Italy. Spain. Sanitiser. Toilet paper. Stay home. New York. Ventilators. Clapping. Care Homes. Testing. PPE. Boris. Donald. Captain Tom. R. Sweden. Stay alert. Cummings.

Twenty-five words that tell the lockdown story.

All the way to the end.

Whether in the future we will easily recall the name of Dominic Cummings remains to be seen, may depend on what he does next, but it was him wot done it.

When he told journalists yesterday, “it’s not about what it looks like, not about what you guys think, it’s about doing the right thing” was he talking about the Durham trip or whether or not Boris had to sack him?

He could have said, “I’m sorry for what it looks like. It’s important what you guys think about it. The right thing to do is to explain myself”.

But that would have required humility, not hubris, telling the truth, not being economical with it.

When he didn’t explain himself, Boris’s failure to sack him, in a way that made a clear example of him and reinforced the still stay home message, ended enforced lockdown.

“The guidelines still say don’t drive the length of the country, don’t visit ageing parents, don’t be a dick .. but .. er .. you know .. if you must .. up to you ..”, Grant Shapps almost said at surely the last Downing Street briefing anyone will take any notice of.

Millions of people who have played by the rules will see the goalposts have moved. They will feel they can do what they think is the right thing to do, not what they have been told is the right thing to do.

It’s all voluntary now.

We will see our Mum when we want to.

Today’s tip. Always apologise. Always explain.

Day 62. Voluntarily

Classic Dom has been on the back foot since the Imperial College modelling trumped taking it on the chin. He must have been told-you-so seething as infections and deaths did not grow exponentially, and a tanking economy undermined the down-sized, low-tax government he was planning.

In refusing to apologise, choosing to fly in the face of public and press opinion, getting the the Prime Minister to back him not sack him, is he sending the biggest nudge of all? Does he want us back out there mixing it up a little, hoping not for a second spike but for a steady spread, herd immunity still the solution as he sees it.

Is he purposeful in giving licence to others to do as he does, not as they say? Classic Classic Dom?

In early March many of us saw the writing on the great wall, stopped using public transport and started working from home before the government edict. We felt the nudge. We nudged each other. We went into voluntary lockdown because it was the smart and right thing to do.

Whether we can say we did a good job saving lives when perhaps Covid has killed as many as the Luftwaffe, we did succeed in protecting the NHS. We were not ready for a first spike but it didn’t come, because we stopped it. We are ready now for a second spike that may not come.

In late May some of us have to continue to be very careful, a quarter of all the people who have died were diabetic, while others are stretching our wings and beginning to take calculated risks based on different personal circumstances.

But we will only give up completely on lockdown, voluntarily, when it’s the smart and right thing to do.

We won’t need a government edict. We’ll not respond to a nudge we think comes too soon.

Whenever the time is right for each of us, we will reintroduce ourselves into society gradually, rather than diving straight back into the social whirl.

We will continue to protect the NHS and save lives.

Today’s tips.

Don’t let Dominic Cummings make you angry; he probably gets off on it.

Don’t put any store by what Bishops say, even if they’re going for Cummings; they are delusional.

Listen to, and laugh with, Will Self talking about cleaning during lockdown here.

Day 63. Fishy

Not Machiavelli. Just a very naughty boy.

If something looks like a duck and smells like a duck, its a fish. The eye test birthday drive to Barnard Castle doesn’t stack up.

A friend said, “John 8.7, look it up”. Fair point. But what about Exodus 20.8.11?

I thought splashing about in the night was ducks, perhaps disturbed by a predator. In the morning it continued. And I could see it wasn’t ducks.

Large fish, a couple of feet and more long, dark brown or golden, carp, were jostling and slowly rolling and sliding up and out of the water, splashing loudly back in and thrashing about. Here. There. Nothing. Again. Where? There. All day.

They had come to the now shallow lily pad covered water on the opposite side of the cut to spawn. The jostling is males working three or four to one to ‘encourage’ the female to release her millions of eggs to meet their sperm. The trashing about is getting the fertilised eggs moving, mixing and spreading them through the water.

They’re doing it amongst the lilies because the eggs are sticky and they will attach to the plants. And that’s the last the parents will have to do with them until they bump into them in Lidl or Spoons.

They’re doing it now because the water needs to be above 18 degrees which they knew it must be when they saw the teenagers swimming in the lake.

That evening the wind picked up and blew for 36 hours, scaring away the teenagers, covering the boat in a layer of grey dust blown off the path, stealing from a duck six of her seven hatchlings, and bringing an end to a show of nature it was a privilege to have seen close up (and impossible to photograph).

Today’s tips. Move on. Let Dom move on. You’ve more important things to worry about. Really, you have. So has he. Really.

Buy a car? As if.

Day 64. Motoring

I’m still to stay at home as much as possible. I’m still to work from home because I can. But the shops are opening so that I can go out to buy non-essential items.

Or am I supposed to get a friend who cannot work from home to buy non-essential items for me? Is he allowed to bring them to me after work? Shouldn’t he be going straight home? And staying there as much as possible?

Surely his journey would be non-essential, what with the items being non-essential. He wouldn’t be out for exercise. Unlikely it would be his wife’s birthday.

As of Monday responsible and reasonable reasons for leaving home (as much as possible?) will include to buy a car.

Why would I want to buy a car? I have two I can hardly drive already, I’ve furloughed one of them, and where am I going to go?

Seven-tests Michael Gove can hardly drive either. But for different reasons. He told Nick Ferrari (Ha!) the Goves have downsized to become a one-car family. “My wife has a Fiat”. Best fact-check that.

Who has the job security to make a big financial commitment now? Not the 1200 workers supercar maker and F1 team McClaren made redundant yesterday.

So why prioritise the re-opening of car showrooms? A few weeks ago the boss of Vauxhall said they needed to open if he was to re-open his factories; no point in making more cars if you’ve nowhere to sell them. Some sense in that.

More likely Arthur Daley, Swiss Toni type Tory party members and donors will have been lobbying their MP on this for weeks. They might even be their MP.

They have a lot of capital going rusty on the sales lot. They need to shift some motors ASAP. Whether they will buy any more to replace them is another matter. Why would they?

A few weeks ago the government made the puzzling decision to let garden centres open while we were all still meant to be staying at home.

Loads of garden centres are owned by farmers. Loads of farmers are Tories. Lots of MPs are farmers.

The same story. Cronyism and the Conservative party. It goes on and on.

Today’s tip. Spend some of the day going back over you old blog posts to make you look more prescient than you really are. I know I will.



Day 65. NHS T&T

It’s turned out the chances of catching Covid 19 have always been pretty slim. Unless you live or work in a care home in which case it came special delivery.

You might in the past have spent fifteen unavoidable minutes in close contact with someone who later tested positive – say working together in a take-away kitchen or riding in a taxi cab – but there was no certainty you were going to catch it yourself.

Do it now and it’s pretty likely you’re going to be ‘asked’ to self-isolate for 14 days.

The risk of going outside, of going to work, of going to buy a car (how is the test-drive supposed to work?) is now less that you will die, and more that you will have to spend two weeks on Statutory Sick Pay which is £95 a week.

That’s a worse deal than furlough.

It could happen time and again. What’s your employer going to think about that?

I can’t see many people being very keen to take up the opportunity to ‘do their duty’ if they feel perfectly well, if they don’t know from Adam the person who has named them as a close contact, or if they don’t think the contact was close enough to qualify.

When someone who tests positive is asked for a list of people they have been in close contact with, will they name family members and friends if it’s going to mean they can’t go to work, can’t pay their bills, buy their beers, or go to the beach?

Who might name family members and enemies for the same reason?

Today’s tip. Only socialise and work with people who don’t know your name or where you live. Or wear a mask. Ideally a Dominic Cummings mask.

Day 66. Twist

I played a lot of pontoon on the top deck of a red double-decker bus on the way to school. The government says we’re passing its five tests, that we have decent cards.

NHS capacity in place (yes).
Falling infections and deaths (maybe).
Testing and contact tracing (sort of).
Social distancing (yeah, right).

Twist.

Except for shielding people who have to stay shielding, lockdown restrictions can be relaxed.

In England six people from different households can meet up in the park, even in the garden, even if they have to walk through the house to get there. They can have a BBQ (but can’t use the toilet).

The Premier League will re-start behind closed doors. Liverpool will be Champions. Aston Villa are going down.

The pubs are staying shut for a while (even the gardens), your holiday choices are limited (though flight tickets are selling) and school’s pretty much out for summer.

I’ll be back working at the chocolate factory by my birthday.

Twist.

Or bust?

Today’s tip. Keep your eyes peeled for the five golden tickets to my party.

Day 67. Meanwhile

Whatever the rights and wrongs, OK the wrongs, of what Dominic Cummings did, I think the almost never-ending trail of Conservative MPs prepared – even a week on – to trot out the super-thin line of defence, even the ‘eye-sight test’, has been a greater breach of contract with the public.

Who is going to believe a word they say now? On anything.

Cummings didn’t have to be sacked. He did have to be made an example of.

Otherwise what’s the challenge to the fifteen adults dressed for a beach party sitting in a row, bare shoulder to bare shoulder, bare thigh to bare thigh, drinking on the steps by the lock outside the pub yesterday evening?

And who’s going to offer it?

Might as well re-open the pubs.

Meanwhile members of SAGE are saying it’s too early to lift the lockdown.

Meanwhile your civil liberties have been more significantly curtailed than at any time since 1215 via the introduction of travel quarantine.

Meanwhile China’s re-take of Hong Kong may result in 3 million people being allowed to come to the UK. Not the sort of people who think fruit-picking is for them unfortunately.

And meanwhile, once again, the US is convulsed by street violence in reaction to the murder of a black man by a white cop, and the Donald stokes the flames.

On the up side, meanwhile, The Wight Bear is getting back to business.

Today’s tip. Slip, slap, slop.

Day 68. Perspective

It’s a bumper weekend for fear and sunshine.

There’s enough for everyone.

The fear that lifting lockdown will lead to a second spike, especially as some people go too far too fast.

The fear of a friend of a friend, the right kind of scientist, that this might be an extinction event. She doesn’t mean for bees.

The fear of an old chap, sitting outside his house in a folding chair and shorts, talking to his neighbour, “that there’s going to be a world war”.

Bloody hell.

We still have good reason to be sensibly fearful, some of us much more than others, of a virus that has not gone away. Especially if you think too many people are already tearing the pants out of it.

But don’t worry, you can suntan!

Today’s tip. Worry only about what you can do something about. Don’t let the seeming idiocy of others consume you, or even spoil your day. And no cliff jumping.

Day 69. OK. Not Fine

“I’m loving it”, he said. “You must be too”

Making the most of it? Maybe. Hopefully.

Recognising my good fortune in being here rather than in a flat in town. Sure.

Getting out and about on foot and bike in a bit of the world I don’t know well? Straight into countryside at the drop of a hat? Lucky with the weather? You bet.

But travelling and exploring are not novel. I am of no fixed abode.

I’ve not taken up baking. Or painting. Or yoga. I’ve not read a single page of The Anarchy by William Dalrymple.

I can’t hear the birdsong you’re all talking about unless I wear my hearing aids and then I can hear the motorway too. Have I said that before?

I spend nine hours a weekday sitting in the same spot looking at three screens. Cook. Clean. Talk on the phone. Walk. Run. Cycle. Waste time online. Drink a little too much. Eat chocolate. Watch the Donald. Sleep. Write this.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

I’m tired – not bored – of it, but it’s nothing to complain about. I know people who have lost family members and more who will lose their job.

For all we may have gained in community spirit fostered, respect at last for those who deserve more of it, time with family or just to slow down, we’ve likely all lost something too.

Learning time at school, an opportunity at work, a business we put our heart into, a holiday of a lifetime, a wedding, money, a friend, a sense of security, our trust in others to do the right thing.

No. I’m not loving it.

“I might be OK. But I’m not fine at all”.

(Taylor puts it all too well. https://bit.ly/2AoMNwL)

Today’s tip. When cycling, but not just when cycling, if you look at the cracks and holes in the road you will put your front wheel into them and have a rough ride. Look at the gaps between the cracks and the ride will be much smoother.

Day 70. June

An owl hoots unanswered at first light. Slim young Mr Fox joins me briefly on my walk. The lambs fatten before my eyes.

A tall grey heron waits and waits and stabs the water. It’s the end of days for the small brown fish that I can see is still fighting as it goes down the bird’s throat.

He tries his luck at a moorhen’s nest deep in the reeds that I’d not noticed before. The much smaller bird puts up an almighty shrieking fight, flaring her wings. He leaves on one of those short-hop, three flap flights. He’ll be back.

A hare without a care in the world. A horse feeling the heat. A clutch of day-old cygnets nearly coming a cropper under the bow of an unseeing motorboat.

Three egrets on stick thin black legs. One oyster catcher. A buzzard startled from the long grass at my feet. A Red Kite they say. Canada must be out of geese.

Up by the bridge at dusk the cows watch the to and fro of the swans’ twenty-to-one turf war, then, keeping to their nightly routine, they shuffle along the flood bank, coming down into the water to tear at the newest freshest, greenest grasses.

When I close the hatch at bed time there are twenty large dark shapes floating silently on the still water right outside. They got this far.

Billions of tiny insects striking my cycling face, clustering around the ceiling lights, trapping themselves in the spiders’ webs, lying dead on the window cills in the morning.

All our optimism tied up in one small white duck. Have you seen her today?

Today’s tip. Start seeing your friends. Don’t have sex with them though. Indoors or outdoors that’s illegal now. And tricky while remaining two metres apart.

Day 71. Swimming

I went swimming with friends in one of the lakes nearby yesterday. It was lovely. I got an early birthday present.

This morning, after the sunniest May on record, when we have all been having such fun, it’s raining. The garden needs it.

Boris is ‘taking back control’ of the government’s response to Covid 19 while still not looking well enough to drive to Durham.

He needs a break. We all need a break.

There won’t be a Downing Street briefing on TV at the weekends any more. Ratings are down. The A-Team will be on instead.

Backbench Tory business interests could mean we are free to go overseas on holiday, but many of us are thinking, “I ain’t gettin’ on no plane!”.

Trump says Washington was ‘the safest place on earth last night’.

He’s scared.

Today’s tips. Give the kids a break. Nothing to do. Nowhere to go. Very little chance of catching the virus. Hardly any clothes apparently.

Don’t swim in the Trent. It’s properly dangerous in too many places.

Day 72. Lost Cat

I’m going to find my mojo today.

Not sure where I put it.

Not seen it since Tuesday morning.

It’s around here somewhere though.

Can’t be far away.

Got it.

Today’s tips. Let your council know what you think they can do to make cycling and walking more attractive and safer. They have government money to spend.

Day 73. Food

Entitled folk in the US, many of them young, many of them white, have been using their privilege to smash up the neighbourhoods of those without privilege in the name of anti-fascism.

There are two great books by William Shawcross that I read about 25 years ago.

‘Sideshow’ is about the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia by the United States, while all eyes were on Vietnam, the Moon and the Seleção.

It led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the death, in the killing fields and elsewhere, of perhaps two million Cambodians, or Kampucheans as lunatic, certainly fascist, year-zeroist Pol Pot called them.

We called them that in school too when we told the racist playground ‘joke’ about the Kampuchean chicken. We were kids. It was the 70s. You had to be there.

‘The Quality of Mercy’ tells the story of the international response to the humanitarian crisis that followed the eventual defeat of the Khmer Rouge by an invading Vietnamese army.

The surviving five or six million Cambodians, already exhausted, faced the very real prospect of disease and starvation. No rice had been planted that year.

America prevented the feeding of civilians crowded into the jungle along the Thai border for fear of also feeding the Khmer Rouge soldiers mingling among them.

Britain and America refused to provide food aid via Cambodia’s southern ports for fear of it feeding instead the Vietnamese army that was backed by the Soviet Union.

UNICEF did a good job. The Red Cross had some success. But the first and most significant deliveries of food were made by Oxfam supported by a Blue Peter bring and buy appeal that raised more than £2m in a month (£8m in today’s money).

The Blue Peter Kampuchea appeal taught some of us – not enough of us, maybe they were watching Magpie – a lot about racism even if we didn’t understand that at the time, it gave us an internationalist perspective before we knew why that was important, and it demonstrated the power of collectivism (10 million people got involved).

It was anti-fascist before it was fashionable. And it didn’t require setting fire to things that poor people rely on.

Today’s tip. What actually saved the Cambodians from starvation was not, despite their racism, the schoolkids of Britain, but the natural abundance of the trees, rivers and lakes of Cambodia. Bees and fruit and fish saved them. Next week entitled – and titled – folk in the UK will discuss the Agriculture Bill in the House Of Lords. Check it out. We might need the bees, the fruit, the fish – and the chickens – to save us one day.

Day 74. Chains

It looks like the whole thing is being managed in reverse. Travel quarantine. Test and trace. Increasingly compulsory face masks. All the stuff we weren’t ready with on the way in, we’ll try on the way out.

When there is much less need for it and much more evidence that much of it doesn’t work.

The case for lockdown being essential to protecting the capacity of the NHS was strong in the beginning.

From-the-beginning lockdown skepticism was a valid point of view also, but there wasn’t much evidence to back it up.

NHS capacity has been increased and, daily, we know more about viral transmission and whom infection threatens most.

When the argument for lifting lockdown and against two-metre social distancing is made by people it’s preventing make money, simply because it’s preventing them make money, it’s weak.

When it’s made by scientists of many sorts, who have nothing to gain personally, because we know more now than we did and they don’t think it’s so effective, then it can be compelling.

This is good news because, as predicted, lockdown is being lifted by the very many of us who have simply had enough of it already and are not going to wait to be told what we are next allowed to do.

Rules are being bent and broken as fast as new ones are made; it starts to rain so we sit in the garage; we gather in a group of more than six to stand together against racism; we give a friend a lift home; we stay overnight at their house because we get too pissed to drive home.

Rosa Luxembourg famously said that “those who do not move, do not notice their chains”.

We’re moving. We’ve noticed our chains. We’re shaking them off.

Today’s tip. We are all fans of the Spectator magazine now so I’m sure you’re keeping up with the writings of Dr John Lee, a former professor of pathology and NHS consultant pathologist, and therefore know all about CD4 positive T cells. If not, read this https://bit.ly/3cEGUZN and then dig into his back catalogue

Day 75. Choice

Maybe today was a good day to go out protesting.

I think it’s been a better day to go to the beach.

Today’s tip. Make up your own mind.

#BlackLivesMatter

Day 76. Sweet as

New Zealand goes to Level 1 and lifts all Covid restrictions except border controls.

Shake my hand bro.

They do have the advantage of being out in the wop wops, but only twenty-two people have died. There have been no new cases for days, there is no-one now in hospital with Covid-19, and Jacinda Ardern is able to announce the full re-opening of the economy saying, “We are ready”.

Grab the piss out of the ute cuz.

The UK passes 600 deaths per million people ‘out-performing’ every other country in the world.

Trebles all round.

Yesterday the UK daily death figure was below 100 for the first time since March 26th and new case numbers are heading in the right direction too, but we are introducing only now (and not for long*) the sort of border controls New Zealand has had in place since the very first day of its lockdown.

Anyone coming in to the UK from today will have to self-isolate for 14 days.

Even cousin Sean arriving on a tiki tour from Covid-free New Zealand.

Are we anywhere near ready for anything?

Today’s tips. Watching Marvin Rees (Bristol), on TV yesterday, and listening to Andy Burnham (Manchester) and Steve Rotherham (Liverpool), on the wireless last week, all showing what strong local leadership looks like reminds me to recommend – again, it’s an old horse maybe, but not a dead horse – that you get your city a directly elected Mayor.

Introducing here (for copyright reasons) the ‘country metre’. Judging from yesterday’s TV and social media there’s a big difference between city social distancing and country social distancing.

*Watch Tory business interests dump it in three weeks when it will need a vote in Parliament to renew it.

Day 77. A Visitor

I’ve watched two moorhens build a really substantial nest, in the reeds, from reeds (in town it would be crisp packets). One of the birds sits on it always, a foot above the water line. It’s an avian skyscraper. The other busies itself around and about, never far away.

I mentioned before a heron coming a hunting and being dispatched. A couple of nights ago the cows were in the water; the fast-growing, bright green reeds are their favourite supper-time snack. One came very close to standing on the nest. That would have been curtains.

In the dark last night there was a a hell of a row. Splashing, shrieking, what sounded like a proper dunking. Enough of a row to have me grab the binoculars. One of the moorhens was on the water chirping persistently, but there was nothing more to see I thought.

Then the light of my torch bounced back off two large eyes deep in the reeds.

Like a Bengal tiger the fox crept into the water and forward to the nest. He poked his nose in, helped himself and retreated to the shore. A minute later he crept back for a second go. And twice more. Then he stalked his way slowly through the reeds just the tip of his tail visible, skipped up the flood bank twenty metres away, and ran off along the top.

It’s a bucolic scene again this morning. Lambs are quietly munching their way along the water’s edge. The water is calm. A heron stands neck-tucked-in surveying the scene. The gosling horde are on the march.

One of the moorhens is around. No sign yet of the other.

A duck and her clutch have taken over the nest.

Today’s tip. Don’t count your chickens (obviously).

Day 78. Privilege

I’ve been up to the water point again. I’ve filled the tank. I’ve emptied the toilets. Fingers crossed the gearbox leak is fixed. I’m ready.

I will soon be leaving this place, shifting from the countryside back into the city, taking the boat out of the water and into dry dock for a couple of months.

It’s been great to have been surrounded by water and greenery and to have had such easy access to so much of the great outdoors here.

It’s been a real bonus to have had a couple of good friends nearby to shoot the socially distanced breeze with.

And it’s been an absolute privilege to share this Spring like no other for humans with the abundant wildlife for whom, in all its loveliness and horror, it’s been a Spring like any other.

When I hear that included in its latest bowing to pressure from business interests the government is allowing zoos and safari parks to re-open from Monday my only thought is, “Why do we still have zoos and safari parks?”

If you want to see a lion or a polar bear, a penguin or a chimpanzee, go to where they live in the wild or make do with David Attenborough and the Discovery Channel.

Re-opening zoos is nothing to celebrate. We should be closing zoos.

Today’s tip. Keep a close eye on the weather. I’m looking for a window.

Day 79. Power

Opened in 1968, Ratcliffe on Soar power station’s four boilers can produce 2000MW of electricity, enough to power over 2 million homes. In the eighties it was burning over 5 million tonnes of coal a year and producing 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, equivalent to the average carbon emissions of a million local people these days.

Waking up you may read or hear that this windy morning more than 50% of our electricity is being produced from renewable sources* and that Britain has now gone two months without burning any coal in any of our power stations.

Around here you can always see the power station, even if some people fail to work out quite where it is and how to get to it. It’s appeared in even more of my photographs than the coronaduck, but it has been doing nothing all this time.

It’s due to close for good in 2025.

Half of nearby Nottingham has ambitions to be carbon neutral by 2028**. Not having a coal fired power station on the doorstep will help with that.

The prime site right beside the M1, with its own rail link, will be cleared to make way for some bright or crazy idea that has not yet been settled upon.

I think the eight cream cooling towers are beautiful, in of themselves and in their setting. They change colour with the changing light, they perform a geometrically perfect dance as you move around them, they’re a landmark for miles and miles around, they are the gateway to Nottingham and the North.

I think we will miss them when they are gone. I know I’m not their only fan.

In an age when statues are being reassessed and removed let’s opt instead to keep these statuesque beauties as a monument to the age of coal and in tribute to Britain’s third longest river, the Trent, whose waters cooled the seven power stations like this one that together once produced 20% of all the electricity we used.

Today’s tips. Don’t get a haircut. Boris Johnson is clearly determined to be the last person in Britain to get one. Don’t let him have that to add to the list of things he’s proud of.

And beware double-bubblers.

*Demand is about 25% down on ‘normal’ due to lockdown reducing commercial and industrial use and this figure includes biomass which means wood pellets imported by diesel-burning ship from America, so hardly ‘green’. If you’re interested to see the mix of power supply in use at any time click here https://electricinsights.co.uk

* Not really carbon neutral, Scope 1 and 2 carbon neutral, about 40% carbon neutral because Scope 3 carbon emissions that include things like waste disposal – and that are 60% of the City’s carbon emissions – are not being taken into account. Read more about the three scopes here https://www.carbontrust.com/resources/what-are-scope-3-emissions

Day 80. The Wall

Last week I wrote about my mojo going missing. I found it. Lucky me.

This week I’m reading and hearing lots of people saying they have ‘hit a wall’.

It’s because they’ve had enough of working from home or because furlough feels increasingly insecure.

It’s confusion about whether or not they should be sending their kids to school, if school is open to go to, or is a pleasant place to be.

It’s because bubbling up might be as good as it gets, that they’re not supposed to get within touching distance of all their grandparents or grandchildren, just some of them, for a while yet.

It’s because they have no idea if, or where, or with whom they will or will not be going on holiday.

It’s because they’re seeing now just how badly our government has performed compared with other countries.

It’s the dragging social disconnect, the relentlessness of randomless routine, the hollowed out happiness of the humdrum.

And it’s the change in the weather too. That might be what tipped people over the edge.

If you’re feeling any of this yourself, I know it’s tough.

But let’s make this weekend, somehow, a turning point.

Let’s actively look for reasons to be cheerful.

Let’s act as if the sun is shining anyway.

Today’s tip. Don’t worry too much about the white duck. She’s old enough and big enough to look out for herself now.

Day 81. Docking

Keeping it brief on a big day for me and for Mandalay as we slide into dry dock for an eight week stay and a new lick of paint. It’s definitely make up your own lockdown rules time now, so while I’ll still be aboard if not afloat, I will also be using my second home.

Today’s tip. Never work on your birthday.

Day 82. Plantation

I’m often asked where the canal goes ‘after Sainsbury’s’.

The Nottingham and Beeston canal (the clue is in the name again) is a river diversion route, avoiding Trent Bridge and Beeston weir (and you only need a CRT River licence to keep your boat on it).

In its original form the Nottingham Canal, built in the 1790s during the canal mania, also ran all the way up to join the Cromford Canal at Langley Mill via 19 locks and the eastern edges of the Wollaton Hall estate.

Initially the canal was a reasonable commercial success but the railways came along in the 1840s and it was all over by the 1930s. In the 50s Nottingham City Council acquired the southern stretch, drained it, and filled it in.

You can just about follow the remains of the navigation from Old Lenton up the side of the QMC, through the University of Nottingham’s Jubilee campus and on to Crown Island where I’ve never been on foot until yesterday.

Emerging from the pedestrian tunnel the remains of lock 6 are obvious. Turning back at Beechdale Road we find a street sign the only reminder of a once important woodyard, and the decidedly wild and rural Harrison’s Plantation, with its pond from which clay was taken to puddle the canal, and also Martin’s Pond nature reserve too. Who knew they were there?

We walk back via Wollaton Park where young people sun themselves in groups of many more than six and at much closer quarters than 2 metres. That’s already been peer-reviewed Boris.

Today’s tip. Even after three months of lockdown there are probably places still undiscovered right on your doorstep.

Day 83. New Wheels

The tram stops right outside the boatyard. It’s super handy. 7 minutes to the train station, 10 minutes to Old Market Square.

So lucky.

I’ve not been on it since one Sunday evening in early February when a sweaty, ill-looking young woman in a face mask came on board.

She was the canary in my coal mine.

I’ve watched trams going by this weekend. There seem to be very few seats that passengers are not prevented from sitting on. The economics must be pretty shaky and bending the two-metre rule is not going to help.

As of this morning if I did want to ride on the tram it would be compulsory to wear a face mask. I won’t be doing either. Who will unless they have to?

So lucky to be able to walk and ride a bike.

So lucky to be able to live close to work.

So lucky.

Today’s tip. Ask yourself why you’re standing in a queue for non-essential items.

Day 84. Number 10

Marcus Rashford, just 22, has helped raise £20m to provide meals for the vulnerable during lockdown, without yet being promoted to Honorary Colonel or Knighted.

He has called on the government to extend the free school meals scheme to cover the summer holidays

The government’s Self Employed Income Support Scheme has been a lifeline for many people running their own businesses (so long as they are not Limited companies, in which case you can whistle). It’s pretty generous, particularly for the straight-up people who don’t pay themselves a lot and don’t fiddle their taxes.

Many of the people receiving this support will also have received at least a £10,000 grant, maybe £25,000, if they pay business rates, up to a certain amount, or get small business rates relief. That’s meant the last twelve mostly sunny weeks have been financially pretty pain-free for many. For some they’ve been a blast, an extended vacation, even if they did have to stay at home.

They didn’t have to stay at home.

You could get both the income support scheme money and the rates related grant and – unlike the similarly generous furlough scheme – continue to work if you had the work to do, if you wanted to.

£6.8bn has been handed out already. That’s about £1bn less than we’re spending on two aircraft carriers, so we can definitely afford it.

And yet the Prime Minister has got himself into a shoot-out, with pitch-perfect timing with a young black man, over a move that would cost just £120m, a paltry sum by comparison.

Mr Johnson has rejected calls to extend the free meals scheme but Manchester United’s Number 10 is sticking to his guns and has a good chance of forcing u-turn, if we all get behind him.

Today’s tip. Reflect for a moment on what you were doing at 22 and then maybe use this somewhere #maketheUturn.

Day 85. Metrics

The queue outside Primark on Monday was not exceptional in terms of the number of people involved, the people queuing were just well spread out. The queue at Sports Direct was much shorter but involved just as many people.

There’s a well-established methodology for measuring queues using a scale everyone recognises.

1. A queue (more than two people waiting in line).

2. A queue out of the door (for food in the Soviet Union).

3. A queue up the street (outside Rock City on student night).

4. A queue right around the block (for FA Cup Final tickets in 1991).

5. A queue for a polling station in a country where they’ve not had an election in decades (worth it, however long you have to wait).

That was it, all queuing circumstances covered (except the queue at the bar which is measured using the people-depth scale which is different).

Social distancing has stretched the scale beyond easy comprehension. How are we to make that time vs reward snap judgement as to whether a queue’s for joining or we should come back later?

We’ll have to re-calibrate. But by the time we’ve done that for two metres the rule will be one metre and we’ll have to do it all over again.

Yesterday the queues had pretty much disappeared and ‘town’ was pretty quiet.

City centres only exist as they are because they are places, even as they change, in which we congregate for manufacture, exchange, trade, commerce and fun. We will not have enough people in them to form even a short queue, even at Greggs, until a whole lot more of us are back at work.

The two metre rule might make sense in random-filled shops and bars, gyms and theatres for a while yet, but if it means large employers can only get 30% of their staff back to their buildings then they will form the skeleton crew of a ghost ship.

There will continue to be near empty streets at lunchtime and not enough of us to keep the after-work pubs open for pints and crisps.

But reducing two metres to one metre in offices and other workplaces occupied by easy-to-test-and-trace known-contacts will allow 70 or 80% of us to get back to the office at reasonable risk for those willing to take it.

That should be enough to put the oomph back into most businesses and bring city centres back to life.

Today’s tips. If you’re six foot tall one metre is the distance from you right ear to your left fingertip. Adjust accordingly.

If you’re gradually re-opening your workplace, let it be the colleagues who’ve been living alone or in flats for twelve weeks who go back first. They need it most. They’ll embrace it quickest. They’ll get you off to a flying re-start.

Day 86. Update

Stretching metaphor beyond repair, “fighting-fit again” Boris Johnson had a bit of a car crash.

Football’s back on the wireless but it might as well be bowls with smaller crowds and less atmosphere.

The UK’s promised-by-the-end-of-May Covid app won’t be ready ‘until early winter’. It ‘relies too much on technology’ as if that were even possible.

Why not just translate the German one that works?

Which reminds me I’m starting to feel a bit sorry for hardworking-at-least Matt Hancock. He called Marcus Rashford “Daniel” on the telly.

Insert your Harry Potter joke here.

The Police are going to start enforcing the wearing of face-coverings on public transport. I’ve got myself one of those all-over rubber Trump masks.

If you don’t want to wear a mask on the bus, don’t. If challenged by a cop or anyone else say that under Part 1 Section 4 (a) of The Health Protection (CV, Wearing of Face Coverings on Public Transport) you are exempt as they cause you severe anxiety.

Post-Brexit (will we ever be really) trade negotiations with the US promise again the delights of chlorinated chicken on one side, and on the other salmon farmers in Scotland will be banned from shooting seals.

Read that again. Shooting. Seals.

I met someone at a party who works in the salmon industry. She told me seals that get into the nets can kill hundreds of fish. They don’t even eat their flesh.

They “suck out their livers” and eat them with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (he of the hat) had a folding walking stick that allowed him to check the 7ft gauge of the track being laid for the Great Western Railway.

I’m going to get myself one of those for this social distancing thing no one in town seems to get.

It’s great to be working from the office again. Proper coffee. Colleagues IRL. The new air conditioning is amazing. Fighting climate change can wait.

It rained a lot yesterday. The River Lean backed up and pushed about two feet of smelly, maybe sewage water into the dry dock. No irony there hopefully.

Both my countries now have seats on the UN Security Council but I do I feel any safer?

You OK hun?

Today’s tips. Don’t worry so much about the chlorine. Worry about the ‘lifestyle’ of the chickens that requires its use.

Check out the difference between Black Lives Matter and #blacklivesmatter before you put up your banner – unless you’re a revolutionary Marxist that wants to destroy the nuclear family. I don’t think you are (except Kirt, I think he may be).

Day 87. Counter-productive

Welcome back. Keep left.

Shops are open, after a fashion. Bars and restaurants are likely to be able to re-open from July 4th, but it’s still not 100% certain that they can.

And even if they can, some won’t.

I’ve spoken to bar operators who are gagging to get open somewhere, somehow, putting a premium on outdoor space and pressure on councils to relax rules on alcohol consumption in the street.

But I’ve spoken to restaurant operators doing a brisk take-away trade who will leave their staff on furlough for as long as they can. They will only re-open when they can trade at near full capacity.

To get the economy up and running again fast, to save as many jobs as possible, we need offices, shops, cafés, bars and restaurants to reopen, safely, as soon as possible. Which in most cases is now.

The Chancellor’s extension of the furlough scheme was well received by many businesses, but it is now going to work against bringing town and city centres back to life.

It would be better to direct the furlough money being used to keep people at home to get them back into work by supporting restaurants (and some other businesses) to re-open, not to stay closed.

Today’s tip. Make the most of tomorrow by getting up super early and staying up late. It’s the summer solstice and the longest day of the year. The nights are about to start drawing in.

Day 88. Mandalay

Nellie the elephant packed her trunk and said goodbye to the circus,

The head of the heard was calling, far, far away,

They met one night in the silver light on the road to Mandalay.

In a bumper New Year amnesty in April, as fear of Covid 19 grew, Myanmar released 25,000 people from its over-crowded prisons.

He called from his home in Mandalay last night. He’s a very smart guy but a pretty stupid guy sometimes too.

The last two times I’ve been to Myanmar I’ve not seen him. The first time because he was being stupid, the second because he was paying the price for that stupidity.

Fifteen months, one hundred and thirty-eight men in a single room, all pretending not to see the things they saw.

“A once in a lifetime experience”, he says.

It’s great to have him back.

Today’s tip. Wonder how it is that Myanmar, a very developing nation right next door to China, with a population similar to the UK, has had only about 350 cases of Covid 19 with fewer than 20 deaths. It’s one for the conspiracy theorists.

Day 89. Solstice

As sunset approaches trams scuttle along with a few more people on them than last week.

The carparks up at the cinema and bowling alley are empty except for two boy racers who think their Golfs are dragsters and a few men in sporty BMWs doing whatever men like that do in empty car parks at this time of night.
Two big grey gulls stand high above the grey tarmac, on grey lampposts, before a grey sky, waiting for their burgers and fries from Five Guys.

Click and collect.

Rows of new cars and trucks are fenced-in outside what was The Black Orchid. No-one is going to ask them to dance any time soon.

The scrap yards are silent.

They don’t need lawnmowers at the tennis centre. So many rabbits work there.

A large fox wanders among them, spoilt for choice. They take no notice. It’s a numbers game.

At the Science Park the reedy wooden boardwalk leads to Tottle Brook and the (not in Beeston) Beeston Sidings nature reserve.

When things are back to normal-normal we’ll have breakfast at Kelly’s again.

Today’s tip. Challenging times lie not far ahead for many of us. Don’t over-think things. Trust your instincts.

Day 90. Conclusion

Just fifteen deaths and fewer than one thousand new cases were reported today.

Shopping streets were pretty busy this morning, even if not all the shops were open.

There were plenty of people enjoying the sunshine in the square this afternoon.

Traffic is at increasingly normal levels. Dickheads are parking in cycle lanes again.

Tomorrow the two metre rule, that next to no-one is observing well, will become the one metre rule, which is just normal distancing plus a few inches, so that’s no rule at all.

Shielders can soon stop shielding to gather in sixes or bubble up like the rest of us.

We’re done.

We protected the NHS. We stayed alert. We stopped the spread.

We even saved lives (though 42,000 dead is a pretty poor outcome when 20,000 was supposed to be a good one).

Now take care, don’t be an idiot, but get on with your life.

Lockdown is over.

Well done.

Thanks for reading.

Today’s tip. Don’t be scared. And keep your fingers crossed.

Monday June 22nd 2020.