Another day of juggling lockdown.

This morning I walked to the market in Uppermill again. Once again it was restricted to stalls selling only foodstuffs and everyone was being careful to keep their distance. The co-op store also has distancing measures in place. Shelves there are better stocked than last week. Maybe people have resumed a more normal level of shopping. There were fewer people around as many are relying on online shopping, despite a reported problem with actually getting delivery slots. Shops are reducing their opening hours as well.

While sports events remain cancelled other sports-related stories are making the news. The sports reporters have to make a living, I suppose. The latest scandal seems to be that there are clubs, such as Tottenham and Newcastle, still paying their players huge salaries while putting their non-playing staff on furlough and relying on the government scheme to pay those people 80% of their usual salary. Rather skewed priorities!

Not all football clubs are doing this. Lionel Messi has announced that Barcelona’s first-team footballers will not only take a 70% pay cut for as long as the “state of alarm” continues in Spain but also make contributions to guarantee that staff at the club earn their full salary throughout the coronavirus crisis. I also heard that Juventus players have agreed not to be paid for the next four months. They want to help their club stay solvent. After all, they want a club to play for when this is all in the past.

Mind you, I find myself thinking that the fact the players can make this “sacrifice” suggests that maybe the young men are overpaid in the first place. Just a little bugbear of mine!

Here is an article about a district of Paris that was being used as a film set for a story set in 1942. The set was supposed to be dismantled but then along came the lockdown and no dismantling could take place, leaving the streets with fake facades for corset shops, tailors, a shoe repairer and mirror-maker, and dotted with war propaganda, anti-communist tracts and signs in German. Some aspects of the set are relevant to the present situation, such as posters telling residents that a curfew is in place and that they must be in their homes between 11.30pm and 4.00am! As might be expected, the set is in the process of being dismantled by 2020s residents who are apparently pillaging the district for souvenirs.

There are statistics that show that fewer women than men have contracted coronavirus. There are parallel theories that women are more resistant. One explanation offered on a radio programme I heard is that this is because from birth women have all the eggs they are ever going to have, a finite number, whereas men keep on producing sperm forever. This means that women’s bodies need to protect themselves more carefully. They are more “precious” as one person put it. If this is so, does that explain man-flu and the fact that we women have colds whereas men have flu? It’s a theory!

On the menu today is a dish we call “Is that all there is?” This is a rice dish with stir fried onions, carrots and shredded cabbage. At the final stage you add prawns and soy sauce. The name “Is that all there is?” arose more than thirty years ago when a couple of friends turned up unexpectedly with their 8 year old son and ended up staying to eat. Between us we polished off a large wokful of the dish. As we scraped the last rice grains out of the wok the small boy asked, rather plaintively, in his cockney accent, “is that all there is?”

We all laughed and the name stuck!