Birthdays. Celebrations. Getting together at some point.

Today is our daughter’s 40th birthday. It might be what people often call a “significant” birthday but I don’t think she’s having any spectacular party, although with a three year old in the house there will have to be a cake. Maybe her teenage daughter, who enjoys baking, can provide one. It was also my father’s birthday. He would have been 102 today. He is supposed to have said that our daughter was the best birthday present he ever received. There you go. Nostalgic family photos and comments from family members are flying around Facebook.

As politicians, scientists and epidemiologists warn that the lockdown, or at least social distancing, could have to continue into an indefinite future we all wonder about social gatherings and family gatherings. In this article Gaby Hinsliff writes about the ideas of “quarantine buddies”, which Professor Stefan Flasche, epidemiologist and mathematical modeller at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, calls “contact clustering”. This seems to mean a group people, in different households but geographically close enough to avoid the need for length travelling, agreeing to be a kind of exclusive regular social contact. Because they would only see each other they would avoid “contamination” from other sources, although they would of course still need to go shopping and the like. Each member’s safety would rely on the others not sneakily seeing other friends on the side, and taking sensible precautions if they did need to go out.

Some of this idea is to help parents pool home schooling and to give children contact with friends but I find myself thinking of family. We could “contact cluster” our household (Phil and me), our daughter’s household (our daughter, her partner and four of her children) and our eldest granddaughter’s household (that’s our daughter’s oldest child and her best friend who lives with her). Of course, that excludes our daughter’s partner’s parents, who might also like to see their grandchildren, our son and family, and our eldest granddaughter’s friend’s family. All those households are geographically too far distant to be included though. Could such an idea become a reality?

On the radio I have just heard the Transport for London in planning to furlough a percentage of their workers. Fewer people are using the transport system of course but our son, who works for TfL, tells me that he is still working very hard from home. Interestingly and coincidentally, our daughter has just told us that her partner who works for Transport for Greater Manchester, has just been furloughed for three weeks. At the end of those three weeks he will be rotated back into work and another worker will be furloughed. It’s one way of working it.

The world is beginning to look very different and there seems to be an increasingly small likelihood of our returning to the previous “normal”. Here is an interesting account of one Englishman’s experience of lockdown in Italy with his Italian wife and three half Italian children. The Italian education system, he tells, will perhaps have to change considerably when children get back into school. So no doubt will most education systems.

And most ways of working.

Not to mention our travel possibilities. As I watched Gabriel Gatehouse reporting from Sweden on BBC 2’s Newsnight last night I found myself wondering if he is staying in Sweden for the duration or if he travelled there to make his report. If the latter, did he fly? And just who is flying at the moment? Interesting!

On the menu here today we have more tagliatelle and tomato sauce. When I buy packs of fresh pasta I note that it says “serves two people” and each time I wonder how many meals for two people is this pasta meant to serve. If it is just one meal, then some people eat an awesome amount of pasta in any one meal. We just might still be eating tagliatelle and tomato sauce tomorrow at this rate!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!