Today I cycled to Uppermill to do my market-shopping, a change to my normal routine made possible by adding panniers to my bike. It worked fine but revealed an oddity about Fitbit. If I walk to Uppermill and back my Fitbit clocks up well over 10,000 steps. The same distance cycled only comes to 2,500. How odd!
Face-masks are still not much in evidence around the shops in Uppermill. Presumably that will change in a few days’ time. Shopkeepers and stallholders seem not to feel the need to wear masks either. The lady who runs the delicatessen told me she has tried put face-masks over the last week and has not enjoyed the experience. So now she is ordering the full-face plastic visor. So it goes. On the radio they were talking about masks again, with a presenter saying she felt her voice was not as clear through a mask, not a problem I have come across over the last couple of months of mask wearing. Maybe the microphone makes a difference.
Our son should have been flying to Galicia on holiday today. That’s not happening and so he has a couple of weeks’ holiday at home. He has already NOT taken the family on holiday to Cornwall earlier this year. When he phoned this morning he discussed the possibility of visiting us, which would be nice, but in the end we all decided to put off such a family visit a bit longer.
Later I came across an article by someone whose parents live in Cornwall. Basically he was appealing to people not to go on holiday to Cornwall, although campsites and the like are seeing uncreased bookings as people opt for holidays in the UK. His argument was that places like St Ives do not have the medical facilities to cope with a sudden outbreak of the virus if brought by tourists. And the writer has opted not to go and visit his parents until life feels more secure again.
“It saddens me,” the journalist wrote, “to think of my family staying inside while the tourists indulge in a coronavirus-free fantasy, and it angers me that our reckless government is forcing people to choose between their health and livelihoods. My dad has been driving far out of town to walk his dog, but even there he meets tourists who “pay no attention whatsoever to social distancing”. His solution is to brandish his dog’s poop bags at arm’s length. As a deterrent it’s proving effective and, as a symbol, it sums up the whole show quite nicely.”
Interestingly his article also included this:
“Cornwall’s visitor economy is estimated to be worth around £2.4bn, and with Brexit coming it arguably needs that money more than ever. Last week, Cornwall council asked the government for £700m over the next decade to fill the gap left by the end of European Union funding.”
Now, which way did Cornwall vote in the referendum? I wonder!
People have been ordering lots of things online. Amazon’s parcel delivery service has done really well from it. The service has a series of TV adverts where parcel deliverymen express how happy they are to take these smiley-faced parcels to families where the children get really excited to receive them. I bet Jeff Bezos has a similar smile on his face as he is reported to have set a fresh record increasing his fortune by an additional $13bn (£10bn) in a single day to take his personal wealth to an unprecedented $189bn.
Wow! How much money does a person need? Enough to make him the richest person 8n the world obviously?
I hope he is paying his taxes at least.
On one of those TV programmes where they examine and comment on the news stories about to appear in the papers the next day I saw Anne Applebaum, writer of a book called “The Twilight of Democracy”. She reckons we could / should put an end to tax havens. They are not created by God, she says, but made by laws. So we can un-make them yes! That’s not going to happen. When people start talking about deadly sins, I find myself thinking that the worst of all is greed.
On balance, though, maybe it’s inventing systems like social media and IT systems that allow snooping and reporting on a personal and an international political level. We have accusations of Russian poking their way into elections and votes of various kinds in other countries; accusations of anti-semitism and racism based on stuff trawled from years ago on social media; and people’s lives are made miserable because of remarks online.
It’s not that I am totally agains social media. On the whole I really enjoy using it. But .... It’s like Pandora’s box: it’s been opened and we have to learn to live with it.
So here we go with stuff gleaned online.
I commented recently on famous people giving their offspring strange names. Yesterday I found an interview with a singer called Jess Cornelius, not someone whose work I am not familiar with. Among other things she spoke about having a baby in the middle of the coronavirus crisis at the same time as releasing a new record. Both happened on the same day, in itself quite impressive. The baby is called Tui Pepper Cornelius-Hale. For me Tui is first and foremost a small town on the border of Galicia and Portugal - Tui on the Spanish side and Valença on the Portuguese side. Okay, people have been named after places before. Think of all the Chelseas there are around these days. Tui is also a holiday travel company; it’s not very usual to be called after such companies. But I was doing the baby a disservice. This little Tui is named after a native New Zealand bird whose white throat tufts and garbled but crystalline song are national motifs. Fair enough! But why is she also called Pepper?
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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