It is unusual for Phil to be without a bicycle. After all, he used to cycle goodness knows how many miles to work and back in his younger days, on a very fine road bike. But as our cycling these days is pretty much all on bridle paths with their gravelly surface he really needs a nice hybrid like mine, not fully mountain bike but good on all surfaces. Can he find one? Not easily! The first place he contacted said they had the bike he wanted and just needed to check whether they could deliver. They never got back to him. Another place closed down. Yet another simply ignored him. One looked promising but was based in Northern Ireland, making delivery a problem. The latest took several days to answer his email, only to tell him the bike he wanted was out of stock.
It seems that the places that remain open have been inundated with orders and are selling out as fast as they replenish their stocks. Then there is the delivery problem; many of them want buyers to go and collect - a bit difficult if you live in Greater Manchester and the supplier is in Newcastle!
It’s rather a pity he is still bikeless as if that were not the case, yesterday he could have accompanied me on a ride to our oldest granddaughter’s house to wish her a happy birthday. In the absence of an actual birthday cake, difficult to carry in the small rucksack I use to carry essentials while cycling, I got some on my home-made scones out of the freezer. They defrosted as we rode and we celebrated her birthday with strawberry jam on scones. Her mother had driven over with some of the siblings and so we had a mini family reunion.
Amazingly the rain, an almost permanent feature at present, held off and we went for a walk in the sunshine during the afternoon. Quite like old times.
Outside of our social bubble, the world continues to be rather crazy. A blame game appears to have begun. According to our PM the problem with care homes and the overwhelming number of deaths is the consequence of staff not following instructions properly. He said: “We discovered too many care homes didn’t really follow the procedures in the way that they could have but we’re learning lessons the whole time.”
Attempts to soften the impact of his rather damning comment followed as a spokesman “explained” that Mr Johnson was not blaming care homes, but “pointing out that nobody knew what the correct procedures were because the extent of asymptomatic transmission was not known at the time”
That sounds a bit like blame to me. No mention of people sent home from hospital without testing to carehomes without facilities to institute proper isolation procedures. Nor of a shortage of PPE.
As Mark Adams, chief executive of an organisation called Community Integrated Care commented, “I think this, at best, was clumsy and cowardly, but to be honest with you, if this is genuinely his view, I think we’re almost entering a Kafka-esque alternative reality where the government set the rules, we follow them, they don’t like the results and they then deny setting the rules and blame the people that were trying to do their best. It is hugely frustrating.”
The new normal seems, therefore, to include passing the buck.
Now, I wonder who can be blamed for the police stopping black drivers of nice cars .
Across the pond, POTUS is maintaining again that America seems to have a high caseload because it performs more tests. Isn’t the point of testing to indicate how many cases there are? Or am I being naive? Not only do they test a lot more people but, according to “Dr” Trump, they are mostly harmless! “Now we have tested almost 40m people. By so doing, we show cases, 99% of which are totally harmless. Results that no other country can show because no other country has the testing that we have, not in terms of the numbers or in terms of quality.”
Okay!
Here in the UK data on the number of individuals tested for coronavirus is not longer being published. Does this have anything to do with not meeting targets? Who knows?
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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