Communicating with the neighbours. Old photos. People ignoring the restrictions.

It’s uncertain whether we can speak to neighbours in our gardens; after all, they are not members of our household. But communication takes place one way or another. One of the neighbours recently posted through everyone’s door a print of a photo of our bit of the street about 100 years ago, on the occasion of the Whit Walks. The houses were almost certainly occupied by workers at the textile mill in what is now an industrial estate with a range of small businesses behind our houses.

So I wrote a thank you note and pushed it through her door. We don’t know her as she has only moved into what was her parents’ house not long before the Coronavirus crisis put us all into lockdown. Her mother has died, her father is in a nursing home, and she is now living in and renovating the house. In my note I asked her if she could email me a digital copy of the photo and thought she was ignoring me until I discovered her email in my junk folder. Such are the vagaries of electronic communication.

And here is the photo.

In the radio news broadcast I heard that police had to intervene in huge parties in the Birmingham area, parties involving marquees and DJs! It seems that people wanted to have a big get together before Birmingham went into tighter restrictions. No doubt a big party helped the situation!

I get the impression that an alarmingly large number of people simply want to ignore the restrictions now being imposed. Goodness knows what would happen if we needed to go into total lockdown again now!

In Okinawa, Japan, the police have to deal with another type of ignore-the-crisis problem: people falling asleep drunk on the road. This is not drivers falling asleep at the wheel but people literally curling up and going to sleep on the road, sometimes getting undressed and using the kerbstone as a pillow - alcohol-fuelled somnolence called rojo-ne. Most such sleepers are woken up and sent home unharmed but there have been fatalities. Restrictions on Japan’s nighttime economy prompted by the coronavirus outbreak have failed to slow the trend. In the first six months of this year, police received 2,702 rojo-ne emergency calls – about the same number as at the same point last year – despite government requests for people not to venture out at night.

It makes a party in a garden seem quite sensible by comparison.

I doubt that many such parties are going on around here as the weather is just too inclement - rain and wind seems to be on the cards for the day. So it goes.

 Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.