Feeling rather isolated!

From midnight tonight we are not allowed to meet anyone from outside our household in any setting. We had been restricted to not going into each other’s houses or gardens but going for socially distanced walks in the countryside and in parks was okay. But now we Oldham residents have been told that even that is no longer acceptable. Children can still go to nursery so and small businesses stay open. We can still go to the pub or for a meal on a restaurant but if you can’t actually meet friends there, I wonder what is the point.

It’s all rather confusing, not helped by headlines like this in the Manchester Evening News:

“Amazing day trips to take from Manchester before summer ends”.

Okay, so that was probably written before the latest change in rules and regulations. Even so, it would seem that we can’t visit each other but we can travel to other places for a day out, travelling by car, the MEN article reminds us as public transport is still not recommended, and presumably take our high infection rate with us.

Similarly, I find the quarantine-after-your-holiday business very odd. Many people who have been to Croatia on holiday are cutting their holidays short to get home before they have to quarantine. Presumably they are bringing as much infection back with them just before quarantine kicks in as the people who don’t manage to get back in time.

It’s a very strange situation all round.

Is it acceptable to chat to a neighbour in the shared back garden or is that too much mingling of households?

It hasn’t yet stopped people going to the pub next door and sitting out in the garden until late in the evening (despite the occasionally inclement weather) and talking loudly. Clearly nobody has told them the more you project your voice the more, possibly infected, droplets you spray around you. I wait to see whether the latest increased restrictions make any difference to the pub garden.

Our daughter has just acquired a second-hand off-road buggy to push her small offspring around when we go on our “adventuresl. She has been concerned that her ordinary, townie buggy has not been coping well with bridle paths and bumpy tracks. The new (to her) buggy will permit more adventurous sorties, following footpaths across fields and the like. So we gave it a bit of trial run yesterday afternoon, before the announcement came about not mixing households.

We are now fighting the temptation to organise a longer “adventure” today since the new ruling does not come into force until midnight tonight. Technically, I suppose, we could still cycle to her house or to her oldest daughter’s house, both outside Oldham, and do a socially distanced walk from there. This is the kind of thinking that muddled instructions encourage.

Hey ho!

Scanning news items here and there, I came across one which expressed concern about the continued decline in Modern Languages studies, a matter close to my heart. Only 7,557 took A-level French this year. Numbers taking Spanish rose slightly but German numbers also fell. It’s not just the increased isolation of our population that worries me but the loss of exposure to other cultures and the increased intolerance that comes along as a result. More worrying still is the fact that, certainly in state schools, that decline is accompanied by a decline in the humanities, such as history and geography. English fell by 25 percent and creative arts subjects by almost 17 percent from 2014 to 2019.

We’re not going to be world beaters in culture, that’s for sure!

In my youth I optimistically thought we lived in a world of expanding possibilities. Now it begins to feel that things are closing in on us. And I worry about the world our grandchildren will have to live in.

On that dismal note, life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!