Pessimistic headlines. Family adventures. Lockdown experience stories - and other stories.

Among the various headlines in Coronavirus updates I find these:-

• Italy hits record daily Covid-19 case since May. 
• France reports 3,015 new cases over 24 hours. 
• Greece will only flatten the curve of a second coronavirus wave now gripping the country if diagnosed cases drop below 200 a day, a leading infectious disease expert has warned. 
• Spanish regions attempt to control virus by shutting bars by 1am as cases rise. 

I bet that last one is going down well in a country where many people wait until 10.00pm to dine and loads of young people only go out just before midnight.

And people are telling me that it’s perfectly safe and reasonable to go on foreign holidays!!

For the time being I think we’ll just carry on having family adventures, out and about in our local area.




Yesterday our daughter reckoned we did 12 kilometres. Not bad for a fairly sultry afternoon: from our house, through the village, up the hill to Heights church again and back down the valley once more. 

We split the party into two at one point. We had been walking through the valley that goes from Slackcote, where we had our first house, and Delph. (We had wanted to show the grandchildren where their mother was born.) It became clear that the baby buggy was not going to make it on one section of path. So Phil took the granddaughters, 23, 17 and almost 4, on the valley path, while my daughter and I pushed up the track to the main road, meeting up further along the way. En route we saw a charming little house I have never come across before. Bits of beauty everywhere.

Despite the adverse weather forecast, we managed to do our marathon without getting properly rained on. We did walk through quite a bit of low cloud at times though. And later in the evening the rain came down with a vengeance although we had none of the promised thunderstorms. I thought I might have to run in the rain this morning but it stayed fine for me, although the mud puddles are back on the bridle paths after the overnight rain. And it’s surprisingly warm still. Not a spectacular summer but still a summer of sorts.

As we settle down to accept our odd social situation, and in between one, usually government-created, crisis and another, the newsmen seek out new angles to write about. One has been how the lockdown caused changes in people’s lives:- losing weight, learning to live with certain aspects of life and so on. One that struck me was about a man who gave up gambling.

When the lockdown was announced, he decided this was his opportunity to get out of the addiction that had been growing since he was in his twenties. He had slipped into gambling when he worked as a waiter and would finish an evening shift gambling away his tips, just his tips and no more. Little by little he began to gamble more money away, borrowing from friends and family and using his girlfriend’s bank card to withdraw money. Lockdown prompted him to take take decisive action and he asked his local casino to ban him for life, presumably in case he stepped back on the slippery slope after lockdown. He had never been tempted by online gambling; it was the excitement of the casino’s atmosphere that caught him. And as he could no longer visit casinos during lockdown he says he has successfully turned his life around. Good for him.

Another, completely unrelated, story also caught my eye. Two years ago a small boy stuffed a Lego man’s arm up his nose, in that annoying way that some children do. His parents and several doctors were unable to retrieve it and in the end thought he might not have introduced this foreign body into his nasal cavity at all. If he had, the doctors assured his parents, it would probably make his way through his system and come out. Really!?

Anyway, the other day, tempted by the smell of a plate of cupcakes he sniffed long and hard and then complained that his nose hurt. Aware of his propensity to get things up his nose - he had form even before the Lego man’s arm incident - his mother helped him blow his nose hard. And out came a lego-man’s arm, to the delight of the small boy who had felt misjudged by his parents two years previously. “You see, I did put the arm up my nose! And you didn’t believe me!”

Lego people’s arms are very small, I hasten to add in case any reader is unfamiliar with them. And it would seem that lots of children also swallow bits of Lego, for the rather gruesome, and very snotty, story finished with this comment:-

“In 2018 a team of doctors swallowed Lego and timed how long it took to pass through their bowels in an attempt to reassure concerned parents.”

That’s dedication for you!

 Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!