Fighting with nettles. Feeding pandas. Melting glaciers. And speaking Welsh.

Towards the end of yesterday afternoon we decided the time had come to stretch our legs. As the previous day’s walk had been stymied by sudden rainfall, Phil suggested a walk up the hill “to give ourselves a bit of gradient. Fine! Having been up the hill and down the other side, he then proposed returning home via the “forest path”, something of an exaggeration as names go as that bit of woodland does not really constitute a forest. We also call it the “secret path” as that was the name our son gave it when he was about nine and we first discovered this path off the main road, linking two villages together.

There was an ulterior motive to this walk. On Wednesday, as I have undoubtedly mentioned, I purchased a handy-sized pair of secateurs. This was a chance to try them out. Already, going up the hill we had come across blackberry brambles and rambling roses trying to take over the pavement and block the way. A quick snip here and there and the way was much easier. And so the proposed return via the forest path gave the perfect opportunity for “a bit of snipping”.

At the point where we got onto the path, it looked like this. Brambles there were but it was the nettles that really encroached, reducing the width of the path to diminutive proportions. We have walked this lath with our almost 4-year-old granddaughter and the idea of someone her size pushing the nettles was simply not good.

So Phil got to work. I held his jacket and worked as his consultant/advisor/chief “nasties” spotter. Now, Phil is a very determined person and when he gets a bee in his bonnet he will not give in easily. Consequently, something like an hour later we had progressed about 100 yards.

The path, however, was now much clearer.
I hope it is appreciated by all who tread it.





By the way, we also saw some splendid toadstools, worthy of any fairy tale.

It’s a good job I had put our evening meal in the oven on a slow cook. Otherwise there is no knowing when we would have got around to eating.

On the subject of eating, one of the odd, sad co sequences of the pandemic is that pandas in a Canadian zoo are in danger of starving as the supply chain for bamboo has broken down. Calgary Zoo said in May that it planned to return Er Shun and Da Mao to China, after coronavirus disrupted bamboo supply lines, but on Tuesday the zoo announced that due to the pandemic, it was still unable to secure travel permits. And so the pandas stay in Canada for the time being but the keepers are unsure about how they will manage to feed them.

Here’s another story, not Coronavirus this time but the environment and global warning. The glacier on Mont Blanc is melting and people are having to be evacuated. Some 65 people, including 50 tourists, have left homes in Val Ferret, the hamlet beneath the glacier. Roads have been closed to traffic and pedestrians. “We will find [alternative] solutions for residents,” siad Stefano Miserocchi, the mayor of Courmayeur. “The tourists will have to find other solutions.”

It’s not the first time this has happened. Experts are keeping an eye on it. Glaciologists monitoring Planpincieux say a new section of ice is at risk of collapse. Homes were also evacuated in September last year following a warning that 250,000 cubic meters of ice could fall. The movement of the glacial mass was due to “anomalous temperature trends”, the experts said. The glacier has been closely monitored since 2013 to detect the speed at which the ice is melting.

But still there are climate change deniers out there!

And among the problems besetting schools at the moment and the big question of whether or not they will be able to open for the new school year, in Wales they have another problem: not enough Welsh-speaking teachers. Like many places in countries all over Europe where minority languages exist, Wales wants to promote the use of its language through bilingual teaching in schools. But too few young teachers, coming newly qualified into the profession are able to work in the languages. In some cases they have grown up in Wales, even been educated themselves in Welsh, but because their families mostly communicate in English, they do not feel confident about delivering lessons in Welsh. I can sympathise; you aren’t completely confident about keeping control of your class and less so if you are asked to teach in what is for you your second language! This minority language business is very tricky. However, I can’t help feeling schools have more serious problems to deal with at the moment.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

IT problems. Conspiracy theories. Controlling Facebook. And advice from strange quarters.

Another day. The weather seems to be improving. It was pleasantly mild when I went for a run this morning. By the time I got around to hanging washing out it was feeling a bit muggy, as they say, stuffily warm and rather humid. We’ll see how it goes.

Out and about, I called in at chemist’s shop for a prescription which we had been assured would be ready and waiting on Tuesday. On Tuesday they told me they had had IT problems and that it would be ready on Wednesday. Just as we had decided to walk into the village to collect it, the heavens opened, the rain came down in torrents and we gave up on the idea of a walk. Just as well, since when I popped in this morning they told me on e more that they had had IT problems and orders had been delayed. I should call back later today, they recommended. Maybe I’ll wait until tomorrow morning, just to be on the safe side.

IT related stuff seems to be afflicting the track and trace app again or still or whatever. Questions of how or if the data collected is stored abound. Will they ever sort it out? Other countries have systems working. Why not us?

Some people would, of course, oppose the whole idea of track and trace, regarding it as part of the government’s plan to control and monitor us all the time. And that is not just here but also in the United States where conspiracy theories still do the rounds. A “Plandemic” video is apparently going a bit viral, putting put he belief that the whole pandemic was planned as a way of gaining the necessary control. These conspiracy theorists believe that mass vaccinations will be used for human tracking purposes. How? Does a vaccination somehow insert a tracking chip?

Whatever the theory, over 40% of Republicans reportedly would decline the vaccine even if free. This reluctance puts eventual herd immunity at risk of course. The journalist whose article I read quoted previously sensible friends who said things like this:-

 “From Rockefeller to Gates, it’s all related. This has been in the works for a long time, and it’s all part of a new world order of control and surveillance.”

 “Anthony Fauci is conspiring with Bill Gates for forced vaccinations.”

 “STOP the toxic 5G Towers…”

 “Can you believe that Bill Gates and Fauci? They should be arrested.”

The fact that the journalist questioned these views was taken as proof that she had been brainwashed by the mass media. A nicely circular bit of double-think.

The thing is that the belief in the Plandemic is not confined to the uneducated. Many anti-vaxxers are university graduates. Some of them are doctors, would you believe? Most anti-vaxxers have been left-leaning but now it seems they are becoming right-leaning and are switching from Democrats to Republicans. R Trump has been known to support their views on vaccination, after all. If enough do this they could end up giving Mr Trump another term in office.

And now Mr Trump has been in trouble with Facebook, “for spreading false information about the coronavirus”, specifically suggesting that children were “almost immune from Covid-19”. And so they deleted his post. This has not gone down well, of course, and is seen as proof of media bias. As Courtney Parella, the deputy national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said. “Another day, another display of Silicon Valley’s flagrant bias against this president, where the rules are only enforced in one direction. Social media companies are not the arbiters of truth.”

Oh, boy!

Meanwhile, experts area till uncertain about children and the virus and their ability to spread it. The experience of summer camps in Georgia USA and schools in Israel suggest that we should be very careful.

Now for a bit of light relief! Here is an excerpt from something that claims to be from the Independent:-

“Annunziata Rees-Mogg should have her own advice show on daytime TV, giving tips to the poor on how to survive. She has a natural flair for it, as she showed this week, suggesting the poor should make their own chips. “Tesco 1kg potatoes = 83p, 950g own brand chips = £1.35,” she tweeted.
Her deep interest in fried potatoes will resonate with the poor. “It comes from the heart, she’s clearly one of us,” they’ll say.

She probably spends whole evenings discussing these issues with brother Jacob. “We simply have to calculate whether they should use disposable nappies,” she’ll remark, “or if it would be more cost-efficient to sell their child to a trafficking gang in Albania. Quick, Jacob, do the sums, they’re depending on us.”

When you’ve had to rely on squeezing the most out of every resource like the Rees-Moggs, you understand that frugal living is an art. Annunziata would give tips such as: “When you go to The Ivy for dinner, ask the waiter to place the leftovers in an Imperial Crystal doggy bag. Then, the following day, when chef is preparing luncheon, they’ll have the option of frying up the nez d’autruche sur un lit de pissenlits you couldn’t manage last night, with some lentils and baked beans. If you’re really up against it finance-wise, maybe you could lean across and ask to take home Kate Winslet’s pudding! There’s nothing like an Oscar winner’s discarded eucalyptus and custard to get you through a tricky financial patch.””

 Surely not to be taken at all seriously!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Wednesday out and about. Rescues and rejection!

It’s Wednesday again. I thought I was going to have to ride to the market in the rain as I woke quite early and heard a serious downpour. By the time I got up and moving, though, the rain had stopped and in fact The downpour must have been less copious than I thought because the puddles on the Donkey Line bridle path were not too bad.

While I was out and about I finally got round to buying some secateurs. I am sure we had some at some time but they have not been seen for a while. We wanted a pair that could be carried quite easily in a pocket as we keep coming across dangerously treacherous trailing brambles and such like when we are out and about. So now we can snip happily as we go, at the same time hoping that carrying a pair of secateurs does not count as carrying a dangerous or offensive weapon!

I have come across a number of stories of people being found or rescued. In one case a man, an immigrant worker I think, who was feared to have been murdered five years ago turned up living in woods. He disappeared from his workplace in Cambridgeshire and someone was even arrested on suspicion of his murder. The suspect was later released but the suspicion remained that the disappeared chap had perhaps been exploited and threatened and had fled. And then early in July he turned up, or was discovered, living in the woods. How did he live wild for five years? Quite amazing!

Another story is from the other side of the world and smacks of adventures such as we used to read about in comics when we were kids. We must all at some time have written words in the sand on a beach, usually nonsense and usually washed away not long afterwards by the tide. Well, three Micronesian sailors wrote an SOS on a beach after their small boat ran out of fuel and ran aground on the uninhabited Pikelot Island, less than half a kilometre long, is a low coral atoll, heavily forested and home to a seabird rookery and turtle nesting site.

When they did not turn up at their base and alarm was raised but the men were found when a rescue team spotted their giant SOS message. Oddly, the Australian rescuers just checked they were okay, gave them food and water and left them to it, informing the Micronesian authorities of their whereabouts so that they could send a patrol vessel to pick them up!

The Pacific islands seem to be the place to get stranded. Just last week a man from Brisbane was rescued after drifting about near the Solomon Islands for three days after bis trimaran was damaged by a storm. And in 2016 a couple stranded on the uninhabited Micronesian island of East Fayu for a week were found by the US navy also after writing a big SOS in the sand.

There you go.

Some people get stranded. Others are in danger of being expelled. Here’s the story of someone who had lived in the UK from the age of 2, considered herself British and suddenly found she was being threatened with deportation - at age 15:-

“ Why do you sound so British?” the immigration officer asked 15-year-old Ijeoma Moore as she followed orders to pack for herself and her 10-year-old brother. Officers had arrived at their London home that morning in 2010, as they were eating breakfast and getting ready to leave for school. “Because I am British,” the teenager replied. What else could she be? She had lived in the UK since she was two years old. She loved tea and toast and “stupid telly”. But her mother’s repeated residency applications to the Home Office had all been rejected. Moore was not a British citizen.
Still in school uniform, the children and their visiting father – her mother was not there that day – were put in the Home Office van. Moore felt like she was watching someone else’s life on TV. They were taken to an immigration detention centre, where she narrowly avoided deportation three times. Eventually she and her brother were placed in foster care and her father sent to Nigeria.
“I had to grow up really quick and become like a mum to my brother,” Moore says.

A decade on, Moore is still not a UK citizen. She will not officially become British until she turns 33 – 31 years after she arrived in the country and picked up a London accent. And it is not guaranteed if she runs out of money to pay the soaring fees, or the Home Office loses a document from the required stack of evidence, or if the rules change yet again.”

In the USA they call such young people “dreamers”, undocumented or “alien” minors who as a group have for two decades campaigned for legal status under the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (Dream) Act. But this is going on in our own country. And we just get on with our lives, unaware for the most part of such goings on.

Meanwhile things are a whole lot worse in Beirut, in the aftermath of that huge explosion. I can’t begin to imagine how you deal with such devastation in the middle of a pandemic.

But somehow life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Mission accomplished - getting what I need. Out and about. Travel problems for some ... but not for all.

The other day I realised why my distance glasses, useful for reading the subtitles on foreign language films and TV series, were feeling uncomfortable. The bobbly bits, the nose-pads, had fallen off. One remained in the glasses case but the other had disappeared completely. This reflects the fact that one side had been feeling a bit scratchy for a good while. But finally, having found the stray nose-pad in the glasses case, I took a careful look and found the reason for the scratchy feeling. Why had I not looked before? Goodness knows!

So yesterday I got on my bike and set off for the optician’s in Uppermill. I hadn’t bought the glasses there but I still didn’t fancy a bus ride to the centre of Oldham to the optician’s section of Boots the Chemist. However, I was hopeful that the Uppermill place would be prepared to do a small repair for me anyway. And so they did!And free of charge. Mission accomplished!

As I was in Uppermill I popped into the coop store with a small shopping list. On my list for weeks I have had All-Bran and have been unable to find it. Those of the family who still go to supermarkets or order stuff from the big stores on line have been on the lookout for it for me, all to no avail. Consequently I was very pleased to find it back on the shelf in the coop. I briefly considered buying more than one packet but in the end I decided that panic-buying and stockpiling was not really my thing. But it was a small success. Such is life at the moment!

Later in the day, actually into the evening, we went for a walk along what we call our forest path, aka “the secret path”. There are always interesting things to see along the way.

Bits of beauty everywhere! We consider ourselves fortunate. There were even flowers to coordinate with my hoodie and my bag.

On the radio programme, You and Yours, they have been discussing holidaying in the UK. Reports are mixed. Some places, most places in fact, really welcome the return of tourists but a few are feeling inundated with people who do seem to know how to behave at seaside places - litter left around and people urinating in full view of family groups! Levels of tourist politeness varies too. One Cornishman described going for a walk in his local area. He has not been out and about much during lockdown and stopped to sit down and admire the view, only to find a group coming and sitting really close to him. So he reminded them about social distancing, only to be threatened and sworn at. So he’s not feeling very happy about tourists.

I suppose he was lucky only to be threatened and sworn at. There was a news report in one of the papers about a shop assistant asking a customer please to wear a mask in the store. The customer got out bis handgun and shot the assistant. When police went to his home to investigate the incident, he turned an assault rifle on them. He wasn’t dealing well with the virus crisis! This was, of course, in the USA. Fortunately we haven’t quite reached that stage yet.

Some of us, quite a lot us by all accounts from what the radio commentaries tell me, might be feeling more than a little limited by the virus crisis. Travel options have been seriously reduced but it could be worse. I have been reading about young people in particular feeling cut off from home, in fact, actually cut off from home. Chinese students, Mongolian tourists, Palestinians from Gaza and many others have all found themselves unable to return home, often meaning separation from close family, economic hardship and uncertainty about the future. This is largely because of borders being closed and airports restricting the number of flights allowed in. Mongolians seem to be suffering the most as their country’s borders are closed. Government evacuation flights exist but they only run once a month from Frankfurt and Istanbul. Tickets are expensive. Students whose study visas are running out cannot afford them, cannot even afford to get to the Frankfurt and Istanbul and the cannot afford to pay for a mandatory 21-day stay in a government quarantine facility on arrival. Just another of the Coronavirus consequences.

One person who has managed to travel seems to be Juan Carlos de Borbón y Borbón, emeritus King of Spain, who abdicated a few years ago in favour of his son King Felipe. He is reported to have - maybe, possibly, but nobody is sure - travelled to the Philippines, escaping from the various scandals that have been revealed about him recently! Once he was a hero, seeing his country through the transition from dictatorship to democracy, standing up for what was seen as right. As time has gone by his image has slipped, financial shenanigans have come to light and he has become an embarrassment to his son and, indeed, his country. How are the mighty fallen?

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

“Eating out to help out”. In Greater Manchester? Problems and solutions for restaurants and cafes. And Jamie Oliver.

Today we can start to “eat out to help out”. Whoopee! Of course, the place where you eat out has to be part of the scheme. And whether you can do it in Greater Manchester is questionable, given our current status. Apparently a “major incident” has now been declared, which I understand means extra checks in the readiness of emergency and public services to react to the escalating transmission of the virus.

None of this seems to have stopped people eating out and drinking out at the pub next door to us. So maybe you can still eat out provided you eat outdoors and with someone from your own household, although quite how anyone checks you are all from the same household seems a bit unclear, to me anyway. And I am pretty sure that people have been eating in at the pub next door.

This is all academic, as I have no plans to go and eat out anywhere just yet, apart from maybe a picnic in the park.

On the Food Programme on Radio 4 yesterday I heard a restaurant reviewer say: “No-one goes into the restaurant business to make money!” I think she meant that most people who open restaurants do so because they love food, love cooking, love the idea of making people enjoy good food but I bet that deep down they have a little glimmer of hope that they might be opening that little goldmine that makes the restaurateur rich. After all, every successful restaurant chain much have started somewhere small!

Jamie Oliver, who has made it big, and then saw his Jamie’s Italian restaurant chain run into difficulties, expressed his concern about the quality of food in restaurants in an interview with Zoe Williams:

 “If you look at everyone doing well at the moment, they are basically prepping and shifting fairly low-quality food. So the thing I’m most worried about at the moment is the actual business of cooking and service is hugely under threat. Because it doesn’t pay the bills to care.”

That’s a bit damning about successful places!  However, to some extent he echoes the sentiment expressed by the restaurant reviewer about the difficulty of making money running a restaurant or cafe. And the difficulty is even greater with Coronavirus around. Some restaurant owners have spent lockdown time refurbishing and developing outdoor spaces but presumably you have to have to be doing well enough already to have the spare cash, tens of thousands of pounds in some cases, to spend on such work. And not everyone has that possibility. One cafe owner in Leeds had this to say:

“We are on our knees financially and I haven’t paid this quarter’s rent. Normally we would take at least £1,500 over a weekend but since 4 July we’ve only made £300 over a Saturday and Sunday.
It was fabulous to be able to furlough our 10 members of staff, many of whom are young, renting and need the money, but now it’s coming to an end I’m not sure staying open will be viable. I’m optimistic we’ll see some people visit but I think it will be regular customers rather than new ones.” 

She has handed the day-to-day running of the cafe to her son but is looking at selling up. “I’ve used up all of the £10,000 local authority grant on rent and utilities. I used to be a lecturer and am living on my teacher’s pension. It’s such hard work running a business and I’m tired. I’m hoping by next month someone will buy it otherwise we’ll go bankrupt.”

Interestingly, it seems that a large number of restaurant owners have invested money in vans so that they can run their own delivery services or even set up shop on the street, having canvassed areas to see where they might be welcome and popular. This may explain “Tin Box Pizza” which pops up from time to time on a housing estate hear here. Even fish and chip shops have apparently begun delivery services in some villages. I am reminded of being in France at the end of the 1960s and buying chips, but no fish or sausages, from a van in the square. The chips were usually served with mustard rather than malt vinegar. There is also Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown story “The Van” about a worker made redundant and setting up a fish a chip van.

In some cases they are hampered by the difficulty of getting a permit to set up shop in town centres but on the whole it looks like a viable alternative for some small businesses. Some enterprising folk are even planning on serving prosecco as well as coffee.

Getting back to Jamie Oliver, here’s an excerpt from Zoe Williams’ article:

“Oliver’s absolute passion, besides food itself, is fighting childhood obesity, an issue that has just landed at the top of the news agenda thanks to the government’s new obesity strategy, which will include banning junk food advertising and putting calorie counts on restaurant menus. Oliver is delighted by the announcement, as he was by the former prime minister David Cameron’s work on the issue, and says it was only derailed by Brexit.
But his thinking, to my mind, doesn’t make sense – he is clear about the fact that the root cause of obesity is poverty: indeed, he shows me a graph he has had embossed in gold, and put in a gold frame, which shows that children from poor families are twice as likely to end up obese, that they – in his words – “live on the planet less time than their affluent friends”.
So I find it absurd for him to laud two prime ministers who have done so much to cause poverty in families, from benefit cuts to sanctions, from abandoning child-poverty targets to gleefully overseeing the introduction of a food-bank culture in this country, and congratulate them for taking obesity in childhood seriously.”

Good for Jamie Oliver for fighting obesity, but taking a graph about poverty, embossing it in gold and putting it in a gold frame, while possibly making an ironic statement about poverty, does seem a little over the top to me!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.

Getting out and about. Restrictions here and there. Who to blame.

The weather forecast promises me a 10% chance of rain. A more detailed forecast tells me it will get brighter and finer as the day goes on, and so I took the chance and hung the washing out in the garden. I couldn’t stand the thought of hanging it up indoors. So five minutes later another rain shower came along! It was only brief, so the washing remained in the garden. We shall see!

Yesterday we finally took Phil’s bike on its real maiden voyage. We have been up and down the Donkey Line bridle path a few times but yesterday I persuaded him to accompany me to our granddaughter’s house, about three quarters of an hour’s ride away. We almost turned back as it started to rain lightly but determination won the day. And so we rode mostly along bridle paths to meet our daughter, with her smallest children, at her oldest daughter’s house so that we could all go for a walk together. We had our waterproofs just in case but the weather favoured us.

It was strange to hear the not quite four year old say solemnly, “We can’t go in Tasmin’s garden. Am I allowed to hold Grandma’s hand?” Such are the times me live in!

But we managed a pleasant walk, examining snails and beetles along the way.

I suppose it could all be a lot worse. In Australia Victoria has declared a state of disaster and the city of Melbourne has instituted a curfew. Serious measures! 

 Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, warns that the sudden increase in restrictions we are currently facing around here are likely to be a frequent occurrence:

“Last week we got a taste of things to come. As we head for winter without a Covid-19 vaccine, we will all need to get used to a new routine where, every Thursday, the latest round of local restrictions is announced. Greater Manchester was not the first and we certainly won’t be the last.”

He argues that a major factor in the parts of Greater Manchester which have seen an increase in Coronavirus cases is the nature of employment of the people living there. Almost all unable to work from home, they have had to continue going out to work just to keep going.

In similar vein. Kenan Malik, has been writing about how the poor get the blame:

“Obesity is a significant health issue and an important factor in Covid-19 deaths. But the reason poor people eat junk food is not because they are ignorant or lack middle-class virtues. It’s because of the circumstances of their lives. Britons work the longest hours in Europe. Many are forced into two or more jobs. Few have the time or the resources to cook like Jamie Oliver.

For poor households, fast food is one of the few indulgences they can afford. “A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t,” George Orwell observed in The Road to Wigan Pier, castigating middle-class homilies on working-class diets. “When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you… want something a little bit ‘tasty’.” If we want healthier diets, we need not lectures on healthy eating but a serious attack on poverty.”

While our PM seems to have decided to take the possibility of further spikes in virus a bit more seriously, across the Atlantic POTUS appears to be continuing to argue with his scientists:

“Donald Trump launched an extraordinary attack on his own top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, arguing against the doctor’s claim that high rates of infection in the US stem from a less aggressive reaction to the virus in terms of economic shutdowns and stay-at-home orders.

“Wrong!” countered the president as he retweeted a video of Fauci making the point in recent congressional testimony. Fauci had explained that differentiations between surging US infections and a sharp decrease seen across Europe could be explained by the different reactions to the virus. Fauci said most European countries shut their economies down by 95%, while the US only shut down its economy by half.

Trump countered: “We have more cases because we have tested far more than any other country, 60,000,000. If we tested less, there would be less cases. How did Italy, France & Spain do? Now Europe sadly has flare ups. Most of our governors worked hard & smart. We will come back STRONG!””

It must be nice to be so confident!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Cooler weather. Feelings about lockdown restrictions coming back. Schools. And fashion recycling.

Today is cooler than yesterday, which is quite a relief. My daughter and I took the small people out for a shady walk in the heat, ending up sitting in a park under the trees.

Quite how anyone sat out in the sun is hard to understand. In fact, our going out for a longish walk in that sapping heat is also rather hard to understand, but there it is.

We would have been happy just to sit on the picnic blanket in our garden but new lockdown restrictions in our area put a stop to that. 

Here’s a little something I read yesterday, or perhaps the day before:-

“Scientists are anxious that the lockdown measures in the UK are neither tough enough nor being well enough observed to avoid either localised rises in infections and deaths, or a second wave. The increase being seen in infections needs to be nipped in the bud, they say. “What I fear is that if we fail to check this flare up, we will head into the winter months with a high level of circulating virus,” said Prof James Naismith, the director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute.”

Judging by the chatter coming from the pub garden next door to our house until very late yesterday evening, neither the heat nor increased lockdown measures around here made any difference to people’s desire to be out having a drink.

Experts and politicians appear undecided about whether we are still in the first wave of the pandemic or in danger of a second wave but rumblings keep coming out about the possible need to reintroduce severe lockdown measures.

It’s not just here either. This is from an article about resurgence of the virus across Europe:-

“The advice from Spain’s health ministry this week was simple.

Using the hashtag #Don’tChuckitallAway, the ministry told people not to kiss or hug friends and family, not to share plates, to keep a careful eye on who’s been drinking from which glass, to slip the mask back on straight after eating and to keep washing hands frequently.

Behind the entreaties lies a blunt and unwelcome message that has since echoed across Europe: the small, quotidian pleasures of communal life – pleasures willingly and gainfully sacrificed during the springtime lockdowns – may soon have to be foregone once again.

Whether described as a second wave, a continuation of the first or merely a rash of local outbreaks, the number of people found to be infected with Covid-19 in recent days across the continent has climbed to the highest levels in months.”

“Adarra Solas, a 21-year-old dancer also from Barcelona, agreed the post-lockdown scenes witnessed so far were nothing if not predictable.

“I think they’re putting the blame on us to dodge responsibility,” she said. “It was obvious that young people would go out, drink and have fun after the months we’ve been through. But when I look around, I see both young and older people walking about without masks, not wearing them on public transport, or not following the safety guidelines.

“The summer’s come and we’ve all started to relax,” Solas added. But if the governments of Europe are warning of anything, it is the danger of that.”

Exactly! There is a feeling of relaxation and I can’t help feeling that many people would object to the closing of pubs and restaurants for a second time. Reading María’s blog yesterday  I realised that she was echoing almost exactly my thoughts about schools opening up again. Here is what she had to say:-

“I fear when school starts, the second wave will come and sweep everyone out to sea. No real provisions have been made. Kids will return to the same classrooms, with the same number of classmates. The only difference is that primary school kids will wear masks until they're in their room, where they can take them off. Each class will be like a bubble, and I assume they won't mix with kids from other classrooms. But it won't be so easy. Either the school hours will be prolonged, to stagger enterings and leavings and recesses, or more time will be spent trying to keep them apart than in teaching and learning. Secondary school students are supposed to keep a mask on all day, except in class while they're sitting, if they can be kept at least 1.5 meters from anyone else. Another impossibility. If young kids can't be bothered to put on masks in the summer when they're out with their friends, they will not keep them on all day in school, either.

The ideal would have been to build more schools, and keep class numbers low. But there wasn't much time for that. Instead, fast barracks could have been cobbled together next to existing school buildings, and, in that way, increase the number of classrooms. That, however, would also entail hiring more teachers. After years of cutting back on education budgets, the money available for such expenditures is nil. So, back to school we go. And possibly back to the hospital when contagions start rising.”

She could have been writing about the UK situation.

Enough doom and gloom!

Here is a feel-good story. Apparently people often forget to collect clothes from laundries and dry-cleaners more often than we might think possible. Chang Wan-ji, 83 years old, and his wife Hsu Sho-er, 84, have had so many items left in their Taiwanese laundry over the decades that they given some to charity organisations or directly to the poor and needy.

But recently their son decided to get them involved in modelling some of the items and posting them on Instagram. They now have about 600,000 followers and have featured in the Taiwanese edition of Vogue and Marie Claire magazine.

Despite their bit of instant fame prompting some customers to go and claim their laundry, they still have about 400 items hanging around. The couple hope to use their new social media clout to promote the concept of “environmental fashion”.

“Instead of following fast fashion and keep buying new clothes, we hope people can see that old and second-hand clothes can be fashionable if you arrange and combine them in new ways,” said their son. “This would cause less damage to the earth and the environment.”

There you go! Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!