Cold weather. Rat invasions.

Yesterday my weather app was predicting snow flurries and a light breeze for today. This morning it has changed to thick cloud and a fresh breeze. Considering that I can see moderate sized patches of blue sky I wonder how they define thick cloud. The temperature is set to stay at 0 degrees all day, sliding down to -2 by mid-to-late afternoon. That bit of the forecast might be accurate. It was certainly cold when I went out for a run first thing. At certain points my run turned into a careful walk over icy surfaces - it’s a lot harder to control where your feet slide to when you run - and at others I had to work my way round the mud puddles to avoid getting wet feet. Wet feet are not terribly good at the best of times but when the weather is cold they are really best avoided. 

And so here we are, another Sunday, another week about to start and no clear idea of where the pandemic is taking us. Vaccination is working - well, it’s being “rolled out”, as they say - but despite all the hype about how well it is all going, I keep hearing more stories of people being sent to places some distance from home to get their injection. And we are not the only people to have been reminded to go for vaccination after being vaccinated! I’m just glad ai don’t have to coordinate it all.

According to this article rats are taking over empty offices and workplaces while their usual occupants work from home, another odd consequence of the pandemic. The writer sounds almost sympathetic to the poor rats, whose pickings on the streets have been more than decimated as commuters have pretty well disappeared. He can fully understand their invading empty workplaces, climbing round u-bends to get in via the loo! He sounds almost admiring:-

“... it is true that in addition to being able to slither round a U-bend, rats can survive a 50ft (15m) drop, tread water for three days and hold their breath for three minutes. They giggle when tickled; experiments on rats have located the “tickle centre” in mammal brains. Their teeth are harder than iron, and their bite is six times stronger, relative to their size, than that of a great white shark. “When a rat’s bite touches the bone, it makes you faint in a minute, and it bleeds dreadful – ah, most terrible – just as if you had been stuck with a penknife,” reported Jack Black of Battersea, the rat-catcher profiled in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. Black anointed himself ratcatcher to Queen Victoria and sold a couple of pedigree “fancy rats” to Beatrix Potter

Rats are clever, too. Extremely clever. A trap is nothing to the older, more experienced rats, an exterminator told the journalist Joseph Mitchell in his classic New Yorker essay, “Rats on the Waterfront”: “They just kick it around until it snaps; then they eat the bait. And they can detect poisoned bait a yard off. I believe some of them can read.” Young says he once saw a rat pause at a glue trap that had been laid in its path, return to the bin it had just come from, and fetch a crisp packet to stick over it, meaning it could pass with ease. “I think they’re a fantastic rodent,” he says. “Not just because they provide me with a living. But everything tries to kill the rat. When you think about how much they pack into 12 months of life, you gotta have a bit of respect for them.””

Our oldest granddaughter is fond of rats. She has four “fancy rats” in a cage in her living room and gets most offended when her mother and I protest and tell her that they smell. (They don’t just smell, they stink!!) I don’t think she likes the wild variety quite so much. When we were sorting out the wilderness of brambles that constituted her back garden she expressed her horror that there was a rat living in there. Of course, this may have been an excuse to stop pulling up weed and prickly brambles. 

In similar fashion, I suppose she could use the possible presence of rats in her work place as a further reason not to return to the office any time soon.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Reactions. Covid mysteries. Ethnicity. Streotypes.

 Well, apart from waking up at 1.00am with freezing cold feet, real blocks of ice, so far I don’t seem to be having any adverse reactions to the Covid vaccination. I would have dismissed the cold feet as just “one of those things” but then I got into conversation with a neighbour who said that she had the vaccination on Thursday and spent all yesterday feeling really cold. I often suffer from cold feet and wear socks in bed almost all year round as I cannot sleep if my feet are cold. So I have no real idea what is going on. I simply filled a hot water bottle to warm my feet up, probably a recipe for chilblains!

Weeks and weeks ago, before the cold snap snapped in, Phil started to suffer from swollen, reddened toes, as if he had chilblains but not chilblains. We sent photos to the GP who then arranged a face to face (face to foot?) consultation and eventually diagnosed “Covid toes” and gave him steroid cream to see if that helped. We are still undecided about the efficacy of that treatment! The neighbour I spoke to this morning told me she had also suffered from “Covid toes” but it was back in April or May last year, when the weather was fine and warm and there was no chance of her having chilblains. The doctor she consulted was less helpful and thorough than the one Phil saw. Her doctor simply told her she had “Covid toes” and dismissed it with a “What do you expect me to do about it?” Not very helpful!

And now comes the news that up to 100 children a week are being sent to hospital with the Kawasaki-disease-like ailment that our small grandson had back in March. They are saying it is a very rare illness but if so many small children are catching it, how rare can it really be? 

It seems that there are many things we do nor know about this virus. 

And the Tory “Test and Trace Czar”, Dido Harding has been expressing her surprise at the mutations in the virus. I quote: “None of us were able to predict the virus would mutate.” I bet the scientists were doing so. 

Q. Why do we have to have a new flu vaccination each year? 

A. Because the flu virus mutates.

It’s what viruses do. We couldn’t predict HOW it would mutate but it was always on the cards that it would do so. 

And so the mess continues. But the vaccination programme is rolling out - as they say - if a little chaotically. This morning, however, we had a telephone call reminding us to make an appointment for our first dose. Surely there is a computer programme, a data base of some sort, that should automatically remove our names from the list of people who need reminding as soon as the doctor or nurse who administered the vaccine yesterday entered that detail into the doctors’ practice computer. Yes, it involves masses of people but that’s what computer programmes are supposed to be able to do. 

Of course, there is always the possibility that responsibility for such a programme has been contracted to a person with no experience in that field, a friend of a friend of someone in government! Oops! There goes the cynicism again!

But the rate of infection And inevitably there are people shouting for restrictions to be lifted. All well and good! Except that I look at figures and notice that we are still running on rates as high as those that led to Greater Manchester effectively going into lockdown at the end of July last year! Hmm! 

Hey! Ho!

I am reading Accordion Crimes, by E. Annie Proux. At one point I read about “hyphenism”, the practice of putting a nationality of origin with American: Italian-American, Irish-American, etc. It seems Roosevelt was opposed to it, especially to German-American. “Some Americans need hyphens in their names because only part of them have come over.” That’s what he is alleged to have said. Everyone had to be American. 

But nowadays it’s okay to have African-Americans. According to Wikipedia - “African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans or Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group of Americans with total or partial ancestry from any of the black racial groups of Africa. The term African American generally denotes descendants of enslaved black people who are from the United States, while some recent black immigrants or their children may also come to identify as African-American or may identify differently.” 

Apart from medical matters, I can see no reason for Americans being anything other than American, or the British being anything but just plain British. I had to identify as “White British” for my injection yesterday but on the whole I prefer to be British. Well, really I would like to be European but that’s a different matter altogether. 

A friend of mine who is learning Dutch sent me a cartoon of cyclists faced with “hills”. The Dutch cyclists considered a bridge over a canal a “steep hill” while the Swiss cyclists regarded their mountain track as “nice and flat”. It struck a chord. Growing up in largely flat Southport, I was not accustomed to hills. The “hill” where the road went over the railway line on my way to school was enough for me. There was even a sandhill at the start of the sand dunes that my family always referred tomas “the big hill”. Revisited years later, it looked so small. I had grown used to the ups and downs of Leeds and then of Saddleworth. Everything is relative.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone. 

Innoculation -stage one! Out and about. Finding a dry-ish path. Some fashion advice and ranting.

 Well, that’s that. Or at any rate that’s the first stage of that. We have now been given our first dose of the anti-Covid vaccine. Here’s hoping we have mild or, even better, no side effects. We have received a little card saying when we were vaccinated and what they put into us and I have noted in the diary ten weeks from now that if we have heard nothing more I should ring our GP. 

It was very misty in the valley when I went running first thing, usually a good sign but you never know around here. In fact it has turned into a beautiful day. It would have been a perfect day for a Diggle Chippy Hike, as my brother-in-law proposed, but the timing of our vaccination appointments got in the way. So it goes.

 

Yesterday we decided to take a walk up Lark Hill, aka The Quarry Road. 

 

We’ve not walked it for a long time as it has been so wet and soggy. The surface had been very badly eroded. 

 

In places it’s just a muddy mess, while in others it seems to have got down to bedrock.

At the top of Lark Hill we usually carry straight on and come out eventually in the centre of Dobcross but the last couple of times that we have done so that section of the path has been a veritable quagmire. We have had so much rain and snow lately that we did not expect it to be much improved. We’ll wait until we’ve had some dry weather. 

Consequently we took a right turn at the top of the hill and followed a road which brings us out about half way along the road from Delph to Dobcross, at the point where the Old Toll House cafe (now closed) and mini garden centre (possibly also closed) is situated. It’s a rather dull and boring tarmacked road but it produced a surprisingly good photo. Well, I think so anyway!

With more cold weather forecast, I thought I might have a little rant about leggings. This was provoked by an advertisement from a company that specialises, I think, in sportswear, The company, Sweaty Betty, advertises leggings you can “live in all day” for the amazing price of “two pairs for £110”. This makes Marks and Spencer leggings look like a giveaway. Goodness knows who buys such leggings and then only wears them to exercise in. Don’t loads of women wear leggings and long tops day after day after day. Some young women, of course, wear them with crop tops, something of a fashion mistake in mu opinion, but who am I to dictate to the young.  One of my sisters never wears trousers, only ever leggings. But I bet she doesn’t pay £50+ a pair for them. 

Sweaty Betty are not alone in advertising leggings but the other adverts I have seen have been for fleecy-lined leggings. Ideal apparently for cold weather days. Here are a few examples:-

URLIFE UK

😍The most stylish & easiest solution against winter chills - Winter Warming Leggings.

Lined with ultra soft fleece 🐰which retain warmth at 35°C 🌡️

The Cashmere Company 

❄️ Do you love wearing leggings but are tired of cold legs during the winter?❄️

Our cashmere leggings are warm, comfortable and look just as great as any other pair of leggings you own! 

🥰 Stay Warm and Look Great This Winter 🥰

✅ Stay Warm Without Adding Extra Bulk!

✅ Strong Shape and Flexibility!

✅ Ideal for Temperatures down to -45°C!

✅ Showcase your curves without freezing! 

(My note: -45°C! Where do these advertisers think we live?!)

Warmday

🔥🔥Keep warm and elegant in winter with the Warming Leggings.

Lined with ultra soft fleece 🐰

which retain warmth at 35°C 🌡️

I even saw one advert for very high rise leggings, leggings that go almost up to your armpits, the idea being that you could hold in the flab and present a smooth chub-free line, presumably under your crop top! The crop top being, as I have already said, a serious fashion mistake! Considering that back in the day leggings used to be referred to as “footless tights” and were worn, with leg warmers, mainly by ballerinas in training, the idea was surely never that women should walk along the street showing off their shapely, or otherwise, backsides for all to admire, or not as the case may be, looking as though they have forgotten their skirts. 

Leggings, fleece-lined or not, and a long top - perfect fashion solution! And maybe leg warmers as well! 

That’s the fashion section over and done with.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Clapping. Covid vaccination organisation. Going walkabout in the drizzle.

Here’s my latest Michael Rosen gem:-

“Dear Dominic

What do you think of my clapping? Good,eh? I watched a clip of me doing it and if I had to rate myself I'd say that I do it with sincerity and style. In short, I'm a good clapper. Watch out Covid, I'm going to clap you to hell. 

Pro patria toyota

Boris”

There is a petition doing the rounds at the moment asking for a state funeral for Captain Sir Tom. I have nothing against this fine old chap but I can’t help feeling that the sentimentality is getting a little cloying. But maybe that’s just me!

As regards the clapping, which was for the NHS as well, it would still be better if NHS staff were paid properly and the service itself funded so that old men didn’t need to do fund raising walks. 

Phil and I have appointments for our first Covid vaccination tomorrow morning. Making the appointments was quite a palaver. I received the official NHS letter last week and went onto their website to make an appointment, only to find that they were inviting me to go to places miles and miles away. The closest was Sport City, the Etihad stadium, probably ten miles away. Then there was Holmfirth or Huddersfield. My daughter offered to drive me there if I could arrange for it be a Friday, when she doesn’t work. Yesterday Phil had the same experience. The underlying message: stay home and stay safe unless you need to travel miles for an injection!

In the meantime, yesterday morning I had a text message from our NHS medical practice, again inviting me to click on a link and make an appointment. This time I was “invited” to go to one of two places in Oldham, both of which involved a bus ride or two. Now, I knew that some people were being injected at the Delph surgery of our medical practice. So why should I travel even five miles? Are people from other parts of Oldham being directed to travel to Delph? I wonder! Am I unreasonable and grumpy? I wonder once again!

In the end I phoned the medical practice, spoke to an understanding and helpful receptionist, explained that we have no car, and in a trice appointments were made for Phil and me at the surgery in our village centre. 

I know it’s a massive undertaking to vaccinate all us old dears but really, it seemed unnecessarily complicated. Some people will have been put off having the vaccination altogether!

Nonetheless Mr Johnson says the rollout of the vaccine is probably the greatest achievement of the NHS, or words to that effect. I beg to differ. Their greatest achievement has been, and goes on being, coping with all the coronavirus cases that have been going through our hospitals in the last year. 

Anyway, tomorrow we have our first injection. Reports on our reactions to it will follow. 

That’s enough of that. 

Yesterday I walked through the drizzle to Uppermill market, having decided that given the weather conditions two feet were better than two wheels. It wasn’t a bad walk, if a little grey and damp. 

Walking back along the Donkey Line I had to circumnavigate some very large muddy places and some quite deep puddles. It was at that point that I thought it might actually have been easier to have been on my bike and just ridden splashingly through the puddles! Mind you, some of the muddy patches were so deep that I might well have got stuck or even - heaven forfend! - been tumbled off my bike into the muddy mess!

En route, I met this forlorn little chap, a last vestige of Tuesday’s snow, looking very pale and wan, clearly not long for this world!

 

But i also saw signs that spring may not be too far away.

 

During the night I was woken by heavy, nay, torrential rain. This morning, however, it was bright and sunny. For the first time in ages I ran without a waterproof jacket. The bright and sunny weather didn’t last until lunchtime though. The cloud moved in. And More cold and wintry weather is forecast for the coming days. So it goes.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Sir Tom. More about hair. Our TV watching habits. The Sami.

 So Captain Sir Tom Moore has died. I’m pretty sure I read the other day that his family was with him at the hospital. I rather hope that was the case but we need to remember the many who die from this nasty virus all alone in a hospital room. 

And now Boris Johnson proposes that the nation should clap for Sir Tom, and the NHS of course. If there is a heaven then I don’t really think Sir Tom needs our applause to get him there. 

Praise for him is everywhere. And rightly so, but there is also this, posted by someone who calls himself Corbynista Teen:-

“I don’t want to see your Captain Rom tweets if you don’t understand that it’s messed up a 100 year old man had to walk laps of his garden to raise money for an underfunded NHS, to then be venerated by Tory MPs who made his charity necessary in the first place.”

Well said, Corbynista Teen!

Sir Tom seems to have had a good life, compos mentis til the end and fortunately without a very long and painful illness to carry him off. May we all be as fortunate!

Further to my remarks about hair yesterday, here is something I found when I investigated the Halo collective:-

“Welcome to the home of the Halo Collective

We are the Black hair revolution

We are an alliance of organisations and individuals working to create a future without hair discrimination, founded by young Black organisers from The Advocacy Academy.

Race-based hair discrimination has been illegal in the UK since the the Equalities Act became law in 2010, and yet it still happens all the time.

For too long, Black people have been told that our hair textures and hairstyles are inappropriate, unattractive, and unprofessional. We’ve been suspended from school, held back in our careers, and made to feel inferior by racist policies and attitudes.

Together, we are fighting for the protection and celebration of Black hair and hairstyles.”

Okay! 

We have been watching a detective series set in the far, far north; Rebecka Martinsson, Arctic Murders. As seems to be common in crime fiction these days, the eponymous Rebecka is an investigator with problems of her own - disturbed childhood, troubled love-life and identity crisis. There also seems to be a theme, a minor theme anyway, running through the stories, about children being brought up by grandparents, including Rebecka herself. It makes you wonder how so many people could be careless enough to lose their parents. 

And, as the action takes place in a relatively small town where everyone seems to know everything about everyone, I am once again surprised by how many people get murdered in such a small place. In this case I might put it down to the depressively, disturbingly long dark winters so far up North but in general it would seem not to be very advisable to go and live in a small community. Just in case!

The episode we watched last night involved the Sami people. (Are they the same as eskimos?) A whole family was being killed off, one after the other, so that one person could inherit wealth. Most of the others, including those killed, seemed mostly preoccupied about ownership of reindeer, something that is equated with status in the Sami community. For those who want to know more here is a link to information about the Sami here is a link to a website.

In the meantime, here are a few interesting facts about Sami and reindeer:

DID YOU KNOW?

Facts about Sami and reindeer

• There are some 260,000 reindeer in Sweden. Natural predators such as the wolf are seen as a major threat to reindeer owners.
• Reindeer in Sweden are semi-domesticated and live in the northern forests and mountains. They eat mushrooms, lichen, grass and herbs.
• Suovas is a protected word which refers to smoked reindeer meat. Reindeer meat is rich in minerals and very lean.
• Reindeer milk tastes sweet and looks like melted ice cream.
• Sami shoes and gloves are made from reindeer hide.
• Typical Sami first names are Ante, Ristin, Sunna and Aslak. Double names such as Per-Anders, Lars-Nila and Elle-Maret are also common.

There you go!

Life goes on, stay safe and well, everyone.

Snow. Addiction. Hair. Personal space.

I looked out of the window first thing this morning and decided that I wasn’t going anywhere. Snow on the garden, snow on the pavements, snow still on the main road, and sleety stuff still falling from the sky. Bang goes the exercise routine! Maybe I’ll go for a stomp in the snow later.

This morning I read an article written by someone who had fought to overcome a lifelong addiction to diet coke. She was drinking about seven cans a day. I know people who drink that many cups of tea in a day. Does that count as an addiction. In this case her doctors agreed that she had become addicted, probably to the caffeine, but also to the routine of waking up to a cold can of diet Coke with her breakfast. She had serious withdrawal symptoms as she weaned herself off the stuff, headaches and irritability being the least of it. Apparently the bubbles don’t help - or rather they possibly help the body to absorb the caffeine. It has been proven that the bubbles on champagne help you absorb the alcohol more quickly! Who knew?

I was reminded of a friend, years and years ago when we were young mothers together, who realised she was addicted to caffeine. We were terrible trendy and considered ourselves too sophisticated to drink instant coffee. Only the real thing would do for us and every day she brewed a large pot of coffee to last her through the day. Gradually she found that she was finishing her daily pot by midday and would make a second one. She began to think she was overdoing it a little and decided to cut coffee out. By the afternoon of the first coffee-free day she was feeling shivery, a bit twitchy, her head was aching and she she was showing decided signs of withdrawal problems. A cup of coffee sorted it out. Cold turkey was clearly not a good idea. Gradually she cut down her consumption though. In the case of the diet Coke addict, she has not touched a can since she freed herself, for fear of slipping back into bad habits!

It’s quite likely that we all have addictive personalities to some extent. Think of those who MUST have sugar in their tea, who always have a packet of sweets to hand.  Maybe we all should examine our diets more carefully. 

Oddly enough the diet Coke addicted, who as a teenager had regarded the fizzy drink as a substitute for food so that she could remain super skinny, found that she actually lost weight as she reduced her intake. It seems that the artificial sweetener in fizzy drinks can actually make your body crave other sweet things: cakes and biscuits, bars of chocolate and the like.   

I also read something about an actress, Monique Coleman, who was talking about racism in the fashion and entertainment industry. This was because she believes make-up artists and stylists preparing models and actors for filming do not know how to deal with black hair, which may well be true. I would imagine you need experience of dealing with such hair. As a naturally curly- even frizzy-haired person I can sympathise. It demands a lot more attention than straight hair if you want it to look good. No doubt the straight-haired people will argue that they put a lot of effort into making their hair curl. All I can say is that they should compare all our childhood school photos!

Anyway it seems that there is a bigger issue going on here. According to research from Pantene, 93% of Black people have experienced “micro-aggressions” related to their hair, with uninvited touching being the most common, experienced by 46% of Black people. 

“On one occasion, a girl at a bus stop on my university’s campus, who I did not know, stood next to me and started touching my hair,” said Stephanie Cohen, a founding member of the Halo Collective, an activist group working towards ending hair discrimination. “I had not realized this was happening and assumed it was the wind or something, however as I turned around, there she was touching it without me knowing. I immediately felt uncomfortable and awkward. I asked her to stop and moved away abruptly, she just stood there as if nothing had happened,” she said.

I can sympathise with the problem but I did not know there was such an activist group and I am not sure it’s really a question of racism. A friend of mine, someone I taught in an adult education Spanish language class, had a mass of naturally red - very red - , curly - very curly - hair. After attending my adult classes she moved on to study A-Level Spanish at one of the local secondary schools. (By the way, having an adult in a standard sixth form A-Level group is a very interesting thing and productive educational thing.) She accompanied the sixth formers on an exchange visit to a small town in Andalucía. The people living there had not seen such hair before (they should visit parts of Galicia) and would approach her and touch her hair, as if to check that it was genuine. 

It’s annoying but it’s not really discrimination. It’s part of a natural tendency to exclaim at the unusual. Or sometimes the not really unusual. How many expectant mothers have experienced complete strangers feeling quite free to compliment them on their bump and even put an almost proprietary hand on said bump? I suspect it happens less nowadays than it used to. I don’t mean specifically because of our Covid restrictions but because we have all become more aware of privacy and personal space matters. 

However, some people take that awareness to extremes; according to the Pantene research I mentioned earlier, 53% of Black people have said that discrimination against their hair has affected their self-esteem or mental health. Well, I know that some schools and workplaces cause problems because of hair but surely there are more important discrimination matters than hair. 

That’s my opinion anyway.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

What the postman brought. Praise for posties. Making vaccination appointments. Cold weather sleeping.

We received a Christmas card this morning, one of those with a photo of someone’s small children, cute or twee depending on your point of view, sending you the season’s greetings. In this case it was from my Spanish niece, or rather her children: “Samuel, Mireya y Adrián os desean Feliz Navidad”. Now, there are several possibilities as it is already the start of February:-

... the international postal service is totally rubbish and it has taken about 6 weeks for the card to arrive from Spain. Likelihood: HIGH!

... my niece has got her English mixed up and thought that Feliz Navidad meant Happy Birthday and it was meant to arrive for my birthday last Monday. Likelihood: LOW!

... my niece ordered these fancy photo cards and had some left over, realised that by next Christmas the children will all be a year older and so she decoded to send some out now anyway. Likelihood: MIDDLING!

I also received a pair of boots that I ordered weeks ago. It’s quite a miracle they arrived at all as the address was given as Delph, our postcode, Oldham. It says something for the efficiency of the local post office workers that they could not only managed associate the postcode with the correct road but to recognise the name and make a good guess that it might be this house. Well done, Posties!

And I received a letter from the NHS inviting me to go online and make an appointment for a Covid-19 vaccination. So I duly did so, only to find that they were offering me vaccination centres on the other side of Manchester or in Holmfirth or Huddersfield. Difficult for me as we have no car. Now, it happened that while I was out and about this morning I spoke to two people who have just had their first dose. One of them advised me to ring 119 and tell them I had heard nothing yet. This is what he did and he was given an immediate appointment, I am afraid I don’t remember where. The other was an old chap in the post office, who had done the recommended thing: i.e. he waited for an invitation, made an appointment and had his vaccination this morning at ... wait for it ... our medical practice’s Delph surgery! 

The letter from the NHS said that if the centres they listed were too far away then you should try again later or wait for a letter from your GP. Our medical practice website says to await an invitation from them. The general advice is not to harass the providers as it will slow down the service. More vaccination centres are said to be opening every day, but maybe nobody has updated the NHS website to tell them that Delph is available. There is probably not a highly paid IT consultant working on the site every day! So I shall wait a little longer. I am not going to be able to go anywhere in a great hurry anyway.

It’s still very cold out. The mud puddles are nicely frozen. Last night I looked out late in the evening - rather like Good King Wenceslas - and saw a more or less clear sky, lots of stars and a bright, cold moon, waning now. I was supremely thankful not to be sleeping on the street. And this morning I read this article which informs me that there are about 8,000 homeless people, some of them families with small children, in Rome. Centres which have been open in the past have had to close or at the very least reduce their capacity because of Covid restrictions, meaning that about 3,000 people are sleeping on the streets of Italy’s capital city, in shop doorways and bus shelters and, where possible, underground stations. People have frozen to death! When we think of Rome, we conjure up young people sitting on the Spanish Steps in the sunshine, tourists queuing to visit the Vatican, fanning themselves as they wait, footsore walkers getting into trouble for bathing their hot feet in the fountains. We don’t imagine people freezing to death. 

But they have winter in Italy too. We once spent Christmas in Florence, another city we visualise under the summer sun, and have rarely been so cold - bright blue sky and sunshine and subzero temperatures! That’s one kind of Italian winter for you. 

Now, to cheer us up, here’s a little something from Michael Rosen:

Dear Dominic

It doesn't matter what we screw up, we stay ahead in the polls. To tell the truth, dear boy, it all feels like a bit of a jape. Don't hear from you at all. Where dost thou lurk? Not Chez Barnard, perhaps? Missing you.

Synthesis pubis

Boris.”

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!