Rick, Nicky and Claire in NZ

We have 18 deaths now due to Covid-19. This is more than double the number of passengers that I have seen on buses since the Level 4 Lockdown began over 4 weeks ago. Now I know this isn’t a rigorous piece of statistical analysis, but while out for morning walks, or ambles with my senior management, I think I have seen 40-50 buses plying their regular trade, and the majority have been completely empty. The drivers must wonder, like me, why they are doing it. And they probably don’t have any Simon & Garfunkel to listen to either (that reference may be lost on all the under 50’s reading this apart from one). Which also raises the question, do any under-50’s read this? Apart from Tuesday, which started damp and foggy and remained overcast most of the day, and some cloud on Thursday afternoon, we have had another week of clear skies and wall-to-wall sunshine. Even though the daylight hours are fewer, and some of the breezes have been a little chilly, it has been very pleasant, and ...

The later part of this week has had a different feel for us. At the PM’s urging that anyone with any sort of respiratory infection symptoms should go and get tested for Covid-19, on Thursday afternoon Nicky and I drove over to St Lukes for said test. What we hadn’t realised for some reason was that following the test, we had to go straight home, Do Not Pass Go, and Do Not Collect £200. We had to stay at home until we got our test results - no going to the supermarket or out for a walk. I was quite surprised what a difference this made to my perception of the situation. Fortunately, except for milk, food stocks were good, and we had a plan B for milk anyway. This didn’t get implemented as Nicky got her negative result very late on Friday night, so nipped up to the local supermarket on Saturday afternoon for milk and a couple of other items. My negative result came through just before breakfast this morning, so as the weather was inviting and Nicky was attending church via Zoom, I went ...

On the whole, it has been a quiet week, but we are getting on OK with the lockdown. Nicky’s routine weekday task has been cleaning - first the windows and then moving onto the pantry. Mine has been scanning photos, and I’m making reasonable progress (I only had one remote support call to deal with this week). However, other things have also kept us occupied. Nicky has been sent a “call sheet” from church of 10 people to phone every so often to see how they are getting on. An interesting finding from this is that the more senior people seem to be managing more easily than the younger folks. I can’t say as I find this surprising as I am liking the p&q. We have binged watched a TV drama, Gold Digger, over two evenings, which was OK but a little unbelievable. I have been for a walk most mornings, and we have had a couple of ambles together. My Tuesday shopping trip was, in terms of time and number of people, much more like a “normal” trip. I don’t think the same will happen wi...

Some of you will be aware that many years ago (back in the early 1980’s), I worked at a paper mill. As in many factories in the UK, new members of the workforce would have tricks played upon them, especially the young and innocent. One of the classics used at the mill was to send the newby to the stores with a chit for a glass hammer, long stand, or bucket of steam. In the time I worked at the mill in the lab, we had some YTS (Youth Training Scheme) teenagers (the last one, Melanie I think, ended up with a job because I left to go to University). One of the lads (whose name escapes me) was two sandwiches short of a picnic, but a good lad at heart, so Barry, Nick and I sent him off to the stores one day with a chit for something a little more unusual - a packet of Fallopian tubes. He had no idea what these were so went blithely off to the stores to get them. He was gone so long that Nick decided he needed to investigate so called into the stores on his way to the effluent plant. He did...