Tag Archives: corona virus

The Queue

24 Replies

Sorry, I had to repeat the header picture again. I was going to take more photos today, but didn’t do any in the end.

We went to the pharmacy this afternoon. Julia needed more medication and we had ordered mine at the same time to cut down on the number of times we risked contact, both for us and the pharmacy staff.

They open at 2am. We went down at 2.15 and found a queue of approximately 18 people. We decided to have a drive round and come back later when the rush was over. At 2.50 we returned and found the queue had reduced to 17, though most of them were different people. Several of the people who had been at the back of the original queue had still not reached the shop.

Reluctantly, we joined the queue. As I said to Julia, it was a good thing she had arranged to pick her prescription up in advance, or we’d have ended up in a massive slow queue.

She told me to shut up. Apparently sarcasm does not make queues go faster. An hour later, I found myself agreeing with her. I nearly said: “At least it isn’t raining.”

If I’d said that, I’m sure it would have done. So I restrained myself.

The woman in front of us had her son with her. He was about 12 or 14 and about the same size as her. He had learning difficulties, which originally took the form of engaging in a game of pointing at me and laughing whilst saying “man” and “giant”. He also said “hello” a lot, asked our names and named our hair colours – in my case this was “blonde” so I can forgive him a lot. As they queued, and he became bored, he started wrestling with his mother. She was impressively strong, and very patient. I’m guessing that the lockdown is harder for her than it is for many of us.

As we got to the door of the shop, the woman in front let them take her place, which was pretty good considering it had taken us an hour by that time.

Julia went in before me. I went in a couple of minutes later. She got hers in five minutes, as it was already organised. It was to take me another half hour. I gave them the barcode the surgery had texted me. It didn’t work.

So much for technology.

I had to go across to the surgery. Biosecurity was not as tight as last week, and I was able to walk straight in. Strange, I thought. What was even stranger was the way they had piled up furniture and tape as a barrier. And the fact there was nobody there.

I double checked the notices – there were many prohibitions (this situation is heaven-sent for people who like giving orders) including telling me not to enter if I had an appointment, but there was nothing telling me not to just drift in from the street. Strange…

Eventually someone found me, issued a paper prescription and, after checking my identity on my driving license, gave me a password for the website, which should mean I can just order online in future. In theory. I’ll believe it when I see it.

And that was…

No, that wasn’t quite it.

They were short of Warfarin and had no pain-killing gel. The gel will be in on Monday and the Warfarin on Tuesday. I am, it seems, welcome to queue for an hour any time next week to pick the extras up. I can even queue twice, once on Monday and once on Tuesday, if I want.

This, as I pointed out, rather works against the whole point of self-isolation.

 

 

Admitting Defeat

31 Replies

I am going to admit defeat. I have been struggling for things to say for a week or more and am now going to admit that I am defeated. There is no point in dressing it up – I have lost my ability to be light, frothy and cheerful.

I have no confidence in the government, who are lurching from one knee-jerk reaction to the next.

I have no confidence in my fellow citizens, who appear to be in the grip of panic-buying hysteria.

I have no confidence in many of the professionals who appear on TV. There have been a few who were worth listening to, but by definition, if they know what they are doing they are generally too busy for TV.

Does this sound bitter and negative? Sorry if that is the case. However, I assure you that it is upbeat and mild compared to the earlier versions that I wrote and discarded in the last few days.

I also think we are in the middle of a grandmother’s railings scenario – they want us to concentrate on washing hands rather than examine their policies.

I have been looking at various information on hand hygiene and flu transmission with a view to making sure I am doing the right things. It seems that hand-washing reduces respiratory infections by 16%. Yes, one sixth. It’s worth doing, but it’s clearly not the entire answer and it’s been diverting attention from other matters.

Now that I’m in the groove I can feel a rant coming on. I’m amazed by some of the things I’ve been reading, and very interested in the way that things are phrased to avoid giving information to casual readers like me.

I did find some concrete information – as a result of a hand hygiene campaign in the NHS a few years ago the use of soap and sanitiser went up and the incidence of infections went down. From that I infer that people weren’t washing their hands properly and patients were becoming ill as a result.

Try this, for more information. It’s illuminating, and frightening. The basic information is that the WHO calculates handwashing rates at 40% and in an American hospital study only 22% washed their hands after seeing a patient (rising to 57% when they knew they were being watched).

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

I used the owl as the header picture because we all need wisdom. And because I don’t have a picture of a Boris Johnson doll with pins in it.

 

 

 

 

 

A Sea of Troubles

13 Replies

Forest lost 3-0 last night, as several of our customers lamented today. I follow football on a casual basis and one more loss for Forest doesn’t really affect me one way or another. The big football news of the day as far as I’m concerned, is that they are discussing banning people over 70 from going to football matches. As the demographic most at risk from coronavirus it is seen as a good thing to ban the over 70s from large gatherings where they may catch the virus.

As panic and over-reaction gradually become the norm this prize piece of buffoonery comes as no surprise. I was mainly surprised that people over 70 could afford the ticket prices for football matches.

This evening we went shopping and found that the shelves were nearly empty of toilet rolls. As far as I can see coronavirus has no gastric symptoms so extra toilet rolls aren’t necessary. It just seems to be a growing 21st century reaction to any crisis (including Brexit). There seems to be no problem in the world that doesn’t trigger panic-buying toilet rolls. Julia was talking to a shop assistant in Boots (that’s a pharmacy chain, not a sort of footwear, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the world of British retailing) this morning. It seems that people are panic-buying cold cures, hand-washing gels and baby products. I can’t see that any of that is really going to help.

If I was going to panic-buy I’d buy toilet rolls (because they always come in useful and have no sell-by date), sausages (because a good breakfast always improves things) and chocolate (because there is nothing that can’t be improved by chocolate). For the purposes of this blog I’m ignoring diabetes, obesity and tooth decay, which are, I admit, all things that can’t be improved by chocolate. However, there is enough reality in the world without me adding to it. If I’m going to die from an exotic virus I don’t see any point in having a trim waistline and a gleaming smile.

And that, for the sake of posterity, is my diary relating to a world in the grip of coronavirus panic.

Incidentally, has anyone noticed that the WP spellchecker does not like coronavirus? It prefers corona virus. But when I put corona virus into Google it asks Did you mean: coronavirus?

I don’t know about you, but I’m a trifle concerned that we’ll never be able to cure something we can’t spell.

I don’t have a picture of coronavirus or chocolate so you’ll have to make do with a picture of a Cook Islands $5 gold coin depicting Captain James Cook. It’s 11 mm in diameter and weighs 0.5 g. That’s 11/25 of an inch and 1/56 of an ounce for those of you who don’t do metric. It is very small, not particularly attractive and part of a fashion for small gold coins. No, I don’t know why, but people seem to like them.

 

A Better Sort of Day

19 Replies

It was a better day today.

The tree is topped, the pigeons are inspecting the result, and the neighbour across the road has said she is already missing the view. She liked it as it was. This proves you can’t please all the people all the time.

The tree fellers have done a good, tidy job, despite there being just the two of them. (If you pretend to say “tree fellers” with an Irish accent the last line will make more sense. That same accent also explains why Leicester Tigers’ Billy Twelvetrees was known as Thirty Six.)

To make things even better, they worked quickly and charged less, so it was an economical sort of day.

Before…
…and After

Work went well, starting with me getting there early and taking loads of photos for the presentation. It’s only five or six days away, depending if you count Monday as one of the days.

That click you may have heard then is the sound of tension moving up another notch…

After work I had to go shopping. I lost the stylus that goes with Julia’s tablet, and she can’t use it by using a finger tip like I do. Did I mention I lost the stylus? She did. About a dozen times a night for the last two nights. It was getting to the point where I either had to go shopping (which I don’t like) or commit murder. I’m pretty sure they don’t allow WordPress in prison so I decided to go shopping.

The first shop stocks them, but had sold out. The second didn’t stock them. The third only had one left. At this point the full horror of coronavirus struck home – when China sneezes the whole world of cheap consumer goods catches a cold. (If it develops into a pandemic, with people falling dead in the street, this will probably seems like an unfortunate turn of phrase, but at the moment it seems apposite).

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Magpie, shortly after being bested by a Gull

In the car park of the first one I saw two Magpies engaging in a tug of war with a packet of crisps, and reached for my camera. By the time I had switched it on a Black-headed Gull had swooped and taken the bag. The Magpies are looking shiny, and the Gulls are developing their (chocolate brown) heads. Spring cannot be far away, despite the plunging temperatures.

I have found out why hand gel and soap is in short supply – local school head teachers have, it seems, being laying in massive stores of it. Because nothing averts a pandemic like panic buying and hand gel.