the isolation diaries - week six

Two things broke this week: the weather (it's started raining at last) and my curfew.

The rain I can't control, but I decided to go outside to perform the charitable act of taking my father-in-law for a blood test at his GP surgery.

I was expecting to be stopped by the police and challenged as to the necessity of my journey, as we are only allowed to make essential trips.  But I had a good enough reason so I wasn't concerned.

Anyway, on my way to pick him up I overtook a large lorry travelling slowly along the motorway.  As I got alongside the behemoth I heard a loud bang.  The car still drove just fine so I carried on, but when I got home and put the car away in its garage, I noticed an inch square area on the rear bumper where what must have been a large stone hit my car removing paint and leaving an unsightly "ding".

This has made me utterly fed up as you can imagine.

I only made the journey as a good deed to help out my family and this happens.  It'll cost a couple of hundred quid to get the bumper re-painted whenever I can actually get it done.

My wife said I'd get my reward for all my good deeds in heaven.  Well I think I'd quite like something right now as recompense for yet more bad luck with my beloved Audi.

more macro magic!  a dandelion

Whatever, we're now six weeks into this lockdown and our PM (and new father - yet again) has announced we are now over the worst of the pandemic.

Really?

The cynic in me thinks this may be a little bit of propaganda.  I mean such good news coinciding with Boris's return to daily government press conferences after recovering from the virus.  I sincerely hope I'm wrong though.

But The UK is heading towards being the worst affected country in Europe.  This is inexcusable.  We had three weeks of warnings from Italy about what was coming yet the Government did little about it.  In fact our PM, rather than attending important meetings, decided it more important to play tennis at his country residence with a Conservative Party donor.

It also transpires we ignored warnings from specialists when we ran a pandemic exercise in 2016.  The same warnings were ignored in December 2019 when the first rumblings of coronavirus were out in the wild.

Oh well.

The only positive to come out of this pandemic it seems is that worldwide C02 emissions levels are at a record low for modern times.  I see fewer aeroplanes in the sky, hear less traffic on the nearby motorway, hear more birdsong in the trees and the air does smell sweeter.   Hopefully this trend will continue, with less commuting to and from work on a local level, less reliance on large office blocks nationally  (both due to increases in home working) and fewer air miles travelled globally.

Wishful thinking I know but right now it's all we've got.  Well, that and a dented car.