Christmas is cancelled!

What a shower we have running this country. I can forgive stupid statements such as “it will all be over by Christmas” as they were made back in spring and there was little information to go on.

However, this past week, the government has threatened to take legal action against councils for closing schools early and, at Prime Minster’s Questions on Wednesday, Bojo the Clown lambasted the opposition for “wanting to cancel Christmas”.

Guess what? Everyone else could see what was coming, except those in charge.

Now, Kent, London, big chunks of the home counties (and Peterborough) have been placed into a new, stricter Tier 4, while the rest of the country have had new restrictions applied over Christmas. Instead of a five-day holiday from lock-downs, we have one day to see family (Christmas Day).

For us, in Tier 4, Christmas is cancelled. We are not allowed to travel into a lower tier area, which means we can’t go to Sam’s for Christmas Day (Soham is in Tier 2) and we can’t go to Max’s to see baby Alice – not even through the window (Syston is in Tier 3).

It’s quite depressing. I’m sure the measures are required, but the government is always behind the game. They are a complete shower!

Margaret said last night (the restrictions were announced just after 4pm yesterday) that this would be the first Christmas in over 40 years that we have spent on our own. I’m not even sure that’s true. I can’t remember a Christmas all alone – it always seemed that before we had children of our own, we spent the holiday at my dad’s and visited Margaret’s parents and my aunts.

Anyway, there is nothing we can do. We should be grateful, at least, that we’re healthy, warm and safe and have no money worries. Peterborough does have a high rate of Covid-19 infection, although Thorney has very little. We can’t go to Whittlesey (four miles south), Crowland (five miles north) or Thorney Toll (five miles east).

These certainly are strange times. The one bit of good news is that vaccinations are being rolled out slowly. The over-80s are the first group to get them and several people we know have been vaccinated – Bert and Irene (both in their 90s – went to Peterborough City Hospital to have theirs. They need a second jab in the new year to be fully covered. We hope new vaccines will get approval soon and we will all be offered one in the coming year.

Welcome grandchild No 6

I was woken up in the early hours by Margaret, who has been monitoring her WhatsApp messages all night waiting for news …

Max and Inna’s baby was born at 3.50am. We don’t know any more than that at this stage. No weight and I’m not absolutely sure of the name, although I’m running with Anya.

She has been keeping everyone waiting for just over a week and Inna had to go into hospital to try to kick-start labour on Monday (it’s Wednesday today). It’s been quite a marathon!

So, Anya becomes my sixth grandchild and Max and Inna’s first child. I’ve had one grandchild every year since 2015. Funnily enough, I’ve become more and more anxious about each one. Julia, Arthur and Aureliano presented no particular worries to me (although plenty for their parents, I'm sure).

With Saoirse there was a concern that there was some kind of foetal abnormality on a scan and they wanted to do some more tests. Sam and Lucy said no and, of course, Saoirse is absolutely fine. Florencia caused some concern with early contractions after a bumpy trip to Santo Domingo and with later scans, too. Lucy had to get a second opinion and (of course) we had the added problem of a flight from Quito to Mexico City and then a long plane journey to London. We upgraded Lucy to first class so she had a bed and, again, Florencia was fine. I was so worried that she'd arrive at 35,000ft over the north Atlantic.

Max and Inna were worried that Anya, who had been a real wriggler, had stopped moving. I think this caused also some concern for us with one or more of ours and might be that the baby is just settling down for the “big push” as it were. Anya seemed very happy where she was and in no hurry to make her entrance; the hospital was able to monitor her heartbeat but said they’d induce contractions if there was nothing by Monday, so that’s what happened.

We had some concern when there was meconium in the “waters” but she’s been checked and there’s no sign of her having ingested any into her lungs, so we can relax a little. Max is heading home for some sleep and Inna and Anya will be transferred to a smaller post-natal centre in Melton Mowbray.

I don’t know when we will be able to see or hold Anya. Leicester is in the strictest Tier 3 Covid-19 restrictions and Peterborough may move from Tier 2 to 3 tomorrow. Apart from all the hazards of birth, there’s still Covid to consider. Infection rates are high (20,000 new cases and 500 deaths per day) so we have to be careful. Oddly, some people still don’t believe Covid exists. They say it’s just a regular cold, but a bit worse, and that the government is in the hands of evil scientists trying to control us. I suppose Brexit should have made it clear that there are a lot of gullible people out there but, honestly, the crass stupidity of some folk doesn’t bear thinking about.

Footnote: So I'd almost written all my Christmas cards telling friends and family about Anya, when we got a WhatsApp message from Max to say they had decided to call the baby Alice Marina (Marina after Inna's mum). Alice is a very nice name and it's good to have Marina continuing into another generation.

We're heading for a new lockdown

 

Covid-19 is still with us and it seems to be winning its battle to infect the whole country. As I write, we are about to go into a second full lockdown (on November 5) in four days’ time.

Back in March, we locked down too late and made a complete mess of handling the pandemic, which cost many more lives. Then, the government was desperate to get back to normal – people were told to go to work, go on holiday and were even paid to dine out (the ill-fated Eat-out to Help-out) government scheme which cost £60 million.

Well, it turns out this extra social interaction was keeping the virus simmering nicely, holidaymakers from Spain brought a mutated version back home with them and when schools and universities went back in September, it spread like wildfire.

We now have 20,000 new positive tests per day and 300 deaths per day, and if we don’t get the numbers down, our hospitals will be overwhelmed by the end of the month.

The government plan was to control local outbreaks, through its Test, Trace and Isolate system but this has been a complete disaster, with the privatised service failing to trace a huge number of contacts. No-one has any confidence in it. Basically, it’s a waste of £12 billion (unless you’re a shareholder in Serco, the firm contracted to run it).

Next, the government tried regional lockdowns, with tougher sanctions on areas with higher infections (basically the north of England). The scientific advisors said it wouldn’t work and wanted a two-week lockdown to halt the rise in infections. What did the government do? It continued with a tiered system of regional lockdowns (we’ve been in tier 1, the lowest) and it supressed the scientific advice. Of course, the report was leaked, so we’ve known for some weeks what was needed and the opposition has been calling for a lockdown.

Now it’s happened (late again) and now it has to be for four weeks, not two. Who knows if that will be enough?

Frankly, our handling of this emergency has been a shambles and, on top of all this, it now seems there’s a good chance of us leaving the EU without a trade deal with our major trading partner.

Can it get any worse?

Poor old Tom had stayed behind in England when Lucy and the children flew back to Ecuador. He had been building up his work quite steadily and was getting a decent income stream building up. That now looks as if it’s wrecked. Will he be able to work in lockdown? Will anyone want to set up stories? I’m not sure what he’ll do but, probably, he’ll head for Ecuador and try again in the new year. It’s very frustrating.

20,0000 dead and counting

More than 20,000 people have now died from Covid-19 in the UK (probably another 40-50% that when home and care home deaths are taken into consideration), We only get figures from those who have died in hospital and the health service will not admit some people to hospital. What’s the point in putting and 85-year-old on a ventilator?

There’s obviously lot more deaths caused by Covid-19 – people whose cancer treatment has been delayed and important operations postponed due to lack of capacity in hospitals.

This isn’t a good time to be old or ill.

The news on radio, TV and newspapers is universally depressing, so much so that I have turned the radio off this morning and I’m playing my “Driving Music” playlist on iTunes - Hetty and the Jazzato Band are cheering me up a little.

We have been in lockdown for a month, allowed out of the house only for an hour’s exercise each day or to buy essentials (such as food). It could be a lot tougher – I’m allowed to go to the allotment to work, we have a large garden and the weather has been pretty good. However, I can’t shake off a weird feeling about everything and a low-level anxiety which is always in the background.

Lucy, Arthur and Saoirse are staying with us at present. When France went into lockdown and we had to abandon our ski holiday in mid-March, they couldn’t get a ferry back to Jersey until later in the week, so they came back to Thorney. Sam flew to Jersey later in the week and then had to self-isolate at home while seeing patients by video or telephone consultation.

We don’t really know what is happening about anything in our lives from one day to another and it’s been even worse for Sam and Lucy. They were supposed to move back to the UK in the middle of April and have had to negotiate the stress that the crisis would prevent them selling their house, buying a new one or even getting off the island.

The sale was completed to schedule, but Lucy and Sam had to sign power-of-attorney documents for it to go ahead. Sam drove to the solicitor and they watch him sign through the window of his car. Lucy had arranged to go to Greenwood’s in Peterborough to get her document notarised, but then the government closed everything down with three hours’ notice from midnight the day before.

It seemed there was no alternative but for Lucy to fly back to Jersey, sign the documents and then fly back. We arranged an early-morning flight from Gatwick and a flight back on Friday evening. We’d look after the children. Then Sam discovered that if she flew back, she’d have to stay in Jersey for two weeks. What now? It looked as if she might have to go back with the children because she wouldn’t want to leave them with us for two weeks, but then a lawyer friend of Sam’s suggested that the document could be witnessed by a range of other people – a judge, a solicitor, JP, magistrate …

I called Ken Sheraton, a judge I know who lives in the village, but he was stranded in Wales at their holiday cottage. He did suggest a JP who lived in the village, so we managed to get it signed by handing it through the top window of his front room – very strange, but very welcome. It was sent to the solicitor yesterday and the courts in Jersey remained open for business and for the sale to go through.

We then heard that Condor had ceased all passenger services on its ferries, so Sam was not be able to leave Jersey with his car, which had been the plan. He flew back to Southampton (the only route left to get between Jersey and the UK) and the NHS paid for a taxi back to Thorney.

Their house purchase in Soham has been delayed by the lockdown and some feet dragging by the vendors. It’s a tough call, they would like somewhere settled to live, but it might be better to rent for a year and see what happens to house prices. If we get a 20 per cent hit to the economy (which some are predicting is the best we can hope for) then house prices are bound to fall … probably … maybe.

Anyway, they now have a completion date for the end of May, which will be something of an achievement considering the circumstances. Sam is due to start work the following Monday, so it will be a pretty frantic few days for them.

What strange times we're living in

These are strange times. I’m sitting at my desk in my study at home writing this piece. I’m not allowed to go out of the house except for daily exercise or to buy essential food items and the whole country is in lock-down due to Covid 19 – a virus no-one had heard of a few months ago, but which has now spread to almost every country in the world and is killing thousands of people.

This is the worst global pandemic since the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1919-20. We’ve often been warned that sooner or later mankind would be faced with this type of challenge – well folks, here it is!

There have been other scares down the years. Polio spread fear into people in the 1940s and ‘50s; and, in recent years, we’ve has SARS, MERS, Swine Flu, Bird Flu and Ebola crises, although none has caused deaths on the scale of this.

Coronavirus, now renamed Covid 19, has an estimated mortality rate of around two per cent, although it’s higher in some countries and lower in others. It is most dangerous to old people or those with underlying health issues and it is having a profound effect on everyone in this country and beyond.

It started in China, in Wuhan Province (I’d never heard of Wuhan until February) when it jumped from animals – possible bats, possibly civets, kept in live animal markets in China – to humans.

Unlike other viral scares, Covid 19 has proven to be extremely virulent. It spreads like wildfire and it does so partly because infected and infectious victims don’t show symptoms at first but can still pass on the virus. It kills by attacking the lungs, causing pneumonia, although many people suffer mild flu-like symptoms and may not even realise they have it.

Our government response has, of course been woeful. The administration that sent soldiers to face roadside bombs in canvas-sided Land Rovers, hasn’t even been able to deliver face masks to hospital staff, let alone plan an effective strategy to prevent the virus spreading.

Initial advice was to wash your hands for at least 20 seconds as often as possible. The borders were open, people were told to go about their business, go on holiday – keep the economy going. The government strategy was to allow “herd immunity” to develop, which means 80 per cent of the population need to get the disease. At some point, a couple of weeks ago, someone realised this meant 500,000 deaths and the National Health Service being overwhelmed.

They changed tack and started issuing stricter advice. Much of this was contradictory, all of it was muddled, so no-one did much except start panic buying so supermarket shelves were stripped of toilet paper, tinned food and pasta. Folk have also been bulk buying bread, milk and cheese. I guess we’ll reach a point where their freezers and store cupboards are full.

The country is now in complete lock-down. Pubs, restaurants, theatres, cinemas, museums, galleries and cafes are shut; football and sports events are cancelled (including the Olympics); all shops except food stores and pharmacies and most businesses (from hairdressers to notary publics).

Max and Inna are in Syston. Max is writing up his PhD and Inna is working from home. Tom, Lucia, Julia, Aureliano and Florencia are in Ecuador. They should have come back to the UK this week, but Ecuador is in lock-down and their flights were cancelled.

Sam is in Jersey, but Lucy, Arthur and Saoirse are here with us. They are due to move to the UK in April (in three weeks) but have to sell their home in Jersey and buy one in Soham while all the country is shut for business.

I have no idea what will happen. I expect to be alive this time next year, but I am in that danger area of over-65, so I shouldn’t be complacent. In a week’s time, the NHS will run out of intensive-care beds and ventilators, so if you develop severe pneumonia, it’s curtains!

I can go out to walk the dog and to shop, but I’m not supposed to get closer than two metres to anyone. I’ve been to the allotment today (that’s allowed) and I’ll go shopping on Friday. I just hope there’s something on the shelves.