10 April 2020 (Friday) - Good (?) Friday


Over a bowl of Sainsburys muesli I watched the last episode of “The Good Place” (which as rather good, really) before posting today’s album choice. Today’s choice was “Journeys to Glory” by Spandau Ballet; their first album from back in the days when they were mean and moody and not “disco-crappy”.
There wasn’t much else on Facebook at six o’clock this morning really.

As I drove to work the pundits on the radio were talking about coronageddon. They were interviewing some very irate woman who had the hump because her mother has been asked (by her GP) to give some thought to her end-of-life choices. This woman's mother apparently went hysterical at the thought of dying. I can't help but wonder why. Did she think she was going to live forever? Now a lot of people don't like to think about death. A lot of people deliberately ignore the matter and pretend that death is something that happens to other people. When you think about it, that is a really stupid line to take. In this uncertain world, an eventual death is one of the very few things that we all have in common.
This irate woman's mother is in the COVID-19 "high risk" group for several medical reasons. Surely it makes sense to make your end-of-life plans when you have time to do so, rather than waiting until you are extremely ill, hooked up to a ventilator and surrounded by busy ward staff who are rushed off of their feet? With a global pandemic going on, surely anyone with any sense should be thinking about what might happen in a worst-case scenario *before* the worst actually happens?

There was then talk of the communities minister who has caused upset by ignoring the stay-put rules and travelled half-way across the country to go visit his mum and dad. Perhaps this lock-down needs to be enforced a bit? I travel a round trip of over fifty miles a day to work and have never once been challenged, or even seen the police out and about.

This was followed by an interview with the Prime Minister's father, Stanley Johnson. With the Prime Minister out of intensive care the nation seemed to be breathing a sign of relief.
Mr Johnson (senior) is always an entertaining figure when on the telly; he rather blew it on the radio this morning. As older posher men so often do, he didn't so much speak words as huffed-and-puffed. and one of the very few intelligible things he said was a quote from Shakespeare, which only showed how out of touch he was with the average person in the street (or in their house now we are all locked down).

I got to work, I got myself a croissant from the small branch of M&S in the hospital and (once I'd scoffed it) got on with work. I knew that what with lock-down I wasn't missing much, but I couldn't help but think about the what-ifs. In the past Good Friday has been an epic booze-up at the Chambers Bar beer festival. It has been a really good walk out into the countryside with friends. This one was supposed to feature me being picked up by "er indoors TM" after work and driving up to Cambridgeshire for a weekend away, but that was not to be.

I came home and we took the dogs round the park on our one allowed outing of the day. We had a good walk; we didn’t upset too many normal people. I was rather impressed with one chap’s having set up a mini-gym of his own in the park, with pull-up rings hanging from a tree. We walked on to the dog beach where the dogs had a rather good splash-about in the river. "er indoors TM" recorded a video.

Once home "er indoors TM" boiled up a rather good bit of dinner, and then seeing how it was Good Friday we watched “Jesus Christ Superstar”… or tried to.
Last weekend Lord Lloyd-Webber made the musical “Joseph” free to the public, and this weekend he did the same with “Jesus Christ Superstar”. We settled down in front of the telly and the thing wouldn’t play through the Amazon Firestick. After a *lot* of fighting we eventually got it going through the Youtube app and the ChromeCast. We’d not seen the musical before; it was a shame that it was something of a disappointment, and it was even more of a shame that half-way through the video bit stopped and it was singing (howling) only.
Have you ever seen “Jesus Christ Superstar”? If not, I wouldn’t bother…
Such a shame…

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