Although the dogs gave me some space last night, one of
them was having a nightmare in the small hours. Not only did they wake me, but
their plaintive cries were so unsettling that I didn’t get back to sleep after
that.
Over a bowl of muesli I watched an episode of “The Good
Place” then peered into the Internet. \With jokes and games and videos
being posted it was nowhere near as dull as often it can be.
As I drove to work I listened to the
pundits on the radio who were interviewing yet another vacuous windbag, They do
that a lot. This one was talking about how in the current crisis it has become
the normal thing to be working from home and then made wild speculation about
how society will change in the future, but with absolutely no evidence to
back up what he was claiming.
I do wish the people who plan these
radio shows wouldn't keep wheeling on these idiots who seem to live in cloud
cuckoo land where the "might-bes" play with the "ifs".
Is there *really* no actual news they might be broadcasting at the
moment?
This was followed by the "Thought
for the Day" section in which someone or other was dribbling on about
how he only went to church to suck up to God, but now that the churches are
closed he misses the other people he meets there. He then wittered on about how
people like meeting other people at church and wasted a good five minutes of
prime-time radio. Whilst there is always a need to pause for thought and
reflection, when you consider that only fourteen per cent of the UK population actually
go to a church perhaps something that appeals to the majority might be a
better use of the TV licence fee that pays for Radio Four?
With a few minutes to spare I went to
Sainsburys for the early opening for NHS workers. I arrived to see there was
already a queue of dozens of normal people which was stretching round the car
park waiting for the eight o'clock opening. At half past seven four of us
"key workers" walked past them and were let in to get our shopping.
EI hadn't given me a list so I got what I thought we needed. Rice, cereals,
sugar, biccies, a bottle of plonk and turnips for the dogs (they *love*
turnip).
The woman on the checkout watched me
with suspicion as though she expected me to attack her at any minute. She was
certainly judging what I was buying.
As I walked back to my car I thought I
might deploy a cheeky munzee, but the app had gone west. I whinged about this
on Facebook; it would seem the app had gone west for a lot of people. What with much of the nation on lock-down and
geocaching officially declared to be marginally more dangerous than poking
hungry tigers with a sharp stick (have you seen the geocaching
"discussion" groups recently?) there's been an upsurge in
Munzee-ing amongst those who are allowed out of the house. You would have to
work hard to catch a virus by scanning a bar-code (but I'm sure it could be
done if you tried hard enough).
I'm told the app randomly returned to
normality at some point during the morning.
A *lot* of people are currently
locked up at home all day long. I'm very lucky that I can got out of the house
to go to work. I did my bit today, but (apart from a Whitby bun in the
afternoon) it was rather dull.
Just as I was about to go home my phone
beeped. A text from NHS England. They apologised to me that I wasn’t officially
labelled as “high risk” last week, but they were asking for clarification
before reconsidering my case.
Am I at risk of going down with the virus?
There’s no denying that I knowingly come into contact with it many times every
day, but that’s my job. I can’t imagine why I’m being considered to be “high
risk”. I don’t want to be; I don’t want to be stuck indoors for three
months.
Once home we took the dogs out for our
daily permitted one bit of exercise. For the first time ever both Treacle and
Pogo ran off. I think they’d got the scent of a rabbit. Poor Fudge was too slow
and was captured before he realised what was going on.
I’m going to make the most of these dog
walks whilst I still can…
