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3 April 2020 (Friday) - High Risk


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…

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