Danskcolin: Thursday November 26th 2020

10:30 We talk on the phone to Alison, our elder daughter, who lives in Haslemere, Surrey, with Ed and their 3 children, Josie (14), Rosalind (12) and Isaac (10). We discuss possibilities for Christmas visits, but decide it's too difficult to say at the moment. Both of our counties, Gloucestershire and Surrey, are in the safest tier, Tier 3, at the moment, but we think we're probably both going to go up to Tier 2 - the Government is making an announcement today. Restrictions will be relaxed for 5 days around Christmas Day, so that might be the best time to plan for. Fingers crossed!

flashback to September, in our back garden: (left to right) Rosalind, Alison, Lois, Ed, Isaac and Josie

Alison will just have to work with the restrictions when we know what they are. And I passed her a link to this story on the influential American news website, Onion News, because an American mom, Jill Elliott, who looks about Alison's age, has some useful pointers in how to handle grandparent visits at this difficult time.

HOLLYWOOD, FL—Calling her dinner plan “foolproof” despite varying significantly from official recommendations, area mother Jill Elliott explained several new, wildly ill-informed measures Monday to keep her family safe during the holiday season.

“I’ve been doing my research, and I think if I sit the whole family at an extra-long table, give everyone their own disposable silverware, and spray some Lysol into the air every few minutes between courses, we should be a-okay,” said Elliott, holding up several bottles of hand sanitizer in one hand and a box fan in the other while listing off various well-intentioned but completely off-base strategies for preventing the spread of coronavirus.

“The second people come over, I’m going to open all the windows, take everyone’s temperature, and sit the grandparents at a separate table in the living room where there’s a fireplace, because I heard the coronavirus can’t survive heat. Also, I know we have some people flying in from out of state, and I think as long as they hug high-risk people from the side, instead of face to face, that should stop the spread.”

Elliott added that even though she had a fever and a bit of a cough, she was sure she’d be over it by the time her family arrived.

It's good to take advice on an authoritative Internet website from somebody with a dazzlingly confident smile, who sounds like they've done some real research into this problems, that's for sure!

You can't do better than that!!!!

Later Alison sends us a picture of their (literally!) shiny-new Japanese piano, delivered today. It's a proper piano but you can mute it, just like you can Trump, and listen to what you're playing via headphones. That's very useful for the family - all 3 children are studying the piano, and the only place for it is in the study where their father, Ed, works from home in his legal adviser role, so the juxtaposition is not ideal, to put it mildly. But with the headphones, it's much more practical - simples!!!

Josie playing the piano silently, with headphones on - simples !!!!

Josie is working on her Grade 7, Rosalind on her Grade 5, and Isaac on his Grade 2. But Isaac also does violin and singing - singing is his first love.

12:00 Today is Thanksgiving Day in the USA, and Steve, our American brother-in-law, sends us this picture of mine and Lois's last Thanksgiving over there before we moved back to England in 1985. The picture includes my late sister Kathy, and was taken in our house over there, in Columbia Md.

Thanksgiving, November 1984: (left to right) Sarah, me, Lois, Alison and Kathy

- happy days !!!!!

In the picture Lois and I are only a little over half the age we are now - yikes, scary!!! As the great Paul Simon wrote in "The Boxer" (live at Central Park):

Now the years are rolling by me
They are rocking easily
I am older than I once was
And younger than I’ll be
That’s not unusual

No, it isn’t strange
After changes upon changes
We are more or less the same
After changes we are
More or less the same

Wise words indeed !!!!

12:00 Today, like every other day, is a "walk day" for me, according to the regime laid down for me by Connor, my physiotherapist. So Lois and I go for a walk on the local football field. It's bright and sunny, but a tad chilly at 43F or 6C: brrrrrr!!!! There are not many people about - we've noticed that the dog-walkers disappear when it gets towards lunchtime.

Lois and I go for a walk on the local football field - brrrrr!!!!!

We see a military plane do a roll and disappear over Cleeve Hill - it's one of ours luckily haha!

20:00 We watch some TV, the third and final part of an interesting documentary series on the Great Plague of 1665.

The plague peaked in mid-September 1665: bacterial infections (unlike viruses like Corvid-19) spread faster in the warmer temperatures but die down with the cold. We see an experiment tonight where the principal suspects - body lice and human fleas - are subjected to different temperatures: those kept in the warm were found to be jumping about like crazy, while those in the warm looked pretty lifeless, a bit like me haha.

At the plague's height it became too much for the authorities to police any restrictions. And it's hard to believe, but apparently there were so many burials on top of each other in churchyards that Samuel Pepys, the diarist said he was afraid to walk through them. It was said that the average churchyard in London rose to 3 feet higher than its usual level.

And tonight presenter Alexander van Tulleken shows us Pepys's local churchyard, where steps were put in to allow you to get down into the church.

What madness!!!

From October the numbers of victims started to decrease, but there were still a lot of abandoned houses, formally occupied by deceased plague-victims, that the Mayor had to deal with. And in fact the measures taken by the authorities to make those houses safe for new residents were surprisingly quite sensible an effective.

The first stipulation was the houses had to be left unoccupied for 40 days - this would have been a death blow to many of the body lice and human fleas still alive in there, so that in itself was a good first move.

The next step was to "fume" the houses (i.e. fumigate them with herbs and other chemicals) and then plaster them with lime-wash. Surprisingly, new experiments have found that both processes were actually very effective - the "fuming" methods used created a powerful dose of sulphur dioxide. And lime-wash has been found to be an insecticide as effective as most insecticides used today.

As the plague died down in London, it was still spreading over many parts of the rest of the country. It's well-known that the villagers of Eyam in Derbyshire agreed voluntarily to commit the ultimate sacrifice: they isolated themselves and stopped all exits and entries into the village.

We now know that the plague was being spread not by rats but by person-to-person contact through body lice and human fleas. So Eyam's self-isolation was a pretty effective way to stop the plague spreading to nearby towns with bigger populations like Sheffield: however the village paid a high price for its generosity - 257 residents died, about 40% of its inhabitants.

Lois and I visited Eyam on our Derbyshire holiday in September 2012.