08:00 We wake up and Lois asks me to check my smartphone to see if we know who the next US President will be - but the BBC says nobody really knows of course, as predicted! What an astonishing system they have over there - my god!
Lois says Trump may win Florida because he's suddenly become popular with Hispanic men who admire his machismo: and they seem to think that Biden is a socialist. She thinks they've forgotten about Trump's Wall perhaps. Oh dear!
09:00 We dress and come downstairs, because we don't want Ian the Window-cleaner to catch us in bed or in the shower - the bedroom and bathroom windows are, respectively, windows nos. 2 & 3 on his routine - yikes! Why can't he start at the back of the house!!! Come on, Ian, be fair!!!!
It's Ian's last working day before the lockdown starts. Lois's hairdresser James has also rescheduled Lois's next appointment to December.
10:00 We realise suddenly that we are due to have our flu jab on Saturday, and so won't be at home to take delivery of next week's groceries from Budgens, the convenience store in the village. So we decide to order from Sainsbury's supermarket this week instead, but without having to feel disloyal to Budgens, which is nice.
Brand loyalty is a terrible curse - Lois and I suffer from it a lot! But we figure if we tell Budgens we didn't order anything this week because of an appointment for a flu jab, that they'll forgive us - if not, we'll ditch them and go over to Sainsbury's - simples!!!!
I know we're not the only ones to feel this kind of misplaced loyalty - witness this story from the influential American website, Onion News.
RUTLAND, VT– Area resident Teresa Grant was plagued by feelings of guilt Monday after buying a box of Snuggle fabric softener, ending years of unswerving brand loyalty to Downy. "I remember my mother using Downy when I was a toddler," a distraught Grant said.
"It's just that I got a trial size of Snuggle in the mail and, well, I kind of preferred the smell." Grant added that, while taking the Snuggle box from the supermarket shelf, she strove not to make eye contact with the baby on the Downy bottle.
15:00 Still no election result from the US, according to our phones. We are currently in bed again, and, while we doze, our bulk order of PG Tips tea arrives (6 packs = 420 tea bags) - a good morale-booster in a pandemic, that's for sure.
We use 3 decaf teabags a day so these fresh ones will last us 20 weeks, which is nice. Not that we're at all predictable haha!
We hear the box thud down on the floor of the front porch: that's a relief! The delivery guy doesn't ring the bell, which is considerate. I'll give him a good review again, that's for sure - poor man, he must lead a horrid life haha!!!!!!
What a crazy world we live in !!!!! But ordering groceries has now become our main interest. And what a fantastic hobby it is - my god!!!
19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's monthly Business Meeting. I settle down on the sofa and watch Episode 4 in the new Danish crime-series "DNA".
20:15 Steve, my American brother-in-law, has sent me a link to a BBC radio series, "The Moral Maze", which is on tonight. I'm not quite sure why he's done this, but I give it a whirl.
The issue tonight is our response to the coronavirus crisis - the lockdown, the priority we lay on the saving of lives over everything else, and that kind of thing. An interesting discussion - several times attention is drawn to the fact that we have difficulty today in thinking about death, and tend to avoid the subject. We're a little bit removed from it, compared to the past, partly because people tend to die in hospitals rather than at home. And funerals happen often quite a bit later on, when relatives and friends have started to get over the death. The consensus is that it's probably a good idea if we're faced with life-threatening situations every so often, so we don't get too cosy a view of our prospects haha!!! And unlike our parents' generation in the UK we haven't had to live through a major war.
Some of the contributors to the programme are young or middle-aged, and they perhaps don't realise that as you become genuinely old, the prospect of your own death gradually gets to really dawn on you, no doubt about that!
George Harrison said the whole of life was a preparation for the moment you face your own death, but I wouldn't go that far myself. He needed to get out more haha!!! (But not during lockdown - Ed). People are the only species that know in advance that they're going to die, but usually you don't have the exact date and time, so you can always hope it's still a few days or weeks away haha (again)!
Tonight's contributors to "The Moral Maze" still seem to think, however, that we need to make sure our hospitals aren't choc-a-block with COVID patients - that won't really help anybody much. And if you say "Just shield the vulnerable", you're committing another white middle-class bias offence: non-white groups are much more likely to live in multi-generational homes. Also it's a slippery slope to start making judgments about who is "expendable" and who isn't.
Pandemics have happened regularly over history, but this is the first one in the age of penicillin and anti-biotics. And it's affecting Western countries with a long tradition of individual freedom, where people aren't used to being told what they can and cannot do in their private lives.
During the 1918 "Spanish flu" epidemic, Western countries couldn't afford to shut down because they were still fighting a war against the Kaiser. Lois's grandfather died in that epidemic - luckily he and his wife had already had Lois's mother Ruth - born 1916: otherwise Lois wouldn't be here today, which is an awful thought!
21:15 Lois emerges from her Business Meeting, and we watch tonight's Autumnwatch, with its network of live cameras monitoring wild life across the UK.
Michaela shows us pictures of an Arctic quahog, a type of clam, which scientists at Bangor University in Wales calculated a few years ago was the oldest known animal in the world, at 507 years - my god!
It's an Arctic quahog, and the scientists christened it "Ming" because it was alive in the Ming Dynasty in China. It was born before Henry VIII came to the throne in England. Unfortunately the researchers killed the animal accidentally when they opened it up to find out its age - oops!!!!
You can tell the age of a clam by counting its "growth rings" - a bit like the rings inside trees, which also by their width give scientists information about environmental conditions in each year of the clam's life. The clam's longevity is enabled by its extraordinarily slow metabolism, apparently.
Welcome to the crazy world of Arctic clams!!!!
The Autumnwatch and Springwatch series are renowned for their famously amateurish "visual aids", but I completely fail to understand what the following one is about. And I don't think I want to know, either, thank you very much!!!!
We give up on this one!!!!! Answers on a postcard, please!!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment