A drizzly damp day - we take the car out to give it something to do: it's been complaining haha! We drive to Bishops Cleeve and motor down the main street looking at all the places we used to stop and shop before the pandemic hit. We wonder how many of the town's shops and cafés will survive the pandemic and the subsequent dearth of old people, that these establishments seemed to depend on to keep going.
Looking back in my blog I see that we haven't done an extensive visit there since January 31st. If only we had known then that this glittering world of bustling stores and vibrant eating-places was about to come crashing down about our ears. Yikes!!!
Joyce Arnold's fruit and veg store - sob sob!
the Tesco supermarket - sob sob ....
... and Lowry's café - we haven't been there for months: biggest sob sob of all !!!!
12:00 Lunch and then to bed for a nap.
15:00 Lois hurries into the kitchen to make some scones - always a good morale-booster in a lockdown. And they turn out to be real professional standard, I'm happy to say.
ten scones that Lois has made - yum yum!
16:30 We have a couple of the scones right now with some quince jam, and a cup each of the latest tea flavour in the "Advent Calendar of Teabags" that our daughter Alison sent us. The tea for today is a fruit-flavoured green tea, which is nice.
Lois has had a message from our friend Jen in Oxford. The two have been friends since childhood. Jen says that back in September, when the pandemic casualty figures were at some sort of peak, her 17-year-old granddaughter Linnet had one of her poems read out on the radio, on BBC Radio Four's statistical programme "More or Less".
This is a programme that Lois and I listen to regularly - we remember hearing the poem back in September, but we didn't pick up on who it was by.
The poem is called "The Statistics and the Silence".
The statistics grew exponentially like everyone's uncut hair,
All the hedges forsaken by the council,
Or like the strangling queues round shops,
The statistics couldn't understand
Why no-one else appreciated their magnitude,
Why no-one was proud of them,
They couldn't be kept quiet,
Too young to realize,
Too old to be expected to find out for themselves.
Silence became chewy,
Politicians began to speak about science,
And scientists began to speak about people,
Which confused the statistics,
Slowing them down,
But they had already grown too far to be reclaimed, like how
When I next see you, you'll be a head taller,
And I'd have missed it.
My cousin will have learned to talk without me.
My granny will have shrunk.
And the silence will have begun to take root,
Having taken our friends,
Since the first day.
We sort of understand the poem too, which is a bit of a surprise - it may seem a bit weird at first glance, but then lockdown is a bit weird isn't it. And "silence became chewy" certainly beats Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers" by a ton of feathers ["Accelerates down as quickly as a ton of hammers by the way!", comments a Mr. G.G, of Pisa] - at least that's what I think!
20:00 We watch a bit of TV, the second part of an interesting documentary series about Amazon the online retailer.
An interesting programme. Lois and I have different attitudes towards Amazon. Lois avoids using them wherever possible, because she objects to them trying to take over the world, an attitude I respect.
I use them as my go-to source, because it's easier and the deliveries are usually quicker, and I even do my searches on the Amazon website rather than use Google, which is what they want you to do of course. And I certainly tend to choose the products nearer to the top of the webpage, although I avoid anything that says "sponsored" if I can. My trouble is I'm afraid that if I order from a website outside of Amazon, that it will turn out to be one of those scam sites, like those ticket sites where you pay a lot of money and then no tickets arrive.
Tonight we learn quite a bit we didn't know, for example all about their "Amazon Fresh" grocery delivery service - so far only available in the UK in London and the South East. They aim to deliver the same day, but Lois and I rarely need groceries that quickly - we plan ahead (to put it mildly) so we've always got what we need for today and a few days on top of that haha (to put it mildly) [You've said that already in this paragraph: this is your final warning! - Ed].
And we didn't know they're planning to expand into prescription medicines in the UK also, and having an Amazon doctor you can "talk to" maybe - I think this may already be happening in the US.
Lois is now more determined than ever not to use them - oh dear!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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