Thursday March 25th 2021

09:00 Ian, our local neighbourhood window-cleaner comes to do our windows - he hasn't come since before Christmas, because of lockdown restrictions. Is he allowed to come now, however? The jury's still out on that one, but of course he doesn't come in the house, and we pay him by cash which we put in an envelope for him, so it's pretty much all non-contact, which is nice!

a typical window-cleaner - not Ian

Lois and I can't go out this morning - not only do we have to be here till the windows have been cleaned, but we also have two deliveries coming today: a meat and deli order from Waghorne's, the butcher's in the village. Also a delivery from Cook - some ready-meals for my birthday meal.

14:30 Lois and I run the UK's only U3A Intermediate Danish group, and we hold our meetings every two weeks at this time on a Thursday on Skype. The meeting goes fairly well today, but there are the usual technical hiccups: the most serious is that although Scilla, the group's Old Norse expert, joins us without difficulty at the beginning of the meeting, we think that after about 5 minutes she somehow managed to mute herself: and it's impossible for other participants to "unmute" somebody who's done this. What madness!

We try and advise Scilla - she can hear us - but nothing seems to work, and eventually she disappears from our screens. It's one of the drawbacks of having a group where members are all elderly, that our collective grasp of internet technology is tenuous at best, to put it mildly - oh dear! I ring her up after the meeting finishes, but it's impossible to work out exactly what happened. I advise her to discuss it later with her son Tom, with whom she is staying at the moment in Frome, Somerset, so fingers crossed!

Scillla's son Tom

I don't think any of us would be much good at "doing stand-up", but Jo Brand, surely the UK's most elderly stand-up comedian, did an apposite and topical set recently, all about the problems of older family members trying to work zoom and similar software.

16:45 The Skype meeting ends after 2 hours and 15 minutes - my god! Lois and I feel completely drained. It doesn't help that the meeting included a 45-minute discussion - in English!! - about which local supermarket gives customers the best deals. What madness (again) !!!!! 

Although in theory I'm the group's moderator I don't like to cut these digressions short. I figure that members like the chance to chat online when they have limited opportunities for chatting in the normal way because of the lockdown rules. 

Joy sings the praises of Tesco's to such an extent that Jeanette, the group's only genuine Danish member, to try Tesco instead of her favourite, which is Lidl. I decide that I, as group moderator, have a duty just to check with Joy that she isn't a so-called "influencer", and is maybe being paid a commission by Tesco's but she insists she's just a so=called "free-lancer", so I guess it's probably just about okay. Let's hope so, anyway!

Jeanette, the group's only genuine Danish member

17:00 I recall afterwards, that needless to say, younger people sometimes have trouble with programmes like zoom, as a recent story in Onion News made clear - the story later went viral.

SAN DIEGO—Noticing the woman’s lips appeared to be moving during the afternoon Zoom meeting, local man David Keely said “Hey, I think you’re muted” Monday to co-worker Cassie Boyd, who was screaming “F*** you, f*** all of you.”

“Wait, nobody can hear you,” said Keely, was quickly joined by the rest of his co-workers in offering Boyd troubleshooting solutions as the woman stabbed a finger toward the camera and threatened to rip out their throats with her teeth the first chance she got.

“Uh oh, I don’t think your microphone is connected. Did you try unplugging your headphones and plugging them back in? Hmm. Have you hit ‘Join audio?’ Sorry, we still can’t hear you.” At press time, Boyd had successfully unmuted her microphone and announced “Never mind” to the group. 

Remembering that story makes me and Lois feel a whole lot better about our own lack of technical skills, no doubt about that!

20:30 What could be a nicer way to round off the day than by watching a nice COVID documentary? We're hoping it will provide all the answers that we've been searching for, and that we can go to bed fully relaxed!!

There's lots of good stuff in this programme, ranging through many countries and many different approaches and policies for combatting COVID. But what we really want at the end of it is a nice summary, pulling all the threads together, followed by a discussion with the experts, thus making the picture crystal clear, so that we know what we have to do next time there's a pandemic.

Unfortunately, by the time that we get to the 50-minute stage in this 60-minute documentary, Lois and I begin to suspect that we're not going to be given that kind of satisfying conclusion. The presenter Jane Corbin says it's "too early" for that, because the pandemic isn't over yet, but we think this is a cop-out - sorry, but we do!!! Some provisional conclusions, at least, would have been possible surely. Wake up, BBC!

As far as the UK is concerned, we know already that the UK got it completely wrong at the beginning: reacting too slowly, and underestimating the impact the pandemic would have, not ordering any lockdowns until there had already been 15,000 deaths, which was much slower than most countries - and the UK has had a relatively high death toll. Somebody has calculated that if lockdowns had been started just 1 week earlier, it could have saved 20,000 deaths - my god!

We see again pictures from those early days of Boris proudly announcing that he'd "visited a COVID hospital ward and shaken hands with all the patients" - what madness! However, the UK has done much better on its vaccination campaign, so there's some solace there.

During the programme we travel to South Korea, who seemed to do everything right with very strict lockdowns and very rigorous track and trace programmes, at the expense of extraordinarily intrusive surveillance of its citizens. South Korea had the advantage of having been through a couple of previous epidemics in the very recent past, so that they had a much clearer idea of what to expect.

We travel next to the Kerula province of India, where the Communist-led state government took the virus seriously from the outset and the population cooperated fully , self-isolating when told to. They also had had recent experience of a viral epidemic. Out of a population of 35 million, there have been only 4.5 thousand deaths: the UK's death rate has been 15 time higher than this.

When it comes to Africa, it's a mixed picture - it's hard to get accurate statistics, but in general the continent seems to have been less badly hit than predicted: this is partly because of the continent's young demographic.

It's fairly widely recognised that Sweden got it wrong - aiming at the elusive 'herd immunity' with a policy which hit the elderly, particularly those in care homes.

In Germany the response to the pandemic has varied from place to place. Local areas there have each been given the authority to work out their own solutions. The city of Tulinger was singled out tonight for special praise because of the rigorousness of its controls.

So there you have it - oh dear, Lois and I will just have to draw up the conclusions ourselves: we'll let you know when they've finalized them haha!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!