Category: Politics

Coronavirus 18 months in – Gareth v Boris.

Since I wrote my last blog before Christmas a lot has changed both personally and with the virus. We have moved from Crewe to a new house in Oswestry. We are still not quite sure (despite only Alyson and me being involved) how we ended up here!. The virus has ‘moved on’ as well with and is now the delta variant, under the new naming convention so as not to stigmatise India – the country where the mutation was first found. The number of new infections is doubling every 9 or 10 days and could be as high as 50,000 a day soon. Many of the restrictions we have been living with will be removed on July 19th, so-called ‘Freedom Day’. There is a mixture of moods and opinions of optimism, fear, hope, sadness, concern, joy, uncertainty, division, and a belief that as a nation/country we are on the brink of a bright future where we will end up once again as world-beaters. Those same words could describe the expectations placed on the England football team as they prepare today for the final of a major international tournament for 55 years.

1966 was the middle of a decade of growth described by the then Labour Prime Minster Harold Wilson in part due to ‘the white heat of technology’ with the economy and the country generally on its ‘uppers’. No doubt the current Conservative Prime Minster the first name politician Boris is hoping that a win for England can be framed as overcoming the ‘doomsters and gloomsters’ he referenced in his pre-Brexit election victory in December 2019 – colliding as it did with the start of the current pandemic.

The two national passions of football and politics clashed after England’s semi-final victory on Wednesday when the ex-England and Manchester United footballer Gary Neville, in his capacity as a pundit for ITV’s coverage of the match, said these words as manager Gareth Southgate and his team paraded around the pitch, applauding England fans

The standards of leaders in this country in the last couple years has been poor. And looking at that man there that’s everything a leader should be: respectful, humble, telling the truth, genuine. He’s fantastic Gareth Southgate, he really is unbelievable and has done a great job.

Unsurprisingly the comments drew attention from all side of the political divide. The left-leaning papers jumped on them as an example to show up the perceived problems of the government and much of the right-wing press criticised the ‘Corbynista Neville’. Whatever the result tonight, I get the impression, from conversations in the media and with friends, that if the choice was between Gareth or Boris as leader I am pretty certain Gareth would win by a large majority.

Some might say what does Gareth know about being a political leader, to which others would respond what do many in the present Government know about running a large organisation, such as the National Health Service. I am certainly not going to criticise former Secretary of State for Health Matt Hancock for the actions which lead to his resignation, as we are all subject to our human failings, and it is a sad situation for all the families involved. What I have criticised before in these blogs is Mr Hancock’s part in the failings during the pandemic. The majority of government ministers were elected as MPs, and appointed to cabinet because of their desire to be part of a Brexit-focused government. It is easy to say ‘no one could have done better in the circumstances’, but, as has been pointed out not just by Dominic Cummings -someone not beyond criticism for his part in the ‘Barnard Castle’ affair – but by early parliamentary inquiries, there have been serious failings. Rewriting history over the failure to protect those in care homes, the lack of provision of PPE, and the fiasco of the ‘testing and tracing’ procedures, does not deflect from the errors that have been made.

People who have experience in commercial business and doing ‘real jobs’ such as teachers, doctors, engineers, or running care or health or even large sporting bodies are, in my opinion, better placed than those whose only exposure to ‘real life’ is being a political analyst or researcher to ministers in government or opposition. I know they appoint ‘special advisors’ and have civil servants who know the systems and processes, but simply relying on your own narrow view or that of like-minded people does not lead to good leadership or good governance. Apart from a short time working for the family IT company and as an economist at The Bank of England, Matt Hancock’s time has been spent studying for an MPhil and being chosen aged 26 to be a special advisor to then Chancellor George Osborne in 2005. He became an MP 5 years later aged 31 with no more experience of the real world.

To be fair to Boris he has been a journalist. I will leave it to others to decide if that is a ‘proper job’, or whether he was a particularly rigorous in his research, and he also led London as Mayor responsible for a huge organisation, and important areas like transport and policing.

As a fan of Middlesbrough football club I have a long affinity with the work of Gareth Southgate as he came to our club in 2001 (on July 11th as it happens) from Aston Villa, signed by that other former Middlesbrough manager who also went on to become an England manager, Steve McClaren. I have an interesting ‘joint autobiography’ written by Gareth and his long time best friend Andy Woodman called ‘Woody & Nord’.

It is a fascinating read as it charts the lives of two young friends started as youth players with Crystal Palace, but whose football careers took very different paths. Nord was the nickname given to Gareth by Walley Downes a coach at Palace who thought Gareth sounded posh like the TV personality Denis Norden. Another person at Palace manager Alan Smith clearly ‘old school’ looked into his eyes and told the then seventeen year old trainee Gareth ‘Son, no f***ing chance’. It is a sign of Gareth’s character that in the book he says that Smith is one of the good guys.

Ten years later Woody had his moment of glory for Northampton as a goalkeeper winning a playoff at Wembley (saving a penalty) and Gareth played for England at a European Championship – the famous one in 1996 when he missed that penalty! As their paths diverged and Woody moved further down the leagues and Gareth continued his rise in the Premiership they stayed close friends. The book is about how their lives remained entwined with holidays together and being best men for each others weddings. The book was written in 2003 while Gareth was Middlesbrough’s captain, but that was before he and Steve McClaren lead us to our first trophy winning the League Cup, and then two seasons in Europe culminating in a UEFA Cup final against Seville in Eindhoven in 2006.

I have an original signed photo of Gareth holding that League Cup in 2004. I have the same replica shirt as it is one that I am willing to wear, given that it doesn’t have a betting company logo on it. The picture was presented to me when I was made redundant in 2007 after the Co-op took over the company I was working for. One of my sales manager’s partners ran a sports memorabilia company and gave me an authenticated copy.

After the match in Eindhoven Steve McClaren left for England and Gareth was appointed manager of Boro. He had two seasons of mid table finishes (including an 8-1 victory over Manchester City managed by the former England Manager Sven-Goran Eriksson). Following relegation the next season Gareth was replaced in October 2009 by another soon to be international manager, Gordon Strachan.

I have always had a soft spot for former players who have been our manager and like the fact that generally our Chairman Steve Gibson sticks with them, even after many others have started losing faith. I have a vivid memory of sitting in the away end at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry the weekend before Gareth was sacked a few days later – ironically after a mid-week match when we beat Derby and were in 4th place. It came to light that Steve Gibson met Strachan(a former Coventry manager) at the match and discussed the job with him, even as Gareth was managing the team that day below where they sat.

It is not too much of an understatement to say that Gordon Strachan’s time with us was an utter disaster. He criticised Gareth and the team and brought in a whole new team of former Scottish players, some of whom were ok, but others didn’t fit. To be fair he walked away less than a year later, when Boro were 20th in the Championship, without any compensation admitting he had failed.

I had wondered if ‘Woody and Nord’ were still friends but saw an interview this week on ITV with Woody, now managing National League side Bromley FC out of a wooden hut, while his best friend was giving the team talk at Wembley, and was pleased to see that they are still best mates.

Gareth still lives in North Yorkshire and used the nearby Middlesbrough training facilities and had two warm up friendly international matches at the Riverside Stadium. It may be a pipe dream but I hope Gareth comes back after his international career has ended and manages Middlesbrough in the Premiership again and brings us more success!

A large part of Gareth Southgate’s success is his willingness to surround himself with good people and to listen and learn from them. I read an article by one of the team, former Olympic Athlete Matthew Sayed who pointed out that many people in leadership roles surround themselves with like-minded people who in effect become an ‘echo chamber’ telling them what they think you want to hear, and in reality they only know the same things that you do. Gareth has people from other sports, business people and tries to learn what they do to bring success. Sayed states.

“One source of these ideas is the FA Technical Advisory Board, an eclectic group that has been advising on performance in regular meetings since 2016. Members (all unpaid volunteers) include Sir Dave Brailsford, a cycling coach, Colonel Lucy Giles, a college commander at the Sandhurst Military Academy, the Olympic rower Kath Grainger, Manoj Badale, a tech entrepreneur, the rugby coach Stuart Lancaster and David Sheepshanks, mastermind behind the St George’s Park national football centre.

At first, football insiders were horrified by this group, with negative articles appearing in the British press, on why they are not “footballing men”. But this is why the group is capable of offering fresh insights on preparation, diet, data, mental fortitude and more. This is sometimes called “divergent” thinking to contrast it with the “convergence” of echo chambers.

“I like listening to people who know things that I don’t,” Southgate told me. “That’s how you learn.”

It is clearly a winning formula at the moment. He has also appointed a diverse group of coaches who he relies on to get advice during games. You will often see him discussing something with his assistant, former Chelsea & Crewe Alexandra coach Steve Holland, immediately after a goal, or other key moments.

Whatever the result in the final, most decent people will judge this campaign as progress Even if we lose in an awful way or one person makes a similar mistake to Gareth’s 25 years ago, getting to a final is a huge step forward. One last quote from ‘Woody & Nord’ serves as a pointer to how Gareth will deal with it. In a section where he talks about not loving the game as much as he did in his youth, and giving everything for Middlesbrough in every game he is part of, to improve our position to the highest it can be he writes:

” Cynicism has coloured my view of the professional game . The attitude of some of the players, the behaviour of clubs, even the fans. Nothing appals me more than those endless and mindless phone-ins. Some guy, reacting to a defeat that afternoon, thinks the manager should be fired. Someone else agrees and in no time there is a bandwagon rolling. Spare me all of that. But the nonsense is everywhere. I’ve played with blokes who are happy to pick up the money, with others who have given everything and been treated dismally by their clubs. Fairness doesn’t come into it. Supporters call for loyalty from the players, but it’s a one-way street, expected from players but not reciprocated.”

Sport can be a joy and in good times can bring people together. Football can provide real health benefits and opportunities for young people from deprived backgrounds to make the big time. But recent stories about the greed of clubs in the failed European Super League, the ridiculous wages and transfer fees some of the current England team are on at their clubs and the racist and hateful social media comments, are the darker side. We saw at the start of Euro 2020 with the incident involving the Danish player Christian Eriksen collapsing on the pitch, that many were saying that some things are more important than the game. But even in the sleepy market town of Oswestry we have already seen the other aspect, with a fight between youths at a pub in a local square after the semi-final. Sadly, I can predict that if the result doesn’t go England’s way this will be repeated in a lot more other places. Gareth will want to celebrate the good things and learn and move on, but he knows there will be some for whom winning is everything.

If England do win, which will be fantastic, there will be some politicians who will frame it as a victory for us leaving the EU and one in the eye for Brussels. In the same way that the success of the vaccination scheme has been framed. It should be acknowledged that the willingness of our government to put money into the research, and to commit funds to orders for any vaccine has been a huge success. But please, spare me the view that this would not have been an option if we were still in the EU.

Turning back to the current situation of the pandemic. Politicians and scientists are divided on what will happen next. For every view that we need to ‘learn to live with it’, there is one that states it is still too early to release everything. In my view the lessons of the last 18 months have not yet been learned. Those who are vulnerable will still suffer. Those who can afford to self-isolate and are in relatively stable and well-paid jobs, live in good housing. with good support structures will survive, and even flourish. Those who have few of those things will not. There is a reluctance from the government to provide the support needed. The issue of ‘long covid’ and large numbers of people who won’t die but have long-term health effects caused by the virus will need even more of our limited healthcare resources, over a long period of time.

The rush to get ‘back to normal’ and go on expensive overseas holidays is not a right, but a luxury open only to those who can afford it. Even the idea of a ‘staycation’ has lost its original meaning. That of enjoying days our and time spent at home, rather than as now ‘of having to only go on holiday in this country rather than overseas’.

What has not happened yet is the sharing of the vaccine more widely with countries who can’t afford them. It is true to say ‘no one is safe until we are all safe’, but the reality is that the recent G7 summit in Cornwall whilst announcing the sharing of over a billion doses, missed the opportunity to extend that to the 11 billion which the WHO says are needed to vaccinate 60% of the world population by mid-2022. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted that the $50 Billion dollars needed to do that, will be dwarfed by the $9 Trillion of increased global output that would result from it. The other side of the argument we all need to face up to, is that if it comes to a choice between vaccinating children in our country who don’t appear to suffer severe effects of the virus, or giving it to the most vulnerable populations in other countries, we need to choose the latter. It is a hard political sell, which is why we need good leaders who understand that, and work to change opinions by actions rather than ‘playing to the gallery’, or being an ‘echo chamber’ of those who think the same way.

Few people enjoy a good sporting occasion more than me, and it is hard to keep focus on the 95% of the rest of the world population, many in our own country, who aren’t as well off as me in terms of actual real wealth, or in terms of education and opportunity to achieve a basic standard of living.

An estimated audience of 33-35 million of us are expected to watch the final on TV and that’s just in this country. That figure is less than 5% of the 785 Million people worldwide who don’t have access to basic drinking water and less than 2% of the 2 billion who use a water supply contaminated with faeces. A sobering thought for all the people throwing beer in the air when England score. Come Monday morning whatever has happened, the sun will rise, and set later in the day. Sure we may have made some minor sporting history and a few individuals will have achieved ‘greatness’, but in the end will anything of real significance have happened?

Keep safe everyone, but please let’s also keep some perspective.

Coronavirus week 39 – Advent hope or Christmas cancelled?

It is 20 weeks since I did my last blog, or ‘CoronaDiary’ as it was named for the Swansea University project that it became part of. It seems a long time ago but serves to show how time passes quickly after I decided that the time had come to stop, with things apparently starting to ‘slow down’, ‘getting under control’, ‘living with the new normal’ or any number of ways of describing life in late summer/early autumn. There was also a possible vaccine in development.

I started several times to write another instalment as events and key points in the story of this year were reached, but each time my enthusiasm to finish them waned. Due in part I suspect to not wanting to repeat the same themes I had visited before, but mainly due to the fact that we too were doing some of the things we hadn’t been able to. We were fortunate to be in a situation where we could take a week away to each of the Norfolk coast, Cornwall and North Yorkshire. In addition we enjoyed days out walking around the Cheshire countryside and Alyson managed some open water swimming at a nearby lake in Shropshire. The project I am working on with the accountancy practice in Sale was reaching the critical ‘go-live’ point, and Alyson was getting more NHS 111 home-based call centre shifts.

Deaths – a change of measure but still increasing quickly..

I had set myself the target of writing another blog when the official figures for the number of coronavirus deaths reached the level they were at my last blog, as the government reassessed them, just after I published it, in light of some ‘mis-recording’. On 12 August, the total fell by 5,000 overnight from 46,706 to 41,329. Until then a death was recorded for anyone who had tested positive for Covid-19 at any time, regardless of the cause. So someone who had died of a heart attack or in a car accident but had a positive test 10 weeks before was added to the virus statistics. It would take another 11 weeks to get back to 46,513 at the end of October – an average of 71 deaths per week. Just over 7 weeks later we have surpassed the grim figure of 60,000 to reach 68,307 – an average of 3,113 per week. The other measure of all deaths where coronavirus is mentioned on the certificate is likely to be over 80,000 by the end of the year.

Key events I could have written about…

There have been some major issues and milestones in the time since my last blog. Ones I have had strong feelings about are;
– The exam results ‘fiasco’
– The on-going story of migrants drowning whilst crossing the channel, and my idea of requisitioning unused cruise ships anchored off the south coast to give them decent accommodation.
– Introduction of the tiers system of restrictions
– My (and many others) perception that GPs are hiding away
– Schools and universities returning to full-time teaching
– A study I read on how the virus circulates indoor via ‘aerosol particles’
– ‘Circuit-breaker’ or second national lockdown
– President Trump catching Covid-19, US Election & refusal to accept the result
– Announcing the vaccination program earlier than planned on the day the report into the Home Secretary Priti Patel’s bullying behaviour was published.
– The seemingly endless Brexit negotiations/deadlines and extensions.

So why now…

The recent excitement over the new vaccines, the hope that brings of a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, allied to planning for a small family Christmas get together was shattered by yesterday’s Government Briefing. Our Prime Minister, the only one in the World known mainly by his first name, Boris announced a new ‘Tier 4’ for London and the South East plus severe restrictions on ‘Christmas bubbles’ and the time they are allowed to meet. It seems like another one of the many ‘key points’ in the pandemic, coming as it does with the fact that a ‘new strain’ of the coronavirus that is much more effective at transmission is circulating and spreading rapidly through the population. The disease is called Covid-19 because it was in late December last year that the WHO office in China reported a ‘new type of pneumonia virus’ being reported in the area around the city of Wuhan. Whilst there is still some dispute about where it originated, the virus has been traced back to cases in mid-November. The first anniversary of the discovery of what we now call SARS-CoV-2 seems like a significant event to record in my blog.

For those with an interest in the science, the new variant is being referred to as SARS-CoV-2 VUI 202012/01 and the more detailed description of the mutation is as follows;

This variant has a mutation in the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the spike protein at position 501, where amino acid asparagine (N) has been replaced with tyrosine (Y). The shorthand for this mutation is N501Y, sometimes noted as S:N501Y to specify that it is in the spike protein. This variant carries many other mutations, including a double deletion (positions 69 and 70).

US Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, Emerging Variants Briefing December 2020.

It is this variation in the ‘spike protein’ that scientists think accounts for its ability for increased transmission by better binding to cells in people who get infected by the virus. It remains to be seen if the symptoms are more severe or if it is resistant to the vaccine, but the early signs are ‘hopeful’. What will certainly be the case is that the number of infections will rise and given the pattern up to now, many people will need some treatment in hospitals. This is the factor that may lead to ‘Lockdown v3.0’ and more damage to mental health and the economy.

In recent weeks I have been leading four sessions on the season of Advent with our church Bible study group and there are some themes which resonate with the current situation. As we approach the end of an extraordinary year and try to look forward to 2021 it seems an opportune moment to write down my personal thoughts and feelings. This blog has always been for my own reference, but I continue to be grateful for all the comments it attracts as each one is published.

Advent – the season of waiting – 2020 theme ‘Hope’….

It is only in the last few years, after 50+ years of being part the ‘Methodist Tradition’ through my church membership, that I have understood the ‘true meaning’ of Advent. For many it is ‘just the few weeks before Christmas’ but it is so much more than that. It is a time of ‘waiting’ and ‘anticipation’ during which we are called to lament/repent for all that has gone before and wait for the arrival of the long-promised ‘Light of the World’ to arrive in the form of a small child. Our fellow Christians in the Church of England, or ‘the Anglican Tradition’ recognise this in a more formal way. In the build up to Christmas they don’t sing ‘traditional carols’ and for them Christmas starts on the eve of the 25th December. It lasts for 12 days until Epiphany on the 6th January.

This year in the ‘real world’, the commercial one and the one that the church has hijacked from the original pagan ‘winter festival’, after all the upheaval of Covid and the challenges and illness and death, there has been a desire to ‘go early’. When I worked in retail pharmacy we would have started to plan for all the Christmas stock arrival earlier in the year. Indeed, during my time as Managing Director of our ‘Pharmacy Sundries’ subsidiary company, January would see me and the sales team attending trade fairs in the UK and Frankfurt in Germany, to meet suppliers from all over the globe to purchase, and in some cases ‘design’, the gifts our stores would sell during the ‘Christmas Season’. Stock would be ordered, shipped from China or India or wherever the suppliers were based, duty paid, containers received and unloaded at the warehouse, and delivered to the shops by a small fleet of vans ready to fill the shelves. There was always a tension between the warehouse wanting to get stock out (and our small company to invoice the larger one!) and the shops saying it was ‘too early’. In the end together with the retail marketing team for the shops we agreed a rough policy that, whilst stock could be delivered during September the, ‘big reveal’ would happen after the solemn celebration of Remembrance had taken place on November 11th. After that it was ‘all hands on deck’ to shift as much as we could. On a really good year our shops would be calling the warehouse in the second week of December pleading for us to send more – the items we had chosen that they were sceptical of selling were flying off the shelves. In the last week it might get to the point that shoppers were so desperate for a gift that even the stock we had left from previous years would look like the ideal gift for a family member!

It seems that a lot of people after the year they have had decided to ‘go early’. There was a rush to put up Christmas lights and decorations not just earlier but in bigger volumes than before. Around our estate there are so many whole garden displays and inflatable characters they can probably be seen from space! Goodness only knows what the electricity bills will be like in January. Shops have sold out and many Christmas tree growers have shut as all the stock has gone. There is an understandable desire from people wanting to celebrate and have something to look forward to. I confess to liking it, but it can get a bit wearing listening to hours of the old pop Christmas favourites from the 70s and 80s.

The theme for the Advent study we chose this year was ‘Hope’ which seemed appropriate for the year and is one aspect of the season along with joy, peace and love. As churches we have readings about John the Baptist and the Old Testament Prophets foretelling the arrival of The Messiah, the story of Mary and the journey towards Bethlehem. Many of us light four candles (and many ministers refer to the classic sketch on The Two Ronnies!) coloured red in an Advent wreath of holly, lighting the fifth white candle in the middle on Christmas day to represent Jesus. .

In many of our times of study we referenced the difficult times we have had during the pandemic. We would lament people we have lost, pray for support for those going through difficult times, missing friends and family contact, particularly those who know people in care homes or have not been able to attend the funeral of a family member. We have given thanks for the key workers helping us through difficult times. More recently we have given thanks for the God-given skills of the scientists for developing the vaccines, the hope that brings and the ability to start ‘looking forward’ in anticipation of a better 2021. Many of the Christmas cards we have received, had a handwritten note to reflect this hope too.

Watching Boris, Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer and Sir Patrick Vallance, Government Chief Scientific Adviser on Saturday evening announcing the new ‘Tier 4’ measures, and limiting even more the Christmas travel and bubble arrangements, it would have been easy to find a new low of depression, and lack of optimism. Sunday morning’s news headlines on television and in the print media could be summed up as ‘Christmas Cancelled’. During the summer and into the early autumn with infection rates falling, deaths levelling-off to a figure that we could probably live with, health services opening, people going back to work and children to school, things appeared a little brighter. Despite having to take a lot of measures on our holiday in Norfolk and again when we went to the lodge in Great Ayton, North Yorkshire, and the early figures for the ‘second wave’ seeming not to be as high as the first, my optimism was still there.

It was whilst ‘attending’ (via You Tube) the live streamed service from Methodist Central Hall Westminster (MCHW) on Sunday morning that I decided to write this blog. MCHW of course is now in Tier 4 so the chances of a few people attending the church physically on Christmas Day has gone. The reading was about Mary and her willingness to carry the child that would become our Saviour. We sang Joy To The World and O Come All Ye Faithful and accepted the challenge from Rev Gordon to take up whatever challenges we will face in the coming months. Both Gordon and Rev Tony who leads the service said that although we were in lockdown, Christmas itself wasn’t cancelled. Tony said he had received a humorous text about there being ‘only 370 more sleeps to Christmas’ but he wanted to state that wasn’t true. I posted the image below on my Facebook page on Monday and it attracted many likes…

The commercial ‘winter festival’ may have been curtailed and many would not be able to see family and friends, but nothing is going to stop Christmas being Christmas for Christians. It brought to mind this tweet from earlier in the week reminding us that other religions had their celebrations ‘cancelled’ at even shorter notice – in some cases the evening before the big family gatherings.

Admittedly, some replies pointed out that Easter was ‘cancelled’ at the start of lockdown and, as happens on social media these days, there were plenty of racist comments, but the point was the same one I had made the night before Eid. ‘Imagine the uproar if they cancelled Christmas…’

The most striking interview I saw on Sunday morning was with Rev Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show. It appeared to me that the leader of our national church was shaken by the events of Saturday and, like many of us, struggling with an inner voice that was saying to him ‘I am really not sure that my faith is strong enough for this…’. But he found another inner voice and rallied to assure us that Christmas would indeed happen on the appointed day. He also talked movingly about the ‘hole in the celebration’ left by those who can’t be with us, either because they have died or are alone in a place we can’t travel to. He encouraged us all to celebrate the great festival by remembering those who have died, talking about them, and for those who are isolated to pick up the phone and speak to them. He encouraged the vulnerable not to attend church but to call one of the many phone numbers with services, carols or prayers being broadcast.

Some of the many people with a spare place at the table are the family of our school friend Clare who died in November aged just 61 from motor neurone disease diagnosed five years ago. Clare is the first of our contemporaries that we have kept in touch with for over 50 years to go. It is as much a sobering reminder of our own mortality as it is sad. It was also our first (and probably not last) ‘virtual funeral’, we watched the live stream whilst listening to the music chosen by Clare herself on You Tube.

As I sang along watching the service from Westminster to O Come All You Faithful I remembered the Christmas of 2016 when my dad died. We were celebrating at a cottage on the North York Moors with Alyson’s family. Dad was on end-of-life care in a nursing home nearby, and died the day we were leaving the cottage. You can read about that in the blog that I wrote at the time . I asked the minister if we could sing the hymn at dad’s funeral as he was a long-time member of the church choir and hadn’t managed to sing it that year. Rev Ruth said that it was a great idea and all we needed to change was the last verse usually sung on Christmas Day from ‘Yea we greet thee born this happy morning’ to …that happy morning..’. Alyson’s dad who was 90 and not in good health gave a short speech during Christmas Day lunch suggesting that this might be the last one he had with us. He died later that year in October.

So we had two Christmases in a row with spare places at the table. Such is the ‘circle of life’, we have lost Alyson’s mum since, but this year we have two small boys born to our nieces since. They represent the joy, love and hope of the Advent season.

Final thoughts and looking to the future…

There will be three households with us on Christmas Day, but only four people – Alyson and I, and our two sons who are single-person households. We will social distance as much as we can and maybe even eat outside. Other than that we have several ‘Zoom’ catch-ups planned with other family members and friends. We had one last weekend with my brothers and cousins (my older brother lives in San Jose California, 6 miles from the global Zoom HQ so was supporting one of his ‘local businesses’!). We have had one ‘virtual Christmas party’ with the head injury charity I am a member and trustee of. Ready-made meals were delivered along with a box of crackers, hats and gifts. We played charades, told jokes from the crackers and even tried to sing some carols. A great time was had by all who attended.

I heard from another friend that the company he works at had a ‘Zoom office party’ that started at 8pm and for some people went on until 6am. Apparently, the ability to drink and not have to drive home led to some problems with people saying and doing things that they would regret when reading the ‘chat’ the next day. So it seems a virtual party can be as good or bad as a real-world one!

I like to think I have always been generally an optimistic person, trying to see the positive in both situations and in people I meet. Alyson thinks I am a bit too laid back and even naive, and reminds me that earlier in the year I was still hoping that we would be able to get a sunny holiday overseas and was one of those who said it would be all over by Christmas. I try to find hope in the vaccination program but recognise that our governments record for ‘ramping up’ the testing capacity could induce pessimism that our ability to vaccinate the estimated 16.5 million people aged over 60. To get this done before Easter, considering the five weeks to achieve full immunity, will require an average of two million vaccinations each week. There have been half a million people vaccinated in the two weeks since 90-year-old Margaret Keenan became the first person on 8 December. We need an eight-fold increase in that rate if we are to reach the Easter target.

As I reflect on the end of a very strange and difficult year, my faith is strong, and my optimism remains at a high level. The hours of daylight are increasing from today, and I am looking forward to 2021

 

 

 

 

Coronavirus week 19 – That didn’t last long…second wave starting

A short heatwave but signs of another wave of infection.

According to one of the weather forecasters I heard, to qualify as a heatwave there needs to be a period of three days of higher than average temperatures, but ours this week was only one day. It was 20-21 degrees on Thursday and reasonably sunny, by Friday afternoon it was 35 but by the evening it was cloudy muggy and raining and on Saturday it was back to 21 with a cool wind and some showers.

At the end of my last blog I suggested that I may not do another for a few weeks as things appeared to have reached a ‘steady state’, with falling numbers of deaths and a ‘levelling off’ in the number of infections. That idea didn’t even last for 24 hours. It wasn’t that a couple of people were kind enough to comment on my Facebook post saying that they enjoyed reading them; it was watching Channel 4 News on Monday evening.  It’s a way of getting updated on current events that I get the most from. All day ‘rolling news’ is a great thing, something we never had in ‘the good old days’ when there were only three or four terrestrial television channels. The problem is that even  BBC News 24, whose coverage I also enjoy, only touch the surface of a story. I don’t want to sound like a ‘grumpy old man’, but programme makers appear to think we are incapable of listening for more than 90 seconds, or in ITV’s case, that we also need the chance to win a £150,000 prize of gifts we probably don’t need.

Anyway, it was watching the news on Monday evening that there were so many items I wanted to write about, many of them linked to each other or to coronavirus. Hence this blog with all the topics originating with the items on that edition.

Holidaymakers returning from mainland Spain complaining that there were more cases of the virus on one caravan park in Shropshire, than the whole of the Balearic Islands, and they felt safer in a country where everyone was obeying the rules on social distancing and hygiene. By the evening, the islands had been included. Transport minister Grant Shapps went to Spain but had to isolate when he came back on Wednesday. I admit to thinking that I would go if insured, and suffer two weeks quarantine or extend the holiday as I was sure there would be extra capacity. By the end of the week, however, as local lockdown was declared for large parts of Greater Manchester, Lancashire, and West Yorkshire, like others I suspect, I was more doubtful.  I listened to arguments about having to declare whole countries as giving a simpler message than trying to exclude certain areas, and had to agree. Whilst the Canaries are further from mainland Spain than Venice is from London, it would not be difficult to get around the rules by taking a flight from the mainland to the islands and return from there. There is also the danger of catching the virus and having to be in hospital in a foreign country possibly for a long time where the care may be excellent, but my Spanish is almost non-existent.

Despite early criticism there appeared to be more acceptance later in the week when the rates of infection in Belgium (which had one of the highest rates in Europe in the earlier part of the pandemic), and Luxembourg, were rising very quickly. It seems a ‘second wave’ is starting to spread across Europe.

In the UK cases were definitely rising with average daily cases approaching 800 at the end of the week. The fact that average daily deaths was still falling to about 60 at the end of the week, could point to two things; that the lag between cases and serious illness is not showing yet, or that it is mainly younger people getting infections and they don’t generally suffer with the more life-threatening symptoms.

Boris says ‘get on your bike’…

Boris encouraged us (like Norman Tebbit in 1981) to ‘get on our bikes’, but this time not to look for work, but in an effort to fight obesity. The web site handing out free £50 vouchers to get bikes repaired crashed due to demand. Not surprising for £2.5million of untargeted benefits. Many would be snapped up by those who could well afford to repair the bicycle that had lain neglected in the garage for years. It all seemed a bit of a headline-grabbing gimmick. Boris has previous on this topic. As Mayor of London he encouraged people to use a Transport for London (TfL) scheme for hiring simple bicycles parked in many areas in the city to travel to other areas. Registered users could take any of the 5,000 cycles from any of the 315 docking stations in central London to any other for a relatively small fee. This was in 2010 and proved successful. The original bikes were sponsored by Barclays bank with a blue highlight. The scheme was transferred to Santander bank with the current ones mainly red and there are now 11,000 bikes and 800 ‘stations’ spread across 40 square miles of London. 

In a week of mixed messages I had one alert from GOV.UK announcing a ban on buy one get one free offers on unhealthy food, and the next one reminded me that I could go to the pub or restaurant and taxpayers will give me 50% off any meal. This is for as many times as I like. So presumably I could get a first course with chips, followed by a chocolate brownie/ice cream / sticky toffee pudding (with extra chocolate sauce) for 12 days (it’s only Monday-Wednesday) from 3rd to 31st August. All washed down with a nice glass of wine or beer – but don’t worry the discount is not off those and they don’t contain many calories. Even HMRC were putting out Tweets about the offer – even if they couldn’t bring themselves to think people might want other European or even British menus…?

The idea of making it a requirement to put calories on all restaurant menus is a good one, but many pubs and fast-food sites do that now. The problem appears to be the ‘education’ needed to allow us to make the healthier choices.

Channel 4 News had an interview with chef Jamie Oliver (who also has years of campaigning for us to make more healthy choices. He made the point that the good quality food is more expensive, and those with less money can only afford the ‘less good’. Rather than taxing sugar, he suggested that perhaps we should be subsidising healthier food.

It could be that this approach to obesity, exercise and healthy eating was related to Boris’s own experience of Covid-19 and the realisation that his own health may have meant not seeing his fiancee and young child? There are many in the Conservative Party who decry the so-called ‘Nanny State’ (itself a posh expression), but a government that claims to have been ‘following the science and experts’ appears in the past to have paid more attention to the food and drink industry lobbyists than ‘health experts’ when deciding policies. Like tobacco before it, the ‘curse of sugar’ needs mass cultural and social change if it is to be effective.

What it doesn’t need is ‘fat-shaming’ and judging people by their apparent excess weight. The majority of our population have some problems maintaining a healthy diet. No one wakes up one day and finds themselves several stones overweight.  The busyness of our lives and availability of cheap food make it hard to change. I have the luxury of a good income, the space to own an exercise bike, and a pleasant area go out for a run. In my case I have made a conscious decision to change, and am currently about a stone less in weight than I was at the start of March. I also know it will be a struggle to keep this way once we get back to eating out again on a regular basis.  I often wonder how people in poverty-stricken countries who have to walk miles to get clean water or a meagre amount of food to take back to a house with no electricity, would make of our kitchen cupboards and American-style double refrigerators. As if that wasn’t enough for them to take in, imagine trying to explain that we then pay a membership of £360 a year for the privilege of driving, three or more times a week ,to a large warehouse full of bicycles that don’t move and treadmills. All in an effort to lose the excess body mass we have!

The next item of news last Monday was one on rehabilitation from the after effects of having Covid-19, or one of its variants dubbed ‘Long Covid’, as the fatigue and memory issues and muscle weakness can last for months (maybe even years, we don’t know yet). The item showed a group using a gym closed due to lockdown, and sharing experiences with people who have been through the same thing.  This is just like my journey after brain injury, when I found the charity that brings together people from all parts of society and background to share with each other. Access to physio and rehab services across the country is patchy at best, but so vital. All of this should have happened years ago. There is a small charity that works with people who have been in intensive care for long periods of time. Patients may be physically well, but the mental effects can last a very long time.  If this step of physio is missing or not done thoroughly, there is more of a cost to the country in terms of lost working days and productivity, as well as actual treatment, medicines, and care in old age. It makes no sense health wise or economically, not having these services readily available for everyone.

The final two articles on the Monday evening news was one that US president Trump’s security advisor had tested positive, after a trip to Florida ,where there is a rise in cases of Covid-19.  Then that Brazil’s president Bolsanaro has been reported to the International Criminal Court, by an umbrella group representing health worker unions and social care organisations, for ignoring and mishandling the crisis. Their claim of crimes against humanity amounting to genocide are unlikely to be taken on by the ICC but demonstrate the strong feelings in the country.  There was an interview (on BBC news!) with a doctor in a hospital in Sao Paulo stating that they had people turn up at hospital still claiming it was all false and a hoax – but when they ended up in intensive care they say ‘doctor don’t let me die and tell my family to take care!’ 

Other news last week.

  • We watched Jimmy McGovern’s powerful drama imagining the life Anthony Walker a young black man killed aged just 18 in 2005. He wanted to become a barrister. His mum asked the writer to show him qualifying against all the odds, marrying his (white) girlfriend at the time of his death, having a child and saving his best man from a life of crime by taking him to live with his family after becoming destitute. It brought me to tears. 
    Anthony’s mother, Gee Walker, has setup a trust in his name and as a Christian she believed this was part of Anthony’s legacy.  This will be something that is hard for those without a faith to accept. But I believe, as his mother hopes, that despite not becoming a civil rights lawyer and going to America, Anthony’s legacy through the work his mum does, and the effect of this drama, means more people could be touched. Some small comfort to his brave mum.
  • Late Thursday evening health secretary Matt Hancock announced that Greater Manchester, East Lancashire and parts of West Yorkshire were told to go into a ‘local lockdown’. This was due to a ‘spike in cases’ from people going into each other’s homes. There was some confusion and a great deal of contention from the Muslim population as it was the eve of Eid one of the major feasts of Islam. One leader likened it to cancelling the Christmas Day at 9 o’clock on Christmas Eve, although another did acknowledge that when the original lockdown was imposed many Christians had to miss Easter Day celebrations.
    Writing as someone who is doing project work for a company in Sale, there was concern that some members of the team who had only returned to work because their parents could look after the children again, may have to go back on furlough until the lockdown was over.
  • Another member of the team at the company developed some symptoms and was relieved when their test came back negative – but they had to wait over 3 days for the result.
  • One report from Manchester showed a street where many of the rainbow posters drawn to put in windows to celebrate the NHS Heroes were faded and torn….perhaps a sign of how quickly we forget?
  • One of the most worrying statements last week was from Professor Chris Whitty as he stood next to Boris Johnson at a Downing Street press conference on Friday announcing that the opening of face to face beauty treatments and bowling alleys was to be delayed for a further two weeks at least. He said

“I think what we’re seeing from the data from ONS, and other data, is that we have probably reached near the limit or the limits of what we can do in terms of opening up society.

“So what that means potentially is that if we wish to do more things in the future, we may have to do less of some other things.”

He expanded to say that if we are to get children back to school in September we may need to close some other places (pubs perhaps?) or put new limits on what people can do and who they can meet.

It really does feel this week that we are not in a ‘steady state’ anymore….!

How was week 19 for us?

After weeks of training and struggling with IT and ‘HR’ Alyson finally managed to book a few shifts on NHS 111 service…but only as reserve. She responded ‘I don’t want to be a reserve I want to be on the first team!’ Her wish came true on Friday when she was given just 20 minutes notice that she was working an 8-hour shift. This was due to late cancellations by two other people on the shifts. The deal is that people are supposed to get 24 hours’ notice. So, she managed to cancel one and worked 4-8pm. It was a tough shift, not only with the types of call, but using the systems for the first time. Reflecting afterwards Alyson felt that she had helped people at a difficult time, and knew that the next shift(s) would be better.

We both signed up as volunteers for vaccine trial in conjunction with the NHS and a pharmaceutical company. Unlike last week’s attempt we both passed the age & health requirements.

After the very warm day of Friday we went to Coventry for a ‘socially distanced picnic’ in a large park to meet up with Alyson’s sister and brother and their families in  Coventry. It was good to see everyone again including our two boys and our nieces. There were three generations and one of our nieces is expecting her first child in October  – she works in a hospital so was concerned about getting too close to us, but I think she enjoyed the day. The only member of the family who couldn’t come was our nephew who returned from the Spanish Balearic Island of Majorca so was self-isolating in his London flat.

On Sunday I attended my now weekly Zoom service at Westminster Central Hall Methodist Church. It was great to be part of a ‘congregation’ of over 1,100 people sharing in worship. Rev Howard Mellor gave an amazing sermon on the ‘original picnic’, the feeding of the 5,000, a miracle told in exactly the same way in all four gospels. Howard pointed out a small word that I had not noticed before – grass! Despite the disciples only having meagre rations of five loaves and two fishes, and thinking that was not enough to feed the crowd, Jesus managed to make it sufficient for all the people (more than 5,000 when including the women and children) and ‘still there were 12 baskets left over’. All this in an area which, because of the grass, was clearly a place of abundance where crops could grow. Howard’s message to those of us hoping to be modern day ‘good disciples’ was however little (in terms of skills and gifts) we think we have, if we give it to Jesus, he can help us achieve so much more than we ever believed.

Stay safe and let’s see if there is enough for another blog next week!

Coronavirus week 18 – the long wait for a vaccine

Will it be the scientists or anti-vaxxers who stop us getting a vaccine?

For the first time in the last 18 weeks of lockdown I found myself agreeing with Boris Johnson. He was visiting a GP surgery in London to promote the importance of flu jabs in the upcoming winter. Referring to the opponents of vaccinations he called them ‘nuts’. Ever since (the then doctor) Andrew Wakefield persuaded many parents 20 years ago not to give their children the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine following some ‘research’ linking it to autism and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), the use of vaccines has been called into question. 

Researching the claims by (now struck off doctor) Wakefield I learned the following facts from the General Medical Council (GMC) fitness to practice hearing of 2006 published in 2010.

  • A good study will include many participants, and Wakefield’s study included only twelve children.
  • Wakefield lied in the Lancet paper when he wrote that the participating children were referred independently after being diagnosed with IBD or other major gastrointestinal issues. In fact, many of the children were chosen specifically by Wakefield, and others were recruited with the help of the same lawyer who was paying him to conduct the study.
  • Even before publication of the study, Wakefield was working on patenting his own version of a measles vaccine, which he would sell at a great profit as a supposedly “safe” alternative to the MMR vaccine. The father of one of the children in Wakefield’s study was a cofounder of the planned business that would market this product.

The problems caused by Andrew Wakefield were in the news last August. Children who didn’t get vaccinated as their parents listened to him and not their doctors were now students, and an outbreak of measles was happening leading to serious side effects. The UK along with other parts of Europe has lost its status of being ‘measles free’.

The cofounder of Microsoft, Bill Gates and his wife Melinda are an example of people who have acquired enormous wealth, but are trying to use that to help others. They have been victims of terrible social media attacks and conspiracy theories as a result of pledging literally billions of dollars to vaccination programmes for children. They are partners of Gavi a global alliance of the WHO, UNICEF,  The World Bank and donor countries with the aim of funding vaccination programmes for children in all areas of the world. This will improve health, prevent needless deaths and lead to less poverty. In June a little-reported summit of world leaders was hosted by the UK and pledged over $8billion over the next five years to the programme.

The UK can be proud of being the largest donor pledging £330million a year. As Bill Gates said at the time

To beat the COVID-19 pandemic, the world needs more than breakthrough science. It needs breakthrough generosity. And that’s what we’re seeing today as leaders across the public and private sectors are stepping up to support Gavi – especially Prime Minister Johnson. When COVID-19 vaccines are ready, this funding and global coordination will ensure that people all over the world will be able to access them.

In recent weeks Russia (who pledged no new money in addition to the $4milion per year share from a previous campaign) have been accused by the UK of trying to steal scientific secrets on the development of a Covid-19 vaccine. China, who also only pledged $4million per year, are still being accused as a possible source for the current outbreak. 

To be clear, the pledges are for vaccinations of all types and not just Covid-19. Since 2000 over 760 million children have been vaccinated against polio, pneumococcal disease, typhoid, MMR, meningitis and rotavirus (that causes diarrhoea). However, the lockdowns in various parts of the world and the WHO advice to temporarily suspend vaccination programmes, to prevent people from spreading Covid-19, could lead to an estimated 6,000 children dying every day from lack of protection that vaccination provides. It’s a terrible dilemma for many countries’ health systems.

Their personal $1.6 Billion pledge hasn’t stopped the conspiracy theorists putting false information out about Bill & Melinda Gates, accusing them of wanting to use the programme for mass sterilisation to control world population, and even implanting a microchip as part of the programmes, to track everyone in the world.

This week DHSC announced that eligibility for the programme of flu injections for the coming winter has been extended to 30 million people in an attempt to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed by a flu pandemic and a second wave of Covid-19. We have had years of creating vaccines for seasonal influenza which is a slightly different strain each time, but even these aren’t always fully protective, but can lessen the severity of symptoms and reduce the rate of infection. 

We have never succeeded in getting an effective vaccine against any of the coronaviruses. Even with about 150 programmes to develop one and almost 25 starting human trials, there are questions to be answered  before getting one. Here are seven according to an article I read this week.

  1. Is the vaccine safe? Early results suggest that there can be mild side effects from the vaccines, but more worryingly these can we worse in those more likely to be affected by the actual virus – the elderly and those with comorbidities. It is possible that a vaccine could make the disease worse in those who have it already.

  2. Does the vaccine work? The general view is that it is unlikely to be completely effective and Professor Chris Witty has said that at least 50% would be a good result.

  3. Will protection from a vaccine fade over time? There was some excitement when the vaccine being developed at Oxford produced the type of reaction expected, but it could be that this fades after a few weeks or months. However, there is also a theory that some element of ‘immune memory’ could result that helps the next similar infection.

  4. Can we mass-produce it? Whilst the UK Government claims to have pre-ordered 100 million doses and be investing £150 million in new production facilities, there will be a long timescale. Some vaccines need to be stored in specials conditions such a low temperatures before being given. This could also be a challenge both in transportation and worldwide in countries with poor facilities and health systems.

  5. When will we really have a vaccine?  Are we talking about when we have a proven vaccine after clinical trials, when it is approved by regulators, when we have enough to give it to key workers in clinical settings and then those at greatest risk, or when we have enough to inoculate the whole world?
    There is a danger that if supplies are strictly limited only those who can afford it, or have the political leverage to get it will be treated. This will only exacerbate conditions in the rest of the world who can’t afford it – and the virus will be around for even longer.

  6. Once we have a vaccine, will people want to get it? So we come back to the anti-vaxxers or even those who are just cautious. In a recent poll about one in five Americans said they don’t plan to get a coronavirus vaccine, while half said they would. The rest were unsure. The US has a system where people need to pay or have insurance, so even in the richest country in the world cost could be a barrier.

  7. What about booster shots? It is likely that any vaccine could need more than one dose to maintain effectiveness, so all the points about cost and organisation of healthcare systems come back into play.

There was an appeal for volunteers to take part in the clinical trials for vaccines produced by Oxford University and Imperial College London, so I thought I might offer – but although I am fairly fit and healthy I am over 55 so that was the end of that.

Vaccines aren’t the only treatment and this week again there have been trials of a new therapy based on a protein called interferon beta that have shown promising results when given as an inhaled dose. This was previously shown to have been effective for the treatment of SARS.

Other news this week.

  • A couple of months ago when the government was recruiting 25,000 people to train up to ‘track and trace’ contacts of those who had a positive test for the virus, there were newspaper stories of them having so little to do that they were watching Netflix movies. A story emerged this week that could have been interpreted in a way that could have suggested these people were making their own work. It was an ‘international’ story too.
    The English NHS ‘test and trace’ system has been outsourced to a US company that uses call centres based in Scotland.  Eight of the Scottish workers there tested positive for coronavirus, meaning that the Scottish system, called ‘test and protect’, had to get involved to trace their contacts – you couldn’t make it up!
  • In an interview on the anniversary of taking over as leader of the Conservatives and moving into 10 Downing Street, Boris Johnson admitted that there were some ‘open questions’ to be answered about the handling of the crisis in relation to timings of lockdown and protecting care homes. There was a less than generous video doing the rounds on social media claiming that as the virus was spreading across the world Boris missed several COBRA meetings, was uninterested in briefings and more interested in throwing a party to celebrate ‘getting Brexit done’.
  • Whilst the school holidays had started and some people were enjoying time in Spain, on Sunday morning all four UK governments brought back measures for people returning from the country to isolate for 14 days on their return. Despite FCO advice that travel to the Balearic and Canary Islands was still allowed, and only that to mainland Spain was not recommended, people returning from the islands still had to isolate. Such measures had been on the cards, but the suddenness and extent caused some controversy with many people again unsure of their holiday insurance situation. Many will also lose money as not all employers will be sympathetic to them taking more time away from work.
  • The number of cases is still falling very slowly with average daily deaths at 64 by the end of the week, down 8% from last week. The number of daily cases was averaging 662, which is up over 6% from last week. We are definitely plateauing but possibly to a sustainable level to live with as a trade off for an economic recovery.  Total deaths reported for the outbreak was 45,752.
  • At the same time as gyms and swimming pools are allowed to open, the government was trailing an old idea of getting doctors to focus on reducing the levels of obesity in the country. This is one of the key factors that makes people particularly susceptible to severe symptoms of Covid-19, as well as being bad for general health. Laws on advertising junk food will be brought in and GPs will be allowed to prescribe 12-week health plans and exercise.

How was week 18 for us?

It was back to work for me with planning for the project I am doing with the accountants in Manchester. The pressure is on to complete the first stages of the system in the next three months. We are not planning to be away on holiday any time soon so this should be manageable.

Alyson continued to come close to getting a first shift with NHS 111 pharmacy advice service. She had more technical problems but at the end of the week all appeared sorted and this is a photo of her ‘mobile call centre with a laptop with connection to the NHS systems, two screens, a smartcard and a mobile phone system that allows her to call patients using an NHS number.

In the week more sports opened up, I was pleased to be able to follow some Major League Baseball (MLB) as the team I support the Toronto Blue Jays started a shortened season in empty stadiums. As the only team in MLB outside the US, the Canadian authorities would not give them permission to play home games in Toronto as it would mean them crossing the border to play away games and US teams crossing to play at Rogers Centre in Toronto. Right up to Opening Day on 23rd the team had no base, but then it was decided to play games at their minor league team’s base in Buffalo in New York State. Their first series was away in Florida, so they need to get the stadium ready for the first home series, which was to be next weekend but has been put back until 11th August.
My other sports team, Middlesbrough football club managed to survive in the Championship on the last day of the season on Wednesday – ironically away at Sheffield Wednesday. Two teams previously managed by World Cup winner Jack Charlton, whose funeral was the day before.

Keep safe everyone and let’s see what the next week brings.

I am thinking about stopping this blog for a few weeks as the situation in the UK appears to be in a steady state.

Coronavirus week 15 – the fine line between hope and crisis…

Did we go too soon?

Most of the week has been spent anticipating the 4th of July or ‘super Saturday’, ‘Independence Day’ when the pubs, restaurants and hairdressers were allowed to reopen. Also self-catering cottages, campsites and some B&B’s along with theme parks. We were waiting an announcement on which countries people will be allowed to visit without the need to quarantine on return. There were some concerns from scientists that we were going too far too fast.

For all of the above there were some who took it as a green light to start now. Airlines had passengers off to Spain, France, Greece and whole host of other places where they had second homes or were planning to be away for many weeks. Such people clearly had enough money to ‘self-insure’ against any eventuality. Street or ‘block parties’ continued and some pubs were open early. By the time Saturday came there were camera crews and reporters ready to capture the inevitable response to cutting a bit of hair or downing a pint.

The reports appeared to be mainly positive, but watching the crowds in Soho roaming the streets on a sunny afternoon there didn’t appear to be much social distancing going on there.  As a reporter from the Associated Press put it

John Apter, chair of the Police Federation, who was on patrol in the southern England city of Southampton, said it was a busy shift, one that saw officers having to deal with naked men, “happy” drunks as well as “angry” drunks. He said the shift “managed to cope” but it was “crystal clear” that those who have imbibed one too many cannot, or won’t, socially distance.

I don’t usually use swear words but that last sentence is one to which my friend Gareth from the head injury charity might reply ‘no sh*t Sherlock!’.

A few days earlier the authorities decided that one place that the pubs and hairdressers would not be opening was the city of Leicester. Due to data showing the infection rate rising alarmingly in some post codes  a ‘local lockdown’ was imposed. Many words were written about the possible causes, some speculating that the ‘hundreds’ of local small garment factories in tiny buildings that continued working were the main reason. Others said that it was the fact that the city is home to many people of Asian heritage where the culture is to live together in multi-generational households, some in areas of deprivation. It is well-known that two of the groups more susceptible to infection are minority ethnic and the elderly.

I am weary from hours of attending the Methodist Conference along with 300 others on Zoom, voting by virtually raising our hands or completing  on-screen polls. I am emotionally drained by listening to speakers on so many topics that needed our action. They all seemed so relevant. We were diverted from our agenda on the first morning by several urgent ‘notices of motion’ that altered proposed resolutions around equality diversion and inclusion (EDI). I admit to being a little annoyed, but as speaker after speaker from the LGBTQI+, transgender, black and ethnic groups, those with disabilities both visible and hidden, spoke of injustice, hatred and, even worse – indifference, I couldn’t help but be determined that action is needed.

This is about justice and inclusion and the need to work more as a church to celebrate difference. Again I was challenged to look at the EDI learning kit – but it is so much more than that. It is easy to think that living as we do in a predominately ‘white European’ town, that I am not racist. But that falls into the example heard in church so many times, ‘well we don’t have any minority ethnic people in our church so we can’t be accused of being racist’! I would now be tempted to ask, so how many disabled, homosexual or ‘gender fluid’ members are in your church or even your circuit? Is the membership or attendance representative of the area you live in?

This focus on EDI may have influenced some representatives to elect our first BAME President elect for 2021. Rev Sonia Hicks also happens to be a woman. She has great experience having served as a Circuit Superintendent in three connexions: Britain, the Methodist Church in the Caribbean and Americas and the Methodist Church in Ireland (MCI). Sonia is quoted as saying;

As a Black person born in the UK, it is a great privilege to serve the church family I love in this new way. I will do all I can to honour this choice of the Methodist Conference and enable British Methodism to celebrate our God-given diversity.

Not for the first time, the Conference elected two women to the top posts as Sonia will be joined as Vice President for 2021 by Barbara Easton, a secondary head teacher from the West Midlands.

Next up at conference was Sam Monaghan, chief executive of our charity that provides services and care homes or living in the community Methodist Homes (MHA).  They have been very visible on our news programmes as a case study for the problems in care homes. 400 residents have died so far. It was obvious that care homes were forgotten initially. I was in tears as Sam recounted the story of those losses and that of three members of staff. Our district team decided there and then that as well as EDI, MHA would be one of our priorities for the year. One of our group with homes nearby said that some church members had commented that it is more expensive to live in them. That’s partly because they are an organisation that pays its care workers the ‘real living wage’, decided by the Living Wage Foundation, rather than the national (minimum) living wage set by our government – something to celebrate not complain about.

After the main session of conference finished for the day attended (via Zoom again) a ‘fringe event’ about how our ‘bank’ Central Finance Board (CFB) were deciding which oil companies to divest themselves from, on the advice of the Joint Advisory Committee on Ethical Investment (JACEI) of which the Methodist Church is a member. There was some ‘controversy’ that we were still investing in three oil companies who were not meeting the measures set by the Paris Agreement on climate change. CFB explained that reduced returns and loss of income had to be balanced with a judgement about the companies ‘moving in the right direction’. There were also difficulties in the metrics of how to judge the companies. Change costs money, and whilst change needs to be worked through and company’s encouraged, it won’t happen overnight ( I know we don’t have time here, but I believe that science and technology will play a large part in solving climate change – it just needs investment and a push).

We spent many hours the next two days discussing long reports on important projects and issues for our church, but as time went on I got more worked up about the young people of our church who we call ‘3-generate’ pushing hard on the climate issue, and asking for CFB to overturn their decision to keep the three oil companies. This came to a head in a debate when, despite warnings from our treasurer and others that the loss of income and costs of doing so would be many hundreds of thousands of pounds and our own independent pension scheme trustees might decide to ‘disinvest from our own bank’ to seek better returns elsewhere, a notice of motion was agreed to overturn the decision. I resolved that I would speak up on the subject. Having spent many hours preparing carefully what I would say, by the time I was called to speak it was the very last part of the final session and due to overrun I had to quickly cut what I wanted to say from three minutes, to two and then one. I nearly didn’t speak but had ‘promised’ out treasurer that I would. At the last minute my printer also ran out of ink. I was very weary and tired so, instead of putting one negative point and one positive suggestion, I stumbled my way through one minute of the negative before being cut-off mid-sentence. I was shattered and devastated. The clip is on YouTube as the sessions are up there. This is a screenshot of me making my ‘speaking debut at conference’, looking distracted by trying to read what I am saying off the other screen next to my laptop.

It has only been seen by 2,734 people (mostly watching live at the time), and as far as I can tell no more since. Fortunately it is only up there until 1st August so not many more will view it!

Other news this week

  • As well as final details of the releasing the lockdown, the prime minister announced the ‘big spend’ infrastructure projects to get the UK moving again, a boost to the economy, and providing work for many of those workers who have lost their jobs in the last four months. This led to the inevitable calls to cancel the HS2 rail project to save money and the environment. People against this often quote that there is no need for people like us in Crewe to get to London 20 minutes sooner than we do now, particularly with more people working from home in the future. My response is that HS2 is not about speed but capacity. It is to get more freight off the roads and onto rail. To develop the current system to add another line or so next to current ones will take much longer, be even more disruptive and be more expensive. Just imagine the number of ‘back gardens’ you would have to destroy and the stations, bridges and signalling that would need to be altered. There are already lots of delays from upgrading the present system to current standards, not much of which does anything for capacity, but is making up for decades of underspending.
  • The list of countries we are able to travel to without going into isolation was published at the end of the week. There were 50+ on there but some confusion as some did not want a ‘reciprocal arrangement’ whereby we are able to travel to them.
  • We had one last ‘clap for the NHS’ to celebrate the 72nd anniversary of setting up the organisation. It was supposed to be for five minutes at 5 o’clock on the 5th, but there were only a few households out near us and certainly not for the full time.
  • The figures for deaths and cases kept falling, but were beginning to ‘flatten’. The average Monday to Friday official deaths were 124 this week down from 152 last. Daily cases are averaging less than 900 now. The total at the end of the week was 44,220 and average new infections are just over 500 per day.

How was week 15 for us?

Well the NHS finally appear to have got their act together and, using the new terminology, Alyson was ‘on-boarded’ on Thursday. She received her updated NHS email address on Friday, and has spent the weekend doing some final training on the system. Alyson completed the other modules around safeguarding and GDPR. Hopefully the last portion of the training will be done this week and she can arrange to choose some sessions from the roster in coming weeks.

During my time at conference Alyson did some Nordic walking at Delamere Forest having not done any since before lockdown. Normally she is part of a group but felt safe enough to go on her own and really enjoyed it. On Friday I needed to clear my head, so we spent a pleasant afternoon walking the forest tracks for 90 minutes.

Saturday saw us forming a ‘bubble’ with Michael as we went to his house to help put up a trellis for his climbing rose on the side of his shed. Alyson took the photo below and titled it ‘danger Skaife and son at work’. As I wrote a few weeks ago I am not known for my DIY skills and have not passed any on to my sons. It was a successful afternoon as Michael only hit his thumb half a dozen times with the hammer putting in the metal staples!

Michael had gone into his office in the centre of Manchester for the first time in more than 12 weeks to setup a new colleague with the IT equipment needed to work from home. He said it felt very strange with the added element of social distancing.

I will be going into an office on the outskirts of Manchester this week in order to meet Steve the director of the accountants I am doing the project for. This was the result of a Zoom meeting when I presented my report to the directors and it was agreed that rather than me try to go over all the systems and project plan remotely, it would be more efficient to be in the office, either side of a large table and share the various systems on a large screen on the wall. It will feel strange, but the company has spent a great deal of time putting ‘Covid-secure’ measures in so I am certain it will be as safe as it can be.

When I attended the weekly live-streamed service at Methodist Central Hall Westminster, I was confronted by my disastrous speech on Wednesday again. Three of the main participants had been at the conference and Rev Paul was part of the main organising technical team, and the person who probably pressed the button to let me ‘into the room’. Anthony, a local preacher and rep from the London District, had spoken well to another ‘notice of motion’ to persuade conference to do more about EDI.

Sunday was the first anniversary of Alyson’s mum’s funeral. Again we reflected on how different things were then. Not only the social distancing and the ability to at least hold some sort of tea and meet friends and relatives, but the weather a year ago was very warm too.

Stay safe, and we will see if the easing means we cross the fine line back over to the crisis side and a ‘second wave’.

Coronavirus week 13 – The best and worst of the NHS – the old normal is back…

C22H29FO5 – the wonder drug

As it is nearly 40 years since I was awarded a BA(Hons) in Chemistry, I think I can be forgiven for not being able to give the modern name for dexamethasone. This is the drug announced this week used to treat patients with Covid-19 resulting in reduced deaths for those receiving oxygen or on mechanical ventilators.

Nomenclature has changed since I taught chemistry for five years in the mid-80s. Looking back at the literature of the time it was called 9α-fluoro-16α-methylprednisolone or 6α-methyl-9α-fluoroprednisolone, but either way even having done a biochemistry module I am not sure I would have known it was a steroid derivative of the well-known drug hydrocortisone. One of the main topics I enjoyed was organic chemistry, that of carbon compounds. Looking through the 1,280 pages of Hendrickson, Cram and Hammond’s textbook from 1977 there is no mention of it, despite being used in a clinical way since 1961. To complete the confusion that people often express when I tell them I used to teach chemistry, it is always good to have a chemical structure to describe the compound. Here are two for this drug.

The slightly more modern version on the right shows the different elements hydrogen, oxygen and fluorine as different colours and the methyl (CH3-) structures as a dark triangle. My pharmacy consultant (and wife) Alyson tells me that I was on dexamethasone for a short time in 2012. I was in hospital for 12 weeks (the time we have been locked down now) with a brain abscess, and was given it to reduce the resultant swelling of my brain.

The research on dexamethasone done in British hospitals, with volunteer patients involved in the clinical trials, has been hailed as ground-breaking. The drug has potential to save tens of thousands of lives worldwide. It must be devastating for those who have lost loved ones who may have benefited from it. This and the amazing dedication of the care staff, cleaners, physios, pharmacists, therapists, doctors, nurses, and administrators demonstrate the best of our NHS. As a country and tax payers we need to fund them to the level required. We will have a thorough review and ‘learn the lessons’, but I fear that once ‘real life’ takes over and self-interest resumes its ‘normal life’, we will forget those weeks early on when as one voice we said ‘this can’t be allowed to happen again’.

The whole system needs a thorough rethink. There have been many reviews and reorganisations over the years, and it would be natural for those who work in it to think ‘oh no not again’.  The NHS needs rebuilding from the ground up, and possibly renaming. Before Covid-19 I think most people thought of the NHS mainly as the hospitals and local surgeries. In latter years, and certainly during the crisis, there have been concerns that care homes, mental health services, and some social care is linked to the NHS. Many people comment on ‘private business’ not getting involved in our health system as a bad thing. Well I have news for them, much of what we think of are ‘private businesses’. Community pharmacies which I worked in for over 20 years and Alyson has worked in for 40 now, are private limited companies owned mostly by pharmacists but some by medical wholesalers. The same is true of almost every doctor’s surgery who are businesses of doctors setup as a partnership of lead GPs who employ other GPs to help them. These private businesses operate as ‘contractors’ and are paid by Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC), itself only renamed in January 2018.  They are paid a rate for their services, whether that’s seeing patients, running clinics or dispensing prescription or carrying out medicine use reviews that is negotiated by their professional bodies with DHSC. It should not be a surprise that negotiating with what is in effect a ‘monopoly’ supplier is not one that leads to mass riches. What does surprise those doctors who visit pharmacies or chat to owners is unlike their partnerships, DHSC pays nothing towards premises or staffing costs of pharmacy businesses, or pay for the holding of large amounts of drug stocks. And don’t even get me on the subject of Dispensing Doctor practices – people who can write a prescription if they have too much stock of a particular drug, or choose the one that’s best for their business rather than the patient.

‘Business’ and the idea of accountability and competition has been part of the health service for many years, and now we have ‘Trusts’ who are independent organisations running services at a local or regional level. They contract to suppliers and surgeries, pharmacies and ‘buy in’ other services from blood and organ donation services, laboratory services and a host of other clinical ones. There are companies who contract for IT projects, finance, property building and maintenance, catering, cleaning etc. This started when I was still in pharmacy 20 years ago and even then I could see the problems of having local GPs on trusts. As with teachers and risk assessments I wrote about in an earlier blog, most GPs are not businesspeople and they can’t be blamed for conflicts of interest between their business and that of patients and other contractors.

Many governments have presided over reforms but the last major one by the coalition government in 2010 and overseen by Andrew Lansley has proven to be disastrous. Even before starting it drew criticism from a lot of areas. The idea of giving even more power to GPs and frontline staff and increased ‘competition’ on one level might seem like a good one, but in reality it led to a mix of systems and lack of any central accountability. The devolving of the social care and public health issues to local government foundered as the secretary of state for health, Jeremy Hunt, cut the budgets under the guise of ‘austerity measures’. The well-publicised ‘scandals’ with Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust and others in care homes can be laid at the lack of oversight on patient safety.  The organisation Public Health England (PHE) was formed as a result of abolishing Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs), and at the time several directors warned that this would compromise our ability to ‘fight any future pandemic’. SHA’s would have been able to lead on organising the local response and would have people on the ground able to conduct a ‘track and trace’ system. Andrew Lansley stepped down from government in 2015 and was rewarded for his efforts with a seat in the House of Lords.

Jeremy Hunt was the secretary of health who ignored the results of ‘Operation Cygnus’ in  October 2016 used to check the resilience of the NHS to respond to a pandemic (albeit one of influenza). As widely reported at the start of this pandemic, this led to a failure to replenish our stockpiles of PPE, antiviral drugs and ventilators. It is shocking to see him in recent weeks, as the now chair of the parliamentary health and social care select committee, taking the government to task over their failure on issues he was responsible for. When he was elected by MPs to this role in January there was a feeling that this conflict of interest might stop him questioning too much. It’s extraordinary to see the exact opposite happening, but his ability to wipe clean his own responsibility is equally unbelievable.

Andrew Lansley promised a ‘bottom up’ review but ended up with more ‘top down’ structures in place and setting up a whole series of ‘independent bodies’ to monitor things.

Several people have expressed surprise that hospices receive so little funding from DHSC and other government bodies that they have to rely on local fundraising and charitable status to continue. This was put in the spotlight early in the current crisis when fundraising stopped and no provision was forthcoming to help with PPE. If a national health service is supposed to cater for us from ‘cradle to grave’, what has gone so wrong that patients and their families who are facing the real end of the health system are left to donations and sales from charity shops for the provision of care to their loved ones. Another part of the health service that I have experience of, and which has been neglected are rehabilitation units. It seems Covid-19 is an illness that takes a terrible toll on survivors, with months of aftercare needed to even walk again. Many weeks on a ventilator in a medically-induced coma leads to mental health issues as well as physical weakness.

NHS IT provision, which I had some experience of when trying to implement the Electronic Prescription Service (EPS) in our pharmacy branches in 2005/6 was one riven with problems. With the help of our wholesalers and investment in NHS broadband we got all 50 branches setup just as we were sold to the Co-op. Alyson continued working in branch and even now, 14 years on, the system is not fully implemented and looks unlikely to be any time soon. Only recently can pharmacists see a very small amount of information held nationally on any patient who comes into their branchwhen they are away from the place they live. I know from personal experience that my local hospital, 15 miles from the one in another county and a separate trust where I was treated for my brain injury, can’t access any of my scans or records. This is why I have a lever arch folder with all my records and several CDs of my scans/x-rays that I can take in should it happen again.

As predicted by my sons in a blog six weeks ago NHS IT, or NHSX as it is now called, was criticised this week for the failure to deliver the NHS Test & Trace app, and are considering reverting to the Google/Apple model. As my chair of district tweeted;

In all the ‘clap for carers’ and accolades given to those in the health and care systems, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking everyone is working for the common good. In an organisation of about 1.5 million people there will be some ‘bad apples’ and strong management and administration supported by decent pay and training is needed.

Our National Health service should be as much about prevention and encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle as it is about treating us when we fall ill. The effects of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and respiratory conditions on the death rate from coronavirus demonstrates this need. The savings made from prevention should outweigh the costs of later treatment.  Education, as in many things, is vital for health outcomes as is reducing poverty.

Let’s hope the next review takes all of the factors into account and, as I wrote last week, as a country we can fund the necessary changes. Our National Health Service has become a ‘Reactive Illness Programme’ (RIP), and needs to change, and quickly.

Other news this week

  • The ‘old normal’ resurfaced in our area this week when 6,000 people attended raves in two separate areas of Manchester on Monday. Several people were stabbed, one girl allegedly raped and local people had to clear up the mess after everyone had left.
  • Crime seems to be on the increase (or at least being more reported) and terror is back on our streets with the stabbings in Reading this weekend.
  • There is more talk of reducing the social distancing requirements to one metre to get hospitality and self-catering holiday accommodation open.
  • Dame Vera Lynn died this week at the age of 103. She was called the ‘forces sweetheart’ during World War Two and had shared her thoughts during the current crisis and her song was echoed in the address to the nation by our Queen when she said ‘we will meet again’.
  • The Labour Party review on the reasons for disastrous results in December’s general election was published. It didn’t make comfortable reading for members of the party like me. We must work for Labour to produce policies which chime with the need to do things differently in relation to funding the new health and social care system, tackling poverty, improving education and closing the gap between the wealthy and poorer in society.
  • The daily death announced totals continue to fall with the Monday-Friday total this week being 853 down from 1,065 last week (a fall of 20%). The total of deaths at the end of the week was 42,632.
  • With numbers seemingly under control in European countries despite some local outbreaks in Germany, I looked again at the statistics on Johns Hopkins site and there are some awful looking graphs in other areas of the world. Here are the graphs for cases in Europe;


    These show that we are over the (first?) peak of infections. The story in two countries with presidents who think it is nothing to worry about, and are trying to get their country’s open again is not so hopeful…

    and note that the scales on these are tens of thousands rather than the thousands in Europe.
    The middle and far east countries are also showing curves which are concerning, with a ‘double peak’ for Iran. The cases are in hundreds but show no signs of decreasing.

  • We need to start looking overseas again now that we are getting the UK cases down. There is concern from aid charities that helping less well-off countries will be harder now that the department for international development (DFID) and the UKAid agency has been subsumed into the Foreign Office. A move criticised by three recent former prime ministers from both Conservative and Labour.
  • The debate and protests around racism and the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement continued across the world.
  • I was going to write that the demonstrations and actions of climate protestors, similar to the ones for Black Lives Matters with marches and ‘direct action’ had not resurfaced, when yesterday I saw an interview with Greta Thunberg saying that she was looking forward to going back to school in Sweden, and vowing to carry on campaigning.
  • Greta’s target for criticism president Donald J Trump was back on the campaign trail with a ‘huge rally’ in Tulsa, Oklahoma where only 6,000 of a possible 19,000 seats were occupied despite over a million applications for tickets. For those who did attend there was little sign of masks or social distancing, and six of the organisers caught the virus. At the time of writing there are reports that Mr Trumps rally had been ‘turned over’ by teens and young people responding to campaigns on the Tik-Tok and K-Pop social media platforms applying for tickets then not turning up. Mr Trump said earlier in the week that a million supporters would come.

How has week 13 been for us?

Unfortunately we have another example of the ‘worst of the NHS’ in our household. Five weeks after Alyson applied to help out NHS 111 with taking phone calls from people who need to speak to a pharmacist, and after three polite chasing emails and responses from the HR team doing the ‘on-boarding’ stating that she will hear ‘in a few days’, there is still no sign of her contract or training plans. She has played her part by taking two more calls on the SOS NHS volunteering app.

We haven’t ventured to ‘non-essential shops’ yet and the crush at the Nike store in London and the lady interviewed in the Primark queue in Manchester who stated that she ‘felt like I’ve won the lottery’ didn’t pursuade us. We did go for another walk in Delamere Forest and had a picnic which was pleasant. The weather meant another postponement of meeting with friends in our garden, but we have a walk planned in a park further afield this week.

I have watched a couple of the Premier League football matches now live on ‘free tv’ and have been surprised how realistic the ‘virtual crowd noise’ is to make them seem more ‘normal’ despite empty stadiums. The  online radio commentary I heard for my team Middlesbrough was a sign of the ‘new normal’ being much like the old – we lost 3-0 and are looking at relegation again.

I had my first international Zoom with a call to our subcontractors’ office in India with the person who helps on the IT project I am doing. We have had training sessions with the team from our district who are attending the Methodist Conference in a week’s time. With over 300 representatives, Zoom will be in the form of a webinar where we can only see the person presenting and another speaker who wants to add to the debate. Voting will by the raising of a virtual hand or completing a poll on the screen, so the feedback on numbers should be much quicker than the usual manual count of raised hands in the conference hall.  I will write more about this next week. The conference service on Sunday will be at my now ‘virtual home church’ of Methodist Central Hall, Westminster in London.

Keep safe and let’s hope there is a safe further easing of lockdown in the coming week.

 

 

Coronavirus week 11 – ‘I can’t breathe…’ not because of Covid-19

How many pandemics can we have at once?

When I started to draft this week’s blog the other day, the first lines were about other news breaking in, and that for the first time in weeks it wasn’t part of the first headline. I suggested that even the Daily Briefings are getting ‘bored with themselves’, with just slides and questions rather than new announcements. By Friday Matt Hancock was on his own with no scientists. I thought that by next weekend they will be finished or once a week.  It turns out that they are going to be only on weekdays, so none this weekend. The statistics were still produced by the Department of Health and Social Care and they showed that on Saturday 204 deaths were announced and on Sunday 77 bringing the total to 40,542.

As the number of official deaths passed 40,000 it felt like a grim milestone, and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures of all deaths mentioning Covid-19 is over 60,000. This week worldwide deaths passed 400,000.

The news that pushed Coronavirus off the front pages of newspapers and further down the television bulletins were protests in the US and other countries about the death of George Floyd.  George was a black American killed by a white policeman by kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes 46 seconds, while George repeatedly said ‘I can’t breathe’. At first the Minneapolis Police Department denied there was anything untoward, but after mobile phone footage of the incident was broadcast, that was shown not to be true.  This triggered several days of protests in many of the larger cities across the US, several of which were used as cover for looting of shops and burning of public buildings.

I was particularly shocked by footage from a security camera of tens of people stripping a small family-run pharmacy in the Bronx area of New York of all of its stock including prescriptions made up waiting for patients to collect them.

The irony of many of them wearing masks to protect them from coronavirus was lost among interviews with the devastated owners, as it had taken them 14 years to build the business up in a relatively poor neighbourhood. The Rodriguez family are themselves members of a minority community.

As the protests spread out to Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia under the banner of ‘Black Lives Matter’ the long-standing issue of racism that has been part of American society back to the Civil War and the Civil Rights cases in the 1960’s, was high up the political agenda once more. Protesters and some policemen went down on one knee in a reminder of the act of the policeman in Milwaukee, and an echo of the protests by black players from the National Football League (NFL) a couple of years ago. President Trump had called for them to be sacked at the time. Now he sent the National Guard to clear protestors in Washington who had gathered outside a church, and then he posed in front of the church with Bible in hand, much to the indignation of the local ministers.

The Floyd family have the services of Ben Crump an attorney who takes on high profile cases for those who need representation in the areas of unlawful death and civil rights. At the memorial service in Minneapolis he said

..it was not the coronavirus pandemic that killed George Floyd. It was that other pandemic, the pandemic of racism and discrimination.

Rev Al Sharpton, a veteran of civil rights cases alongside Rev Jesse Jackson in his eulogy said it was time to stand up and say “get your knee off our necks”.

In the social media furore around the riots an interview with a former  police chief of Milwaukee appeared to show him ranting about the fact that people know the names of the last three people killed because they are black, but not the names of the last 300 killed by criminals using guns. He said there are a lot of bad policemen, but there are also a lot of unlicensed guns and he was on his way to reports of a five-year-old girl accidentally shot through the head.  The video was from 2014. The President’s son Donald Trump Jr used it to divert attention away from the race issue. The fact that the police chief was speaking after attending a meeting about the shooting of another black man Dontre Hamilton, was not mentioned.  The white officer involved was fired as he had stopped and frisked the man for no apparent reason.

Given that a record 2 million extra handguns were sold in March, many to first time gun owners, it could be that the number of Americans dying in the future from the ‘pandemic of gun ownership’, will be a high figure.

Despite the home secretary Priti Patel and Australian prime minister Scott Morrison appealing for demonstrations not to happen due to the virus this weekend, large numbers turned out in London and Sydney. Masks and gloves were handed out, but as numbers grew social distancing became an issue. This type of protests needs to be done ‘in the moment’, but it could affect the spread of the virus. So I understand those who criticise. We shouldn’t forget that in the UK we have had our own problems with ‘stop and search’ tactics of policing, and claims of ‘institutional racism’. And these things are not only apparent in police and government, but in business and housing. The scenes of disturbances around Downing Street and violence directed towards the police were shocking. During the demonstrations earlier in the week some people had defaced memorials around the Cenotaph on Whitehall.  The next morning a group of young people were filmed cleaning the graffiti off and being berated by a protestor who said ‘could you not leave it for just one day’. It turns out the ‘young people’ were cadet trainees at the Household Cavalry from barracks nearby. On Sunday in Bristol a statue of the ‘slave master’ Edward Colston was pulled down and one of the demonstrators knelt on his neck. The city is built on the wealth of the slave trade and even though Colston gave much of his wealth to charitable causes, setup schools and hospitals, there are some who think the record of their former MP was ‘sanitised’ and rewritten before the statue was erected.

On the news pictures I saw, however, most of the demonstrations were peaceful and did their best to maintain social distancing (if not the regulations about more than six people meeting). Overhead shots of demonstrations in Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington in the US and Manchester in our area of the UK showed a great deal of good distancing and masks.

Australia, like America has had problems with police brutality and race and this was the focus of the protests. in 2016 David Dungay Jr an indigenous Australian man was killed whilst being restrained by police in a hospital saying those same words ‘I can’t breathe’. We saw the pictures of people talking about their frustration that yet again something happens and again nothing happens.

The last word goes to an academic on a video my cousin Janet’s husband Chris posted on Facebook. I don’t know the name of the person or anything of their background, and it was from an organisation called ‘Atheist Republic’ and appeared to be cut together from a longer one. None of that matters as it struck a chord with its simple message . The question was put ‘why do we hate’?

We hate because we are taught to hate. We hate because we are ignorant….We have been taught that there are four or five different races…there are not…there is only one race on this earth which we are all part of, and that’s the human race. But we have separated ourselves into different races so that some of us can see ourselves as superior to others….It hasn’t worked, and it is bad for everyone. It’s time to get over this business. There is no gene for racism, no gene for bigotry, you’re not born a bigot, you need to learn to be a bigot. Anything you learn you can unlearn, it’s time to unlearn bigotry. It’s time to get over this thing…and pretty soon. I am an educator…and it’s my business to lead people out of ignorance, the ignorance that you are better or worse than someone because of the amount of a pigment you have in your skin. Pigmentation of your skin has nothing to do with intelligence or your worth as a human being. It’s time to get over that.

We are struggling to find a vaccine for the coronavirus pandemic and are worried that it may take a year rather than a few months. It seems that we have been unable to find a vaccine for the pandemics of racism and gun control, or the other pandemics of hunger, poverty, and inequality which have been with us for centuries. After the coronavirus pandemic is over there could be a pandemic of unemployment, a pandemic of economic uncertainty and a pandemic of growing debt. Can we do things to ‘unlearn’ the behaviours that make them happen.

As a representative to the Methodist Conference at the end of the month (see note later on about our week), I have been asked to complete some training on ‘unconscious’ bias as part of the church’s Equality Diversity Inclusion (EDI) policies. I commit to doing so as a small step to understanding my own behaviours and to check if I need to ‘unlearn’ some attitudes.

Other news this week

  • The news that pushed coronavirus down to third place on the television bulletins was that of the German police identifying a suspect for the abduction of Madeleine McCann in 2007 and declared it a murder inquiry.  It is a story that was horrible the first time around and doesn’t get any easier each time it crops up again. I hope that the family get some certainty soon.
  • We live in an area, the north west, where the number of infections is not decreasing, and the R-number is on the unsafe value of almost 1.  The north west as defined by the government is a large area stretching from where we live in Crewe to Kendal 110 miles away on the edge of the Lake District. However, the detailed statistical tables show that in our local hospital there was only one death on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday this week, compared to deaths every day and a total of 15 the week before.
  • Crewe is a town which is dependent on the ‘health’ of one of its largest employers Bentley Motors.  Admittedly, not as dependent as it was when we moved here 40 years ago and along with the Railway Works, Rolls Royce Bentley as it was then were the main employers in the town. The announcement on Friday that nearly 25% of the 4,200 workforce were under the threat of redundancy is a blow to the local economy. This wasn’t due entirely to coronavirus but adjustments for social distancing has cut production by half in recent weeks.
  • With the government declaring two weeks quarantine on travellers coming in through airports, there was talk of  ‘air bridges’ that would allow those from some countries with lower infections not to have to do so. The airline owners are against the quarantines and some countries will not allow UK citizens to have an ‘air bridge’ with them as we are a country with a high infection rate.
  • Track, test, and trace continued to be a point of contention with Boris Johnson challenged at Prime Ministers Questions about the lack of statistics and details around this topic.
  • MPs returned to parliament and there was much discontent about having to vote by forming a queue which was over a kilometre long to walk past the Speaker to say which way they were voting. The irony was that the motion was about the type of voting that could be used if they remain away from the House of Commons due to the virus. One said it was like ‘doing the Mogg conga queuing for a ride at Alton Towers that turned out to be a little bit sh*t.’

How was week 11 for us?

Alyson took advantage of the new ‘freedoms’ to go to a garden centre 8 miles away but came back disappointed by the choice of plants and the lack of atmosphere as the main centre and shops were not open.

Alyson was delighted, however, that as we watched another week of BBC’s Springwatch we had a version going on in our garden. Visitors to the feeders included, bullfinch, greenfinch, goldfinch, long-tailed tits, and a mother blue tit feeding three tiny fledglings as they lined up on one of the supports.

I was elected as one of seven representatives from our District to go to the Methodist Conference in Telford at the end of June, but that has been cancelled in its usual form. We usually meet as a group to discuss the topics and format of the 5 days, and we did so this year but via Zoom, as we will with 300+ others this year. The Conference will not have the debate and resolution of the report we discussed last year on our understanding of relationships. This could have paved the way to same sex marriage taking place in our churches, but it has been held over to next year. It was felt that if we couldn’t give the time needed, meet in smaller groups face to face, and share on the fringes of the Conference, it could be challenged. This won’t stop us looking at more reports and ‘business’ to move our witness and evangelism forward.

Wednesday was Global Running Day, but I wasn’t aware of that as I set out in the rain for my early morning 5k run. It was only when I got back and Alyson told me that she heard it on the radio and I found out that I had joined with over a million people in 170 countries to celebrate a simple sport that those like me with little natural ability can participate in.

During my weekly virtual coffee later that morning with David, a friend from church, we reflected on the ways we need to change personally and as a church in how things are done, and lessons learned during the pandemic. My evening Bible study with 10 others via Zoom is one such example that we will continue with. There really is little point splitting us into two groups and travelling to each other’s houses, especially on cold wet winter evenings.

The cold and damp weather that started on Wednesday led to Alyson cancelling the get together with three former work colleagues in our garden on Thursday morning. The beauty of a ‘virtual coffee morning’ like the one I hosted for our head injury charity, is that the weather will not stop it taking place. There were 11 of us and I used a feature in Zoom that allowed all of us to be put in two separate ‘rooms’. One for the group that would normally meet in Crewe and the other at Ellesmere Port. It worked well and the smaller numbers meant that those who didn’t want to speak in the larger gathering chatted to members that they were used to meeting.

HIP Charity – Cheshire-wide coffee group members

We had ‘virtual Friday night drinks’ with Alyson’s brother and sister and then on Saturday night we had a Zoom quiz with my cousins and family. Alyson and I came second out of ten teams after 100 questions using an app on my phone called ‘Kahoot’.

Sunday brought my now weekly trip via YouTube to the service at Methodist Central Hall in London. We restated our belief in the sanctity of all human life, knelt in solidarity with those who are victims of discrimination, and prayed for the family of George Floyd. It brought to mind one of the modern songs we sing that challenges us to act for the wider good. These are three of the verses. They seem appropriate given the news this week.

Will you use your voice; will you not sit down
when the multitudes are silent?
Will you make a choice to stand your ground
when the crowds are turning violent?

In your city streets will you be God’s heart?
Will you listen to the voiceless?
Will you stop and eat, and when friendships start,
will you share your faith with the faithless?

Will you watch the news with the eyes of faith
and believe it could be different?
Will you share your views using words of grace?
Will you leave a thoughtful imprint?

Stay safe and I hope to post another instalment next week.

 

 

Life & Death – Coronavirus week 10 – taking things one day at a time

Week  10 in daily format.

I usually start these blogs at the end of the week but decided today that I will try doing a ‘daily’ note. This will allow me to capture my thoughts in real time and my mood in relation to events around the crisis. I will review and correct some grammar and shorten sections prior to publishing, but the essence of the days won’t change.

Monday 25th May – ‘I have never been so angry..’

Having made a determined effort in last week’s blog not to write much about Dominic Cummings, the story of his 260 mile trip to Durham, and Boris Johnson’s ‘defence’ of his actions at Sunday’s daily briefing, I woke up this morning quite angry. Not about the actions of the senior advisor, but more that I was so distracted by the whole thing that I missed a huge section of the blog which I had planned to cover.

Sunday 24th May was, for Methodists like me a special day. It is called  ‘Aldersgate Sunday’ formerly ‘Wesley Day’. As the web site for the Methodist Church in Great Britain explains;

In May 1738, John unwillingly attended worship at a Moravian ‘Religious Society’ meeting on Aldersgate Street in London. It was during this service that he felt his “heart strangely warmed”, as he experienced God’s love in a most personal and life-giving way. Until then he had known God in his mind, but not in his heart. Now he understood the value of a personal experience of God that would bring assurance of salvation to the believer.

This year the 24th fell on a Sunday so that made it even more relevant. Not so reluctantly as John Wesley, I attended a streamed service from Methodist Central Hall in London, just over two miles from Aldersgate Street in the City of London.  It was a wonderful service with over 1,500 watching. It was also the last service of their minister Rev Dr Martyn Atkins, former President of the Conference who was ‘retiring’ or as we call it ‘sitting down’ after over 40 years of service to his church. He was what we call ‘one of Mr Wesley’s preachers’, who had been ‘stationed’ in various places across the country as ministers in our denomination are called to be ‘itinerant’, usually staying in one place for around 10 years and then moving to another ‘appointment’ .

The penultimate service I attended in church before they were closed for lockdown was at Methodist Central Hall on 1st February. We were down in London for a visit and, never having been there, I decided to go for the Sunday service. It is an impressive place, built from the donations of one million Methodists, including members of my mum and dad’s families. Martyn was preaching and gave a challenging message about putting on the ‘armour of God’. I received a blessing and was anointed with oil by one of the Deacons at the end of the service. I  managed a few words with Martyn as we had briefly met a couple of years previously. It was in a small room at one of our closed churches, repurposed as a second-hand bookshop raising funds for the museum of Methodism at Englesea Brook Chapel, which is in our circuit between Crewe & Alsager. I was dropping some books off and Martyn was chatting to our Superintendent minister who worked there on his days off. Martyn had written an article for the ‘Methodist Recorder’ that came out that day and which was a challenge to modernise, and I told him it was thoughtful and a great piece. Martyn didn’t remember the conversation but knows the bookshop as he is a great collector of books, and said he would be going there a lot in the future as he and his wife are moving back to Derbyshire, less than an hour away from Alsager.

So, my anger was about not mentioning all that in last week’s blog.

However, the anger referred to in the heading of this section is my wife Alyson’s. Having never been ‘political’ before, she found the email address of our local MP this morning and wrote to him to express her anger at the situation over Dominic Cummings and her disappointment at the way Boris Johnson has handled it. I don’t think Alyson will mind me saying that her natural inclination is not to vote Labour. As a pharmacist and frontline worker who has seen the effects of coronavirus on her patients she wanted her MP to know. He is Dr Kieran Mullan who worked in the accident & emergency department prior to becoming our local MP for the conservatives and has gone back to work some shifts. It will be interesting to see if she gets a reply.

Neither of our moods was improved after the two press conferences that evening. The extraordinary lengthy one with the special advisor in which he showed no regrets but tried to explain why he could make special arrangements for his family. Followed an hour later by one with Boris Johnson. No one, particularly the journalists, was listening to details of how lockdown was to be eased by opening of shops and secondary schools in mid-June. Everyone wanted to keep talking about Mr Cummings. As the day ended the special advisor was still in place, left to be judged in the court of public opinion.

I sat and wrote my own email to Dr Mullan MP.

Tuesday 26th May – hey ho, hey ho, it’s back to work we go..

When the prime minister told the country two weeks ago to get back to work, I didn’t think it applied to me. I was enjoying my semi-retirement, time with Alyson, the warm weather and helping my church and the charities I am involved with. However, at 9.30am I found myself attending a Zoom ‘Monday Morning Meeting’ (moved due to yesterday’s Bank Holiday) with 18 of my new colleagues at an accountancy practice in Manchester.

My friend Steve had asked me back to do another systems project for his new company. If Alyson and I had been managing to take all the holidays that we had planned, there was no way I could have said yes. Truth be known I had some doubts about my ability but after a couple of meetings and 1-2-1’s my interest, and not a little ‘excitement’, was back. It took most of my day, and I had foregone the usual early morning exercise.

Meanwhile Dominic Cummings was still in his job, despite one ministerial resignation and a ‘revolt’ of 30 MPs and literally thousands of similar emails like mine to local MPs. It was left once again to the BBC ‘s Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis in her opening ‘monologue’ to sum up as follows

Dominic Cummings broke the rules. The country can see that and it’s shocked that the government can’t. The longer ministers and the prime minister tell us he worked within them, the more angry the response to this scandal is likely to be.  He was the man remember who got the public mood, who tagged the lazy label ‘elite’ on those who disagreed. He should understand that public mood now; one of fury, contempt and anguish. He made those who struggled to keep the rules feel like fools and has allowed many more to feel they can flout them. The prime minister knows all this, but despite the resignation of one minister, growing unease from his backbenchers, a dramatic early warning from the polls, deep national disquiet, Boris Johnson has chosen to ignore it. Tonight we consider what this blind loyalty means about the workings of ‘Number Ten’. We do not expect to be joined by a government minister but that won’t stop us asking the questions.

Wednesday 27th May

Today was a warm one and started with my weekly 5k ‘local Parkrun’ which I have been doing as the usual Saturday morning one, I have done since 2016, has been suspended as part of the lockdown measures. We ate all three meals outside on our patio table and were delighted to see a pair of young goldfinches on our feeders.

The numbers of Conservative MPs asking for Dominic Cummings to  be sacked was over 40, and the prime minister was before a committee of senior members of parliament from all political parties. Their questions were supposed to be on his performance in the new parliament which started in December. However, they too concentrated a lot on his special advisor and what effect it might have in getting the message over for the rest of the pandemic.

Health secretary Matt Hancock tried to distract from the Cummings story by changing the sign on the podium at the daily press conference announcing the NHS test and trace strategy to help ease the lockdown. He was ambushed by the video question from a member of the public asking if everyone who had been fined for travelling to arrange childcare would have the money refunded. Perhaps taken aback by the questioner being,  as he so tweely described him, ‘a man of the cloth’, he desperately searched for an answer and promised to take it back and ask the treasury. The next day the answer came back – ‘no’.

At 9pm I logged onto the American businessman Elon Musk’s SpaceX website to watch a live stream of his Falcon 9 reusable rocket taking men into space in a Dragon spaceship that sits on top and carries astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley. It will dock with the International Space Station (ISS) and then return to earth. This was the first time since 2011, and it was cancelled with 17 minutes to go due to storm clouds. I looked forward to the second try on Saturday.

The virus touched this event when a photo of people watching the launch from a road bridge nearby caused a social media storm around social distancing and accusations that the picture in USA Today was an old one. I read an account on the paper’s blog that showed the picture from 2011 and you can see not quite so many  people, and some in the today’s one wearing masks.

We have watched the launch of a small rocket from a beach nearby the Kennedy Space Centre during a visit in 1994, so can understand the interest of locals in such a massive event.

Just before turning off my laptop to go to bed I made a sign parodying the one on  the daily briefing podium. Having done so, I almost deleted it immediately, worrying if such a thing was ok. I posted it on Facebook and Tweeted it to Rev Helen Kirk, our own Chair of District or ‘woman of the cloth’!

Thursday 28th May

The tactics seemed to work as the prime minister’s special advisor was not the top headline on news bulletins. My ‘funny’ podium sign was retweeted by Helen and liked on Facebook, so guess it was ok. This was the exchange between Helen and me.

When we had a coffee via Skype with friends David & Janis it was something they were annoyed about. Janis knows the road to Barnard Castle where the now infamous ‘test drive’ was taken and thought it unsuitable as a check for the type of journey back to London.

It was another very warm day and we had meals outside and did more work on the garden.

The evening briefing, after the cabinet had done their legally required 3-weekly review, brought news of another ‘easing’ of the lockdown measures. From next Monday we will be able to meet in groups of six in a garden or outside space, some non-essential shops, outdoor markets and car show rooms can open from the 8th of June.  Premier League matches would start from 17th June behind closed doors. Boris Johnson stated that he wanted to ‘draw a line’ under the Cummings affair and move on ‘as the country wanted’. Journalists had other ideas and asked more questions about the ‘illegal trip’, even trying to involve the Chief Scientist and Chief Medical Officer in the questions. There were questions about how people might hold ‘socially distancing barbecues’ in their gardens, and what if someone wanted to use a toilet in the house. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland announced different measures from England, just to add to the confusion.

The evening brought the tenth and final clap for carers. It was well supported and loud on our street, but it felt like the right time to end it.

Friday 29th May

We had planned to get up very early, have breakfast, drive to Delamere Forest, and see if we could manage a walk without getting too close to other people. We arrived at 8.45am and walked to a small isolated lake surrounded by some beautiful yellow orchids. It was not too busy with people, but there was a lot of litter from visitors over recent days. We resolved to take bags and collect it if we came again. We saw a lot of birds, went on a rope swing under a tree, and walked the parkrun course.  We arrived home by mid-morning and sat in our warm garden for lunch.

Alyson commented during the walk that it seemed odd to be in such a peaceful place surrounded by life when there were thousands of people in hospital fighting for their lives. I said that most days were like that, but it had been heightened in the last three months.

Rishi Sunak, Chancellor of the exchequer announced an extension of the furlough scheme and support for the self-employed until October.  It was at a slightly lower rate and employers were going to contribute towards the costs. Employees can go back part-time under the scheme.

We watched the last of the daily  BBC Two ‘Springwatch’ reports. It has been a joy to see all the birds nesting and trying to survive. Insights into nature, and a new section of ‘mindfulness’ where they show 90 seconds of pictures with no commentary. We have had river valleys, woodlands, seaside, and tonight’s was lakes and mountains. Wonderful.

This was followed by the satirical program Have I Got News For You, and we were back to Dominic Cummings again. The fun (laced with real anger) they had with the story reached new levels of satire. Apparently there is a Durham slang of ‘that’s a load Barney Castle’ meaning a pathetic excuse. It originates from medieval saying based on a siege in the castle. As one famous columnist is fond of saying ‘You couldn’t make it up!’.

Saturday 30th May

Another bright and sunny day. I got a new PB for my new regular ‘local parkrun’ and like every other week I finished in first place! Alyson was back on the frontline working a morning shift in a community pharmacy. It was again one where she felt safe with one patient at a time.

Two members of the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE) broke ranks to voice concern about easing lockdown restrictions too early, risking a second wave and peak of infections. There was a worry that having announced on Thursday that people could meet up in larger groups for a barbecue in gardens, some would start early with the forecast sunny weekend. Our neighbours had two families together in their garden with little evidence of social distancing, and on Alyson’s afternoon walk she saw a group of youths playing a football game.

I watched the SpaceX mission finally take off to the ISS at 8.22pm. It was a spectacular event.

Sunday 31st May

Harold Wilson, labour prime minister in the 1960’s is quoted telling lobbyists before a general election, when it wasn’t looking good, ‘a week is a long time in politics’. He won the election with an increased majority. Well, it is a week since the papers and television were full of stories and accusations about a trip to Durham. It felt at the time like Mr Cummings would be sacked, especially after another day trip to Barnard Castle came out. Boris Johnson decided to try to ride out the storm, pushback on any questions, and focus on getting the next steps of easing restrictions out. It appears to have worked. The news today was of opening schools and some shops tomorrow, and the overnight announcement that those who have been ‘shielding’, and locked in their own homes for the last ten weeks are to be allowed out for walks in the local area but still not to go to shops. They can meet up with one person from another household in the open air but must maintain social distancing. As the virus is around less than it was the chances of infection have gone from 1 in 40 at the start of their self-isolation to 1 in 1,000 now.

This Sunday in the church year is Pentecost (what used to be called Whitsun), the anniversary of the formation of the early church and the day the first ‘sermon’ was preached by Simon Peter after the coming of the Holy Spirit. Watching the service streamed from Methodist Central Hall, preacher Rev Howard Mellor reminded us that the disciples had been effectively in ‘lockdown’ for coming up to 50 days waiting for the next stage in their work.  The image with tongues of fire raining down reminded me both of the fires burning in the US from the protests over the killings of the unarmed black man George Floyd by a white policemen in Minneapolis, and the power of the burning of kerosene and liquid oxygen that took the two NASA astronauts towards the ISS. The US riots had spread to many more cities overnight with more fires and looting. There was little social distancing going on there or at the protests in central London.

I watched the live stream of the docking manoeuvre on SpaceX’s web site as the Dragon-2 spacecraft gently attached to ISS. Despite the seemingly ‘slow and careful’ way the two vehicles came together; we were reminded by the commentator on the video that the two vehicles were travelling at 7.66km per second or over 17,000 miles per hour. As I watched the spaceship close in ‘slowly’ for the last 20 metres between the two vehicles which took just over a minute, they travelled over 300 miles or the distance from Crewe to Land’s End! All at 260 miles above the earth. Over 1.3 million people were watching live on-line.   Docking happened at 3:16pm and the alarm on my phone went off. It is set to remind me of the famous Bible verse John 3:16. My mind went back to the time last November when I stood on steps on top of the Hulda Gate up to the temple at the centre of the ancient city of Jerusalem. Our guide told us that when astronaut Neil Armstrong stood on them he said

I am more excited stepping on these stones than I was stepping on the moon.”

It was seeing earth from the Apollo spacecraft and from the moon that reinforced Armstrong’s belief in something larger than humanity. He had been brought up in a Methodist family and on return from the moon he gave a speech in front of the U.S. Congress in which he thanked them for giving him the opportunity to see some of the grandest views of the Creator.

The final daily briefing of the week gave the figures for deaths on Saturday as 113 compared to 215 on Friday and 324 on Thursday. The total of deaths at the end of week 10 was 38,489.

We shared a weekly family Zoom with the boys. David was happy to be back on the river Avon after his second session of solo rowing from his club in Bath. He had also managed a short swim as he capsized his single-seater boat!  Michael had been walking in Delamere again.

Alyson has arranged for a friend from her ‘knit & natter’ group to come around tomorrow and sit in our garden to share a coffee. We are planning to meet up with her sister and husband for a walk somewhere between our home and theirs in Coventry.

Next week I am planning to look at a single issue related to the pandemic, perhaps the future of the health and social care services, or the costs of repaying the huge financial debts the government support has built up.

Keep safe.

 

Life & Death – Coronavirus week 9 – easing the lockdown

We’re all in this together, again?

As I start this week’s account on Saturday afternoon, I wanted to resist commenting on the incident of government advisor Dominic Cummings trip to his parents’ home in Durham. But having just done so, I will leave it to the mainstream media, and the numerous self-appointed political commentators on social media, to report the story to what appears to be its inevitable conclusion as more details come out. It certainly appeared that the Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps had been ‘thrown under the bus’ at the daily briefing.

Instead I will confess that, however people have interpreted the ‘rules/guidance’ both during lockdown and now, we too have stretched them, or to be correct ‘broken them’. I confess to ‘excusing myself’ about driving faster than 70mph on the motorway on the basis that almost everyone else does, and to drive at exactly 70 or below puts us in danger from all the other ‘idiots’ who are speeding. There always appears to be a ‘get out’ clause if you judge it to be right in your own mind.

This week Alyson and I took advantage of the new guidance to drive outside our local area to a country park near Northwich. It was Alyson’s birthday and she was desperate to go for a walk somewhere else, and it is a place we have been birdwatching.  It is a 42-mile round-trip and it felt very strange to be driving even for half an hour. It felt very familiar as we queued in a traffic jam through roadworks over a closed bridge to get to the park. The car park was quite full and as we ate our picnic we wondered whether to come straight home. We didn’t need to pay & display as the machine was covered, presumably to avoid people touching the buttons, and everyone appeared to be keeping social distancing. The park is very large, so we walked to the birdwatching screen at the end of the lake. It was a sunny day and it appeared that there were family groups sitting alone enjoying the fresh air. We managed to pass other people with at least the required two metre gap. When we got to the bench seats at the screen which are about 15 metres long the only other person there, sat on the end, was our son Michael. He lives only two miles from the park, and I had text him to suggest he went as a birthday surprise for his mum. It worked, and Alyson was really pleased to see him. We chatted for a few minutes as he was on his lunch break from working at home. He looked healthy and happy. Alyson said afterwards that she just wanted to give him a hug. I ventured that Michael didn’t feel the same way! Have you spotted it yet? The current government guidance for this phase of easing the restrictions state;

I have highlighted the parts that make clear we broke the rules. Two of us met one other person outside our household to make a group larger than two. We excused ourselves as I sat two metres from Alyson and four from Michael and it ‘felt ok’. A lot of people will have done similar things over the weeks, using their own ‘excuses’. I know people who happen to have walked past their parents’ house with their child on their daily walk and stood at the end of the drive to talk to them, then later extended this by going through a garage (always keeping themselves two metres apart) to sit on chairs in the back garden and chat to grandparents. And if the young child who doesn’t understand social distancing happens to take a toy over to his grandparents, it doesn’t harm anyone else…. I have seen people who walk a dog in the morning and then the evening, presumably reasoning that it doesn’t do any harm.

There has been much discussion, some with a lot of hindsight, as to whether the lockdown was ‘too late’. It may have saved more lives, but even on the weekend of the 21st March, two days before lockdown was announced by the prime minister, I was emailing the owner of the lovely cottage in the north east we were staying in about renting it again the following weekend. I reasoned that it was so remote we could easily ‘self-isolate’, go for walks in the early morning from the door onto deserted moorland, take all the food we need, drive there and back on one tank of fuel etc etc. In the end we decided not to, which when we heard the ‘rules’ was the right thing. I even held out until the very end, that our week in Lanzarote could go ahead. 

I have re-watched two issues of BBC’s Question Time from March and even ten weeks on there are some things that are now shocking. On 6th March after the first death in the UK when there were 100 cases, health secretary Matt Hancock said that the majority of people will get minor symptoms and a few will need some extra care. There was laughter in the audience when a panellist talked about elbow bumping instead of handshaking, and another joked about not being able to find toilet roll. To be fair there was worry about older people and those who might not be able to go to work and claim sick pay. Matt Hancock said that the evidence was that large-scale sporting gatherings outside were not places where widespread infection spreading would happen.  It was in the ‘containment phase’ where the message was only people with symptoms had to self-isolate.  Professor John Ashton, former head of public health in north west England was on the panel on the 13th March, the night after the Liverpool v Real Madrid match at Anfield. His accent gave him away as a Liverpool fan, but he had stayed away, frightened that the virus had come to Merseyside and spread through the bars before and after the match. I watched this live and, like host Fiona Bruce, remember getting quite cross at what seemed a hysterical reaction when he started shouting about wasting four or five weeks already. 

The daily briefings had started,  but in my opinion there was no appetite for a full lockdown and if it had been imposed at the start of March compliance would have been much lower. Ironically, if it had happened and after two weeks ‘only 100 people a day’ were dying, people would have said ‘it was all a hoax and businesses are going to the wall so let us go back to work and school’. It is also clear that there were not enough tests available as we seemed pleased to be testing 2,000 a day.

For me, this week has been a rollercoaster of hope. One day I hear that the cases may be falling quickly and caught a clip on the radio of a scientist who believed that in a few months the virus would just die out. I started checking the booking sites for the holiday cottage in the north east. The next day there was talk of the virus being ‘with us for years, and life would never get back to normal….’.

It does seem that there is cause for hope. You don’t need to understand much about the way viruses spread to know that if there are no cases in your local population, it can’t spread. The origins of it may have been transmission from a mammal to humans, but that doesn’t happen spontaneously on suburban estates in the UK. New Zealand earlier in the week and Guernsey on Saturday released lockdown completely. They are both islands that have managed to almost full close their borders, and done lots of testing and tracking. New Zealand has a population of 4.82 million and only 21 deaths and on several days in the last three weeks no new cases, despite carrying out an average of 4,400 daily tests. Guernsey, a very small island with a population of 67,000 had no new cases for 22 days. There were pictures of families actually hugging grandparents. Shocking! But to repeat myself, you can’t catch the virus from someone who hasn’t got it. They have been developing ‘household bubbles’, firstly just two then last week putting 2+2 to make four households that don’t have to maintain social distancing. This very simple 3-minute video explains the approach;

This could be the way the UK government(s) decide to go. Let’s stay optimistic.

Test, Test, Test! or Education, Education, Education?

When the head of the World Health Organisation was asked for a message to countries fighting to control the spread of Coronavirus Pandemic in early March, his answer was very clear ‘Test, test, test’. It does seem that those countries who had a good testing regime allied to a system to do contact tracing, asking people who had the virus to isolate themselves, have managed to control the spread.

Former prime minister Tony Blair at the ‘New Labour’ Party Conference at Blackpool in 1996 gave a speech about his top three priorities if they were able to form the next government. He said ‘Education, Education, Education’.

Following on from last week’s blog, these two phrases have collided as the country tries to start ‘the new normal’ with schools being asked to start opening to more pupils. Teaching unions met with scientists and data has been published and discussed. There is still some uncertainty and natural concerns, specifically around the ability to do local testing and tracing. If we wait for a vaccine or 100% guarantees of no risk we will never get schools open. But with a combination of good risk assessments, the ability for schools or local authorities to determine phased opening in conjunction with parents, no sanctions for parents not wanting to send their children back, and exemptions for ‘vulnerable’ children and adults, backed with local testing hubs, it could work. We might even decide to ask parents to form ‘household bubbles’ based on the friends of very young children so that they can hug and go to each other’s houses to play. Some schools will wait two weeks which is the current time for infection rates to halve.

Other news this week

  • The daily death count continued to fall even when ‘all situations’ were taken into account. The last four daily totals of 338, 351, 282 and 118 and the total of 36,793 appears to be a steeper decline than previous weeks.
  • We clapped for carers for the 9th week on Thursday. I was pleased to learn that Dutch-born Londoner Annemarie Plas responsible for starting this initiative, suggesting that this coming week should be the last and tenth time. This will allow us to stop, reflect on the sacrifice and set a date in the future to remember again, perhaps annually. This will stop it going on and on and simply petering out gradually.
  •  President Trump was causing concerns again with his announcement that he had been taking the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine for two weeks. This is not a recognised prophylactic for the virus causing problems now, and even the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) warn against its use. Being a pharmacist, Alyson has access to the online British National Formulary (BNF) of UK recommended drugs. She posted two pictures of the list of side effects on social media. I have highlighted two particular ones that President Trump should be aware of:
    More worrying than President Trump’s personal medication was a warning from the White House’s coronavirus taskforce member Dr Anthony Fauci that new localized outbreaks were “inevitable” as mitigation measures are relaxed, leading to the need to put in place a further lockdown. Given the dependence of the world’s economy on that of the US, however much we wish it didn’t, the decisions of the administration are vital to the rest of us.
  • Airlines, travel agents, hotels and others in the tourism sector gave stark warnings of the economic effects on their businesses. Hertz Global Holdings Inc the US car hire firm, and Specialist Leisure Group, which owns coach company Shearings, both collapsed into administration. US business magazine Forbes stated;

Hertz was just another victim of the pandemic, people will say. It’s easy to blame the company’s misfortunes, as well as the other corporate casualties, on the pandemic. The reality is a different story. The failures of Hertz and the others have more to do with their own arrogant inertia and inability to recognize the fast-changing trends and a refusal to adapt their business models accordingly.

This is a narrative we will come back to when the whole economic story of the crisis is analysed. Some companies have been ‘found out’ by the pandemic while others have adapted in an economic equivalent of the evolutionary principle of ‘survival of the fittest’.

How has week 9 been for us?

We are conscious of the fortunate position we are in with regard to holidays. We have managed to get a full refund on our Lanzarote holiday, moved an Easter cottage and another Cottage in Ross-on-Wye, both with family, to the same weeks in 2021. This week the travel company moved a very expensive cruise in Norway to 2021, along with an upgrade and £45 credit.

We have been taking part in a UK Biobank project for over 12 years. They are a major national and international health resource, and a registered charity, with the aim of improving the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of serious and life-threatening illnesses – including cancer, heart diseases, stroke, diabetes. We have been scanned, had blood taken and completed endless questionnaires on lifestyles. This week I received an email from them on behalf of Professor Sir Patrick Vallance, UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser. I volunteered to send a sample of my blood monthly for six months to be tested for coronavirus antibodies. The project will help the scientists track the course of the infection across the population.  As well as us ‘oldies’ aged 40-69 they needed some younger adults, so I sent invites to Michael and David.

This week I was very proud to wave Alyson off back to the ‘frontline’. It did feel a little like sending her off to war, as she set out with her mask, visor and hand gel to work a shift at a local community pharmacy. She had been desperate to play her part, but as she has a condition that would class her as vulnerable, she wanted to wait until safer conditions were in place. There was no way that she was going in at the start of the crisis with busy branches overwhelmed by customers and lots of other people working there. Her Saturday morning session was at a small local branch with screens between the customers and counter. You can see below pictures of some measures. There was only one other member of the team working so social distancing was easy to maintain. We have had a chat about her wishes should she contract Covid-19 and need to go into ICU.

Alyson also had an alarm on her phone go off as part of the local volunteering force. It was to call a lady recently discharged from hospital to check she was ok in terms of shopping, medication, loneliness and mental wellbeing. All was fine and she didn’t need to pass them on to anyone else.

Keep safe everyone and let’s see what the next week brings.

 

Life & Death – Coronavirus week 8 – assessing risks, dividing the country

Tell us what we are supposed to be doing, don’t ask us to use common sense….

Looking back with the benefit of ‘2020 hindsight’ the week started with what Boris might have called ‘an inverted pyramid of confusion’ with lots of unanswered questions following his Sunday evening address to the nation.  The well-trailed/leaked message of ‘we’re coming out of lockdown’, the ‘meat of the story at the top’ was followed by the fragmented uncertainty of what was actually said, and the shrinking detail of how that would work – the narrowing at the bottom of the pyramid.

‘Stay at Home’ was replaced with ‘Stay Alert’ and we were told that ‘coming down the mountain is sometimes harder than going up’. He announced a government plan to ‘ease the lockdown’ in the next few months. Some of the measures had been widely trailed in the media in a way that I don’t fully understand. All journalists have their ‘sources’ and back-door channels into government departments. Indeed it seems that some cabinet ministers are happy to ‘leak’ when it suits them, or perhaps to gain an advantage in the game of getting more power by a higher profile. The problem was that some people were waiting to hear that they could see more family members, start planning a late summer holiday or going for a beer at a pub that has an outside garden or space.

What we heard instead was ‘go back to work tomorrow’, ‘from Wednesday we can go out more, sunbathe or play sports’, ‘schools and some shops will be opening at the start of June’, ‘hospitality being open from 4th July’.  The new alert system was underpinned by scientific advice and monitoring of the now infamous ‘R-number’. Monday morning brought more confusion when ministers didn’t appear to have details on some of the ‘rules’ and how they would be applied. Could we meet mum and dad in the park or was it only mum (presumably while dad sat in the car and waited his turn next). The situation was not surprising as the more detailed 60-page official document was not published until later on Monday and news programmes were full of traffic jams and crowded tube trains as the ‘rush back to work’ started.

By this weekend crowds were taking advantage of the warm weather to travel long distances to beauty spots in the countryside and on the coast. Some interviewed for the evening news expressed surprise at the number of people there and the lack of social distancing. 

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago the need for careful planning of how workplaces could open with ‘social distancing’ and ‘re-engineering’ of processes. Any business or workplace that had wasted the last seven weeks of the lockdown and wasn’t planning how the changes could happen prior to the announcement, can’t complain if they fail in the future. Talking to Steve, an accountant friend of mine, about how his small business customers were coping, he said there were two groups; those who had panicked and taken short term decisions, and those who had changed. He mentioned restaurant businesses who had turned into takeaway services and were now making more money as they didn’t realise just how much customers liked their dishes. We agreed that the ‘good’ well-run businesses who treat their teams well will come out of this stronger.

Trade Union Leaders were calling for their involvement in helping businesses get back working in a safe way. They have many trained ‘Health & Safety Reps’ that can help companies and reassure their members that safe-working practices are in place. Although the TUC had been on a conference call with the Prime Minister on Sunday evening, no mention of help from the unions was made by ministers in the daily round of the breakfast news media organisations. The phrase ‘it is just common sense’ was often used. The government did produce some detailed guidance on workplace changes, staff shifts, social distancing and deep cleaning measures for eight areas of work from manufacturing, offices, restaurants etc. But I repeat, most businesses should have been thinking about these things before this week.

Wednesday was the day we could all begin to get out more and play sport, but we decided to stay home and see if the beauty spots, parks and garden centres became crowded with people, as had been the concern when it was announced. It was a mixed picture and the mood was captured by a cartoon in one of the newspapers of a golfer playing a round on his own whilst his wife took a towel to sunbathe in the bunker. On seeing the queue of 30 or more customers to get into a garden centre we decided that we weren’t that desperate to get some more plants for our garden.

Parents, teachers, and their unions were raising concerns about how social distancing would be in place for reception, year one and year six classes, the first designated to go back. For some it was literally a matter of ‘life and death’ with some parents accusing ministers of treating them and their children as ‘guinea pigs’ for an experiment and saying that they definitely wouldn’t be sending their children back until schools were ‘100% safe’. Of course there is no such thing as 100% safe statistics were quoted on the risk of being injured in a car journey or playing in a park. There is also a risk of harm if younger children see parents in a state of terror about letting them out for the ‘virus to get them’. We watched an interview with a head teacher from the UK and a teacher in a primary school in Denmark that had been open for a few weeks and put in place measures to help. They put the children in small groups of 4-5 and played a game whereby they had to keep away from the other groups in the school. Washing hands at the start and end of the morning and afternoon became a physical education (PE) class where children lined up two metres apart and did various exercises such as squats, jumps, stretches as they moved closer to the sinks and after washing their hands they went back to the classroom to do a paper exercise. The UK head teacher appeared to take an interest and be willing to learn some lessons from this. The Danish teacher stated that when they opened less than half the parents sent children but after two weeks it was over 90%.

Of course we shouldn’t forget that teachers and schools have been open during the lockdown, doing frontline work and teaching smaller numbers of key worker’s children. They will have learnt something from this experience. Some of the larger ‘Academy School Groups’ that have estates departments have been planning for opening and doing individual risk assessments for their varied buildings. Some head teachers in primary schools are not trained in risk assessments. This is not a criticism, it’s just not their job which became clear when they panicked about how to keep 4-year olds apart, and not to be terrified of teachers wearing masks and full PPE! They may be great teachers, but they also need help from local authorities and others. We have to hope that the large academy groups only motivation is education of their pupils but, as with some of the larger businesses in the commercial sector, it is possible that their Chief Executives are more concerned with lost profit than with the safety of their employees.

Speaking to Chris, a friend who has a daughter that teaches primary school children in a relatively deprived areas locally, I asked his view. He said he could understand the unions asking for guarantees on safety as that is their role. His daughter has identified vulnerable pupils who should be in already but haven’t been coming. Some of her children are not capable of being controlled in the way people would expect and their hygiene habits are poor as the result of the environment they live in. She is not worried about catching the virus as she is young, but Chris is concerned about her, as there is still much we don’t know about how the virus affects children.

The Danish comparison was being used as a ‘positive example of what could be done’ by the same ministers who said it was wrong to compare the way we handled the crisis, compared to other countries who appeared to be doing better. Is it that Danish schools and parents have a different relationship than ours?

As I write teacher unions and leaders have met with government scientific advisors, and doctors have backed the proposed way forward for a controlled opening in June. Anne Longfield the children’s commissioner for England has demanded that the two sides stop squabbling and get on with reopening ‘in the interests of children’, the many disadvantaged of whom had been away from education for too long.

The schools issue was just one area this week that shone a light on the growing division/diversion of the way the crisis is being dealt with both between the countries of the UK and within the regions of England. I wrote last week that Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland were sticking with the ‘Stay at home’ message. This week the elected mayors in Manchester & Liverpool went on record about the support they and their councils were being given from London. The Greater Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham wrote two newspaper articles bemoaning the short notice they were given of the proposed ‘back to work’ message and not having the financial package given to the London Mayor to provide the extra public transport to maintain social distancing. The allowances given to local authorities to deal with the crisis had gone from ‘spend what you need, and we will reimburse you, to ‘we need to be sharing the cost’. It needs to be stated that he was a former Labour MP for Leigh, one of the constituencies that changed to Conservative in the December election. So the following statement needs to be read in that context.

For a government elected on votes in the north, and promises to “level-up”, it is surprising how quickly it has reverted to the default, London-centric mode in this crisis. Last Sunday’s package certainly felt more suited to the south than to the north.

His article refers to another issue I heard on Friday that seems to mark a change in approach. Many homeless people have been taken off the streets and put into hotels with a grant from central government. That funding is being withdrawn and put back onto the local authorities, many of whom have also had a large cut in the funding to give local support during the emergency. It seems that the poorest areas are having the largest cuts.

One of the most deprived areas in the country and one often shown on news bulletins is our ‘home area’ around Middlesbrough in the north east. Alyson & I lived and went to school in one of the more affluent areas from the ages of two and five. The area of Brambles Farm shown in Friday’s bulletins is one we know well and is where Alyson’s mum worked in a bookmakers. The interview with a mum and her child about the cost of living and the need to access support and foodbanks was a stark reminder of areas of poverty in our country. 

Today’s statistics from the NHS show the following;

  • The North East region has the highest infection rate in the country with 358 people per 100,000
  • Within the region Middlesbrough is fourth highest for infection rates at 451 per 100,000
  • The James Cook University Hospital that serves the area is in the top third of deaths in the country with 316 to date.
  • One day in the last week there were 24 new cases in London and 4,000 in the north east and Yorkshire.

The regional mayor had been resisting the reopening of parks despite the pleas of an MP who is a member of the government and one who is the Labour MP for Middlesbrough.  He is, however, in favour of reopening schools unlike his counterpart in nearby Hartlepool.

Other news this week

  • The daily death rates appear to be on a downward slope with today’s figure of 170 bringing the total to 34,636. But this week we had a figure of 50,000 for the ‘excess deaths’ for the period to 1 May.
  • Following the extensive coverage of the track and trace app on the Isle of Wight there has been little news on how the trial is going. I looked up the local newspaper and all it said was that less only about 33% of the population had downloaded it. Michael & David told me on our Zoom call tonight that the source code for the app had been released and there were lots of comments about functionality and not connecting with phones nearby. As per the blogger’s prediction last week there is talk of moving to the decentralised version of the app.
  • Tuesday 12th May was International Nurses Day and fell this year on the 200th anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birthday. Florence died a recluse after many years of a ‘mystery disease’ which some scholars now think could have been partly related to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Much more is known about this today, and it could be that her reluctance to talk about the 21 months without a break looking after the injured soldiers in appalling conditions during the Crimean War, 30 years previously, was the cause. Many today are asking that our NHS workers and others on the frontline receive PSTD counselling in the coming years.
  • Belly Mujinga a Victoria Station ticket office worker died after being spat at on the day before the lockdown by a man claiming to have coronavirus, falling ill with Covid-19 two days later and dying in hospital a week after that. It is a shocking story.
  • The question I submitted to the group who choose ones from the public to the daily briefing didn’t get picked, but somewhat surprisingly one about the possibility of in the future of having a ‘Universal Basic Income’ (a subject I want to cover in a later blog) did, but was dismissed outright by business secretary Alok Sharma MP, who again was happy to use other countries as reference as ‘it had been tried and shown not to work’.

Thoughts at the end of week 8.

This week we were due to be on a cruise in Norway from Bergen to Kirkenes and back, on a small cargo boat calling at many ports and sailing up some of the very scenic fjords. A ‘first world’ problem I know, but we are some of the many trying to get a refund or rearrange for next year.

This week is designated Brain Injury Awareness Week and in the charity I am a trustee for it would be one of our main awareness and fundraising times. I wrote and hosted a Zoom quiz for our members to replace the events we would have had. It was a fun time of sharing. It has also been Christian Aid Week and the door to door collection I sometime do was cancelled. It raised over £8 million across the UK last year. I shared the preparation and hosting of another quiz for which we asked for a donation. We had 16 ‘screens’ with about 25 people joining in. This week’s appeal is to help victims of coronavirus in parts of the world less able to cope and where Christian Aid have projects. I encourage you to donate.

The advice this week from the government was to start wearing face coverings in some enclosed spaces such as on public transport and shops. Alyson had used a design from You Tube to sew some cloth ones for us all. We posted two each to Michael and David and I wore one for the first time to go to our small local Tesco. I only had it on for about 45 minutes, but that was long enough for me to have some understanding of how uncomfortable it must be to wear one for a ten to twelve-hour shift. And that is without the rest of the PPE needed to treat patients in ICU.

I read a blog from an academic at Swansea University who was recruiting people willing to take part in a ‘CoronaDiaries’ project looking at how people react in the crisis. I have been accepted onto the project so these blogs will be converted to PDF and stored in an archive for future researchers to use.

As usual on Sunday I attended a streamed service from Methodist Central Hall in London. The sermon and prayers related to a passage in Matthew chapter 5 where Christians are called to change ‘from  just being, to doing’. This struck me as particularly apt for the events of this week, as did our prayer,

may the poor be enriched, the bereaved comforted and the hungry filled.

Keep safe, stay alert, manage the risk and let’s try to ease the lockdown.

Brian Bilston

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