A Positive End to the Year

The good news - the best possible news - is that the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine has been approved and will begin roll out in the UK next week. The plan is to get a single dose into as many people as possible as quickly as possible, with a second dose up to three months later. While the Pfizer vaccine is brilliant and highly effective, the AstraZeneca vaccine much easier to distribute widely as it doesn't need to be kept at  such low temperatures. Best of all, it is low cost, will have manufacturing centres around the world (including a large one in India) and the vaccine is non-profit. In the long run it will save millions, and possibly even billions of lives. For us in the UK, the end of the pandemic really is in sight now, although the next couple of months will still be grim. 

The sort-of-good news is that a Brexit deal has been agreed, signed off (with virtually no proper scrutiny) by Parliament, and we will avoid the costs and chaos of a no-deal Brexit. The deal is about as thin as could be, but has one small silver lining in that the EHIC (European Health Insurance Card) arrangements are going to continue, meaning that there will still be reciprocal health care across the EU and UK. The government are trying to claim it is a "great" deal, but it clearly isn't. Brexit gains? In my opinion, zero. It won't even get rid of the interminable arguments about Europe. The government is carefully not mentioning that the agreement provides for renegotiation every five years, and includes a long list of joint committees to discuss UK/EU issues in many different spheres. In other words, Brexit doesn't change geography. We are an island at the periphery of a continent; the EU will always be our largest trading partner, and will always be our most important overseas relationship. 

I am still struggling to completely shake off the headache from earlier in the week. I'm wondering now it if is sinus related - not something I normally suffer from, but I have been a bit sniffly and it seems to be worse at night. This quiet time between Christmas and New Year is very quiet indeed this year. Nothing more exciting happening than our daily walks. We normally celebrate New Years Eve with old friends who live a couple of miles away, so this year we are going to have a virtual New Years Eve on FaceTime. The original plan was to make a buffet meal to graze at during the evening (our usual tradition), but then noticed a local pub is delivering meals and thought it would be nice to support them and have ordered a two course dinner from them. We will have a New Year's Day buffet instead. Oh, and I finished the first sock of a pair for myself. 

Winter Picnic

The current coronavirus restrictions mean that we are only allowed to meet people outdoors, so we arranged to meet three friends for a lunchtime picnic in the park. We originally planned it for tomorrow, but the forecast was for rain all day, while today was supposed to be dry, so we rearranged. Yes, it rained. It did at least stop by the time we got to the park, but the picnic benches were very wet. After eating our lunch either standing or sitting, according to how brave or well-protected we were feeling, we went for a walk through town and along the riverside walk and canal tow path. Despite the weather, it was good to see people we don't live with (much as we love our family). I am now finding that the isolation is beginning to get to me. I am the only person in the household who doesn't go to either work or school, and my interaction with colleagues is limited to a 20 minute Teams staff meeting with no video on Monday mornings and occasional emails, with no plans for me to go back to the office any time soon. I know it is going to be a long winter, and suspect that we will be back in lock down again in January, so I am just going to have to deal with it - at least I know now that there is an end in sight, though I don't expect things to improve significantly until the spring. 

Over the past few days I have started to get back into writing and research. A couple of years ago I stumbled across a couple of sisters with local connections who served as ambulance drivers and orderlies in the First World War. The more I found out about them, the more interested I became. Once I began to research in detail I discovered one of the sisters had a lifelong friendship and partnership with another woman who was a very unusual character, and who very conveniently had written a detailed account of her war service. The more I dug, the more I found, and I am now trying to write a book about the three women and their families. I have hardly touched it this year, but I am really hoping I can be more disciplined next year and start to put in the time it needs. I have no idea whether the end result will be publishable, but I would like to finish even if it is just for my own satisfaction. I also have another book to put together, editing some documents for the local record society and writing a commentary. That one I know will be published (unless I make a complete hash of it!), though the market is pretty limited and it is definitely a labour of love, not for money - it is hardly a candidate for the Amazon best seller list! Both have a very long way to go, but I suspect the idea that I will have more time in the future is a mirage, and I should stop using time as an excuse and get on with them. Something to focus on over what looks like being a long, lonely winter can only be a good thing. 

I'm short of photos today, so here is another of my Christmas bauble collection. This one came from one of the Christmas markets in Vienna when we visited last year. Travelling so freely seems hard to imagine now. Once we are eventually able to travel again, it will no longer be as Europeans, it will be as Little Englanders, thanks to Brexit. No European health insurance cards, no fast EU citizen passport queues, restrictions on how long we can stay in European countries, and in another year, the need for a visa to travel to continental Europe. This makes me unutterable sad. So much lost, and so afar as I can see to no benefit. On top of Covid, whatever happens in the current negotiations between our useless government and the EU, we are almost certainly looking at considerable trade disruption in January after the transition period ends on December 31st. I am most worried about the possibility that there may be issues with importing medication, as I am very reliant on an asthma inhaler. Nothing I can do except hope that it doesn't take too long to sort out the initial chaos. The negotiations for a free trade agreement are not going well, with reports that PM Johnson made a hash of a visit to Brussels this week, and there are unpleasant mutterings about using the navy to chase away European fishermen in January if there is no deal. What.a mess. 

Staying Home Part 2: Day 9

A much less busy day today, with just some bits of work to finish up this morning. H had her last exam this afternoon with an immediate result - another strong pass making it 5/5. Well deserved pay off for two months of very hard work. TG came home from school with a glowing progress report (they can't do parent-teacher evenings this term because of the pandemic) so we are having a proud parents day. 

We did another three mile walk today, this time a short drive away. We did a circular walk through woods and fields to a nearby village, then back through the woodland again. Loved this birdhouse in a garden we passed - or maybe I should call it a bird mansion! 

The pub was closed today because of the lockdown. The village is on a hill and the ground drops away steeply behind the pub, where there is a beer garden with an impressive view across to Milton Keynes. I love autumn walks, despite the mud. At least there was less of it today than yesterday, though we walked across another very soggy, desolate, unhealthy looking large field 

This has been a good week for news. Following on the heels of Trump's defeat, Boris Johnson's svengali Dominic Cummings has left his job with immediate effect, hot on the heels of another Vote Leave crony. I don't know who will replace them, but hopefully there will be at least some improvement after what has been an atrocious year of poor decision making, U-turns, lies and half-truths under their regime. Their main policy has been to break things - supposedly to build up better, but as they didn't appear to be capable of managing their way out of a paper bag, it didn't go well, especially during a pandemic. They lied with impunity, and the government's attempt to justify Cummings' trip from London to Durham while he and his wife were suffering from Covid pretty much broke the last lockdown. Few people will be sorry to see him go. 

H went for a takeaway coffee after her exam and brought cakes back for us. I cooked halibut from the fish box for dinner, which was delicious. We (myself and the girls, not M!) are in Christmas movie mode, so we watched Arthur Christmas, which I had never seen before. Then M and I watched the first episode of Queen's Gambit on Netflix. I don't normally watch a lot of TV, but since the pandemic started have watched far more than usual. I think it is partly because I have more free time, partly because I got into the habit during our Disney binge in the first lockdown, and partly because I have been in crafting mood - I like to half-watch, half-listen while I knit or do cross stitch. I have a few things I want to make as Christmas gifts and started one today - a cross stitched coaster with a badger picture for a neighbour who has a family of badgers which regularly visit her garden. I am also knitting the first of a pair of socks for my brother. I had not used this pattern before and the heel section is either odd or wrong. I tried following the pattern but ended up unravelling my first attempt at the heel and re-doing it using my usual method. 

Staying Home: Day 70

Whitsun Bank Holiday today and another lovely sunny day. One of the saving graces of the past couple of months has been the weather. Lockdown would have been so much worse if it had been wet and miserable, but this has been a beautiful spring. I woke up with an irritating headache, which has bothered me off and on all day but now seems to be clearing properly. 

H and R have both subscribed to a fitness app which offers almost endless exercise classes. H did one this morning that was live and participants compete against each other to see who works hardest - it uses exercise data from Apple Watch (and presumably Fitbits and other exercise devices) to calculate effort. R messaged this morning with photos of a foster dog she is expecting to arrive soon. She has signed up as a foster carer for a dog rescue charity, and will take care of him until he is found a forever home. She and her partner already have a dog of their own who likes other dogs, and she will be working from home so is in a good position to look after another dog and help him get settled. 

I spent quite a bit of time in the kitchen today. I used up the remains of last week's veg box and made potato salad and coleslaw for lunch; for dinner I used some leftover chicken to make a chicken and mushroom pie with roasted sweet potato and courgette. I wandered in and out of the garden - more in than out today as the heat wasn't agreeing with my headache - and read bits of my book. I also spent quite a bit of time doing some family history digging. I had been contacted by a distant relative about an elusive joint ancestor, and think I may have identified him. It doesn't really help a lot as I think I can only take the tree back one more generation, and can't be certain I have the right person. 

M and I were very late going for our walk as we wanted to watch Dominic Cummings statement explaining his actions, which ran late and was (we thought) very unconvincing. At least today I am not feeling quite as angry and frustrated as I was yesterday. I forgot to say when I wrote yesterday's blog that I was so cross I emailed our MP. I still think he completely broke the spirit of the law, even if he is able to find loopholes in the regulations, and that he should be sacked as he clearly won't resign. I'm hoping that public opinion will force him to go, though even if it does I'm afraid the damage to the credibility of anything the government now says about how people should behave during this crisis is irreparable. 

We ended up with just a short half hour walk round the woods before making dinner. Being among the shady trees is lovely when the weather is hot. After dinner we watched the second half of Blinded by the Light, the film about a Pakistani Luton boy who wanted to be a writer that we started a couple of nights ago. 

Back to work again tomorrow after a lovely relaxing weekend. Or, at least, relaxing when I wasn't getting into a stew about politics!
 

Staying Home: Day 69

Political shenanigans have upset my equilibrium today (along with many other people). The Prime Minister's chief advisor Dominic Cummings was exposed in the press as having travelled 250 miles from London to Durham while both he and his wife had Covid, supposedly so that his family could take care of their four year old if necessary, flagrantly breaching the spirit of the lockdown rules and in most reasonable interpretations the letter of the rules too. The government spin machine is trying to make out that what he did was only what any decent father should have done, making a mockery of all those people who cared for their own children while sick to protect others, who stayed home and missed relative's funerals, who kept their distance from sick friends and relatives, and obeyed the government's instructions to stay home. The Prime Minister has doubled down behind Cummings. I am furious! There are other accusations which the government isn't even bothering to address. Apparently we should be acting according to instinct rather than being socially responsible and obeying the lockdown regulations. The whole thing is just beyond ridiculous. I usually avoid watching the news and the government's rather hollow daily briefings, but today M and I watched a morning politics show and the Prime Minister's briefing this evening. Given how angry and discombobulated I now am, perhaps I shouldn't have done. 

After watching TV this morning I had a long, lazy bath and read my book. After lunch I went outside to lie in the hammock and read, but fell asleep instead. We went for a slightly shorter walk today, mostly through built up areas but with a short stretch along the canal. One of the boats we saw had lots of painted canal art items on its roof.

I have always rather liked this house, with its arched entrance and windows It was originally the signalman's cottage for a railway branch line that ran alongside. The line closed in the 1960s and parts have been built over, although there is still a section that is now a footpath. On the way home we stopped at the pub to buy fruit. They threw in some extras and a loaf of bread for free as they were about to close and they would otherwise have gone to waste.

H cooked dinner - herb crusted lamb steaks, roast potatoes, carrots and broccoli - and we then watched the second half of Coco (one of Disney's best in our view). Then we had a long family FaceTime call with R, who seems to be enjoying her new job role in marketing though is finding getting up earlier in the mornings a challenge! It is only a temporary secondment, but she is hoping it will eventually lead to a permanent move.

I now need to spend some time distracting myself from thinking about the Cummings debacle, so that I don't go to bed feeling stressed and angry!

Staying Home: Day 53

We were running out of some basics so I took TG down to Tesco Express this morning to pick them up. I wanted to post this picture of the socially distanced queue in the hope that one day it will be a "do you remember when we all had to queue 2 metres apart because of Covid" thing, and people will look at pictures and be amazed that we had to live like this.  

I subscribed to the Ordnance Survey's maps app yesterday so that I could see their more detailed maps with all the footpaths and rights of way. I spent a bit of time this morning planning out routes that we can use for walks, varying in length from 2 miles to nearly 6 miles. Getting ambitious! Our walk today was relatively short as M was tired after mowing the grass this morning, and we wanted to get back for 3pm when there was a plan for a socially distanced street party with our neighbours to commemorate VE Day. Our road had not done much in the way of decorating - a few flags but no bunting or balloons - but we walked past this house where someone had been very busy with pavement chalk.

I counted up nine sets of neighbours sitting out at the end of their driveways, chatting across our socially distanced spaces. I think it was good to have that bit of socialising, and out in the open air I think the risks were minimal, but I do worry that too many people will not have been keeping up with the social distancing today, tempted by a combination of the bank holiday, the good weather, and the promise that there will be some reduction in the lockdown announced tomorrow. We may - or may not, who knows! - get a full road map of how we get to a new normal and how the economy will be opened up again. I'm afraid I am having one of my pessimistic evenings, worrying about what comes next. I wish I could believe that our government has the competence to steer us out of this successfully. Unfortunately taken as a whole, I think we have the least able, lowest calibre set of senior ministers I have known in my lifetime. It isn't even about politics - there have been plenty of times when I have disagreed with past government politically, but could still recognise that they were competent as individuals. This lot just seem to be scrabbling around, making things up as they go along, giving us waffle and soundbites instead of substance. I can only hope I am misjudging them.

H is still working hard but took a break to make chocolate almond cookies, and M baked a cake this morning. We are now down to a single egg again as there weren't any in the shop this morning. I cooked cottage pie for dinner with green beans from the veg box and sweetcorn from the freezer. After dinner we had a Zoom quiz with band friends with M as quizmaster, which he enjoys doing and is good at. H, TG and I were a team, though TG missed the first half as she had an online dance class. Oh, and H went for a run first thing this morning - she has now worked up to running a regular 5K, but is a little frustrated that she her time has been exactly the same for the last three runs, and she can't seem to get it any quicker.

I did spend a bit of time out in the garden reading, listening to my audiobook and sewing, but overall it has been a busy day. I am very clearly in introvert mode as socialising - even virtually - drains my batteries. I'm now looking forward to a quiet, relaxing weekend to recharge.

Goodbye Summer

School holidays are over - youngest daughter started back at school on Wednesday - and the summer weather has gone with with them. The evenings are starting to get a cool and tomorrow is forecast to be 14 degrees (57F) and wet. So, hello autumn! I have always loved autumn, not just because I have an autumn birthday. I like the colder weather before we hit the long dark evenings of summer, autumn colours, leaves crunching with the first frosts, and that sense of new beginnings. I think even when I no longer have kids going back to school or uni, I will still think of September as a "new year" month.

This year student daughter is back from Italy and will be heading back to Yorkshire for her last year at uni. She is very on the ball with job hunting and is already beginning to get applications in for grad schemes - I'm not sure whether the US has a similar system, but here many large employers have training roles for new graduates and begin recruiting for these up to a year in advance. She has some ideas for the direction she would ultimately like to go in, but is keeping options open and casting her net fairly widely. She has a house share all sorted, is signed up for all her preferred courses, and has put in a proposal for her final year dissertation. I am looking forward to being able to see the floor in the garage once all the stuff she has left there for the last 15 months goes back up north!

Her younger sister is now thirteen and is now at upper school. We are in one of the very few places in the UK which operates a three tier schooling system with kids moving to middle school at nine and upper school at thirteen, rather than two tier with transfer from primary to secondary school at eleven. I actually prefer the three tier system, though I think it is doomed to disappear in the next few years. She seems happy enough after her first three days at her new school. She chose to go across town rather than to our nearest school, but quite a few of her friends made the same decision so she has enough familiar faces not to feel lonely. Our school exam system means that she will have to start making specific subject choices this year for exams to be taken at sixteen (GCSEs), then from sixteen to eighteen they usually only study three or four subjects, before narrowing to just one or two at university. She is also beginning to have ideas of the sort of things she would like to study - unlike her older sisters she leans to the science side. She is also keen on drama and musical theatre and wants to take part in both a school production and a youth theatre group this year, as well as continuing to dance a couple of evenings a week, so she will be busy.

Politics is utterly depressing, with the Brexit debacle now reaching crisis point and the government pushing the legal and constitutional boundaries to try to force it through at any cost. One positive is that it has forced the opposition parties to work together, and there have been a significant number of defections from the government leaving it powerless to get anything through Parliament. It should now legally be blocked from crashing the UK out of the European Union without any transitional arrangements, but will try anything it can to avoid or subvert the law. A general election is inevitable in the near future, which will I am afraid be both the most important and the most bitter and unpleasant of my lifetime. I am tempted to spend the next two months reading Terry Pratchett and avoiding all media, but my inner historian feels compelled to follow every stage of the whole wretched process.

If I could manage to ignore the whole sorry political mess I would be looking forward to this year's autumn reboot, but it does overshadow everything at the moment. That aside, I am looking forward to getting back into more of a routine, getting on with a couple of writing projects I am working on, getting outdoors and enjoying the autumn weather, and generally getting into my "new start" groove.

A Week is a Long Time in Politics

This has been one of the longest and most extraordinary weeks this country has experienced in my lifetime, following the referendum on British EU membership on 23rd June. The phrase "a week is a long time in politics" coined by former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson has never been more apt. Despite the close recent opinion polls, the assumption was that the Remain campaign would win and Britain would carry on in the EU as before. The assumption was wrong and a narrow vote to Leave has thrown the country into confusion. The Prime Minister has resigned; the pro-Leave contenders for the job have indulged in a bout of back-stabbing of Shakespearian proportions; the Labour Party is imploding with a leadership election of its own pending, one of such significance that it could split the party apart and finish it as a serious political force; Scotland is likely to hold its own referendum on whether to leave the UK in order to stay in the EU. Politically, all is chaos and confusion. 

In the aftermath of the referendum I wrote this on Facebook, which I'll share here as it still reflects how I feel a week on (apologies for those of you who are Facebook friends and get the same thing twice):

"I have said before that I don't normally do politics on Facebook, but I am going to break my own rule again. I spent yesterday in a sleep deprived fog (one hour of sleep just doesn't cut it) trying to process the referendum result. I began the campaign open minded and unsure which way to vote, but as it developed I became increasingly convinced that Remain was the right option. In the wake of the result I am shocked by how viscerally upset I feel. I know I am not alone in feeling an acute sense of loss, of bereavement. Many of us are grieving the loss of our sense of who we are, what our country is, and its place in the world. I also fear that the law of unintended consequences is going to run amok. Already we seem to be heading for financial upheaval, years of uncertainty, the possible (probable?) break up of the UK, a new prime minister, and a government with an agenda radically different to the platform on which it was narrowly elected last year. As for the rest of Europe, who knows what damage our decision to leave will do and what knock-on effects it might have.  

As a natural optimist I usually manage to find something positive in any situation. Yesterday I struggled to find anything in this. Today I am trying harder. It is going to take at least two years before we have any real idea how things will play out and nothing yet is a given. We may - or may not - get increased border controls (both ways). We may - or may not - stop being a net contributor to the EU. We may - or may not - be part of a European Economic Area. And so on. And that means that we all, whether we voted Remain or Leave, will have opportunities to influence how our country will look post-Brexit. Surveys show that for most Leave voters issues of sovereignty and democracy were their primary concern, with immigration a significant but still secondary issue. Most Leave voters are not narrow-minded racists. Remainers and concerned Leavers can work together to answer the questions we face in the aftermath of the referendum. How do we build an independent Britain that is open, tolerant and cares for its weaker members? How do we ensure that our kids have the same opportunities, both here and in the wider world, that they would have had before this vote? How do we protect the rights of individuals if the checks and balances provided by the EU are removed? How do we heal the divisions left by the referendum? Where do we start? There are no easy answers, but whichever way we voted, and wherever we stand on the political spectrum, we need to start thinking very hard about how we answer these questions. My optimistic side wants to believe that we can find some good answers."

I still hope that we are able to find good answers. This is still the very early stages of what will surely be a long process. It has been shocking, though not at all surprising, to see the complete absence of a plan on the Leave side as to how they would follow through if they won. Neither the Conservative nor the Labour parties seem to have had any clue how to respond to a Leave victory. Labour is imploding amidst recriminations against Left-Wing leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is supposed to have been at best lukewarm in support of the party's Remain campaign, and at worst actually obstructive. Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition is currently in no position to oppose (or propose) anything.  The Government is leaderless and a long way from formulating any sort of constructive plan as to how to move forward. It may have been a long week, but it is also going to be a very long few years before the UK, or whatever is left of it, comes out the other end.