Those who were expecting this new year to bring calm couldn’t have been more wrong. For those, like us, still living in our government-imposed bubble, life seems strangely surreal. For Americans reading this, perhaps still planning vacations: under your new regime, please take note. We’ve been under enforced ‘house arrest’ now for almost a year. We haven’t been shopping for over a year and are only allowed to go outside within walking distance of the house. All our food is delivered by drivers who keep their distance. We had hoped to have braved the covid vaccine by now but only silence from our local GP surgery, where all is shuttered and barred like the mental institution it used to be a century ago. I read that most GPs aren’t actually trained to give vaccinations, so what exactly are they doing? They don’t appear to be seeing non-covid patients, just phone appointments, so it’s not a good idea to get ill with something serious at the moment. Couldn’t the staff at least send registered local patients an informative email? I used to laugh at ‘far-fetched’ Star Trek episodes depicting scenes like this, but as I gaze yet again out of our window, will life ever return to normal anytime soon? Not as we know it, Jim!
3rd January 2021
A new year is like looking down a long hill, wondering what obstacles I’ll face as I hurtle towards the unknown. When I wrote Pensioners in Paradis in 2017, the idea of living in France was wonderful. All that sunshine and bon appetit living couldn’t go wrong. But then that first whiff of Brexit blew over the Channel. I had a mini epiphany. If I did nothing, as many of our fellow British expats recommended, I’d have hit severe future obstacles which I wouldn’t have had the physical energy to overcome. Fast forward. Was I right to make that reverse journey, the worst, most stressful house move I’ve ever made? Yes! I’m so relieved to be back in England. In our old French village, hardly any English residents now remain. Just this week I read that English banks, credit/debit cards are now off limits to EU residents, making it more expensive and difficult for oldies to access British pensions. So, my new year resolution: go with your gut and ignore what other well-meaning friends and family say. Your best advisor is yourself. Happy New Year!
27th December 2020
In 2016 did you vote Leave or Remain? Since the narrow Leave vote, Boris’s ovenready deal became a slow pressure cooker but finally on Thursday the deed was done. My mind goes back to my youth. Birmingham used to be known as the city of a thousand trades. We had British Leyland employing hordes of locals making Austin, Rover, Morris, Riley, Wolseley and many other British-made cars. Our clothes’ stores stocked woollens made on Lancashire looms, there were huge iron and steel works and prosperous ship building industries. Britain used to be the biggest manufacturer in the world and the most technologically advanced. By the time I was born, home-grown manufacturing made up 50% of the UK economy and exporting was a major industry. But, no longer. Well, a new year and new self-sufficient era dawns on the horizon. Boris now needs to forget ovenready deals and work on bringing back old-style, home-based industries which employ lots of local people in cooperative, innovative ways. That’s the winning recipe for a newly-independent Britain, Boris.
20th December 2020
In a normal year, national excitement would be at fever pitch. But this is not a normal year. TV of yesteryear would be awash with the best ever scheduling, expensive Xmas advertising by the leading stores jingling out at us every few minutes. Not this year. What on earth has happened? A local FB friend called Ray posted this pic on FB, which says it all really. He says we're destroying our lives out of fear of a virus that has an average 0.43% infection fatality rate (Source: BMJ Global Health), those who are frail and with existing co-morbidities being the main casualties of this group. Is he right? Should we carry on with our lives as normal, letting businesses build up the economy, individuals getting vaccinated, going to bed if/when we feel ill and ploughing extra resources into the NHS? I feel sorry for Boris. Damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. Never in the history of mankind have leaders had to deal with such a thing. I still blame China.
13th December 2020
As I wait to be called for the vaccine, every time the phone rings I jump. Will this be it? Don’t know how long it will be as don’t know how many 80 year olds there are in this area. As some of those at the head of the queue suffered anaphylactic shock, the latest idea is for everyone, after having the vaccine, to sit in a secluded room at the back of the surgery for 15 minutes to see if we’ve become more bat-like. On Wednesday, Birmingham will be told whether it can move from its present tier 3 to tier 2. Hope so, as I feel for small businesses who simply can’t continue as it is. To take my mind off things, we walk around our local park, social distancing, and admiring the giant father Xmas and the inventive coloured lights all around. But, could someone tell our neighbours across the road that flashing blue lights were not a good choice. Every evening we think the police are outside waiting to arrest us!
6th December 2020
73 years ago today, when I was born, it was dark. My father was still away in the army so my mother had to bang on the wall to alert our neighbour for help. No NHS then. But today is darker. Growing up, I had the Salk polio treatment on a sugar lump, but I wasn’t the first to take it so long term effects were well known. On Wednesday I’ll be near the top of the queue to be a guinea pig for the new Corona vaccine, where bat poison will be injected into my arm. Unlike the Salk treatment, no-one yet knows the long-term effects. Some say it might affect our individual DNA! I look outside. A dark hooded shape sidles past our window, face muffled, eyes downcast. I almost expect to see Boris at the end of our road, tolling a bell as he calls out ‘Bring out your dead’. I shake my head and think of medical students. The first thing that’s drummed into them is ‘Do no harm’. They, like me, will have to take everything on trust. Today is supposed to be a happy day but....
29th November 2020
As Birmingham enters the highest Covid tier on Wednesday, there are two schools of thought on the crisis. Whilst one Cabinet minister claims the NHS could be “physically overwhelmed..with every bed, every ward occupied”, others say that, in fact, the Nightingale hospitals remain empty. The general public are increasingly angry. Some say “what’s the point of hiding in a cave for months, as the lion will still be waiting outside ready to attack the minute we emerge again”. Meanwhile, business owners, ranging from Sir Philip Green to every corner shop, see their lives collapsing like a pack of cards. And oldies like me reflect on how we all, as kids, were urged in the ‘50s to build up our own internal immunity by confronting viruses, not by hiding away. When a child caught something, we all went to a ‘sickness party’ to catch it once, then be forever protected. You can’t keep disinfecting the whole world, whilst the economy on which we all need to survive collapses around us. Let’s hope the vaccine side effects aren’t worse than the cure.
