18 May (Part 3) - Beware of the spike
Did you rush to the pub yesterday? Me neither. Boris giving me permission to carefully hug one’s nearest and dearest,
enter a neighbour’s house or cross the threshold of a café will make zero
difference to my life and I suspect many others and as such it is not likely to provoke a spike in infections.
I am not one for breaking the law. I don’t go way over speed limits however
idiotic they may be and I have never dropped litter whether a vulture is
watching or not. I still wear a mask in shops, albeit it is one of the pair
Danny Hackett gave me more than a year ago. One broke almost immediately but it
was replaced by another friend. I am legal but I doubt I am saving anyone.
My suspicion is that the reason there will be no spike is because most people I
know have been meeting up inside when necessary for the past month or two.
Without extending to cousins once removed etc. there are only eight households in my family circle
and I know for a fact that they have all been careful but maybe not entirely lawfully.
What is one to do when a friend and his wife turns up at your door on a rainy
day and suggests that a cup of tea might be nice or you arrange a barbecue with
just one neighbour and it pours with rain?
Probably people have largely stopped reading up on the rules having realised
that too many of them are simply illogical.
Another friend has been telling me how he is keen to see someone who has not been well
but patiently waited until this week to visit because of the rules. I didn’t like to tell
him that his plans involve four people from three households so he is breaking the law.
On the other hand I have been invited to meet up with some aeroplane
enthusiasts (because of my memories of Farnborough) in a café somewhere South of Croydon. Apparently it is
perfectly OK for us to ignore social distancing and sit together as long as we are waited on and wear a mask
if any one of us gets up to go to the loo.
I’m told it is legal but whether it is or not I am going anyway. But you cannot do the same thing in a house.
At the end of the week I will see my granddaughter for the first time since September.
Her Welsh Aunty and Uncle will be there too. We will have to take it in turns to
go inside. Unless Welsh rules are different of course. The Easter Eggs are
packed!
I had been due to go to a rugby match on 29th. Just a small club with a stand
that might take a thousand at most. The local authority has said it cannot be
used and everyone must spread themselves around the pitch boundary. Stuff that.
Standing next to strangers slopping beer is a discomfort too far.
Don’t tell me that most of the rules are not nonsense.