Corona Diary Part 6. Saturday April 25th to Monday May 4th

Saturday April 25^th

Cold wind, some sunshine.  Not as ABD as previously but the sun will come through we are told.

Shortish walk on Parkstone Golf Course this morning.  Large numbers of families with small children, which I guess represents the demographic of the surrounding roads.  Most people are behaving responsibly.  There are signs asking people not to go in the bunkers (traps), but some children are still enjoying these ‘sand pits’.  I was a bit concerned to see one little girl carrying her bucket and spade!

Quiet day but lovely evening meal of roast Welsh lamb, finished off on the barbecue, and first break into wine that we’ve cellared for about 13 years – Ch. Calon Ségur 2005.  No point in dying with a full cellar as somebody in the e-wine tasting club said.

The film club reconvened and watched Twelfth Night, in the YouTube streamed National Theatre live production that we had seen some time before, with Tamsin Greig playing ‘Malvolia’.  I enjoyed it, almost as much as the last time we saw it, but happy memories of Cherie Lunghi playing Viola in about 1979 still supervene.

Sunday April 26^th

ABD.

The Andrew Marr show is one of the few political analysis shows that remains worth watching.  The usual politico-speak from the Labour spokesperson, from the Scottish First minister, and from Dominic Raab for the Tories – I’d give him a B plus for that performance, or perhaps A minus if feeling kind.  Usual harangues about lockdown, PPE etc.  But the most interesting interview was with a German minister who is apparently soon to be the German Ambassador to London.  Very articulate and surprisingly honest.  When asked why the German mortality figures were so much better than the rest of Europe he stated that they were able to ramp up testing very quickly, to contain fairly effectively, but he also honestly stated that some of it was due to luck.  The first infected cohort was in a young healthy group in a localised area and they got on top of it very quickly.  I’m paraphrasing here, but he did say that if you make a mistake scientifically, backtrack, then change the strategy, in scientific terms that’s progress, but in political terms it’s failure.  Very astute.  A Swedish minister (where lockdown is not rigorous lockdown) was challenged that the Swedish death toll is approximately three times as many per million as neighbouring Norway and Finland, but countered by saying that their scientists feel that there is some degree of herd immunity.  Of course we do not know this for sure.  A recent figure for population ‘immunity’ from Italy has put it at only 6%, which will certainly not be enough to contain the disease after lockdown is eased.  Writing in the Telegraph today, one scientist has said that ‘population epidemiological modelling’ which we have heard so much about is not that different from crystal ball gazing.

It is possible to watch, listen to, or read Corona news all the time, so it’s time for a little Bach (that’s an amusing joke if you’re Welsh), and then out to the garden for reading.  Just finished ‘The World of Cycling According to G’, about Geraint Thomas.  Very enjoyable, especially if you’re addicted to Le Tour.  Ghost written of course, but nonetheless, of its ilk, very good.  Enjoyed it more than Burma ’44.

Monday April 28^th

ABD (though rain is forecast for tomorrow)

The PM makes a speech outside 10 Downing Street this morning, emphasizing that lockdown is not over and that we are at a critical stage.  Photos of huge numbers of cars on major motorways suggest that people are beginning to vote with their feet, or perhaps their ignition keys.  WhatsApp conversation with my daughter last night; she’s checking whether I’m properly isolating.  I can sense from her tone that she’s a little chary of my daily trip to get the newspaper.

Pleased to see a tweet from Professor Charles Swanton emphasizing my point about asymptomatic person testing.  He’s referenced several other papers apart from the NEJM one that I quoted.  See @CharlesSwanton.  Spend a dirty hour cleaning the computer, which is beginning to make odd noises in the fan.  A vital lifeline for almost everybody.

No film club last night but the penultimate episode of ‘The Crown’.  What a terrible decision to send Prince Charles to Gordonstoun.  Physical challenges are not necessarily the way to build character.  The cold shower scene reminded me of that famous scene in ‘If’ with Malcolm McDowell.  Generations of Royals have gone there however.  One’s left with the impression that Princess Anne (toughie) should have gone there and Charles (sensitive) should have gone to Benenden!  (Neither would have been possible at that time, of course).

Today is the last day of good weather for the week, so we are told.  Tidy up the garden and mow the lawn.

One could spend the entire day watching Corona Coverage on the TV, and it is difficult to resist the urge not to.  I’ve made a start on a book I have intended to read for many years – Sunset Song, by Lewis Grassic Gibbon.  Stated by James Naughtie (radio interviewer; Scottish) to be one of the finest Scottish novels of the 20^th Century.  I saw the TV adaptation on public television – possibly Alistair Cook’s ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ in North Carolina in the early 80s.  Main problem with the book is the substantial use of Scottish dialect.  Tough going.

Catching up with newspaper articles I came across a Simon Heffer tribute to George Butterworth, the composer who died, aged only 31, at the Battle of the Somme.    I suspect that for many people, Heffer is a bit like Marmite, but he certainly writes well.  He laments that Butterworth is more celebrated in France than in the UK.  There is a moving documentary about him on DVD called ‘All my Life’s Buried Here.’  The ‘film was crowdfunded, a brilliant enterprise and noble of those who supported it.  It is scandalous that no major broadcasting network commissioned it and put its resources behind it; presumably because of its lack of diversity, or because it requires some intelligence to appreciate its profundity, or because it did not offer an opportunity for Dr Lucy Worsley to dress up.’  A fairly typical, but enjoyably waspish Hefferism.

This morning was notable for a brief address by a returned Boris Johnson outside 10 Downing Street.

I was sad to read in the press an account of two identical twin sisters in their thirties, one a nurse, dying with a day of each other from Covid-19.  In rarity terms that should be a less than 1:10,000 event which suggests very strongly that genetic factors are involved in adverse responses to coronavirus.

Tuesday April 28^th

Woken at 2am by the patter of raindrops on the windows.  Perhaps a relief, and at least some people will be deterred from loitering outside.

360 deaths were reported yesterday for UK hospitals, a substantial fall, though caveats about the weekend reporting exist.  Nonetheless this is the lowest figure reported since March 30^th.

Some amusement amid the gloom: President Trump made some throwaway comment about disinfectants treating the virus, and extraordinary to relate, but some Americans have taken him at his word and ingested bleach or other cleaning agents.  A spoof New England Journal Paper reports on ‘Use of Commercial Disinfectants to Treat Novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) through Oral Administration or Subdermal Injection.’ – the conclusion – ‘This will kill you.  Don’t do it.’  Trapper John, MD, is recorded as one of the authors…

Last night was our last night of The Crown.  After a possible entanglement with the Profumo scandal, the Duke of Edinburgh, while not emerging as squeaky clean, has a reconciliation with Elisabeth as their 4^th child is born.  Sad that this series did not move further forward with Clare Foy, but it was excellent.

Wednesday April 29^th

Overcast with some significant rain in the morning.  A useful day for getting on with enjoying reading, playing guitar (working on a new arrangement of Pachelbel’s Canon), and sundry other indoor jobs.

Deaths predictably spiked upwards yesterday, 586 deaths reported; the post-weekend spike.  A remarkable milestone reached in the USA yesterday – 58,000 dead; more than in the 20 years of the Vietnam war; and all in just two months.

Given the focus on coronavirus, it’s surprising that fewer journalists or commentators haven’t asked the question, ‘Why viruses?’  Why do they exist?  What evolutionary advantage can they have to continue to survive?  These are big questions!  I heard a Radio 4 programme yesterday with an American scientist, currently working at Oxford, saying that he had always been interested in ‘The Big Questions.’  The Big Question he is working on and was attempting to explain was ‘String Theory.’  Unfortunately, I was no nearer understanding it after the programme.  But the viruses question is an interesting one.  Rather than expand on this let me give you the web reference of a good article, taken from Nature Education in 2014:

https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-origins-of-viruses-14398218/

(The bottom line is that nobody is sure).

The mention of the USA reminds me to tell of a feature the Telegraph have been running for a little while, ‘My Splendid Isolation’, where the rich and famous tell of how they are coping with the lockdown.  This has often been a forum for celebrities to try to make us jealous (e.g. ‘I jogged around the garden perimeter yesterday, 5Km, thirty minutes…’  or, ‘So far, I’ve read War and Peace and À La Recherche du Temps Perdu’, and I’m now working on my novel.)  But yesterday was refreshingly honest and down to earth.  The writer was David Crosby (of Crosby, Stills & Nash fame).  The headings they are given include ‘What I’m Watching’; ‘What I’m Listening To’; ‘What I’m Reading’; ‘A Hobby I’ve Taken Up’; ‘The Things That Made Me Laugh This Week’; and ‘What I Can’t Wait To Do Once This Is Over’.  Here are Crosby’s latter entries:

‘A Hobby I’ve Taken Up’.  ‘I’m taking great pleasure in ordinary stuff: feeding the dogs, doing chores.  In the evenings, I do what I’ve always done – I smoke pot and take my guitar off the wall and get hung up playing and writing words and music.  I still love it.  It’s hard for musicians, we are all out of work.  There’s no money in records any more and streaming really doesn’t pay enough to live on.  Most of us are living pay cheque to pay cheque and tour to tour.  All of the musicians I know are in trouble.  I just hope I don’t lose everything before I can go back to work.’

‘The Thing That Made Me Laugh This Week’.  ‘If you watch the president’s White House briefings, you have to laugh or you’d cry.  The response to the pandemic in the US has been completely misdirected, mishandled and misguided.  It’s like riding in a bus with a drunk driver.’

‘What I Can’t Wait To Do Once This Is Over’.  ‘Vote the president out of office.’

Refreshing.

Last night was our book club evening.  This is all male (93% of book clubs are female as mentioned before).  It starts at 8pm.  The menu is cheese, wine, and discussion.  Last night’s was held by Zoom conferencing.  Glasses of red wine were brandished in front of webcams,  Chaps chomped on cheeses.  Mean score for Burma ’44 was 6.2.  Our one barrister member chooses next and it will be ‘Restoration’ by Rose Tremain.  I have read ‘Music and Silence’ by RT, largely because as a guitarist I greatly admire John Dowland.  I can’t remember it very well, but I think as well as the lute strings being plucked there was other plucking going on as well.  A bodice ripper set in Denmark…  We’ll see what ‘Restoration’ brings.  Lindsay acquired it for less than £3 on Ebay.

Two contrasting stories: deaths were up again – 909 – but it’s hard to compare because deaths are now being reported out of hospital as well.  Allegedly the 7 day moving average is coming down – at least for hospital deaths which is the most accurate.  Second story is the birth of a son to Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds.  Laura Kuenssberg could not resist pointing out that Boris already has 5 children…  though she refrained from detailing by how many different women.

Thursday April 30^th

Heavy rain first thing and through the night.  Strange to relate nothing much to report.  What on earth happened today?  The afternoon was taken up with a Governors’ briefing from the hospital, with very poor sound quality.  Lockdown Zoom and WhatsApp aperitifs with two sets of friends, one at 6pm and one at 7pm.  After supper we start in on episode 1 of ‘Victoria.’  Our knowledge of 19^th Century history is not as good as that for the latter half of the 20^th Century, and I think we have to gen up on some of the background for tomorrow night’s episode.  Prime Minister’s briefing today was held by Boris Johnson, for the first time since he became ill.

Friday May 1^st

Sunshine and showers.  Yesterday was the deadline for the target of 100,000 coronavirus tests per day set by the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, who has cut a rather beleaguered figure over this last month.  Most scientists, epidemiologists and statisticians have emphasized that this number in itself is a red herring.  What we need is a new strategy to enable us to designate people virus free – and then re-test to ensure that they stay that way – if we are ever going to be able to get out of lockdown.

I view lockdown and social distancing as a little bit like the nuclear fission that occurs in an atom bomb.  Under neutron bombardment, Uranium 235 emits three further neutrons.  If the next atom of Uranium 235 is close enough, those neutrons can sustain the reaction leading to the infamous chain reaction of a nuclear bomb.  In Covid-19 infections, this would correspond to an R₀ of 3.  Increasing the distance between atoms (infected patients) automatically reduces the likelihood of the chain reaction (or further infection).  The analogy with Covid-19 is that if we can identify the atoms of Uranium 235, we can isolate them and prevent the destructive effect of their further interaction with other atoms.

Struggled with ‘Sunset Song’ (Lewis Grassic Gibbon).  Life in Scotland in the 1920s and 30s must have been awful.  A quiet day with a walk over Meyrick Park golf course.

Saturday May 2^nd

The lockdown scenario has, for reasons uncertain, changed my sleep pattern.  I wake at all sorts of times, usually with dramatic dreams.  Then I may get up, read the paper, do crosswords, play patience, make cocoa, write, play the guitar.  I find that I sleep well from 6am, for a further hour, two, or three.

Today is our 22^nd wedding anniversary.  During the night I created a card for Lindsay, utilising, of course, a rainbow.  Started in on the jigsaw of ‘Convergence, 1952’ by Jackson Pollock.  Almost impossible.  Walk in the sunshine this afternoon.

Announcement today that Boris Johnson’s new son is to be called ‘Wilfred Lawrie Nicholas’.  The ‘Nicholas’ is a tribute to the doctors who looked after him during his recent hospital admission, both called Nicholas.

There is much debate in the press and other media about lockdown exit strategies.  The Government has fixed on a 5 criterion requirement; though it seems to me that there is no dichotomous variable within these, and some are mutually interdependent so they are not really separate criteria.  Irrespective of these, no real clues have been given about how to achieve relaxation of the current rules.  Will we have adequate testing regimes to allow more interaction?  In Germany, Bundesliga football will start with regular required testing of players and isolation in approved team hotels with delivery of approved meals, etc.

A 73 year old friend messaged me last night.  He has a past history of coronary artery disease.  He experienced 1 hour of chest tightness, sweatiness, and belching.  He didn’t want to trouble anyone.  He thought it might be indigestion.  I asked him, ‘Do you usually suffer from indigestion.’  The answer was ‘No’.  I told him that the first thing we teach junior doctors or GPs, if they are tempted to diagnose indigestion, was to ask that question.  I told him to ring 999.  He had an acute coronary syndrome.  He nearly became a Covid-19 collateral statistic.

A friend whom I used to play in a band with – the short lived and not particularly good ‘New Rhythm and Folk Group’, moved on to found the ‘Kamikaze Reunion Blues Band’.  After Nine-Eleven they shortened the name and removed the ‘Reunion’.  He hasn’t been in touch for a while, but sent me a link to a documentary about a guitar hero of mine – a very strange individual called John Fahey.  Fahey pioneered American Primitive guitar playing, its influence coming from Charley Patton and other simple Delta bluesmen.  I play a version of one of his tracks, ‘The Last Steam Engine Train’ from an album entitled ‘The Dance of Death and other Plantation Favourites.’  Influence of over 50 years ago…

Sunday May 3^rd

Fair weather.  Slight morning drizzle.  Dull afternoon and by the time we walk along the beach at 6.30pm the sea mist has come in and obscured everything.  There are therefore few people around.  Dinner is a chicken and ham bake with layered potatoes and some Gigondas, an area of France where we had hoped to be cycling just at this moment.

The day is passed with a) Sunday newspaper, b) the infernal jigsaw, c) the Sunset Song.  After just a few chapters of this I realise we shouldn’t complain too much about 2020.

More ‘Victoria’ in the evening.  At last, Prince Albert is on the scene.

Deaths reported in the last 24 hours 315.  Admittedly a weekend figure, but the lowest since 29^th March.  Test, track, and trace is to be trialled first in the Isle of Wight.  An Amazon drone delivery has also been tested between the mainland and the Isle of Wight.

Monday May 4^th

Overcast morphing into beautiful sunshine.  I have to confess that I should have mentioned a very remarkable man earlier in my diary.  Captain Tom Moore (now honorary Colonel) is a centenarian who, some weeks ago, with the assistance of his daughter, decided to walk 100 laps of his garden for his 100^th birthday and raise money for NHS charities.  This was a tough effort requiring a zimmer frame, and it also seems to be quite a large garden.  The target was £1000.  His daughter is clearly quite an operator and managed to attract the media’s attention, particularly BBC News.  As Tom’s 100^th birthday on 30^th April approached, the donations went up and up, eventually topping £30 million pounds!  On April 30^th, as he completed his walk, this Burma veteran received a guard of honour from his old regiment, an honorary promotion in rank, and a fly-past from a Hurricane and a Spitfire.  What a story!

Over the weekend, four prototype facemasks arrived from a friend who is a superb seamstress.  Detailed comments and feedback are required.  They seem to be fine to wear during ordinary activity, but during a brisk walk they quickly become saturated and wet.  It seems likely that face covering will be mandatory during lockdown however.

Two friends have posted (one on Facebook; another in WhatsApp) a waspish letter that could only have come from the Guardian, Britain’s left leaning broadsheet.  Broadsheet is a term for a higher literary quality newspaper in the UK.  It relates to poor Matt Hancock’s pledge to achieve 100,000 tests for Covid-19 by end April.  The correspondent says that as a teacher he has achieved his goal by at least sending out tests to all his pupils.  They haven’t been returned and he has no idea how accurate the results might be.  He states that if his pupils have cheated it is not a matter of life and death – ‘except if my pupils grow up and become Conservative politicians’.  Even if you are a socialist, Mr John Broughton of Calver, Derbyshire, I would just gently suggest that your letter might be more generally applicable if you were to take out the word ‘Conservative’?

Fewer deaths announced today (again); 288, lowest since March 27^th.  Weekend effect noted of course.  No clear answers from briefing on the degree to which the infamous ‘5 Targets’ need to be met.  My guess is that Boris is getting us ramped up for a big announcement on lockdown easing towards the end of this week.  More to come in the next exciting episode!

And one Good piece of news; Roche diagnostics have an accurate antibody test, likely to complete evaluation very soon.

And a few pictures of the English springtime, which is burgeoning about us:

Viburnum, Bournemouth Gardens

Deutzia, Bournemouth Gardens

Broom, Talbot Heath

Talbot Heath buttercups

Alliums and Tulips

Triccolini tomatoes in our own Wild Garlic pesto - and a wine from where we should be cycling at this moment

Starters for Wedding Anniversary Supper