Today has been an unusual kind of day. When I looked at the weather forecast, it seems that the West Midlands was about the coldest place in the country with an overnight temperature of -5 degrees but Meg and I were warm enough even in our downstairs bedroom. I got up this morning just after 6.00am and prepared for the workers to arrive some time after 8.00am but as so often happens these days, things changed at the last moment. The young Asian carer turned up rather than the scheduled carer but the other one was due to arrive later. In the meantime, I helped the young Asian carer but he was feeling below par so got him a Flue and Cold Relief preparation to make him feel better. I also gave him a supply of several of these sachets so that he could dose himself up later - I think he is intending to take one day off to help him recover from these cold and flue symptoms to minimise the amount of time he has to take off work. I had also prepared quite a large saucepanful of porridge which I was going to offer to the workers the minute they arrived. In the event, this offer was declined so Meg and I had it ourselves. In the meanwhile, the young Asian carer was substituted so that he stay on and do 'the sit' whilst I went off to do the normal Thursday shopping. I had already two of the anti-anxiety pills so that Meg would be a bit more stable but they did not appear to work so I had to try something different. We started off with YouTube and some sitar music (as I wanted to remind Meg of how she had gone to see Ravi Shankar perform, if my memory serves me correctly, when she went off with a flatmate to see perform in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1965. This seemed to perk Meg up a bit and then I resurrected a Joan Baez concert available on YouTube and Meg seemed to be enjoying this so I decided to go off and do the shopping. I raced around the shop as fast as I possibly could, thinking that it was quite likely that Meg was having an agitated session. I popped into Morrison's to pick up a copy of 'The Times' but none were available. Having done the shopping, I called in at Waitrose on the way home and, again, it looked as the newspaper had not printed that day. But when I got home, the young carer informed me that Meg and he had experienced quite a jolly time and there was also a certain amount of singing along with the music. This was a great relief to me so I unpacked the shopping and then started to think about lunch. We dined on the last bit of the roast chicken left over from the weekend and complemented with a roast potato and some broccoli. Having eaten my dinner, though, I actually fell fast asleep and was awakened only by the carers coming into do Meg's (delayed) lunchtime call, after which I reheated Meg's dinner in the microwave and fed it to her. This afternoon, after a quick FaceTime call with our son (who is still suffering from his severe bronchitis), I got Meg in front of the TV to watch the second half of 'Don Giovanni' which seemed to be proceeding satisfactorily up the point at which the program 'freezes' This happens quite a lot with YouTube presentations and I have a theory it is a buffering problem so Meg and I needed to find something else to watch which happened the be the concluding part of the programme on Immigration broadcast on Monday evening.
After Meg is in bed this evening, I hope to bring into use a smart speaker I have just impulsed purchased from Amazon. I was tempted into this purchase because there was a 'Black Friday' offer where a good model of Amazon's own smart speaker was heavily discounted. I worked out that I had saved about two thirds of the cost anyway by not having coffee with Meg in Waitrose over the last few days whilst the weather has been so poor. I will need a certain amount of uninterrupted time to bring this into operation but in the meantime I have been reliant upon falling to sleep with the strains of Brahms 'A German Requiem' playing on my old iPhone which still has YouTube access.
What with the Post Office scandal enquiry and the American election, I think we had all rather forgotten about the COVID enquiry which is now taking evidence again. Today it was the turn of Matt Hancock the Health Secretary in the early days of the pandemic who was on our screens practically daily. Mat Hancock had to resign, of course, because he was seen as embracing his new found love ('bit on the side')in clear contravention of all of the rules on social distancing. Matt Hancock's evidence to the COVID enquiry was interesting because there were multiple facets of the decisions he was making at the time that are now worthy of examination. I suspect he knew he would be subject to a fair degree of hostile questioning and therefore probably decided to make a concession early on in his evidence try to allay further lines of criticism. The concession given today was that in the difficult circumstances of how many would be allowed at funerals and what degree of contact could be had between mourners, the ex Secretary of State for Health admitted that the guidance had probably been drawn up too severely. This will be of no comfort to the hundreds if not thousands who lost family members and loved ones during the pandemic and could not give them a proper farewell. I do remember when Meg and I used to walk down the Kidderminster Road every day seeing on more than occasion tearful relatives as an elderly person was bundled into the back of an ambulance as the relatives probably knew they would never see their family member again. Hancock also admitted that the UK came 'within hours' of running out of hospital gowns and of the course the supply of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) on fast-track applications handed out to those with known Tory Party links is a national scandal in its own right. I doubt any of the mis-spent monies were ever reclaimed and certainly none of the 'dodgy' suppliers were ever prosecuted but that is just one of the many scandals surroundings UK's response to the pandemic as a whole.
© Mike Hart [2024]