KYQ4: Day 14 of Lockdown: Certainty in the age of Uncertainty

Room with a view

In a year or so, we will hopefully be able to reflect back on the year when life as we know it was put on pause by COVID-19. The daily routine of lockdown is juxtaposed against the uncertainty of when will we exit this imprisonment and what will life be like outside of lockdown.

What did we do and how did we cope after the government introduced lockdown and asked people to stay at home? We are lucky in many ways being retired with a pension, a house with a garden and the opportunity to walk, run and cycle in the nearby countryside. So what do you do in lockdown?

In the last 19 days since imposing my personal lockdown, I have only made three trips out. Twice for the weekly shop at Sainsbury's, which is well organised, well-stocked and the staff discretely distanced. Last Friday the queue for the older generation slot at 8am stretched three hundred metres around the block. The man in front of me in the queue was playing Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty on his phone. It took me back to 1977 when uncertainty was the elixir of life, the saxophone of Baker Street provided the soundtrack of a sun-kissed day as we tacked down the Sound of Mull to Tobermory and then to Skye on a friend's yacht. I have also made a trip to the local pharmacy, which I combined with a walk-up Lime Craig, a local hill that is still accessible by village footpaths, although not from any car parks, which have been taped off with warning notices against walking. I have been out cycling twice and spent a day clearing mud from one of the local paths as part of a village initiative. The rest of the time has been spent in the house and garden.

The 6th of April dawned bright but cold, the sounds and view from the bedroom with an opened window to the garden lifted the spirits as they always do. The pheasants were crowing. the crows were cawing, the geese in the garden across the burn were honking and the blue tits were trilling. The Campsie hills were sharply defined against the blue skies and the trees were beginning to display a green hue as buds and leaves came into play.

We listened to the Today programme on the radio. Martha Kearney is a reassuring voice who usually brings out the best of her interviewees but she was broadcasting from home today and poor reception meant she lost her natural spontaneity. The Queen had delivered only the fifth speech to the nation of her 67 years on the throne. She had reprised Vera Lynn's famous phrase "We'll meet again" and according to the BBC, it was a pitch-perfect speech to her subjects. The Prime Minister had been taken to St Thomas's hospital for tests and the Chief Medical Officer in Scotland had had to resign after making two trips to her second home in Fife despite being the voice of public broadcasting announcements urging people to 'stay at home'. The election of Keir Starmer as the leader of the Labour Party received little coverage although it might turn out to be the most significant event in today's news.

I went down for breakfast and after a bowl of muesli with blueberries and yoghurt, I opened a jar of blackcurrant jam as a treat to spread on some toast. Tony Blair came on the radio, primarily to make a plea for extensive testing so that there could be detailed planning for a safe exit from the lockdown and opening up some parts of the economy. Despite the fact that his reputation was shredded by the media and his own party after the Iraq war, he still sounds a lot smarter and more focused than any of his four successors.

Clouds had gathered and there was a fierce wind that discouraged venturing out. I have been scanning my old slide photographs and storing them on the computer and cloud since the start of the year. It generally takes about an hour to scan a box of slides and adjust the photos. Today, I scanned in two boxes from 1996 when we had a family holiday in the States. We had visited New York for five days before flying to San Francisco and then driving to Monterey, Yosemite, Mono Lake, Ridgecrest (the earthquake capital of the States), Santa Barbara, Hollywood, Palm Springs, Joshua Tree NP and Disneyland. I scanned in a box of slides from New York and one from Yosemite. Reprising these happy days was the perfect antidote to the dark days of Covid

The Yosemite slides provided a wonderful memory of one of my favourite days of my life. We had stayed in a tent cabin in Curry Village for a couple of days with the bears prowling around at night. On a perfect July day, we hiked up the Half Dome, cautiously passing three brown bears on the ascent. The scenery was awe-inspiring with the waterfalls, forests and wildlife all in their early summer pomp. We made the summit with our three offspring aged 12, 14, and 16. They had a head for heights, which was as well when you look at the climb up the wires in the photo. We spent 15 minutes sitting on the summit, gasping at the beauty of Yosemite Valley.

A Scan of the Half Dome ascent

At lunchtime we watched the BBC One o'clock news and had some pasta before heading out to the garden, The daffodils had finally come out and the lawn needed its first cut. The fifteen-year-old mower started on the first pull and I cut half of the front lawn before clearing some ground that had been used for builders debris. I filled a couple of barrowloads with stone, bricks and clods of clay and emptied them into a large deep hole in the adjacent field that had been left open by the drainage contractor who was no longer on site owing to the lockdown. I raked over a patch of ground and then placed a couple of large boulders at the start of a path that I had been constructing down to the burn at the side of the house. It is heavy work and I brought in a couple of barrowloads of builders sand to set the stones into. A parcel had arrived in the morning with some raspberry canes so the next job was to dig out a trench in the stony ground so that I could prepare it for the canes.

Aileen had come out and decided to attack the rubbish at the other side of the burn. It has been used as an unofficial dumping ground for garden rubbish, plastic bags and quite a few household appliances. She found a Stirling Council notice amidst the rubbish, it was a warning against tipping rubbish with a possible £40k fine for tipping. I put it aside and will affix it to a fence post and reinstate it. We took an overflowing barrowload of the said rubbish and put it in one of the spare brown bins. There are no collections of garden rubbish at present but I will transfer it bit by bit to the grey bins for general rubbish over the next few weeks.

Daffodils are late this year

The mowing season begins

Clearing stones and digging for victory

I finished cutting the lawn, it was almost 6pm before I went inside for a cup of tea and to catch up on the news. It is a fairly routine set of items by now. How many new cases of Covid-19, the number of deaths and then the same for Italy and Spain followed by questions about why testing is so slow and PPE provision is not getting through to NHS and care homes. Unusually President Trump had made no fact-defying statements today so all we had was him wishing a quick recovery for his "good friend and a strong man" Boris Johnson.

We had a salad and pizza as we watched Channel 4 News. Matt Fry displayed his usual impeccable interviewing style and Kieran Jenkins had a sharp piece of investigative journalism on the lack of support for the Scottish care homes where there had been outbreaks of the virus and many deaths amongst residents and staff. There had been no deliveries of PPE or testing, and the care sector does not have the status or clout of the NHS, which had made much noise about the failure to deliver these items to the hospitals or community health facilities. As a result, they had obtained the priority in procuring the limited supply. This had Nicola Sturgeon on the back foot, the government have never recognised the vital role of care in the community despite numerous reports over the past thirty years. It has been subject to competitive tendering, low pay, loose regulation and a blind eye by the government. This was an inevitable outcome and whilst the first minister has generally handled the crisis well, this was a major catastrophe and coupled with the forced resignation of her Chief Medical Officer it had not been a good day for the Scottish Government.

I had put my camera on charge earlier in the day and there was a wonderful late evening sun so I went out at 7:30pm to see if I could get a shot of the oystercatcher that is nesting nearby. I disturbed it sitting on three eggs in a hollow in a pile of earth that had been excavated by the farmer/developer of the site. He was cocooned in his tractor spreading fertilizer on crops in a nearby field. Farmers seem to be carrying on as normal. As I returned to the house, the moon was sitting above the ash trees where about a dozen crows had their nests. There was a fine sunset and Ben Ledi loomed over us, it is now beyond bounds with the lockdown but tempting nevertheless.

I transferred the photos to the computer and as I wrote this blog, the news emerged that the Prime Minister had been transferred to intensive care. But fear not, Dominic Rab and Matt Hancock would be able to steer us through the fight against COVID-19. At a time of national crisis, words of sympathy came from all sides and only President Trump's offer to send over some companies with a wonder drug that he had seen on Fox News brought any discord. The drugs had not been properly tested and had been cautioned against by Trump's senior health adviser. I sent some old photos from 1957 to my cousin in Australia, who contacted me a couple of days ago, I had not seen her since 1994 and she was housebound as a result of her health problems.

I stayed up until 11:30pm reading and thinking about our granddaughter's 7th birthday tomorrow. The grandchildren had been intending to spend the week with us but the little people have become mere images on FaceTime during the lockdown.