Spring is delayed here it seems

I wish I had a lot to report but in reality like many life is still somewhat constrained by Covid19. Here in the UK rates are pretty low at the moment for most of the country, some areas do have concerning rates of infection. Where I live we were at about 8 cases per hundred thousand, this then doubled to about 16 before dropping back again. So vigilance is still needed but there are signs that for the summer the population can return to more normal patterns of socialisation and join work, shopping and schooling in this. An announcement about whether people will be allowed to go on holiday from mid May or not is being made later today.

All this is for the general population, for the extremely vulnerable we still have the contradictory advice from the government, which is vaguely saying you can do more but giving no real indication about what is safe and what isn’t. Whilst the NHS website and the professionals within it are pretty clear it is not safe to relax much and that care and caution is still needed. For example the government website totally skips talking about eating and drinking out, whereas the NHS website says DON’T consume food or drink made by people outside your household or support bubble, I didn’t realise this about 10 days ago when I had lunch out with parents because I had only looked at the gov UK website not the NHS one. A friend who is also shielding has not felt safe to even get a take away drink out, which is in line with the NHS advice. So if this leaves me, a retired health professional, potentially wondering which advice I should follow, where does it leave people with no experience of working in health care. BTW I am not wondering which advice to follow, I will follow the NHS advice rather than the muddled advice put out by Hancock and Johnson.

On a more positive note, my fatigue seems to be going through a period of abatement or I am getting better and not overdoing it. I am getting out for walks, Nordic Walks fairly regularly. I caught up with 3 of the Nordic walking group this week and realised that this was the first time since last year that I was walking/seeing more than one or two people at a time. It felt odd to be doing so, but was also very welcome to be doing so. Other positives, well whilst the weather has been fairly cold it hasn’t rained much but when it does is normally at night, which according to a gardening friend is very much needed. It seems our dry spell might soon be ending with a week or so of cloudy wet weather predicted, April showers it seems are arriving a month late. Other news, well I have been given provisional dates for the next HOPE group I will be facilitating, which should be finalised next week and hopefully I will be doing this from the end of May through June.

As it looked like I wouldn’t be going away to Turkey during May and June as usual, prior to being asked if I was available to help with the group I had decided to spend the money on some new speakers for my hi-fi and I am really enjoying listening to them and hearing bit within well known music I had not heard or at least noticed before. During my 20s I never really watched TV and listened to music most of the time, covid19 and lock downs have returned me to this. During my post cancer period I listened to a lot of Radio 4 in the day and watched a few documentaries during the day or TV plus a few Place in the Sun shows if the country and type of property being viewed interested me. Now it is R6 or playing my own music that I am doing most of the day. Some of it of course is accompanying me as I do stuff but increasingly more time is being spent focused on the music, as it was in the past.

Well, I guess I should be heading towards ending this entry. I do I wonder if anyone will be reading it, since I stopped posting a link on FB my readership has collapsed to near zero most weeks. So if you have read this, you could be in a very exclusive club. I still have posted on FB and since I last wrote about this here I think one or two people have contacted me about this, which definitely confirms my suspicion all my activity on FB was background noise to people and that for most is has not been missed slightest and probably not even noticed. Along side this my dry January has become a dry first third of the year. Life continues to be mostly good for me and I feel very fortunate for this and I am still looking out for the good bits to notice and enjoy.