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Day 2 – Snow and Disappointment [L2]

We had snow and ice overnight, although by the time we’d noticed it the rain had turned it into slush. I think that’s a sort of metaphor for 2021 so far, the promise of something good that doesn’t quite turn out to be as pleasant as we might have hope for! It would be nice to have a couple of proper snow days though, it would redeem the winter.

Snow on a car windscreen 6th January 2021 (Photo: James Kemp)

I took a couple of pictures on the way to school with Lucy this morning. There was evidence of a strong snowfall on the grass and the cars. It looked like there was an inch, or maybe more, of snow. The rain had removed it all from the ground though.

Creative Writing

I finished off a short story for the Write Club Surrey January session. The Mother’s Dream is a creation myth for the world I built for Fierce, the fantasy novel I finished in November 2020.The world starts off in ice and darkness, and warms up as it is populated and the movement of things heats it with friction. Eventually one of the goddesses sets a small sun going.

Repairs

Some of the innards of our Kenwood Chef Titanium, including the burnt out controller on the bottom left. (Photo: James Kemp)

Somewhat mysteriously the Kenwood Chef stopped working a few days ago. I used it on New Year’s Day, and the next time I tried to use it nothing happened when I turned it on. So I watched a YouTube video on how to disassemble it. Having done so, along with some general web searching, I identified that the controller was burnt out. Very literally, you can see the carbon scoring in the picture.So we found a replacement part. It looked like an easy fix given the modular nature of the components.

The burnt out circuit board for the controller, you can see the carbon on the yellow component and the metal plate on the left. (Photo: James Kemp)

Unfortunately in trying to find a better price for it I managed to get slightly side tracked. The link I ended up on looked like it was the same one, but turned out to be for a slightly different model of Kenwood Chef. So when I had it all apart to fit the replacement I discovered that it didn’t fit. So it’s all packed up to be returned, and we need to wait longer for the replacement to arrive.

Food – National Shortbread Day

According to Lucy today is National Shortbread Day. I guess in honour of all the packets and boxes of shortbread doing the rounds for New Year. At school today Lucy made shortbread, and it was very nice indeed. It went down well after dinner. I do really wish she’d been able to make more, or at least brought the recipe home too.

Lucy with the shortbread she made at school. (Photo: James Kemp)

Another Scots delicacy that I managed today was some fried clootie dumpling. There was the end of a piece I’d made in the bottom of the bread tin. It was fairly small, and I was very hungry, so I decided to shallow fry it with a small knob of margarine. The margarine wasn’t the right stuff for that, butter would have been much better. That said, I suspect that when I had this as a kid it was probably fried in a mixture of bacon and Lorne sausage fat. Practically lard. The margarine burnt a bit, but the dumpling was still good to eat.

Supplies Arrive

This is what greeted me when I went out this afternoon to collect Lucy from school. Tracy put the toilet rolls on a quarterly order in the summer, and this was the latest installment. I think this should be enough to see us through Lockdown 2! (Photo: James Kemp)
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Lockdown 2 – Day One

Lucy happy that she got to go to school today! (Photo: James Kemp)

As of midnight we’re back in Lockdown. I think it’s our third time, but seeing as the brief spell in November was both short and the schools stayed open we’re not counting that one.

Lockdown 2 School

Schools are closed, just like in Lockdown 1. However this time round things are a bit more organised. With Tracy working for the NHS we have the option to send the children to school. We didn’t need to ask Lucy. She watched the announcement with us and noticed that key workers’ children were allowed to go to school. So she decided that meant she would go to school today.

Lucy didn’t enjoy school from home, even though she got really good with Lego and read lots. So Tracy took her in this morning. When I picked her up she was pretty excited about her self-described ‘best school day ever’. She had seven class mates today, and they talked a bit about Covid-19, did a worksheet, and then played and watched a video. She’s keen to go back tomorrow.

Planning Lockdown 2

As it happened neither Tracy nor I were at work today. We’d previously planned our day to pick up things we needed for later. Those plans got cancelled, and instead we did the shopping at Priory Farm.

We also spent some time thinking about how we help us all get through the lockdown. The key was something to look forward to. So after a bit of back and forth we decided that the plan is for themed days every fortnight. Starting on 16 January we will do a movie themed day with food, clothes, and viewing related to the movie or show in question. In the intervening weekends we’ll do a local takeaway.

This way helps sort some of the stress we had from the country themed meals we did last time round. Although we’re taking turns picking the theme we can all help with preparation. We’re also only doing it every other week, so there’s more time to get ready. As themes we’ve got

  • Lord of the Rings
  • The Simpsons
  • Stranger Things
  • Marvel superheroes
  • Harry Potter

I’m sure we’ll add more as time goes on.

Since last Lockdown

If you’ve read the earlier blog posts from March 2020 to May 2020https://www.themself.org/2020/12/on-resolutions-2020-and-2021/ you’ll know there’s a significant gap until now.

Some of what happened is summarised (unreliably) on my roundup of 2020 on Themself.

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Three weeks was never going to be enough

As a country we’ve been in lockdown for almost three weeks. The government said they’d review it after three weeks, which is on Easter Monday.

Why Three Weeks?

Why did the government pick three weeks as the review period?

Well, when you look at how people seem to progress through being infected the vast majority, well over 90%, are no longer infectious after that time. Pretty much everyone that was infected before the lockdown started will have either recovered or died after three weeks.

So three weeks in what you think you should be seeing, if the lockdown has worked, are the people that lived with those that were infected before the lockdown developing symptoms. They’ll also be passing it onto the people they come into contact with, but far fewer than before.

What you see isn’t what you get

However there’s a time lag in there, and we’ve only tested people admitted to hospital. So there are a load of people infected before lockdown that only get tested 7-10 days after they develop symptoms at the point they get admitted to hospital. Symptoms start about 5-7 days after they were infected. So overall the people being tested in hospital were infected 12-17 days earlier.

From the published stats, there seems to be up to a three to four day lag in processing tests, especially over a weekend. So today’s reported new cases were probably infected between 2-3 weeks earlier. Before the lockdown in most cases. That’s why it still looks like cases are going up. What we’re reporting today is the pre-lockdown infection rate.

This is apparent in the official estimate of the rate of infection. Before the lockdown the estimate was that every infected person passed it on to 3.3 other people. That took us from a 3-4 new cases per day in late February to over 2,000 per day on 26 March. Those also have the 2-3 week delay mentioned above.

The estimate on 31 March, less than a week after the lockdown started, was that it had slowed to between 0.6-0.9 infections. Certainly when you look at the daily increase in confirmed cases the rate of increase starts to slow in mid-March.