Dream on

Such weird dreams; such mood swings! My condition seems to be a common symptom of this pandemic related lockdown and many are finding that the enjoyment of an enforced holiday is starting to wear thin. Each morning I, for one, wake from a dream that I can’t relate to anything going on in my life. It’s a shame these dreams aren’t more fairy-tale-like or I could enjoy them.

Boris’s message last Monday was that now, instead of staying at home to help the NHS and save lives we are to ‘Stay Alert, Control the Virus, Save Lives’. I don’t feel very alert at the moment, preferring a nice nap on the sofa. The message was only for England anyway; Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland preferring the old one, and keeping the locks on for a while longer. Our much reduced police force now has the added duty of patrolling the Welsh and Scottish borders to stop the English invaders who’ve now been let loose to travel at will (provided they are back home by bed-time - the travellers, that is; not the police). Will the dreams get weirder as we emerge from our caves, I wonder? Will ‘staying alert’ mean constantly looking over one’s shoulder for the ‘invisible mugger’? There has been much derision over Boris’s bumbling delivery of his lifting-the-lockdown plan, and his new confusing message. For sure no one knows how to proceed safely from here.

In June, English schools are expected to take some of the children back. Now that has created quite a stir. While Michael Gove insists that it is perfectly safe (why is he always so ‘certain’ and ‘clear’ about everything?), many others are not convinced, so the Unions are involved. We are assured that children are statistically much less affected by coronavirus, but may nevertheless be infectious and therefore a threat to their older relatives. This pandemic is certainly fracturing human relationships, quite apart from its effect on economies around the world.

Gareth has been spending his furlough time learning about economics and stock markets. The US is about to go down the pan, apparently, and are busy shoring up stocks artificially using Federal (i.e., taxpayer) money in order to give the billionaires time to get out before a crash. That’s going to be a fun scenario! Where will they place their billions, I wonder, assuming their dollars are still worth anything? And will there be any tax-payers left to pay back what has been filched from the Federal Reserve? How will it affect us here in the UK? Quite severely I suspect, given the importance of the dollar in global economics.

I’m doing a lot of wondering and not a lot of doing nowadays. I read a bit, sew a bit (a little super-hero outfit for my grand-daughter Ivy’s birthday, for instance), a bit of crochet, planting a few things in whatever pots we can cobble together (we might achieve a couple of lettuces if we’re lucky), a bit of walking to the extent that arthritic hips allow, a bit of mediocre cooking, surfing social media...... In terms of social contact there is so little to talk about, other than the pandemic. Phone and Zoom chats are getting fewer and further between and TV is having to find ingenious ways to entertain and inform us (production of “Line of Duty” is on hold! Oh, no!!) It all makes me wonder about the ‘old days’ when info about the outside world came by word of mouth only and entertainment was around-the-fire storytelling.  What would we have known about a situation such as this?

Well, I continue with this ‘bloody blog’ so that I, or maybe my descendants, if they survive, can look back on this time and be reminded of how it felt to an ageing grandmother.  Someone, somewhere suggested at the start that we should all keep a journal so I’m on board with that idea. It’s a bit different from the travel blog, for sure. 

I’m off now for a snack followed by a nap and probably another weird dream. Let’s see what week 8 (or is it 9?) brings.