The UK lockdown

Here are some figures presented by another Guardian reader about the differences between the lockdown in Greece and the UK.

How the UK government can claim to be proud of what it's done during the crisis, I really don't know.

IfItsMagic 

8m ago

Reminder: the lockdown was introduced the same day in Greece and in the UK (23 March 2020).

That day Greece had 17 covid-deaths, the UK 336.

20 times more. (UK's population is only 6x bigger)

Result:

Total cases in Greece today : 2,980

Total cases in the UK today: 300,000 = 100 times more than Greece

Total deaths in Greece today : 180

Total deaths in the UK today: 40,465 (50,000, 60,000?) = 3000 TIMES MORE THAN GREECE

What have the Tories ever done for us?

You might recognise the question as being a variation on the classic line "What have the Romans ever done for us?" from The Life of Brian, Well, thanks to a Guardian reader, I can give you the answer to the title question:

doge

11h ago 

Tory Promises/achievements. Remember these???

1000 sure start centres closed.
780 libraries closed.
700 football pitches closed.
Food bank use up 2,400%. Now more food banks than McDonalds
Homelessness up 1,000%.
Rough sleeping up 1,200%
Bedroom tax caused mass evictions.
Evictions are running at record highs.
35% of U.K. kids live in poverty.
Student fees up 300%.
Student debt has risen 150%.
Eradication of EMA (education maintenance allowance).
National debt has risen from £850billion to £2.25tn
Deficit has doubled in 2019 to £43bn.
Emergency Brexit stimulus from BoE in June 2016 of £175bn.
Brexit related fall in national revenue £500bn.
£700bn lost to offshore avoidance and evasion.
GDP growth has fallen to near zero.
GBP fallen by circa 15% versus EUR and USD.
Manufacturing in recession.
Construction in recession.
Services in recession.
25-30% cuts to all govt departments.
25-30% cuts to all councils, mainly centred on Labour councils.
Half of all councils are facing effective bankruptcy.
185k extra deaths attached to the political ideology of austerity.
25,000 fewer police officers.
20,000 fewer prison officers.
10,000 fewer border officials.
10,000 fewer firefighters.
10,000 fewer medical professionals.
Highest teacher leaving rate in a decade.
Teachers paying for school supplies.
Schools sending out begging letters to parents to pay for supplies.
Free school meals slashed.
Legal aid slashed.
20% of crown courts and magistrates courts closed.
Police, ambulance and fire stations sold off to property developers.
NHS satisfaction fallen from 83% to 60%.
A&E targets down from 95% to 83%, even after the Tories altered the targets.
Increase of 200% wait in hospital corridors.
25,000 fewer bed spaces for mental illness.
OECD calculates there’s 3 million hidden unemployed, the rate is really 13%.
Creation of 1.3m jobs only, mainly temporary, self employed, gig economy and ZHC.
Only 30,000 full time employment positions have been created.
Close on 50% of workers are self employed, ZHC, or the part time precariat.
25% cuts for disabled community.
Mobility allowance cut by circa 30%.
Closed Remploy.
40% of working households have (practically) no savings.
75% of households have less than £10,000 savings.
80% of households can only survive 3 months without a wage.
Nearly half the working population (17m) have an unauthorised overdraft.
Household debt has reached a new peak, despite emergency base rates.
Increase of 50% in hate crimes.
Increase of knife crime by 150% to 22,000 per year.
Increase in teenage suicide by 70%.
Suicide up 12% in the year 2018.
Self harm among young women up 70%.
Council home building down 90%.
200k social homes lost since 2010.
Zero starter homes built, despite the Tory flagship programme promising 200,000.
One million families on council home waiting list.
100,000 increase in the council home waiting list since 2010.

I think we should have held onto the Romans and not let them leave the British Isles in 400 AD. This is what you get when you let the foreign Anglo-Saxons in.

Whatever happened to car names?

Yesterday evening, on a fruitless search for buckwheat flour to make gluten-free pancakes, I passed a large, black SUV, proudly displaying its name in large letters on the boot: DUSTER.

I imagined someone asking the owner what car they drove, and him or her replying, "I drive a duster."

A duster? A duster is a cloth you use to remove dust. Not a car.

My dad drives a 'Yeti'. Yeti? For me, that's a hairy being that hides out in the Himalayas. What next? Will we have a car called the 'Sasquatch' one day?

You only need to poke around the Internet to find more ridiculous car names, such as

1 Nissan Friend-Me....
2 Mazda Bongo Friendee. ...
3 Daihatsu Naked. ...
4 Mitsubishi Carisma. ...
5 Hyundai Trajet. ...
6 Gaylord Gladiator. ...
7 Dodge Dart Swinger. ...
8 Vauxhall Adam.

See this article for the complete list of 24:https://www.driving.co.uk/news/the-worlds-worst-car-names/

And if you think that's all, this website - https://www.motorbiscuit.com/the-most-ridiculous-car-names-in-history/ - has even more, such as the King Midget, the Chevrolet Citation, the AMC Gremlin and so on.

That last website also cites the Ford Fiesta, but compared to Yeti and Duster, I think that is relatively harmless. I'm even fond of the Ford Mondeo, despite the derogatory connotations of 'Mondeo Man'. At least the name conjures up ideas of belonging to the world at large rather than a hairy Himalayan mythic being.

But things have come a long way since the elegantly named Rolls Royce Silver Ghost (which was going to be called Silver Mist until they realised what 'Mist' in German meant [dung]).

I can't remember all the cars my father has had, but one that stands out was the second-hand Hillman Avenger, which my father painted himself. 'Silver Fox' was the name of the shade of paint he used. I quite enjoyed driving around in a 'foxy' Avenger as the name put me in mind of The New Avengers, a TV series that included the characters of sleek Purdey (Joanna Lumley) and dashing Gambit (Gareth Hunt). Which young girl didn't want to be as elegant and beautiful as her or to have an attractive man in their life like him? (Answer: probably quite a few - but those exceptions didn't include me.)

In any event, being ferried around in an old Avenger was loads more glamorous than driving around in a modern-day Duster or Yeti.

Now I know what I miss

I work from home. Every working day (and often on Sunday and public holidays - as will be the case this weekend), I sit at my computer from around 7 in the morning to the late afternoon or evening. All my meals are eaten while sitting at the keyboard. As I sometimes drop food onto my lap, because I'm too absorbed in what I'm reading online, I wear my oldest jeans and often place an old tea towel on my lap to catch any falling morsels. On top, I wear old long-sleeved T-shirts or, in winter, plain woollen pullovers. Why sweat into one's best clothes if no-one is going to see them?

This is why, whenever I have a chance to go further than the bins, the post office or the supermarket, I change out of my grotty clothes and into an outfit with a bit more thought behind it. Even going into town on a Saturday, just to sit in the library with a cup of coffee and the latest papers and journals, makes me want to put on some smart clothes. After all, I might meet the love of my life while on my way there or while reading Good Housekeeping. One never knows.

At the last count, I had 12 dresses, around 7 skirts and a plethora of blouses, both long; and short-sleeved. Then there are all the T-shirts and tops, some of which are older than my youngest evening class students.

When have I worn all these things most recently? Well, not in the last three months, that's for sure.

Life has become pretty boring always wearing the same two old pairs of jeans and three long-sleeved T-shirts. I'll even wear them tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow (as Shakespeare once put it) when I go walking over the long weekend. Why wear out good clothes when all you're going to do is get them dusty and sweaty?

I mentioned this to my singing teacher on Tuesday and she requested that I wear a dress to her next lesson. I might wear the one I bought for my sister's wedding. I don't think I've had it on in 10 years. If I were to follow the rule of getting rid of clothes I haven't worn in the last 6 months or so, then I'd be left with some pretty shabby clothes. I shall, therefore, hold on to what I've got in the hope that better times will come. Laissez les bons temps rouler - as they say in Louisiana.

Cute renaming of local bar

Not far from my flat is a small bar where the trendy young folks go - or at least those who think they are trendy, hip and cool.

It's called Kassette (English: cassette). As the restrictions are still in place, they are now offering a 'takeaway' service, so they have temporarily renamed the place: "Kassette to go: Walkman".

Genius.

Happy Towel Day, you hoopy froods!

The day has snuck up on me again. Every year, I faithfully record it on my calendar and then I neglect to look at it and am surprised by photos online depicting hoopy froods all around the world proudly displaying their towels, often casually draped over a shoulder. Well, at least I happen to have done a towel wash this morning. Thirteen of them are drying on the clothes horse in the kitchen.

What am I blethering on about is what you are probably asking  yourselves.

Towel Day occurs every year on 25 May, which happens to be the birthday of the genius writer that was Douglas Adams. Every year, fans all around the world commemorate him by not forgetting to take their towels with them, because as every fool knows, a towel is just about the most useful thing in the universe. I quote from the book, my comfort book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

A towel is just about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can carry. Partly because it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it around your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of theRavenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you — daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course you can dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost." What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase which has passed into hitch hiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is."

Personally, I don't carry a towel with me all the time...but I do always carry a scarf with me and that pretty much fulfils the same functions.

Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund...

...is one of my favourite German sayings. Word for word it means '[the] morning hour has gold in its mouth'. Or in English: the early bird catches the worm. Now, I like worms since, without them, we wouldn't have the world as we know it. Very useful, they are. However, the German saying is more 'sunshiny'. 

And one time when I really appreciate that saying is when I'm off for an early morning walk, which today started at 8.05 a.m. when I arrived at the S-Bahn station in Gerresheim. Off I strode and before long, I was on this magnificent ridge walk, with the ground sweeping down on either side ,even though I myself had barely climbed any height. The trees rose almost alarmingly high above me and I got the feeling that I was in some green cathedral. I passed only one woman and her dog. 

Then I came out into open fields with beautiful dips in the ground and curves to the pathway and a view over Erkrath. I stopped to chat with a man with two Australian sheepdogs. Curving round the town and passing its swimming pool complex, I swung right and was once again surrounded by trees that rose so high it made me dizzy just to gaze at them. I had to tilt my head so far back I thought it would drop off. 

And finally, after descending a slope and walking along a road for a few hundred metres, I passed the site where the remains of the Neanderthalers were first found. I walked up past the museum and had just a 10-minute wait for a train back to civilisation. I had walked 11 km in 3 hours. 

Not many people were around because the day was a bit cold, windy and overcast. By the time the train came, though, lots of people were getting off at the station or parking their cars, off on a walk of their own. I was glad I had set off early and had had all that lovely countryside nearly to myself. Truly the morning does have the 'golden hours' of the day.