Wednesday 22 April: How has Britain ended up exporting the PPE it so desperately needs?

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/04/21/lettershow-has-britain-ended-exporting-ppe-desperately-needs/

760 thoughts on “Wednesday 22 April: How has Britain ended up exporting the PPE it so desperately needs?”

  1. There is no empirical evidence for these lockdowns. Spiked. 22 April 2020.

    The original response to Covid-19 was driven by an understandable fear of an unknown disease. The epidemiologist Neil Ferguson projected that 2.2million people could die in the US alone, and few world leaders were willing to risk being the one who would allow such grim reaping to occur.

    Morning everyone. There is a certain surreal grim humour in realising that these people have taken the advice of our very own Cochrane in a matter of national survival.

    We are truly screwed!

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/04/22/there-is-no-empirical-evidence-for-these-lockdowns/

    2. Good morning, Minty.

      The article is no more convincing than any other.
      Why bring in the sly dig at another poster? it does
      not further your argument!

      1. There was a Telegraph article yesterday, that someone kindly reposted here that said more or less the same thing though. I can’t help feeling that when historians study this period in the future, economic suicide while chanting a mantra to the NHS will be seen as a mistake.
        Generation X is now in power – the baby boomers’ children who have never known anything harder than high interest rates. The millennials define the term snowflake.
        In other words, the vast majority of the population is made up from people who take free money for granted, and for whom war and famine are things that happen in other times or other countries.
        It’s no wonder that their response to a pandemic is skewed.

          3. No Gen Xers are Thatcher’s children. Born, I think between approximately 1965 and 1985. The generation of Boris and Cameron. (cough) I came across both of them at university.

          4. I was clearing out old papers the other day and came across a letter from Halifax saying out mortgage interest rate was increasing to 12.25%. I think that was 1989.

        3. High interest rates? Like, 15%? It’s not been anything like that for decades.

      2. #Me too, within limits. There was often a refreshing breeze at this time of year in Ostfriesland.

    2. What, again?
      Oh well, I’ll just have to sit in the conservatory and gaze admiringly at MB’s work.

        1. 🙂 Perfected.
          And my ‘knicker picker’ is now used to pick up garden rubbish.

  4. I wrote the other day about local tradesmen showing initiative. There is a young lad who brings a van to a dozen villages once a week with fruit and veg, bread and milk etc. You can order in advance – or take pot luck on the day. the MR went down yesterday to investigate and found a queue of 20 villagers waiting patiently for their turn.

    The local market fish man has also started deliveries of phoned in orders. A butcher a few miles away likewise.

    A local farmer left a pallet full of potatoes – help yourselves. (See snap) No charge; anonymous gesture.

    The milkman continues his rounds. We can cope without the tyranny of supermarkets.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cea182a7885171c51977676bc529b9f5d04e9a49afc252e9096cf26ae33131bf.jpg

    1. It’ll be interesting to see how things are once this is past. I suspect there will be many changes initially, then a gradual slip back to how it was before due to convenience.

  5. On the other hand, our wonderful local farm shop is closed. It is a family farm. Mother runs the shop; son farms pigs; daughter-in-law has a flock of chickens.
    Or, rather, had. She got blood poisoning – was in coma for two weeks – is now back home to “recover” having lost several fingers and toes. Farmer, mother, businesswoman – just imagine what is going through her mind. In her 30s.

    Life is a sod, isn’t it?

  6. A Tory MP speaks…

    “Recent experiences with delayed and cancelled deliveries of medical equipment and clothing from abroad should lead us to ask whether we should source more of these important items from home.

    Procurement and state aid rules has required us to source many things through open tender globally or within the Customs Union of the EU.”

    1. Procurement rules in the NHS are absolutely diabolical, a bureaucratic maze of paperwork and no ability to move quickly. Those at the top are overpaid and underworked, they only know one way to work and that is by sticking to their rules and keeping their @rses covered.

      The Covid-19 outbreak has shone a giant spotlight on them and PHE generally. Their needs to be major re-organisation after this – heads must roll and not be just moved to other parts of the NHS.

  7. So “procurement and state aid rules” are being enforced to the letter.

    Unfortunately the virus doesn’t play stupid like the NHS and the government.

  8. 318440+ up ticks,

    How has Britain ended up exporting the PPE it so desperately needs?

    The best that can be said is bad management, but knowing the establishments capacity for high grade treachery gives one fodder for thought.
    Seeing the corkscrew, daisy chain, self interest political types the management parties are riddled with maybe the best arrangement in future would be to cater for the worst conspiracy theory to start with &
    stock up catering for most needs of ALL NI investors first & foremost.

    Organised by 12 honest men / women / thingies, independent of the
    governance overseers.

    Prime example of treacherous mismanagement has just made an appearance good morning Brit. one t bliar with your morning tonic.

    1. “Procurement and state aid rules” are the reason.

      Bureaucracy beats life saving in “Our NHS”.

    2. Exporting PPE while buying PPE from abroad.
      I wonder if the ships’ crews wave to each other as they cross in The Channel

      1. 318440+ up ticks,
        Morning Bsk,
        My way of thinking after witnessing the actions of many of the reigning politico’s is that if there was a serious collision betwixt brown envelope carrying drones there would be a monsoon of currency above the channel.

    3. For how much longer are you going to keep giving us your uptick count og?

      1. 318440+ up ticks,
        Msk,
        Unlike many as in being of a non submissive
        nature as long as it takes.
        As with a great many issues peoples accepted
        what the up ticker gobbling virus was doing
        without comeback.
        I chose the NO surrender, submission is NOT an option route.
        Besides it is an anti abbot brain daily workout,
        one abbot being enough.
        Ps,
        Accepting it is not compulsory in any shape or form.

    4. Hi Ogga1,

      it looks as if the company involved is probably not on the ‘approved supplier’ list of PHE/NHS Procurement. They offered to supply PPE but was turned away because of the “rules” – not by the Government but by the NHS.

      1. 318440+ up ticks.
        Afternoon H,
        In my book we have the results of a perfect storm in so far as having a governance party, not trusted by many, and at best could be judged inept, to others, treacherous.
        Then the NHS carrying an overload of manager chiefs managing managers,managing managers, managing the indians.
        It would pay to keep the ones dealing directly with the nursing / doctor staff, & compensate
        payment for the sh!te they have endured over the years from the managing managers,managing managers.
        Give the excess managers a chinese p o r g payment, at this moment in time very apt.

        1. 318440+ up ticks,
          O2O,
          Sorry, Chinese porg = a small chinaman ( a person of restricted growth) hence a We kin lou.
          This post is in no way meant to be
          anti small peoples; more of a descriptive nature.

  9. Good morning all

    Do any of you get the feeling that the fat controller BBC and ITV’s Piers Morgan are dictating government policy, yes , an alternative government policy, judging by the mouthy gob shite hawks they are wheeling in to air their views?

    1. Hardly surprising as Britain doesn’t have a proper government but instead globalist managers.

  10. Good morning all.

    You know, cats are funny little buggers. Missy knows that if I go to the bathroom in the night for a pee I don’t put my specs on, but when I get up in the morning, I do. So this morning at 6 am when she decided t was time to get up (sunlight streaming in), she “retrieved” my specs from under the pillow & nudged them before my face.

    1. Funny or furry??
      The spring moult is upon us. Effing cat fluff everywhere, in clouds, like tumbleweed, once we open a door.

    2. When they were younger, my two PCs each used to bring me a twig every day. Id get up in the morning and they’d be outside my bedroom door. It was quite charming, if odd.

      1. Only to read the label, so she doesn’t get the same flavour twice running.

        1. Morning, Peddy.
          I do the same thing with Spartie.
          Given the speed with which he wolfs down his food, I really wonder if he tastes anything.

          1. It seems, Anne, that all chihuahuas do that – probably due to their size they’re afraid a bully will come along and nick it.

            So the terrible trio, Spartie, Dolly and Dotty all wolf their food.

          2. Having seen Spartie win a tug of war with a Labrador over a toy, I think it’s just greed.
            He has absolutely no idea of size when it comes to other dogs.

          3. Agreed, nor does Dotty, she thinks she’s a Rottweiler, yet worries like hell when I, at 6’2″, approach her with some meat or cheese in my hand, she shies away as I’m going to kill her! Throw it on the floor and woosh, woof, it’s gone.

            Defies logic.

  13. Morning, Campers.
    Couple of TCW articles to kick off the day.
    There is a good selection on the site this morning.

    https://conservativewoman.co.uk/sorry-sir-your-nhs-has-failed-its-mot/?utm_source=TCW+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=ef031e1eb4-Mailchimp+Daily+Email&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a63cca1cc5-ef031e1eb4-559682581

    https://conservativewoman.co.uk/stop-kowtowing-to-china-and-dont-deal-with-high-risk-huwaei/?utm_source=TCW+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=ef031e1eb4-Mailchimp+Daily+Email&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a63cca1cc5-ef031e1eb4-559682581

    1. The comments under CW tend to be spoiled by some left wing commenters who seem to come there just for the sake of relentlessly telling everyone else that they’re wrong. Funny, they don’t haunt Breitbart quite so much, perhaps because that tends to be a fairly macho site.

      1. Indeed. I read CW most days and what you say is my view also. I often wonder if it’s their own little personal crusade.

  14. According to the Health minister Matt Hancock, who has yet to master the political skill of lying, we start the test of COVID-19 vaccine tomorrow. How are they going to test the efficacy of the vaccine – surely they don’t intend to infect a healthy individual, especially the ones getting the placebo in the trial, with this invisible killer?. Are they including the 3 variant types, A B and C in the vaccine? Laura Kuensberg could ask this as a constructive question for once at the 5 pm COVID-19 update today

    1. It’s just another panic measure. If someone suggested Flagellation and drinking Snake Oil they would be queuing up for that!

    3. LK might also ask if Prof. Whitty attended Event 201 just before he was appointed Chief Medical Officer (three months before Covid-19 became public).
      A CMO with the specialism of tropical diseases, who wrote a paper on Ebola, by another coincidence.

    1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QOuSPOh_UBY
      Akkad Daily: ThemTube
      “Published on 21 Apr 2020
      #YouTube CEO Susan #Wojcicki has overseen the company’s transformation from a platform of content creators to a corporate megaphone. Only half of YouTube’s views now come from content creators. The age of #YouTubers is over. They don’t need us any more. ”

      YouTube has been taken over by big corporations. They don’t want independent content creators unless it’s innocuous cat videos or cooking videos. They absolutely don’t want independent news commentators who question the big news outlets and their dubious narrative.

    1. We’ve seen this. No one is resisting though. Certainly not our Government. Why did Dr Whitty meet with Gates? Having done so, why is he still in a job?
      Is it because he has arranged for Gates to be able to experiment with his vaccines on UK citizens? With or without their knowledge? When do these trials start?
      (from Wikipedia: “Until becoming CMO he was Professor of Public and International Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).In 2008, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded the LSHTM £31 million for malaria research in Africa. At the time, Whitty was the principal investigator for the ACT Consortium, which conducted the research programme.”
      Why did he so suddenly become Chief Medical Officer three months before Covid-19 struck us? Coincidence? I tend not to believe in them.

  17. The news is just too dreary. Have these instead.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b8929bd97b3c572aacd934a1a48cf990e02431e8a5111dd010ce98f8239d0d4c.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e56a1238b2311362039522a7c68fe5c31d175b7153ecfdb40aba927528c70623.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/91d13957d307997b993f97a348629108064affb4684ebe61b304485e535e35b8.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/df3ac799eb2daa2a68acf378e0458fafd93cfeb2fd037dc91fdeec6a2310e29d.jpg

      1. Do the police have tactical nuclear weapons? If they need a crew of over half a dozen, armed to the teeth, to arrest a cleaning lady who offers no resistance, then tooled-up drug dealers must surely be all atremble. They must surely think that the equivalent overkill should the police move against them would obliterate half a city.

    1. They had probably been told it had been ordered, by their civil servants. Please stop blaming civil service and NHS incompetence on the government.

      2. But the Johnson government keeps telling us how great the NHS is. I’m ready to accept tales of incompetence.

    2. I would imagine that patients whose treatment suddenly stopped and those who were in need of medical attention and treatment but did not receive it could bring the largest class action in history against the NHS.

  21. Coronavirus latest news: NHS workers to be rescreened after flawed test fiasco. 22 April 2020.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/de9fee0520459edb044f804435d6440334411bbcf50f943d6221a1d964d88298.jpg

    Some NHS workers are being written to so that they can be rescreened after leaked documents revealed coronavirus tests given to thousands of staff so they could return to work were found to be flawed and should no longer be relied on.

    Meanwhile, an RAF plane carrying a delayed consignment of personal protective equipment (PPE) for NHS staff has landed in the UK two days after the Government said it would.

    Anyone who thinks this is going according to some sort of plan should be in the Government with the rest of the morons!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-news-uk-vaccine-ppe-deaths-peak-lockdown/

    1. Yo Minty

      Me being a bit thisck, wonders why the need PPE, when their arms, from elbow to glove are bare

    2. Also, is there medical evidence to suggest that the virus dies in contact with human hair?

      2. You know, really I am fine – or would be if I could keep at bay the frustration caused by stupid politicians and snivel servants 🙂

        I think I will go walk the dog across the field shortly – that will put life back in perspective.

        Are you suffering from railway withdrawal symptoms?

        1. Not as much as I thought I would.
          More annoyed with the emissions and engine monitoring systems on the van! A severe case of the designers trying to make them do too much.

  24. ‘Morning, Peeps.

    Lancashire Police have at last suspended the plod who threatened to commit perjury:

    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/04/21/officer-threatened-make-up-offence-arrest-man-coronavirus-lockdown-suspended/

    With an attitude like this he should be gone, never to return. Let us hope that this will be a lesson to the minority of power-crazed officers who consider themselves above the law that they should be upholding.

    Edit: I also wonder how many suspects he has stitched up in his time…standby for some case reviews?

    1. I would imagine every case in which he was involved will have to be reviewed.
      Thank goodness he’s a white male, otherwise even less would be done.

      1. Morning Stephen. I can see both posts, and Tom’s reply to yours. Nothing in the “pending tray”. Suspect it’s just Disqus being it’s usual flaky self.

        1. Thanks Geoff – I can’t blame Disqus on this occasion – (I was looking at the wrong post – Doh! hence I’m losing the plot!)

      1. Nothing, but that won’t stop the real racists who see racism in everything.
        Plus, it’s a good excuse to clamp down on any dissension, no matter how miniscule the pretext.

    5. I would be more concerned about this group:

      Local Democracy Reporting Service
      “The Local Democracy Reporting Service created up to 150 new journalism jobs to help fill a gap in the reporting of local democracy issues across the UK.”

      “The journalists are funded by the BBC as part of its latest Charter commitment but employed by regional news organisations.At present 149 Local Democracy Reporters have been allocated to news organisations in England, Scotland and Wales.These organisations range from a radio station to online media companies and established regional newspaper groups.Local Democracy Reporters cover top-tier local authorities and other public service organisations.”

      I am sure the BBC thoroughly vetted the ‘journalists’ and ensured they were trained in the BBC form of impartiality.

  26. Empty 4,000-bed Nightingale hospital TURNS AWAY 30 ‘life or death’ coronavirus patients from other packed London wards because it lacks nurses and has only treated a total of 40 people. 22 April 2020.

    Patients are being turned away from the new 4,000-bed NHS Nightingale hospital in London due to a lack of nurses, it has been claimed today.

    So far the Docklands site has only had 41 patients through its doors, including four who have died, seven who have been downgraded to less critical care and 30 still being looked after.

    This is just one example of what is a gigantic cock up.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html

    1. Unfortunately the government cannot win. Had it not prepared for the worst it would be accused of inadequate preparation if the numbers had continued to rise.

      1. Governments cannot run or organise anything. The hinder our lives and are so overated by so many of the something for nothing brigade.

    1. Has the singer been self-isolating for a long time, P-T? He looks as if he needs a haircut.

      :-))

      1. That singer is Timothy Bruce Schmit, Elsie.

        He was Randy Meisner’s replacement as bass-player and tenor vocalist in The Eagles.

        1. Thanks for that information, Grizzly. I’m afraid that the nearest I got to The Eagles in my youth was the regular weekly issues which featured Dan Dare, PC 49 and Jeff Arnold!

  28. I’ve just been out on a massive shop and stocked up on ice cream, tinned fruit, and raspberry sauce.

    I’m going to self isolate for a month of Sundaes.

    2. Hope your bag is big enough, ‘cos there may not be mush room if you get other groceries.

  30. No evidence of bots impersonating NHS over coronavirus, says Twitter. Tue 21 Apr 2020 16.45 BST

    So far he has only provided details of one of the 128 accounts supposedly involved in the disinformation network: a recently-deleted spoof Twitter profile with fewer than 200 followers which used a profile picture stolen from a real NHS nurse.

    The account, which O’Connell claimed was boosting the government message, posed as a fake person – a deaf, non-binary NHS nurse who wanted to end the weekly celebration for NHS workers because it excluded her as she could not hear the clapping.

    Lol! With a profile like that she has to be a Government Bot!

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/21/no-evidence-of-nhs-government-covid-bot-networks-says-twitter

  31. Coronavirus: Government facing fresh questions over EU equipment scheme

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52377087

    This is turning into a pointless and petty squabble. When the story first surfaced a BBC report spoke vaguely of a ‘stockpile of medical equipment’. The stockpile didn’t exist then and it doesn’t now. The EU hasn’t even bought the bloody stuff. It’s still looking for it.

    1. I see they’re trying to blame Brexit voters.

      At the time, Downing Street said the UK was making its own arrangements because it was no longer in the EU, although ministers denied claims that anti-EU sentiment had played a part in the decision.

      1. I’m sure I read earlier that Raab had leaned on the “senior civil servant ” to retract his story that it was a “political decision” – but now I can’t find it, only this:

        Row rumbles on over UK-EU PPE decision

        Health minister Helen Whately said there has not been a political
        decision made that Britain should not to become involved in EU
        procurement programmes to acquire equipment for dealing with the
        coronavirus outbreak.

        The senior civil servant at the Foreign Office Sir Simon McDonald
        told a Commons committee on Tuesday that ministers had taken a
        “political decision” not to join a programme to procure ventilators,
        only to later issue a retraction.

      2. I’m sure I read earlier that Raab had leaned on the “senior civil servant ” to retract his story that it was a “political decision” – but now I can’t find it, only this:

        Row rumbles on over UK-EU PPE decision

        Health minister Helen Whately said there has not been a political
        decision made that Britain should not to become involved in EU
        procurement programmes to acquire equipment for dealing with the
        coronavirus outbreak.

        The senior civil servant at the Foreign Office Sir Simon McDonald
        told a Commons committee on Tuesday that ministers had taken a
        “political decision” not to join a programme to procure ventilators,
        only to later issue a retraction.

        1. I’m afraid the government are in a right pickle – they just don’t know what they’re doing. They seem to be waiting for Boris to swoop in and take proper charge. They’re a bunch of idiots.

          The decision should be “let those over 70, if so inclined, and those particularly vulnerable, self isolate. Everybody else should go back to work, schools reopen and every business still in business.

    2. Agrippina the Younger, gangnam style?
      Bit young for Livia, though I suppose she had to start somewhere.

  33. Morning all

    SIR – You report (April 21) that personal protective equipment (PPE) is being shipped from Britain to European countries because the firms holding it have been ignored by the Government. What is going on? We need an explanation.

    Evan Parker

    Solihull

    SIR – If the Government ignored firms offering supplies in this crisis, then someone must be held accountable.

    Who was responsible for passing on these communications? Are ministers to blame, or civil servants? We cannot afford such enormous errors.

    Dr Peter Sander

    Hythe, Kent

    SIR – I was horrified by your report on PPE equipment sitting in warehouses.

    Why, having had no response from the Government, did wholesalers not contact hospitals weeks ago? They have their own purchasing powers.

    Maggie Down

    Paulerspury, Northamptonshire

    SIR – Public Health England’s website says that PHE is “a distinct organisation with operational autonomy”. It has 5,500 staff and is responsible – and again I quote – for “protecting the nation from public health hazards” and “preparing for and responding to public health emergencies”.

    If there is a failure to hold enough PPE, then that is the fault of PHE. So why is the Government being blamed?

    Ian E Gardner

    Eastbourne, East Sussex

    SIR – Martin Gomersall-Webb (Letters, April 20) paints a false picture of care homes by suggesting that they were ill-equipped to cope with the Covid-19 outbreak.

    Most privately run homes had sufficient supplies of PPE, yet when they came to order more they were told that stock was being held back for the NHS.

    Contrary to what Mr Gomersall-Webb suggests, Exercise Cygnus (the simulation carried out by the British government in October 2016) showed how ill-prepared the NHS was – not care homes. It is also untrue that carers in homes “are paid low wages to maximise their owners’ profits”. Privately run homes pay competitive salaries in order to attract the calibre of staff required to provide first-class residential and nursing care.

    The care sector faced a shortfall of £3.5 billion even before this pandemic hit. We carried out some research that revealed that county council funding would not be enough to cover a week’s stay in a local B&B, let alone a nursing facility catering for complex medical needs. Care chiefs have rightly accused local authorities of sitting on the £1.6 billion set aside for social care. We are among the majority of providers yet to see a penny of it.

    No one is blaming Boris Johnson – but NHS bosses and PHE have got a lot to answer for over PPE shortages in the care sector.

    Dr Damian Tominey

    Verulam House Nursing Home

    St Albans, Hertfordshire

    1. NHS bureaucracy is to blame. Don’t expect to hear anything more on this subject.

  34. SIR – Your report (“Two thirds of children have not taken part in online lessons during lockdown”, April 20), shows the extent to which young people’s lives have been turned upside-down by the coronavirus. It has closed our schools, cancelled our exams, shut down our play spaces and separated us from friends and family.

    We’re worried about what this crisis means for our future, and fear that things may be much worse for us than other age groups in post-pandemic Britain. It appears that, because children are unseen during the lockdown, they have been forgotten.

    We ask the Government to follow the example of other world leaders and address British children and young people to allay our fears, acknowledge that the pandemic will have a far-reaching impact on our education, health and wellbeing, and offer guidance on immediate plans for addressing our needs.

    Eddie Rose

    Niamh Brook

    Magali Wing

    Isabelle Mathews

    Michael Bryan

    Saema Bint E Khali

    Ciaran Campbell

    Maham Malik

    Youth Advisory Board, Unicef UK

    London E20

    SIR – If schools open before the pandemic is under control, there will be some non-compliance. I won’t send my child back to school until I am convinced it is safe to do so.

    Home learning can be a challenge, but also a chance to go beyond the National Curriculum and let children study subjects they are interested in.

    Josephine Sunderland

    Caversham, Berkshire

    SIR – Joan Freeland’s idea (Letters, April 21) of dividing classes in half reminded me that, during the Battle of Britain, our school in Hove hosted one from London. We used the classrooms in the morning, they in the afternoon.

    Brian Foster

    Shrivenham, Oxfordshire

    1. First letter:
      So the little dahlinks want The Prime Minister to tell them what they already know. I’d rather he got on with more important things.

    2. Most of the time that the little darlings have been away from re-education camps school is covered by the Easter holidays.

    3. I can’t help wondering if the UNICEF Youth Advisory Board has considered the lack of discipline exhibited by the parents, who have not MADE their little darlings attend video-school, removed their play-stations, mobile phones and left only a laptop or PC, permanently locked onto the school-site.

      This is NOT Government responsibility, it’s parent responsibility and the accountability that goes with it.

    1. Oh yes please.
      He was on the TV last week I suspect spouting his usual BS.
      He is not welcome in my home.
      Click.

  36. Morning all

    SIR – I am appalled at the prospect of the current lockdown being extended for people over 70 until a coronavirus vaccine is ready for general use, which could be well into next year.

    I am a relatively fit and active 81-year-old non-smoker of normal weight. I play golf regularly, do plenty of DIY and gardening, and am not on the NHS list of vulnerable people who were told to self-isolate for 12 weeks.

    I want to be treated like everybody else when the lockdown ends: to do my own shopping, visit friends and neighbours, play golf, and go on holiday, while taking common-sense precautions, such as avoiding close contact in crowded places and on public transport, for as long as necessary. The risks of doing otherwise are now very well known.

    I foresee public disorder if all the over-70s are instructed to stay under the present lockdown conditions for an indefinite period when everybody else is set free.

    R V Tate

    Bedford

    SIR – Not only are the over-70s big spenders on holidays, cars, clothes and in restaurants and garden centres, they also very often look after grandchildren (unpaid), volunteer and raise funds for charity. Many are still in employment, either voluntarily or to supplement pensions.

    We are a large part of the fabric of life in Britain and are quite capable of making our own decisions (including about who to vote for). I would not like to be the one who tells the Queen, the Prince of Wales, Jeremy Corbyn and many other MPs and members of the House of Lords that they can’t go out.

    Anita Chapman

    Gobowen, Shropshire

    1. I’m not sure about that Mr Tate. I am over 70 and physically incapable of Public Disorder. Much to my regret I might add!

      1. “..incapable of Public Disorder. ”

        Funny, that’s not how you come across, Minty!!

      2. I am in total agreement with R V Tate. I will be 81 in June. Incidentally the BBC Radio 4 this morning citing a report that the 50 – 69 age group are about 50% of the cases in hospital? with COVID-19. They should be in the lock down group. That means the 275000 volunteers will be drastically reduced.

      3. One of the fit and active over 70s lovely ladies who lives in our road, told my wife (from a distance*) almost punched one of 4 cyclists Sunday morning as she was told to GET OUT OF OUR WAY ! On a public footpath.
        *there’s a song in that. 😊
        A walking stick would have been an asset.

    2. The problem is that your fitness, your job, your regularly paid taxes, your non-smoking and general good health will all count for nothing when you turn up at the hospital requiring an intensive care bed. Over 70? Sorry, it’s a clinical decision…. I have read comments in the Mail purporting to be from NHS workers saying exactly this.

  37. ‘Morning All

    NoTTL always subversive,always ahead of the curve……………….

    I,among several others here have made the point that while pubs and shops are shut,airports and improptu cross channel “ferries” continue apace.You could sum that view up in a pithy phrase

    “Pubs Shut

    Borders Open”

    Oops,turns out that’s an arrestable offence

    “Two men in the UK were arrested on charges of racially

    aggravated offenses after they posted stickers related to the

    coronavirus outbreak which said “pubs closed, borders open.”

    The stickers, another of which said “open border, virus disorder,”

    were posted on lamp posts, bins, bus stop signs and bollards around

    areas of Sheffield. They are believed to be the work of the

    Hundred-Handers group, described as “far right” by the BBC.

    Police said two men, aged 20 and 22, were held on suspicion of

    racially aggravated public order offences and have now been released

    while investigations continue.

    Local councillor Miskell said the stickers were an affront to diversity”

    .https://summit.news/2020/04/21/uk-two-men-arrested-for-posting-pubs-closed-borders-open-stickers/
    “Affront to diversity” is it?? My Arse

    Looks nervously at front door…………………..

    1. How is that “racially aggravated”? There’s no mention of race. The people who have taken offense at that have made assumptions. And from what I can gather, the UK is an outlier in not shutting our borders, so are all those other countries racist??

      1. The police are making it all up as they go along now.
        It’s a shame some of our leftwaffe journo’s don’t focus on what is happening to our long established culture and in our society.

        1. Unfortunately, the leftwaffe journalists are part of the problem. Almost none of them are raising the alarm. The only ones I can think of are the evening presenters on US Fox News, i.e. Carlson, Hannity, Ingraham, Pirro.

          1. There is a good article out about useless journo’s I’ll try to find it in can’t paste a link on my mobile.

      2. Fear. The authorities know immigration is now more and more deeply unpopular and was the primary motivation for the Leave vote in 2016. The lesser of two evils is to kick the most white law abiding majority rather than deal with the issue. Containment then, and hope the issue goes away and put black or brown faces on television in greater numbers to enforce diversity – the belittling insult is bi-directional of course – but elites don’t really care about anyone other than those inside the tent.

    2. Undermining the agenda, how can we get the message out there. Is there a printer in the house ?

    3. I can understand the problems the Police have in the U.K. The far right are everywhere. You can’t go to Sainsbury’s without tripping over them. Marching up and down waving their arms about. Massed rallies all over the place. Waving placards suggesting people be killed.

      You can exchange ‘far right’ for Muslims.

    4. If it’s now illegal to complain about open borders, we are in a very bad place. Cases like this are important.

    6. Morning Rik. Amazing is it not? Mass rape. Burglary. Drug running. Nothing can be done. Stick up a poster in the middle of a Pandemic and the Stasi turn out in force!

      1. Morning, Minty.
        Blighty obviously did have the 20,000 police that this country allegedly was short of.
        Whether they were hidden in the stationery cupboard at the local nick, or were lounging around at home complaining of stress/chronic bunions/or taking days off in lieu, we have no idea. But they couldn’t resist the lure of appearing in public to bully sunbathers and buyers of fancy chocolate comestibles.

        1. Morning Anne. One of the oddities of Police States is that Apolitical Crime flourishes unchecked!

          1. That would be rape, murder, burglary; unless you are a white male of fixed address.

      1. Pubs will be opened only so long as they install multiple, facial recognition cameras complete with sound recording facilities.

          1. ‘Morning, Peddy, having read the Wiki explanation, I have to ask, “Why would you do that?”

            It appears symptomatic of the ill minds that appear to abound throughout our society.

  39. I would love, to be able to read what the historians/history books say about Covid-19 in a hundred or so years from now

    Will it be the truth,or the versions written by Soros and his cohorts or just what the Chinese say (Remember History is always written by the winners)

    1. We’ve been bamboozled, conned, and brainwashed. Except in the future, the good guys probably won’t get to write the history….

    1. Morning all 😊 Mediterranean out side today 😎
      It’s only when you actually have to go to A&E with what turns out to be a serious problem that you see all the idiots with a cut finger a nose bleed etc. Last time I had to go (into could hard breath) a guy next to me was saying to the check in nurse he thought he had sprained his ankle ! He was around 40-45 years old. Not a snowflake.
      He actually lived closer to a minor injuries department than to the hospital Stig and I know so well.
      In polite terms she told him to eff off. To the minor injuries dept.
      Foot up a stuff drink and a bag of frozen peas would have done the trick.
      On that particular Sunday actually came home 12 hours later.

      1. SWMBO works in the out of hours GP service – couple of months back they had a 40ish bloke turn up ( bewilderingly having been triaged and processed then referred by NHS Direct ) with a grazed knuckle following a slight cheese grater event at tea time. The Doc was tight lipped but polite, needless to say that incident entered the Exasperating and Amusing annals along with “I stepped back and fell on it, that’s why it’s up there Doc.” and has probably by now done the rounds of North Somerset and beyond.

        1. It is the manifestation of forty years of political correctness and the delusion of individuality. Fifty years ago we had to fall over, rub it better and get on with it. Kids who whined about graze or bruise were quickly ridiculed. So what do we have now? A denatured, mentally weak, risk adverse society that knows the number of a good personal injury solicitor.

          1. Removing the plaster off an injury was often more painful than the original accident.
            “To yank or not to yank,
            That was the question.”

          2. If you don’t stop crying, I will give you something to really cry about.
            Oh thanks mum, I feel better now.

          4. Yes, It’s not unusual for me to leave a trail of blood and lumps of me during DIY or car stuff in fact I feel a jobs not been properly done if it’s not been topped out with the odd cc of group O, consequently I have little sympathy for anything that requires less then 5 stitches or splints and Plaster of Paris.

        2. It’s almost unbelievable.
          My wife was watching one of those daft cookery zedlebritease progs.
          One of the little luvvies cut his finger and fainted, he was actually lying on the floor.
          Pathetic creature.
          You couldn’t make it up.

          1. Oddly enough SWMBO has produced two children, broken a leg and suffered other odd medical indignities with impunity, she is of robust constitution in body and mind – but at the sight of her own blood , even from a paper cut, and she goes grey and his to sit down for 10mins.

          2. I have given and been given myriad injections. Bish, bosh, job done.
            Despite that, and the fact that the syringes were preloaded and the needles as fine as a hair, I really had to psych myself up for a week to inject anti-coagulants (rat poison?) into myself every evening.
            I really hand it to Type 1 diabetics.

          3. It’s odd, I can quite happily cope with the punctures and lacerations I’ve gifted myself with over the years, I’ve even done some minor surgery with a (sterilised ) craft knife and tweezers to remove a 1″ piece of wire that embedded in my foot , I had an interesting 20 mins with the new inexperienced practice phlebotomist that left both arm covered in little bruises, that left me unfazed but I go all queasy when it’s somebody else’s injury.

      2. I’ve been to A&E with a nosebleed. It simply would not stop and eventually they had to use one of those silver nitrate sticks to cauterise the vein involved.

        1. Of course Js, our middle son had that……but there are nose bleeds and other types of nose bleeds.

      3. I did sprain my ankle quite badly when walking Healabhal Bheag. Slipped on a wet stone. It swelled up quite a lot. The lady i was staying with had a compression bandage. That did the trick.

      5. I sprained my ankle a few years ago, just over a week before a planned trip to South Africa. I rested it up with ice packs for a week. We went on our trip. People asked why I didn’t go to A & E – I said why would I want to sit and wait for four hours minimum to be told I needed to rest it up with ice packs?

          1. Yep! I didn’t need to clutter up A&E to be told that. I already had a compression bandage and it was useful. I was a bit less mobile during the trip than I would have liked, and the flight there was uncomfortable, but we managed.

      6. Hmmmm. I feel guilty now. I went to A&E about 15 years ago with a bleeding hand….. I accidentally stabbed my palm with a knife (just don’t ask how but it involved an avocado pear – I had had a bad day!) and the next thing I knew a graceful arc of group B rhesus positive was tracing across the kitchen. We wrapped my hand in a towel, by the time we got to A&E the towel was dripping and my skirt was covered in blood. I was seen pretty quickly, but all it took was three stitches to put me right.

    2. My niece is a nurse in our local A and E (Large hospital in Birmingham.) She is bored stiff on duty at the moment through lack of patients.

  41. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ndy76mJHD6o

    #CORONAVIRUS UPDATE: Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai and Stefan Molyneux (HD)

    This is a long video, 1hr:27mins.

    Published on 16 Apr 2020
    Philosopher Stefan Molyneux in conversation with Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai about health, coronavirus, Dr Fauci, Bill Gates, the Gate Foundation, the Clinton Foundation – and what REALLY killed Freddie Mercury!

    https://shiva4senate.com/

    Dr. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, the inventor of email and polymath, holds four degrees from MIT, is a world-renowned systems scientist, inventor and entrepreneur. He is a Fulbright Scholar, Lemelson-MIT Awards Finalist, India’s First Outstanding Scientist and Technologist of Indian Origin, Westinghouse Science Talent Honors Award recipient, and a nominee for the U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

    In 1978, as a precocious 14-year-old, after completing a special program in computer science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Science at NYU, Ayyadurai was recruited by the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) as a Research Fellow, where he developed the first electronic emulation of the entire interoffice mail system (Inbox, Outbox, Folders, Address Book, Memo, etc.), which he named “EMAIL,” to invent the world’s first email system, resulting in him being awarded the first United States Copyright for Email, Computer Program for Electronic Mail System, at a time when Copyright was the only protection for software inventions.

    Today, he is the Chairman & CEO of CytoSolve, Inc. CytoSolve provides a revolutionary platform for modeling complex diseases as well as for discovering multi-combination therapeutics. His recent efforts at CytoSolve have led to an FDA allowance and exemption for a multi-combination drug for pancreatic cancer, development of innovative nutraceutical products, as well as numerous industry and academic partnerships. Ayyadurai’s earlier research on pattern recognition and large-scale systems development also resulted in multiple patents, numerous industry awards, commercial products such as EchoMail, and scientific and industry publications. He serves as Executive Director of the International Center for Integrative Systems (ICIS), a non-profit research and education foundation, located in Cambridge.

    Dr.Ayyadurai goes into great detail about how the U.S. health system developed since the 1940s, big Pharma, and the ties between it and the Bill Gates Foundation, the Clintons, Dr.Fauci, McKinsey marketing, and the push towards vaccines on a scared world population. Conspiracy theory? Not when so much of it is documented….
    It’s a very long video, but well worth listening to (watching it isn’t necessary, so you can just plug in your headphones or speaker or whatever)

  42. When even a triple facepalm wouldn’t be enough……………………

    “Unfortunately, it seems that COVID-19 has infected everyone involved

    in healthcare management and turned their brains into useless mush.

    Lockdown has two main purposes. One, to limit the spread of the

    virus. Two, and most important, to protect the elderly and infirm from

    infection – as these are the people most likely to become very ill, end

    up in hospital, and often die. [In my view, if we had any sense, we

    would lockdown/protect the elderly, and let everyone else get on with

    their lives].

    However, the hospitals themselves have another policy. Which is to

    discharge the elderly unwell patients with COVID directly back into the

    community, and care homes. Where they can spread the virus widely

    amongst the most vulnerable.

    This, believe it or not, is NHS policy. Still.

    Yes, you did just read that. COVID-19 patients, even those with symptoms, are still

    to be discharged back home, or into care homes – unless unwell enough

    to require hospital care e.g. oxygen, fluids and suchlike. If this is

    not national policy, then the managers are telling me lies”

    https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2020/04/21/the-anti-lockdown-strategy/
    Now if only we had actual journalists to ask about things like this rather than cretins wailing PPE,PPE,PPE

    1. A case of ‘now everyone look over here, keep looking, keep looking, focus, that’s it – because we certainly, under no circumstances, want you to look over there.’

    3. You may have read Alf’s post about a friend with COPD, taken to hospital due to breathing difficulties, has been passed from “dirty” ward to “clean” ward and back again, several times. He has been tested twice for Covid 19 and has been negative. But because of that they keep him in! However if he had tested positive the hospital would have sent him home!” . Ar&e about face or what! Poor chap is desperate to go home.

    4. BTL comment on that blog:

      simon tilley April 21, 2020 at 6:18 pm

      Dear
      Clive As usual Kendrick talking sense. I personally think Hancock
      should be sacked along with those supreme Idiots at PHE. A quango that
      needs abolishing post this crisis. The sorry story unraveling is
      becoming a joke a magnificent Calamity. Poor testing, false mortality
      figures , no Ppe with manufacturing companies saying they cannot
      penetrate Whitehall bureaucracy, etc. Ppe exports to China. No wonder
      they do not Like the public wearing masks. It puts their shambolic
      precurement to shame

      That the economy is also floundering fast shows ineptitude on a
      massive scale. God alone knows how this is going to end. Not well I
      suspect. Mark thinks armed insurrection is a distinct possibility in
      the US. When I saw armed militia responding To Trump’s call to arms to
      protect the second amendment you wonder if he is right. One guy was
      driving a reinforced Hummer at the governors residence in NewHampshire.
      Their death total has now reached 46,000. Ours is 17,000 of which it is
      estimated 40percent (nursing homes) are not even recorded. All the while
      the BBC pumps out the usual claptrap. Apparently light radio BBC2/1 now
      sees itself Not as an vehicle of entertainment but as an educator. God
      help us.

      When all this is over my prayer is we see the back of the EU, Richard
      Branson, The BBC, all woke Intellectuals of left wing persuasion, over
      paid and egotistical celebrities, overpaid football players, Gary
      Neville and that prat Lineker, and finally and utmost Harry Megan most
      of the a Royal family, half the Mps and to conclude the House of Lords. I
      am sure you can add to my list.As the Lord high executioner said in
      Mikado: none of them will be missed!! Love SimonL

      1. And that we can own guns again.
        Not the military style stuff, but the domestic level pistols.

        2. Talking Pictures last night
          Reilly Ace of Spies
          High St Gunshop scene,where his Luger is in for service and his ladyfriend discusses the merits of the Beretta and the Mauser,making her choice complete with a couple of boxes of ammo.
          Not a single bit of bumph,out the door………………
          Sigh…………

        3. Talking Pictures last night
          Reilly Ace of Spies
          High St Gunshop scene,where his Luger is in for service and his ladyfriend discusses the merits of the Beretta and the Mauser,making her choice complete with a couple of boxes of ammo.
          Not a single bit of bumph,out the door………………
          Sigh…………

  43. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jGUgrEfSgaU
    Dr. John Ioannidis Announces Results of COVID-19 Serology

    Published on 19 Apr 2020
    Dr. John Ioannidis announces the results of his serology study in Santa Clara, California.

    Watch the full-length interview with Dr. John Ioannidis here: https://youtu.be/cwPqmLoZA4s

    “Our Santa Clara seroprevalence study is now out. It shows 50-85 times underestimated number of infections, therefore 50-85 times overestimated infection rate fatality. True infection rate fatality is in the ballpark of seasonal influenza.”

    To read the study, head here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.11…

  44. COVID-19 …. WEE KRANKIE ASKS GERMANY FOR HELP

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1271805/Nicola-sturgeon-Scotland-coronavirus-Scotland-germany-Nicola-sturgeon-news-COVID-19

    The SNP’s historical dalliance with Germany is well-documented, several of its leaders and prominent figures were Nazi sympathisers. While Scotland’s young men – including my father and my uncles – were serving in the Army and fighting to defend us, the SNP was trying to subvert the war effort in any way possible. I wonder how many of its young Left-wing supporters are aware of their Party’s shameful past, which has been conveniently airbrushed out of history.

    Douglas Young – leader of SNP 1942-45 – was twice imprisoned during World War 2, the first time for refusing to register either for military service or as a concientious objector, and the second for breaching the Defence Regulations.

    Arthur Donaldson was the leader of the SNP from 1960 to 1969. In 1941, his home was raided and five revolvers, ammunition, Fascist material and a letter to Nazi secret agent Dr Gerhard von Taverner were found and Donaldson was imprisoned as a potential collaborator. In the event of a successful invasion of Britain by the Krauts, he’d planned to form a Scottish Government along the lines of that set up by Vidkun Quisling in Norway.

    Donaldson was lucky he lived in Britain. In any other country he would have been shot.

    2. I should think so….at last her true unpatriotic colours are hanging on her own washing line.
      She should have used the tumble dryer it’s much more discrete.
      She’d have the audacity to ask for ‘the help’ in Scottish currency.

    1. We need to be brave and weigh up the risks in our fight against coronavirus
      ALLISON PEARSON
      Follow Allison Pearson
      21 APRIL 2020 • 7:00PM
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      278

      Discover the holiday home of your dreams
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      Over the weekend, I was listening to a Radio 4 programme about Dame Vera Lynn when one startling fact jumped out at me. When she was a very small child, more than a century ago now, Vera contracted diptheria and croup. She was taken to a hospital tent where kettles were kept permanently on the boil to help patients with their breathing. Little Vera was one of the lucky ones. She survived, and her lungs went on to thrill and console the wartime generation, but hundreds of thousands didn’t. A common childhood illness, diptheria caused death in up to one in 10 of those who got it. Before a vaccine was finally introduced in 1942, diptheria killed an average of 3,500 children a year in the UK.

      Can you imagine how our 24/7 news cycle would cope if 67 children were losing their lives every single week to a lethal bacterial throat infection? Already, our TV reporters like to focus on younger Covid patients, a bad habit which has already triggered a scary amount of anxiety among adolescents as well as small children. And yet, even well into middle age, fatalities are very low compared to many of the other diseases and accidents that can kill us. According to the NHS and the Office for National Statistics (ONS), people under 60 make up just 7.6% of the reported Covid deaths in the UK.

      Clearly, the mortality rate increases significantly in each age group, starting with 55 to 59 in males and 65 to 69 in females. The highest proportion of deaths is among 75- to 84-year-olds, but, still, only 9% of all the deaths in that age group have an underlying cause of Covid19.

      Yet people are terrified of going outside even when they have no rational reason to be so scared. In a poll on Mumsnet, parents were asked, “If primary schools are the first to reopen next month, would you be happy to send your DC (darling child) back to a crowded classroom? Some 48% voted no against 52% yes. “Absolutely not, far too soon,” railed one mum. What made her say that? According to Imperial College, schools being open has remarkably little effect on transmission of the virus. In fact, children are in more peril at home where two-thirds of them have, quite shockingly, received no form of education since lockdown, not to mention those poor mites who are shut in with violent and neglectful parents.

      Yes, the pandemic has had devastating effects and caused immense suffering. Stories of nurses and doctors succumbing to the remorseless enemy they are at war with are hard to bear. All the more reason for us to try not to give in to hysteria and scaremongering. Those brave people did their duty and so must we. In order to find a way out of this crisis, each and every one of us will need to understand – and live with – our own personal risks.

      On Monday, there was cause for optimism, it seemed we were past the peak of the epidemic. The daily death toll was still painfully high, but trending downwards. Instead of the terrifying “witch’s hat” graph that we might have seen, it looked as if millions of people complying with lockdown had, indeed, achieved Boris’s flattened sombrero. The chronic cases had been spaced out and the NHS had sufficient capacity to cope. Well done, everyone, keep it up!

      But you would have struggled to find any glimmer of hope on that night’s Panorama which had a report about Covid patients in intensive care. Viewers could be forgiven for thinking that they should count themselves lucky if they were still alive by the end of the programme. “Around one in ten people who test positive for Covid19 become seriously unwell and are admitted to intensive care,” said a breathless Jane Corbyn. What she didn’t say is that, thanks to the grotesque inadequacies of procurement by Public Health England, very few members of the public have been tested at all and any who have tend to be extremely ill.

      Let’s try expressing that Panorama stat in a way which helps us to make better sense of the actual risks: so far only 0.1% of the British population has been ill enough to be tested (positive) for Covid19 and about 90% of that 0.1% have survived. To date, some 99.99% of Britons have not perished from coronavirus.

      The Government campaign to get people to comply with the restrictions has been successful. Too successful. One public information advert I saw actually claimed that Corona was “life threatening for people of all ages”. Hmm. A justifiable falsehood for the greater good or a con-trick on the younger generation? Either way, it will take time to reduce the level of fear and panic and get people back to work.

      But reduce it we must. The economy is the ventilator of our country; without it we cannot breathe for long. Vital organs are already starting to shut down and may die. The threat of 6.5 million people becoming unemployed outweighs any risk posed by the virus. Ministers have three weeks to devise an, “It’s OK to go outside now, you lot” campaign.

      In his convalescence, Boris is said to be anxious to avoid a second peak. Such caution is understandable. Who would want to be the Prime Minister weighing up lives versus jobs, especially when no jobs equals lives lost, just farther down the road? But if anyone can get the nation to believe it can beat this bloody thing, it’s him. Once the restrictions are eased numbers will creep up again, but with immense vigilance (and abundant supplies of PPE) we can manage. The lockdown was to defend the NHS against a deadly tsunami, now the Government and the country must learn to surf the next wave.

      Until a vaccine is found we are going to have to live with the risk of Covid19 exactly as we live with the risk of road accidents and cancer. Other countries have started to ease lockdown after their number of active cases fell. When we are sure we are at that point, the UK must follow suit. Restrictions must be relaxed on low-risk groups first. The over-seventies and the immuno-compromised may be advised to carry on some measure of self-isolation while the rest of us build up the immunity which hopefully offers them protection. If it were up to me, I’d put the Army in charge of making sure supplies get through to every quarantined person. Along with medics, our soldiers have shown themselves to be among the very best people we have.

      There will be flare-ups of infection, but the response is in our hands. Our thoroughly washed hands. As we move forward tentatively in the months to come, still looking out for each other, we must retain a sense of perspective. This virus is horribly common but its deadly effects are rare.

      If Dame Vera Lynn’s generation could endure that child-killer, diptheria, then we can handle Covid. As another Prime Minister said when Britain was in a dark place before, “Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.”

      Churchill was right. Let’s be brave. Let’s decide.

      During what can only be described as an extraordinary time for the world, the Telegraph wants to give readers the opportunity to come together as a community. Join our Facebook Group.

      1. The past is another country.
        Notes from that dim and distant land: the one that was arguably better run without armies of taxpayer funded ‘experts’.
        My father caught diptheria when he was 15. He was sent to an isolation hospital and came home a few weeks later.
        I was at school during the 1957 Asian flu pandemic. The schools stayed open, life continued. At one stage there were only 5 pupils left in our class. The following week, we were back to normal strength.
        MB started his nurse training during the Hong Kong flu outbreak; other than the hospital mortuary being a little crowded, life went on as normal.

        1. I remember in 1957, kids going round shouting “Alsation flu- wuff wuff!” as we queued at the district nurse’s house for our polio vaccines.

        2. I Hartley agree with you! (Sorry to sound like a vinyl record)

          I was at a boarding prep school in Bath and we all got it. The smell, the beef tea and the medicines were all completely foul.

        3. Morning Anne

          My mother caught Scarlet fever when she was a child . Moh had a TB gland when he was a lad , and had to be isolated and off school for 6 months . In my primary school , there were children in calipers who had developed polio at a very young age .

          Overseas we witnessed children who had succumbed to measles and chicken pox badly .

          Pneumonia is a lung disease characterized by inflammation of the airspaces in the lungs, most commonly due to an infection. Pneumonia may be caused by viral infections, bacterial infections, or fungi; less frequently by other causes. The most common bacterial type that causes pneumonia is Streptococcus pneumoniae

          https://www.medicinenet.com/pneumonia_facts/article.htm

          1. 318440+ up ticks,
            Morning TB,
            I also was a victim of scarlet fever & isolated in walker gate hospital Newcastle, mum dad visited we spoke via an open ward window.
            Then about to leave WG it was discovered I had chicken pox, yet another isolation ward, plus no mittens
            ( even then) scratched across my forehead leaving pitted scars.
            When asked, when in the Ivory Coast did I belong to a tribe in England whilst talking to a tribal facial scarred up local
            I told him I was of the crib tribe our motto being 15/2 15/4 & one for his knob, he knowingly nodded his head.

          2. I’ve got the chicken pox scars too, Ogga – and last year it came back as shingles.

          3. 318440+ up ticks,
            Afternoon N,
            Nasty I believe, as a kid I had the lot, sf, cp, mumps, measles, whooping cough, pneumonia, broken arm, various scalp scars from railway flint stone fights never quite as many as the “claw”in the illness department though.
            Just a run of the mill kiduppidge as was.

      2. Allison Pearson is one of the few writers that tempt me to pay for the DT (the revulsion towards most of the others is still stronger though).

        I don’t understand why parents of young children are so worried when next to none of them have died from coronavirus.

        1. Death is the new taboo. It must be shoved under the carpet and never mentioned. Every death is a “tragedy”, irrespective of the age of the deceased.

  47. Oxford Uni, Nuffield, Wellcome, MasterCard, and the NHS are all involved together with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to run repurposed drug trials on an exclusive basis in the UK.

    The trials started on March 19.

    How long would it take to get agreement for all those diverse organizations to work together ?

    It must have taken months.

    So someone must have known this pandemic was coming last year…

    1. For the answer PP, please see my comment above.. Think Gates, Whitty, Event 201

  48. A man was about to tee off on the golf course when he felt a tap on his shoulder & a man handed him a card that read:

    “I am a deaf mute. May I play through, please?”

    The 1st man angrily gave the card back, and communicated that “No, he may NOT play through, and that his handicap did not give him such a right.”

    The first man whacked the ball onto the green and left to finish the hole.

    Just as he was about to put the ball into the hole, he was hit on the head with a golf ball, laying him out cold.

    When he came to a few minutes later, he looked around and saw the deaf mute sternly looking at him, one hand on his hip, the other holding up 4 fingers.

    1. Fore a moment I didn’t understand this joke. I must be slowing down mentally.

      1. Slowing down? Never. Today I have to wear a tie for the first time in at least a dozen years. Been doing it since prep school, but I couldn’t remember how to do it properly and had to find a suitable youtube video…

  49. Is Britain ALREADY going back to work? Roads, trains and Tubes appear busier while weekend traffic was highest of lockdown so far as building sites, cafes and now B&Q quietly reopen doors. 22 April 2020.

    Pockets of Britain appear to be slowly returning to normal as traffic on the road increases, cafes reopen and shops resume trading as pressure grows for an exit plan from the lockdown ravaging the economy.

    I certainly hope so! I’ve just been down to Morrisons and it looked busier than Monday with no queues again. Three guys were laying new paving on someone’s drive and one of the Ladies Hairdressers was open. This is the way to do it! Just quietly sabotage the Government’s stupid plan!

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8244719/M25-looks-busier-day.html

    2. Is Britain ALREADY going back to work?you ask. Yes is my reply from what i saw today. I did a round trip to my butcher in the next county and it was far more busy than I have seen it. Good news.

    5. That’s the way yo do it with common sense. Some might even call it the Swedish model.

      Give it until the next sunny weekend for those without common sense to Organise a big gathering that plod cannot afford to ignore.

  50. Oh Hell
    ITV4 The Saint
    Illegal immigrants crossing the channel,one of them has a fever
    Quick,quick shut it down hate crime in progress

  51. 318440+ up ticks,
    Are the airports still accepting unchecked incoming units, are the beaches
    still under attack by a foreign invasion force from a supposedly safe country ?
    This issue is starting to have the odour of a topping up a scam to keep it running about it.

  52. Two from my stroll around the prison grounds this morning.

    T shirt weather. I went out with a light fleece jacket, unzipped over a shirt. The jacket was removed and carried as unwanted baggage for all the trip. 12° apparently. Clear sky and a NE breeze off the sea too faint to notice. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/619d20bcbf0049f76a4f385ac2f61fe9f9366c89348ce39aca05637380b1c3f8.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4d44410699aef4de826a412d82c17292623686136f4520fddb13b79273e811e5.jpg

    1. Excellent, similar weather here. Heard my first cuckoo of the year this morning at Kit Hill. It was a fair distance off but I’m sure to see it tomorrow, they’re not shy.

      1. That path onto the beach is usually like a minefield with dog-emptyings, despite there being bins provided.

        One advantage of the shut-down is that the council has closed the beach car parks, and this has discouraged the usual crowd from driving from miles around to empty their animals. Even so, there are a small number who still do it. There were a couple of cars parked outside the car park this morning. Dogs are still getting walked, but they are those that live within walking distance and whether it’s down to a lack of numbers, or maybe the locals not messing in their own nests the difference is there to see. I did almost stand in one turd at the edge of the path this morning (when I was taking that particular photo), but in general it has been much cleaner these past four weeks and a pleasure to walk on.

        It’ll be a pity when they reopen the car parks and we’re back to the minefield and black plastic fruit hanging on the bushes and fences. I’ve even seen a bag left on one of the picnic tables.

      2. That path onto the beach is usually like a minefield with dog-emptyings, despite there being bins provided.

        One advantage of the shut-down is that the council has closed the beach car parks, and this has discouraged the usual crowd from driving from miles around to empty their animals. Even so, there are a small number who still do it. There were a couple of cars parked outside the car park this morning. Dogs are still getting walked, but they are those that live within walking distance and whether it’s down to a lack of numbers, or maybe the locals not messing in their own nests the difference is there to see. I did almost stand in one turd at the edge of the path this morning (when I was taking that particular photo), but in general it has been much cleaner these past four weeks and a pleasure to walk on.

        It’ll be a pity when they reopen the car parks and we’re back to the minefield and black plastic fruit hanging on the bushes and fences. I’ve even seen a bag left on one of the picnic tables.

        1. I just don’t understand why people don’t take the poo bags home with them .. There is a problem everywhere with discarded poo bags . So unfair on the countryside , isn’t it .

          1. Almost as bad as the days when dogs just did it on the pavements for people to step in.

          2. Then the pain was spread far and wide. These days the chances of stepping in some on a town pavement are remote to non-existent. Good news.

            The downside is that now there seem to be even more dogs than there were in the past and they go elsewhere. It’s no longer enough to have the family pet. They’ve got to have a ‘his and hers’ or even more. Then they take them for a drive in the car to their favourite spot so that the dogs spill our as soon as they get there, dropping their loads on the paths. Most pick it up and good luck to them. It’s not my idea of fun, but there you are. Some do pick up, then leave the bags. They would be better off not picking up at all. Some just let the dogs off to do as they will and don’t bother to pick up. The result is that all the dog crap from miles around is concentrated in one place, like the path in the photo, or all the other coastal paths in the area.

            Welcome to Northumberland and its miles of golden dog toilet.

            I’ve always liked dogs, got on great with friends’ dogs, but never owned one myself.

            These days I’m less of a fan because of the selfish people who so often own them and impose their pets on others. It’s not so long since my wife was bitten by one there, breaking the skin. Its owner excused it by saying he was just being friendly and got a bit excited. Then there are the ones off the lead who run over to ‘be friendly’ and slobber saliva all over your clothing, or get interested in what the 1500 quid camera lens might smell like. If a dog doesn’t respond to a call to come back, even on a beach, it should be on a leash until the owner has bothered to train it.

  53. Look up an article by Effiedeans.com
    This one.
    20th April.

    A great assessment of modern journalists.
    I can’t post it it’s too frustrating to keep trying to access Nottlers on my PC

      1. Journalism is missing the mood the country
        Twitter is an interesting metaphor for infectious diseases. I write something. It might be seen be some of my followers, but it has to compete with what everyone else is writing so it might be ignored. If someone retweets, it might be seen by any of their followers, but just occasionally a tweet captures the mood and suddenly it spreads and spreads way beyond what I might have expected when I wrote it.
        Recently I wrote:
        Journalism is missing the mood the country. We don’t want blame, we don’t want argument as if this were a General Election, we want a contribution to the national effort to get us out of this crisis. We want hope optimism and faith in our country. We need less negativity.
        This tweet has been liked and retweeted more than any other tweet I have written. Some people objected. It became clear from reading their responses that this was usually because they were hostile to the Government either because they voted for someone else at the last election or because they voted Remain in 2016. They too were missing the mood of the country.
        What strikes me most from my online interactions is that ordinary Brits have gone beyond politics. We understand that we are not fighting a General Election. We are fighting the worst pandemic in the past one hundred years.
        Morale does matter. So does national unity and a sense of common purpose. When Boris was sick, and Dominic Raab said he was a fighter, some journalists didn’t get it. They objected that it implied that those who died were weak. It didn’t. Raab was simply expressing hope. He was being positive. If Captain Tom got sick, we would all call him a fighter. We would do so no matter the outcome.
        A person or a people who believe they will win in the end is much more likely to do so. This is why morale matters so much to armies. It has on numerous occasions seen a smaller force beat a larger force. Morale can cause miracles not merely in battle but in illness. Being brave, optimistic and full of faith does not guarantee that you get better, but it helps. Thinking your case is hopeless and you are bound to die sometimes guarantees that you do. This is what the country gets that journalists don’t.
        I have been impressed by a few journalists in the past weeks, but not many. I think the BBC Horizon team have done an outstanding job in helping us understand the nature of the illness we face. Some economic journalists have done a good job in explaining the economic consequences of the worldwide lockdown. One or two political journalists have given us some help in understanding Government thinking. But journalists for the most part have disgraced themselves.
        There are people I usually enjoy reading who frequently make interesting points about society and politics who are simply showing their lack of knowledge today. Too many journalists who think there is only one story to write about skim a few medical journals and then think they are qualified to tell the rest of us what should be done. They go from one extreme to other and pretend to have a knowledge that they don’t.
        Twenty-four-hour news programmes are full of relentless negativity. They pick up on one issue such as ventilators go with that for a few days and then obsess about Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Next we get comparisons between countries. This country has more deaths than that country as if it is some sort of Olympic medal table. Why can’t you get PPE? Because everyone else in the world wants it too. But shouldn’t you have prepared? Would you like to apologise for your failure?
        The worst of all is the daily press briefings. We listen to some of the best minds in the country explaining to us what is being done and why only to have a series of ignorant childish questions from journalists trying to score political points and trip up a minister. No wonder most of us switch off when we get to that point.
        There has never previously in the whole world been such a lockdown. The only insight from the Sunday Times was that hindsight is a wonderful thing.
        The first thing you learn in history is that people make mistakes. Faced with unprecedented situations they make lots of mistakes. When I first started reading about Covid 19 back in January I read everything I could find on the subject because I was planning to make a trip to Central Asia. I told myself I’d be OK and booked my flight. I was lucky that it was cancelled, or I might be stuck there yet. I would have made a terrible mistake otherwise.
        I didn’t read a single journalist in January or February who predicted that Britain would be locked down in March. I read lots of journalists who said that Covid 19 would be no worse than seasonal flu and we had nothing to worry about. I didn’t read a single journalist who in mid-January accurately predicted how the virus would spread worldwide nor one who said that we should lockdown immediately.
        If we had had the modern journalist profession in 1940, we would have lost the war. They would have complained about the Governments disastrous mistakes at Narvik. It should have known that the Maginot line wouldn’t work. Journalists would have demanded that Churchill should have been immediately sacked for the defeat at Dunkirk. They would have described our situation as hopeless and would have ridiculed our ability to fight them on the beaches and would have said it was mere arrogance to suppose that our pathetic little country could have a finest hour. After all the Germans do everything so much more efficiently than we do. They would have listed all the mistakes our country had made and called it insight. The British people however would not have listened to them then, just as we don’t read them now. Newspapers are going out of business. They deserve to.

          1. Yes. It is the Effie blog mentioned above, that Bill T had difficulty opening. We are here to serve.

        2. “Newspapers are going out of business. They deserve to.”
          Indeed. And TV stations, I hope.

        1. Thanks – I saw the article yesterday, somewhere.

          Not that it is not worth repeating – and shoving in the face of the press rabble

  54. LBC’s Nick Ferrari discussing PPE supply to care homes, “…You’re the Care Minister and you do not know when…”

    Disturbing.

    1. This current episode aside, I’ve had my doubts about Ferrari (and others of his ilk) since I heard one of his programmes when I was in the car a year or so ago. He and others like him like to present an image of themselves as someone all-knowing, who rips into anyone perceived not to have answers or to know less than him, because ‘we need to know’, the sort of ‘why didn’t you think of that before you thought of that’ line of questioning that creates more heat than light.

      The programme I was listening to was going on about recycling and he was speaking to someone in particular about the recycling of glass. Now you may have different views about recycling and the recycling of glass in particular, since glass is made out of sand and we aren’t about to have a world shortage of sand as far as I’m aware, but that’s not the point. My point is his total lack of knowledge about one of the most basic facts. He blustered on as he does, discussing it with the caller, who incidentally seemed to know what he was talking about. The caller was talking about someone he knew who had been turned away from a recycling facility with some window glass he needed shot of amongst other things.

      Then at the end of the call, Ferrari posed the question to his audience, ‘Well once you put the glass bottles and windows and stuff into the bin, they all get broken and mixed up. How do you recycle that? If they are all broken, how can you stick all those pieces together again to recycle?’. It wasn’t a one-off. In the ten minutes or so before I finished my journey and got out of the car he posed this same question several times, like a dog with a bone, he kept asking the audience how you could recycle glass if you couldn’t stick all those pieces together?

      A national journalist who expects everyone else to have all the answers and doesn’t know that when you heat glass, it melts.

    2. This current episode aside, I’ve had my doubts about Ferrari (and others of his ilk) since I heard one of his programmes when I was in the car a year or so ago. He and others like him like to present an image of themselves as someone all-knowing, who rips into anyone perceived not to have answers or to know less than him, because ‘we need to know’, the sort of ‘why didn’t you think of that before you thought of that’ line of questioning that creates more heat than light.

      The programme I was listening to was going on about recycling and he was speaking to someone in particular about the recycling of glass. Now you may have different views about recycling and the recycling of glass in particular, since glass is made out of sand and we aren’t about to have a world shortage of sand as far as I’m aware, but that’s not the point. My point is his total lack of knowledge about one of the most basic facts. He blustered on as he does, discussing it with the caller, who incidentally seemed to know what he was talking about. The caller was talking about someone he knew who had been turned away from a recycling facility with some window glass he needed shot of amongst other things.

      Then at the end of the call, Ferrari posed the question to his audience, ‘Well once you put the glass bottles and windows and stuff into the bin, they all get broken and mixed up. How do you recycle that? If they are all broken, how can you stick all those pieces together again to recycle?’. It wasn’t a one-off. In the ten minutes or so before I finished my journey and got out of the car he posed this same question several times, like a dog with a bone, he kept asking the audience how you could recycle glass if you couldn’t stick all those pieces together?

      A national journalist who expects everyone else to have all the answers and doesn’t know that when you heat glass, it melts.

      1. Probably never been to a glass factory (or read Dick Francis’ novel Shattered, come to that).

    1. My wife suggested she could make one with an bra…..i said I feel like a right tit if I wore it.
      Still slightly better than using the cricket box found whilst tidying in our garage.

    2. There’s also a youtube video of how to make 4 face masks with one Hepa filter vacuum cleaner bag and some pipe cleaners and some elastic….

  57. Roads are very busy today so it looks like we are getting back to work and that is great news.

  58. Just walked the dog for an hour. Saw two buzzards gliding around and heard my first cuckoo of the year.

  59. Speccie email 14:17

    Most of the cabinet want a significant easing of the lockdown in May
    by James Forsyth

    Coronavirus has created two different cabinets: an inner cabinet involved in the key discussions about how to handle the pandemic and an outer cabinet. Last week’s meeting reinforced this point, when some in the outer cabinet were acutely aware that the real decision had been taken by the inner cabinet before the whole cabinet Zoomed in for their meeting.

    The outer cabinet tends to be very keen on a significant easing of the lockdown. One minister’s assessment is that two-thirds of the total cabinet favour a substantial reduction in restrictions at the next review in a few weeks’ time.

    As I say in the magazine, out tomorrow, Boris Johnson is at Chequers wrestling with the question of what to do. There are no good answers to the problem. Lift the lockdown too soon and you risk a revival of the virus that could overwhelm the NHS, despite all the extra capacity that has been added. But the longer these current restrictions remain in place, the greater the social and economic damage.

    The view in Whitehall is that the most likely outcome of the next government review is a mild lifting of restrictions while the UK government watches very closely to see what that does to the R number (the number of people infected by each person with the virus) and what happens in other countries that have gone further in lifting their lockdowns.

      1. I thought that nice Mr Blair had outlawed possession of guns?

        It is sometimes said in such cases the individual is inviting suicide by cop….

        1. ‘Morning, Stephen, quicker, cheaper and more effective if he just jumped off the balcony.

  62. Good afternoon all.

    Beyond Explanation

    A farmer is sitting in the neighborhood bar getting soused.

    A man comes in and asks him, “Hey, why are you sitting here on this beautiful day getting drunk?”

    Farmer: Some things you just can’t explain.

    Man: So what happened that’s so horrible?

    Farmer: Well, today I was sitting by my cow milking her.

    Just as I got the bucket about full, she took her left leg

    and kicked over the bucket. Some things you just can’t explain.

    Man: Ok, but that’s not so bad.

    Man: So what happened then?

    Farmer: I took her left leg and tied it to the post on the left.

    Man: and then?

    Farmer:
    Well, I sat back down and continued to milk her. Just as I got the
    bucket about full, she took her right leg and kicked over the bucket.
    Some things you just can’t explain.

    Man: So, what did you do then?

    Farmer:
    I took her right leg this time and tied it to the post on the right. I
    sat back down and began milking her again. Just as I got the bucket
    about full, the stupid cow knocked

    over the bucket with her tail. Some things you just can’t explain.

    Man: So, what did you do?

    Farmer:
    Well, I didn’t have any more rope, so I took off my belt and tied her
    tail to the rafter. In that moment, my pants fell down and my wife
    walked in…

    Some things you just can’t explain.

    2. 318440+ up ticks,
      Afternoon Rik,
      Lots of peoples know that but they find comfort in gripping their nasal passages, whilst others say that they find their comfort in supporting & voting for the best of the worst, then that is just what they receive, the best of the WORST every time.
      By the by,

      Maybe the suppression of truthsayers will get a serious coating of looking at and questions asked.

    3. “The bill – which would have formally ceased freedom of movement with
      Europe after the Brexit transition period – was pulled from the Commons
      order paper by Jacob Rees-Mogg ahead of a second reading on Tuesday.

      It
      comes as ministers spent the last week mulling over plans to delay the
      reading because of the outbreak of the coronavirus, and MPs grappled
      with new technology as the House of Commons moves into a new “virtual
      parliament”

      Doesn’t actually say it’s not going to be debated later, just not now.

      1. 318440+ up ticks,
        Afternoon N,
        He was one of the long line of Brexit saviors was he not ? one of the ones that the peoples put in & lost faith in, in that order.
        You could read it like a book from the 9 month delay ongoing.

      2. This may be about free movement of EU people, perhaps with a view to allowing seasonal workers from Romania to continue to arrive here.
        So it is a Brexit, but not quite thing.
        As regards immigration from elsewhere, why was that in the same bill as EU stuff? Laziness, lack of thought, stupidity or cunning?

        1. Once we’ve really left, and out of transition, why should EU pople be treated any differently from people from elsewhere? Seasonal workers should have a scheme whereby they are temporary and then go home.

          1. I didn’t say they they should. It’s our farmers again bleating that they cannot get British workers, innit. Backed by the Remainers in the Cabinet et al.
            I’d close off the entire country, permanently, and start mass* deportations.

            There are always answers, like students having to earn”credits” to get free tuition, by working on farms or in factories. Family holidays on farms, “Look Janet, look John, that is what your Sunday lunch looks like before it goes to the abattoir”.

            *Small mass deportations ,as big ones are classed as genocide even no one gets hurt.

      1. But is it she or her cabinet colleagues who are responsible for the betrayal?

        If she resigns I shall continue to have some respect for her; if she does not I shall have to concede that you are right.

    5. It might be temporary. We’ll have to see.
      If it’s permanent, I see no reason to vote Conservative ever again.

      1. Our politicians won’t give up betraying us until we, our culture and our Christian faith have all been swamped and destroyed by Muhammadanism.

  64. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x_w1yVk6tmc
    Tucker Carlson 21/4/20
    Excellent opening monologue on immigration, criticizing Trump’s immigration ban, which in Tucker’s opinion, doesn’t go far enough. It will still allow temporary workers into America at a time when there’s still a pandemic (mortality rate is debatable, see video of Dr.John Ionnides) and 22 million Americans have just filed for unemployment benefits.

  66. No Shit Sherlock

    London (CNN)The world is facing multiple famines of “biblical proportions” in just a matter of months, the UN has said, warning that the coronavirus pandemic will push an additional 130 million people to the brink of starvation.

    Famines

    could take hold in “about three dozen countries” in a worst-case

    scenario, the executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP) said

    in a stark address on Tuesday. Ten of those countries already have more

    than 1 million people on the verge of starvation, he said.

    He cited conflict, an economic recession, a decline in aid and a collapse in oil prices as factors likely to lead to vast food shortages, and urged swift action to avert disaster.

    “While

    dealing with a Covid-19 pandemic, we are also on the brink of a hunger

    pandemic,” David Beasley told the UN’s security council. “There is also a

    real danger that more people could potentially die from the economic

    impact of Covid-19 than from the virus itself.”

    https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/22/africa/coronavirus-famine-un-warning-intl/index.html?utm_source=twCNN&utm_term=link&utm_medium=social&utm_content=2020-04-22T11%3A40%3A05
    I note Russia has put a cap on wheat exports to protect domestic food supplies
    Remind me again how self sufficient is the UK??

    1. Mother Nature is taking action to cull the world population. Plague and famine are two of her tools. War could be the third. Politicians should take note. They cannot sit back and let world population continue to grow out of control.

      1. Politicians have already taken note.
        That’s what this lockdown has been about. It’s a practice run to see how far they can push the public into losing their freedoms and rights. Next comes the mandatory vaccine programme. Possibly with side effects.

        1. Possibly with side effects? If Bill Gates has anything to do with it, we’ll be forced to have ‘Vaccine 1.0 Beta edition’ That should wipe out all the pale folk. By the time he releases “Vaccine 10”, it might be safe enough for our replacements…

          2. “Et faciet omnes pusillos et magnos et divites et pauperes et liberos et servos habere caracter in dextera manu aut in frontibus suis.

            Et ne quis possit emere aut vendere nisi qui habet caracter nomen bestiae aut numerum nominis eius.”
            — Apoc. 13:16-17

    2. How many people did they suggest Covid-19 might kill?
      A fraction of the number that the economic blow-back is likely to.

    3. Bob Geldorf will send them our money after getting some tunes played and everything will be OK

  67. OT A good news story.

    The AGA needs overhauling. It is 46 years old. When I came back from France at the end of January, I noticed that there had been a leak from a corroded joint on the hot water pipe below the circulating pump. I contacted a neighbour who is a plumber and he came and looked at it, agreed that it was a straight-forward job, and that he would fit in with the AGA man. We all agreed 5 May. So far so good.

    This Monday, said plumber texted to say that he would be far too busy and couldn’t do the job – and I would have to make other arrangements (as though one can get a plumber at any time, let alone now, to come when you actually want).

    I have used a local building firm for years for odd things – especially plumbing. They had a father and son team (Keith and Martin) of plumbers. Brilliant people. Rang them – they have not got any plumbers any more.

    Managed to find Martin’s mobile number. He rang this morning to say that he could do the job on the 5 May but that I would have to clear it with his new employer. New employer has just rung to say that of course they can do it on 5 May and that they’ll send the boy Martin (he is 45) round to have a look at the job in the next day or so – in order for him to be sure to have the necessary bits.

    Phew – collapse of elderly gent from relief. Nice to know that there are still some decent firms around.

        1. Amazing how FAT some “health” workers are…

          At my GP – the nurse who is the obesity adviser is ENORMOUS….

          1. At my GP, the recently retired Practice Manager was a complete SeaLion – at least a size 22.

      1. I’ve always thought the response of the English team, when the haka is finished should be for the England captain to shout:

        “Form square”
        “First rank, fire”
        “Second rank fire”
        “Third rank fire”

        repeat for the time the haka took to complete.

        1. Alternatively they could just turn away from them when they start their theatricals, shrug, say ‘Whatever’ and walk back to their own half for a bit of a kick-about until the prancing is over.

          1. I’ve had visions of the England captain relaxing in a deckchair at a picnic table covered by a tablecloth. He is enjoying a pot of tea and reading a newspaper, while the All Blacks are working themselves up performing the Haka.

          4. And…?

            It is a complete farce that has no place in modern, professional international rugby.

            It might have been fine when NZ was seen in the UK once in eight years….but times have completely changed. Half the AB are not NZers anyway.

          5. It’s actually a cunning plan.

            NZ stay warmed-up, doing their dance, while the opposition hang around getting chilled.

        1. Indeed. Why on earth don’t they give a traditional English two-fingered salute?

  69. From ‘Elsewhere’

    Danny Finkelstein reminds us where we are…

    “….
    in truth, the choice we face now is no different to the one we faced at
    the beginning of the lockdown. The more we relax restrictions, the more
    people will mix. The more people mix, the more people will get it. And
    the more people get it, the more people will die.

    The public can
    hardly be told: “You won’t die if you get it now because we’ve passed
    the peak so it’s too late for you to start dying”. Or “your mixing isn’t
    lethal now because we’ve already had a lockdown”. Viruses don’t work
    like that. It will carry on until it’s been stopped by a vaccine or
    ameliorated by treatment or until it has been caught by all the people
    who are going to catch it and killed all the people it’s going to kill.

    And this is true for every country, whatever stage of the contagion they
    are in. It’s one of the reasons it is pointless to start making
    judgments about how well or badly Britain has done compared with other
    countries. We don’t know because we are all only at the beginning. We
    will only know when it’s over.”
    Hear Bloody Hear
    We’ve “Flattened the Curve”,built up NHS capacity now get us back to work and get on with life !!!!!!!!!!!!!
    Edit
    Vaccines?? we’ve been trying for vaccines against Coronaviruses for 40 years,no luck so far……………

      3. Abandoned some years ago as no solution could be found. Now HQ for killing Ruskies who happen to live nearby.

  73. Glad to see Ursula von Lederhosen’s suggestion that European destinations may be open to visitors in the Summer.

    Mrs.Mac and I are looking forward to visiting Zizzi again, when our period of house-arrest is over and we are able to travel freely.

    1. You’ll be able to travel, but they won’t let you out of the house when you get there.

      You’ll have to throw 50 euro notes attached to a shopping list from upstairs windows so that anyone passing below with the necessary permits can go and get some groceries and a bottle of wine for you. You will then lower a basket on a rope to collect your rations on their return.

          3. Italian restaurant in Inverness. They do a very good Spiedini Manzo and the Antipasto is to die for.

          7. Ah. Thanks. I now know more than I did a few moments ago.

            I took it to be some town in Italy. 🙂

          14. None in these parts. (EDIT. I’ve discovered from that website there’s one only 30 miles away)

            I don’t use Italian restaurants anyway. Almost everything has cheese in it.

            Come to think of it we rarely if ever use restaurants of any kind. We ate out a couple of times during a two week trip in January 2019, but not since.

            Don’t feel the need.

          15. When out with the family, I have to graciously go along with whatever they choose.
            However, when the choice is Italian, I am painfully aware that I can produce the same food at home. It really isn’t a treat.

          16. A pizza and pasta joint, same owners as Pizza Express.

            Edit:
            Not sure but I think the Chinese have bought Pizza Express. Ask and Zizzi are still part of the holding company but Pizza Express may have been flogged off.

          17. Hi John. One lives and learns. Pizza Express has been owned by Hony Capital since 2014. Zizzi, Ask Italian and Coco-di-Mama are owned by the Azzurri Group.

          18. Hi Geoff. Yup, I should have remembered because I was working at about that time with Ab Rogers (Richard Rogers’ eldest son) on a project in Cheltenham (Huffkins Tea Rooms and Bakery Shop).

            Ab Rogers was designing an experimental laboratory Pizza Express in Richmond on Thames at that time. I was revamping the Carluccio’s in Richmond and paid a visit to Pizza Express. Very poor quality shop fitting and next to a stinking bus depot from memory.

            Pizza Express was attempting to rebrand and had appointed Ab and his team to come up with ideas.

            At the same time Ab Rogers was to be seen on TV attempting to rebrand Pizza Hut with minimal success. He was the chap wearing green tartans, a bit of an exhibitionist with very little colour sense. The attractive girls surrounding him were his assistants, his studio in Wimbledon employing mostly girls.

          19. Thanks, John. Interesting. Not been to a Pizza Express for years. Guildford was the last one, IIRC. Large, busy, grand piano, good vibes. I’ve had a couple of work Christmas lunches at the Woking branch. Not so ggreat, but evidently good enough for Prince Andrew… Incidentally, I worked on an extension to his sprogs’ prep school near Windlesham for a while. Last Italian I visited was Carluccio’s at Gunwharf Quays, a year past March, which I thought was impressive.

          20. When I worked for the late (Sir) William Whitfield I was often asked to report to his flat at 36a Queen’s Gate opposite the gates to Imperial College. The practice’s office was at Alfred Place opposite the South Kensington Arcade.

            This generally involved working through the night on competition entries. I was the ace pen and ink draughtsman in the practice. In the evening Whitfield would suggest we have pizza from the original Pizza Express on nearby Gloucester Road. We would have a green salad and glass of red wine and coffee. Luxury on my salary at that time.

            Returning to the flat we would draw, Whitfield sketched and I set up the architectural drawings from the sketches.

            At midnight we had a whisky and brushed our teeth as one would normally do. This was a sort of ritual because thereafter we both made the drawings throughout the night and at a pace. In the early morning I would go to the printers with the tracings and return with them.

            I would be knackered and given the day off but Whitfield seemed as fresh as ever and would set off, in his own words to “clinch the job”.

        1. It has just been announced by HMG that there will be a 24 hour police guard on every house where there is someone aged 70 or over living.

      2. Not just sun beds. When we stayed in a hotel in Dinan a few years ago a coach load of Germans stopped off for breakfast. When the hotel guests assembled all that was left was a few scraps and crumbs and most of those were on the floor.

        Not just sun beds. The Germans appear to have bought up all the PPE and testing kits while the Italians fell like flies. Not nice people, arrogant, opinionated, smug and self centred.

        3. I’ve watched a group of them gobble up a large breakfast and then make a packed lunch from what was left.

          Next to nothing remaining for other guests.

          Greedy, selfish, fat bastards.

          1. I concur. That has been my own personal experience on several occasions. They are at their worst in other countries to Germany, France, Switzerland, Yugoslavia (now Split is in Croatia) and Italy.

  74. The government and its experts have made one Gawd-almighty cock-up of this whole affair.

    We are no further forward to knowing how many have it, nor whether having had it actually gives immunity from getting it again.The economy will be wrecked for years to come.

    It will be in the interests of the younger generation for all the oldies to be released from lock-down forthwith. As they die in droves each one who goes will be a saving on pensions, NHS treatments and release housing stock.

    Let my people go, you know it makes sense.

    1. Unfortunately this shambles is not restricted to the UK.

      Almost no governments or top level bureaucrats have risen to the challenge. All are promising more testing or more PPE, none are delivering.

      Infection counts being reported are absolute BS, until recently we could not even get a test unless we were near death AND had been out of the country. What kind of count is that?

      Now these incompetents are all preaching that oldies must be isolated until a vaccine is freely available.

      1. This year, next year, sometime, never?

        If it is mutating as quickly as has been suggested the elderly will never be allowed out.

    2. “…all the oldies to be released from lock-down forthwith. As they die in droves each one who goes will be a saving on pensions, NHS treatments and release housing stock.”

      After you….

    3. Come on you oldies

      Spend, Spend, Spend

      If the Milleniums do not like us, spend their inheritance(s)

  75. “It comes as Matt Hancock said today that the UK is “at the peak” of the pandemic at today’s hybrid PMQs.”

    AGAIN.

  76. Thought for the day.

    Prince Harry must have/have had some honorary rank somewhere in the Armed Forces.

    Perhaps the Queen could strip him of the rank and award it to Captain Tom.

    I’m sure the service people within the Regiment, or whatever would be proud to have Captain Tom as their Honorary Colonel in Chief.

    1. Conduct Unbecoming (to an officer and a gentleman)

      I remember seeing the play with this title in London in the 1960’s. Paul Jones – the Manfred Man singer and harmonica player – was in the lead role.

      The silly young couple do not know how to behave – according to the DM they publicised their telephone call to the Queen on her birthday against a specific request not to do so.

      The sheer stupidity of going out of their way to antagonise the MSM will do them no good at all.

      Have Ladbrokes yet offered odds on how long their marriage will last or have they given each other life sentences?

        1. Did you type one on your laptop and the other on the PC or your phone? Disqus lets you do that.

          1. I have just got my desk-top computer back with a new hard disk and Caroline had not tuned it in to my new avatar.

  77. “Research has conclusively shown that those who have heavily tattooed skin are far more likely to die if they get Covid-19.”

    Research has further shown that those who have their tattoos removed by laser surgery significantly improve their chances of survival.

    All right. I admit it. This is fake news which I have made up but there is so much fake news about that my feeble and tasteless jokes don’t really make any difference and if, in the long term, this leads to fewer people injecting ink and putting disgusting graffiti daubs in their skin then so much the better.

    2. Rastus, you have just been taken on by Anne Allan as a recruiting sergeant for her daughter-in-law’s Tattoo Removal business. Does she pay you commission?

    3. It’s on a par with the claim that high urban pollution levels are correlated with the chance of dying from CV.

    4. Yo mt t

      When I am re-incarnated it will be as a

      Color blinde, Dislexik, Jackson Pollock tipe draughing, Tattow Artisht.

      It will be fun, but, the types who have tatts would not evun notiss

  80. Latest Breaking News – Beer retailers fear a crash in sales if women are forced to wear masks on a night out, the ten pinters will be on a level playing field with the babes, beer glasses will become redundant

    1. Ah, but paper bag manufacturers will do well instead, with the double-baggers particularly.

  82. DTletters top comments

    Robert Spowart
    22 Apr 2020 1:56AM

    Why does everyone, like Dr Peter Sander, presume it is the Government’s job to procure PPE? Why do they ignore the highly paid, some would say over paid, Procurement and Logistics Managers of the NHS its self?

    Martin Selves
    22 Apr 2020 7:00AM

    What we need is a balanced, impartial journalism. What we have is close to being a 5th Column. A fifth column is any group of people who undermine a larger group from within, usually in favour of an enemy group or nation. The activities of a fifth column can be overt or clandestine. Brexit and now C-16 reminds me of a chapter in a book by Leo McKinstry called “Spitfire”. One chapter describes the activities in Longbridge that had been taken over by Beaverbrook to make Spitfires. This aircraft was as good as or better than any Germany had leading up to the Battle of Britain, and every Spitfire was desperately needed. The workers of Longbridge, many of them did not comply, and production rates were extremely poor, and the workers worked as slow as possible, down tooled, and many went out of their way to disrupt and stop production. It was so bad Beaverbrook described their actions as traitorous. His solution was to spread production around the southern Counties, and eventually numbers improved.

    We saw this behaviour by the MSM over Brexit, and now over C-19. Laura Juliet Kuenssberg, political editor of the BBC, loves these situations. She described the path HMG is trying to navigate through as “having rocks all over the road”. It is true, but journalists like her and Kay Burley are the ones chucking the rocks. It is difficult to raise an interesting and informative piece at scientific level when you getting your make up put on, but very easy to lower the Bar and spread rumour and half truths around instead. But for what purpose? In Longbridge, many workers were Communists and led by Communists in the Union. Post war, the Car Industry never succeeded in this factory because these same people were employed and indoctrinated other workers. Why is our MSM not on side, but content to throw stones at Boris? They are not Communists, but they are not Conservative either. I believe they are remainers, and are taking the role of the Opposition because Labour is on its knees. The journalists also are pro EU and the BBC has a cancer in its political department, and so does SKY. They are intent on stirring trouble, and they are afraid that Boris will beat C-16 just as he beat them and the Remainers in the General Election.

    I listened to Wake Up to Money this morning. A manufacturer of Armed Forces NBC masks was talking about the “CE” mark our PPE masks must have on them. He said it was difficult to get it, and took a long time. The material needed resists nano sized particles by absorption, and all the factories in the World are not taking orders for 6 months. They are overwhelmed with orders. You cannot get the material because the entire world is after it. When did Burley or Kuensberg tell the people that? And a big rock called “Procurement” is being thrown at the Conservatives all the time. To our 5th Column it does not matter this role is held by the NHS Managers and not the responsibility of Government at all. To them it is just another means to throw rocks into the road. I believe HMG is going beyond the call of duty to “assist” … “assist” in this procurement, but in return our MSM are dragging up unproven, dubious claims of incompetence and even laziness. It is amazing the sloth of Longbridge is not far away in our Country today.

    They want bad news, they want whistleblowers, they want controversy, they want to muddy the waters, and they want “rocks” to throw. Shame on them, when the front line of the NHS is doing everything possible with the resources they have, particularly to help those suffering from C-19. An Italian Dr on TV summed it up the other day. Nearly in tears he said “what can you do when you don’t have enough”. What you don’t want is another rock !!

    1. I’ve got that book Spitfire. It’s very good and an eye-opener.

      The Spitfire programme was almost cancelled with only a few hundred built because of production problems and unwilling workforce.

      1. I have that book, too (unsurprisingly), along with a lot of others on the Spitfire. You have to remember that until Operation Barbarossa (Herr H’s attack on the Reds), most Commies were not willing to put their heart and soul into the war effort. Sabotage was not unknown.

    2. It is precisely why I won’t subscribe to or buy any of our national newspapers & other media channels especially those of the Murdoch empire!

    4. It is about time that Government ministers went on the attack with these “journalists”.
      They should Trump them.
      Hard, often, and rudely. Call the bastards out.
      “Well Laura, you’ve tried to catch me out every day for the last month. Do you actually have any questions where the answer will inform the viewers? And before she can answer say:

      “I thought not, next questioner please.”

      1. Why does Trump even bother with the press questions at those daily briefings? He has already told everyone how wonderful he is and what a beautiful response he is getting from everyone.

        Just hand over to the task force and leave the room. Simple problem gone.

        1. Trump, for all his many faults, says it as he sees it; rather than blathering to try to satisfy all comers.

          From a man whose PM is Trudeau, that’s a bit rich.

        2. Trump sees these daily briefings as a way to keep himself in the public eye and remind everyone how he is saving them. It reached a peak when Dr Birx turned up with an easel and graphs to show. Trump promptly put himself between the camera and the presentation.

          I’ve watched all his daily briefings. They are all over the place. “We have all the ventilators we need, the governors just need to ask”. Then, a day or so later, “the states should do their job and procure their own supplies. It’s not my job”. And so on, daily U turns. It’s pitiful. And when the states do procure their own equipment, he has sent the Homeland Security people in to “steal” them – that’s how New York “lost” an entire shipment. And they tried to grab Maryland’s plane load of supplies from S Korea and Illinois’ planeloads from China.

          Talk about “we have met the enemy and he is us”. Reason? So he can be the one donating the largesse. Then we had “I will decide when the country re-opens, no-one else”. Then he realized if re-opening caused deaths to spike, he would get the blame, so a couple of days later it was “It’s the Governors’ jobs to decide”

          Now he is sending out Tweets encouraging people to protest the states to get them to “re-open”, when they are closed because they are following his published rules for re-opening.

          You’re right, he should leave it to the experts. He adds no value whatsoever. The opposite, in fact.

          1. Apart from the fact it will do far more harm than good to the world as a whole, I truly hope that you get Biden as your next Preisdent.

            It might wake you up to the fact that Trump, for all his faults, is a damned sight better than the alternative, which was La Clintonne.

          2. Biden would be a disaster as he is clearly past it. This crisis gave Trump an opportunity to show himself as a real leader. He’s failed miserably in my book. His only concern has been how this will play at the next election. And I was certainly no HRC supporter, being naturally an old fashioned fiscal conservative.

            I guess you knew Trump’s stimulus package has buried in it huge tax benefits for large scale property developers. I wonder how that happened?

          3. Look into any legislation and you find beneficiaries out of all proportion.

            Why is it that people get so exercised over property development?
            It’s the first stage to overall prosperity.

            I’ m not suggesting that “rent-seekers” are a good thing, but unless one develops and improves property (land), for factories, accommodation and the like, one would still be living in caves.

            But of course that suits the Democrat: keep ’em poor and they’ll vote for us ,narrative.

          4. USA has the same problem we do. There isn’t anyone actually deserving of a vote.

            Trump is an absolute idiot. Clinton was too, both of them. Sanders is more sensible but can’t gain support because he’s seen as being a ‘lefty’. Biden is half senile and it also seems he’s a pervert.

            The US system has always been flaky at best. The POTUS position is usually down to who can throw the most money at their campaign. Who was the last president that wasn’t a ‘wealthy elite’?

          6. I just cannot understand how his behaviour is supported and celebrated by some on this site.
            He reminds me of some sales reps that I used to work with – fragile, insecure and full of bluster. They made quota but never shined.

  84. It is despairing to know that your government is conspiring openly with the unelected oligarchs and billionaires to run your life they way they want to. You do not get a say in it. Your vote means nothing. They do not even pretend to hide. Morals, ethics and legitimacy no longer have any place in society. Society has already been reshaped to accept being run on herd lines. Do as you are told, run with the herd, or be run over. Resistance is useless. Anyway, you have no weapons and nobody is listening.

    1. This is how it was in the Middle Ages Horace! You had no rights and the Government and the Robber Barons didn’t give a sh!t about you except for how much they could squeeze out of you!

      1. But without all the modern technology it was probably a bit easier to go totally off radar if you wanted.

    2. Democracy disappeared quietly at some point during the Blair years. Nobody noticed it.
      Just as a stable society has been sabotaged by destroying marriage – nobody has noticed it yet, but the effects are quietly growing every year.

    3. 318440+ up ticks,
      Afternoon HP,
      The governing parties arrogance especially over the last two decades has gained strength I believe by being given succour by their membership & voters who follow
      the governments guide line as in vote for us our MANIFESTO is better, and the people believe & comply.
      ALL lab/lib/con supporter / member / voters must surely realise by now that that their vote is, on past showings,
      guaranteeing yet another failure.

  86. I am off – had to water the veg this arvo – first time I have done that in April for a very long time.

    Ironically, since we left Laure 4½ weeks ago, they have had a great deal of rain!

  88. A thought for tomorrow, St George’s Day.

    Let’s forget about Ramadan and take our inspiration from Shakespeare:

    Cry God for Harry Elizabeth , England and Saint George!

    (The Harry we have today doesn’t deserve any blessings, cheers or support – but his grandmother does so I have struck through his name and given hers instead.)

    1. Blimey. It’s been a busy time for the church flagpole. The flag of St George was out on Easter Sunday, and every day until Low Sunday. Yesterday, the Union Flag was out for HMQ’s birthday, and back to St George tomorrow for Ramadan. Er…

  89. The Covid-19 outbreak in the United Kingdom has a precedent. The Foot and Mouth in 2001. That epidemic highlighted amongst other issues the utter incompetence of the Ministry of Agriculture, some of whose officials could not even read a map. The media – lead amazingly by The Daily Mail and The Telegraph! – have adopted Private Fraser’s ‘we are doomed’ rather than Corporal Jones’ ‘Don’t panic’ as a way of hooking an audience (and inflating advertising revenues) rather than doing a thorough job of investigating the sheer, dominating failure of the Civil Service that this crisis has exposed. It must be hoped that Mr Johnson or Mr Cummings observes this epic structural failure, partly, to be sure, the result of mountainous red tape enmeshing thousands of pen pushers absorbed in obscure and impossible to comprehend tasks even the Ministry of Circumlocution would find a challenge to match. Come any crisis of national impact and the system is unveiled as a decrepit wreck drifting along on a tide of tea. The ball and chain of the stuffed with the hopeless Civil Service has to be reformed and very brutally.

    2. I always thought it somewhat ironic that both Mrs T and the British Communist Party both shared the same aim of wanting to see the demise of the Civil Service. As we know nether party got their wishes…

  90. Evening, all. Been an absolutely splendid day today; 20 degrees C, no cloud and wall-to-wall sunshine.

    1. Same here, Conners. It’s still 19°C at 18:55. Just changed the mower oil, and air filter. Only because I left the bloody thing on it’s side when the blade got caught in some mesh fencing, lurking in the undergrowth. Most of the oil ran out through the air filter. I’ll attack the green stuff tomorrow.

      1. My lawns need doing again. I was at a fairly low ebb today, having had a fright last night when I thought I wasn’t going to be able to get MOH up after a fall. After nearly half an hour of huffing and puffing I did manage it, but I wasn’t in a good state (who could I have called for help?). Unsurprisingly, I needed a couple of snifters to brace myself. It was not conducive to doing much today 🙁

          1. Thanks. After the stroke and lack of balance caused by it, falls are a fact of life, unfortunately. No harm done except to my nerves.

          2. Gee Conway, that sounds tough .
            It is hard enough carrying on with any kind of positive thoughts at the moment without having to worry about such things.

            Take it easy,I am in the garden enough for both of us, I am working on clearing an old overgrown fence line so there is lots of scrub and weeds for me to dig up and destroy.

          3. It is tough as MOH has dementia as well. Not bad at this stage, but progressively getting worse. That’s life and you have to play the hand you’re dealt.

        2. Flippancy alert, I’m not being serious.

          I find that a taser, judiciously applied, makes HG sit up enough that I can get my hands under her arms to help her up.

        4. Glad you managed to get your other half up; hope she’s ok. Definitely a time for snifters and lying back, rather than ceaseless toil.

        5. Glad you sorted her in the end – hope she wasn’t damaged :-(( Edit: by the fall, I mean!

    2. Same here. Even tidied (well…) the garden after work. Bottle English cider & flat out in the sofa.

    3. I’m simultaneously watering the veg in the bone dry garden and putting logs on the woodstove. Something is wrong with that scenario, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

      3. I have just watered the garden again, yep every day for the past ten days, a good soak was needed . Moh is filling in the bald patches of lawn with grass seed . April is meant to be wet and showery ! (We bought a new hose pipe)

        High temp of 22c today and perhaps even warmer this afternoon.

        No bedding plants , have just raised some runner bean seedlings , radishes and carrots are just showing signs of germination , miserable looking tomato plants , sweet peas just shooting up , all old seed , so that’s about it !

  92. Apparently it’s Global Earth Day.

    Well I for one am pleased that electrical safety is finally being taken seriously.

    2. I see that the UN are celebrating this.

      Trump will tell them what they should do with their day but Trudeau is going to be in his element kowtowing to the big boys.

  95. I give up,what’s the point,our entire establishment have sold out and are on their knees fellating their Chinese Masters

    A top civil servant at the Foreign Office has said

    that the British government has made a “firm decision” on allowing

    Chinese tech giant Huawei to help build the United Kingdom’s 5G network,

    and the arrangement will not be reconsidered.

    Asked whether he would advise Secretary of State for Foreign and

    Commonwealth Affairs, Dominic Raab, to reevaluate the UK’s position, Sir

    Simon McDonald, the Foreign Office’s permanent undersecretary, told MPs

    at the foreign affairs select committee on Tuesday: “As you know… the

    government decided to proceed with an investment but with very strict

    conditions… As far as I know that… is a firm decision and is not being

    reopened.”

    “China is a very important partner of the United Kingdom, and I think

    it’s compatible to proceed with the Huawei decision and have the

    strategically independent relationship that I have been talking about,”

    Sir Simon added in comments reported by Reuters.

    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/04/22/uk-wont-change-its-mind-huawei-says-top-civil-servant/

    1. As I keep saying the alternatives are dire. Huawei are about 5 years ahead of the game in 5G equipment and their antennas are unbeatable.

      Like it or not we can’t survive without a decent relationship with China.

      Often people point out well we can get a lot of the things China makes from Taiwan. Well yes we can often but Taiwan is China as far as almost all major governments are concerned including both the UK and the USA neither of which recognise it as an independent nation.

    2. Welcome to Sector Britain of Greater China.

      Future Chinese sweatshop to the world.

      1. That explains why for 25 years our governments have had a very lax approach on ‘migrants’.

    1. Naff, but racist? Are the non-Maori members of the All-Blacks racist when they perform the Haka? There’s always someone, somewhere, who is prepared to take offence at something.

      1. The All Blacks are maybe racist when they perform the haka? The 1905/1906 All Blacks, the Originals, had no Maori players. However. the 1924/25 All Blacks had 2 Maori players. The 1935 All Blacks had no Maori players.

        1. A lot of the present-day All Blacks teams have more imported Polynesians in them than bona fide Maoris who were born in NZ.

      2. OK.
        No more Viennese Waltzing. No Military Two-step unless you’re in the army. And as for the Gay Gordons ….?

    2. Naff, but racist? Are the non-Maori members of the All-Blacks racist when they perform the Haka? There’s always someone, somewhere, who is prepared to take offence at something.

    3. Yeah, sure. If the NHS is so overwhelmed how come they can turn up by the dozen to celebrate a patient leaving hospital? Or put on performances like that shown above? (How many rehearsals?)

    4. Hey Hoo Māori cultural advisor Karaitiana Taiuru, in that case can we ask you to divest yourself of western housing, culture, clothing , medicine, education, agriculture, electricity, water and sewage systems, computers , communications technology, cars, lorries, trains etc and f.o. back to living short brutal lives

    1. It’s what will happen to him once this is all over……….. or perhaps he’ll be promoted.

        1. She’s been unnaturally quiet lately.
          Maybe she’s too busy dealing with the traitors and commies in the Home Office.

          1. I’m wondering if she lining up her ducks in a row for when the current hysteria dies down.
            It is unwise to open a war on two fronts.

      3. Quite, and as they usually put a few ideas in rough to the editor to decide which is best, it makes one wonder how puerile the rest must have been that were rejected.

      4. I find objectionable many cartoons that Brookes does these days. He has a vicious/cynical streak that is not funny at all.

        On the other hand, Hancock is so utterly inept, in my opinion, that he deserves all the opprobrium he gets.

  99. Self inflicted mental and part physical agony today.
    I had to cut the fret slots for my guitar today. Precision marking out on a very hard piece of rose wood, probably from India, Brazilian is much better quality. It has a surface similar to tarmac. 19 slots measured precisely to fractions of millimetres, marked with a small square and a sharp craft knife. A home made template/cutting block screwed to the bench to hold it place.
    Two different small saws one very fine to make the first cut, then a tenon saw to follow up to the correct depth of 3mm.
    Sounds fairly simple, during my life I’ve pitch many roofs, fitted dozens of kitchens, constructed many loft conversions and built staircases from scratch.
    But this was one of the most difficult jobs i have ever had to cope with.
    Feet up on my second large Shiraz early night on the way.
    Phew 😦 🎸

      1. Will do, I’ll get my wife to make a photo ‘collage’ from the pile of old scrap to the finished article.
        No swearing will be included.

      1. No I been watering the plants out side.
        It’s a pretty good programme never the less.
        I’ve got a small pair of WW1 binoculars I’ve been considering contacting them about.

    4. Hi Eddy,

      Do you have any dealings with StewMac in the USA? A friend of mine, here in Sweden, is a keen guitarist and he sometimes does repair work on his collection. I put him in touch, last year, with StewMac, a company that provides all manner of parts and tools for luthiers. I bought some very fine polishing membranes from them for non-guitar related work.

      https://www.stewmac.com/?lac_guid=3e89673d-0d84-ea11-8101-ecb1d775572a&utm_campaign=M5123&utm_medium=email&utm_source=EPA&utm_content=M5123_O_20200422

      1. Yes Griz I have bought a few bits and pieces from them in the past.
        I made a Martin 00 from a kit 12 years ago. There are restrictions on sending some items from the US to the UK.
        I was able to get round it via a friend in Canada. Who purchased it and sent it to me. Lots of import duty involved.
        There’s a decent company near Manchester Tone Tech. A few days for delivery. Mail or parcel service,
        VG.

    6. Well done , we need a pic.

      Moh has been trying to fix our garden seat . Two vertical bits of wood on the back support have rotted at the base and needed repairing . He has done a fine job , all things considering and a few choice words!

      1. I’m also very good at choice words TB.
        It helps quite a lot.
        Did you see my mention regarding Dorset Tea.
        We always have Yorkshire it’s good and strong. But the Dorset Tea has a much more subtle flavour and still has the dark finish. It originates from the rift Valley in Kenya.
        It really is worth a try.

        1. My OH has been making new bird boxes – ready to go up at the end of the summer to replace the ones currently in use.

          Well done – your guitar sounds brilliant (well – I hope it does when you play it! )

          1. I’ve made a few bat boxes as well.
            Speaking of which I’ve got to go. Close to Flat battery. 😊
            Good night all.

    7. The accurate stuff we do in wood is either cnc routed or else high pressure water cut. Few joiners and cabinet makers have the skill to cut piercings accurately.

      With metalwork we use either laser cutting or else high pressure water cutting, depending upon the metal. Laser cutting for steel plate also some brass plates, and water cutting (up to 6” thickness) for steel and for some alloys, brasses and especially aluminium.

      Edited.

      1. I use to make a few bird and owl boxes for a good friend from the hawk and owl trust,
        All of them are cut by lazer and sent out flat pack now.
        It’s so much easier than the previous methods.
        I’ve made a few mistakes during the process. So I’ve had to try and correct them.

        1. Keep doing what you do. I love to put my hand to woodworking.

          I have some lovely Marples box-handled chisels, all sorts of Record and Stanley planes, including a rare Stanley Number 289 Filister Rebate Skew Plane.

          I also have some historic saws made by the best Sheffield makers including an inherited 3ppi rip saw dated 1915 by Sanderson Brothers & Newbould, far superior to the American Disston of its time.

          I reckon that unless you know about the tools and development of our historic carpentry skills you have no understanding of the limitations of our advanced tooling. We need both. Even the best joiners with fantastic equipment, moulding cutters capable of 48 cuts in a run, will have half a dozen bench joiners to assemble and finish everything.

          1. I’ve also got a collection of old chisels, some Marples, some Taylors, some Robert Sorby and a few from long-defunct Sheffield firms like Eyrewood. I bought most of these as old salvage from eBay (along with some Stanley planes: a No.6 Fore plane, a No.4 Smoothing pane, and a 9½ one-handed plane). I spent some time, last year, refurbishing them and restoring them to razor-sharp usefulness.

            As you say, you can’t beat good quality old tools.

            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/bd62e0f4919f2126c719f7643a61a6056b56784f4150249138bdf50ee4b8ca3d.jpg

        2. The only bird boxes that I have made were made from half inch ply using a table saw, hardly the skill level that you have. Like eveyone else I would be very interested in pictures of the in progress or finished article.

          I did treat myself to a good dovetail saw years ago, that really manages a fine cut. It shows good quality over the cheap tat bought from the B&Q type places.

    3. As we wrinkles aren’t supposed to use public transport, we won’t have to worry about the bus being driven by a starving and dehydrated driver.
      Win, win.

    4. St. George’s Day tomorrow. I shall celebrate by abstaining from alcohol until lunchtime, then drink a few bottles of English beer.

      1. Shakespeare’s birthday, too, (allegedly). I bet the beeboids will have a BAME fest to celebrate….

          4. Blimey and to think there were so few blackamoors in those days. Aren’t they lucky to have managed to find one?

          10. I thought he was a Roman soldier – mind you they could be drawn from any of the Roman provinces, so could have a good suntan in some cases.

          11. Yup, it just shows how tolerant the ‘far right’ are.
            Edited an errant apostrophe.

  103. Pretoria – The United Arab Emirates has sent cargo containing seven tons of medical supplies to South Africa to help fight the coronavirus.

    This will benefit healthcare workers and enhance the country’s efforts to contain the virus.

    UAE’s ambassador to South Africa, Mahash Al Hamli, said the embassy dedicated itself to being an active partner and contributor to the international community in the global efforts to combat the pandemic.

    “There is communication and co-ordination on all educational, political, economic and social levels. The arrival of the first aid provided today to South Africa is proof of the lasting partnership between our two countries and a common commitment to eradicate this virus and support South Africa’s efforts,” he said.

    The ambassador said the donation will be handed over to the Department of International Relations and they can then decide where it goes.

    https://www.iol.co.za/pretoria-news/watch-7-tons-of-medical-supplies-arrive-from-uae-to-help-fight-coronavirus-47036353

    Where did the UAE get their kit from?

  106. The Government’s Soviet-style ‘command and control’ methods are driving our PPE woes
    MATTHEW LESH – 22 APRIL 2020 • 1:00PM

    The NHS’s multi-billion-pound procurement system has always been chaotic and excessively complex

    The bureaucracy surrounding personal protective equipment procurement is putting lives on the line. PPE has turned from farce to deadly scandal. We are sending healthcare workers into battle without the best possible protection; exposing far too many to a high viral load of a deadly virus.

    Now it has emerged that the Government ignored offers from PPE wholesalers and manufacturers. Veenak, a Birmingham-based wholesaler, has shipped millions of PPE items overseas after offers to the UK Government were ignored. They still have £5 million worth of equipment in their warehouses.

    Cheshire-based Weaver Dane and Trade spent thousands of pounds to produce 450 visors a day, but have also had their offers ignored by the NHS and ceased production. Textile specialists have filled in official forms to offer their help but never heard back.

    The Government has responded that they are prioritising larger orders and have received thousands of offers. But this is precisely the problem: centralised procurement is causing bottlenecks.

    The decision to centralise all procurement to a single form has not worked. We are struggling to get hospitals, GP surgeries, and care homes what they need when they need it.

    At first, the state struggled to distribute items from the national stockpile, being forced to call in the army. Procurement prioritised Chinese factories, not anticipating the risk of non-supply, rather than identifying existing domestic wholesalers and manufactures. Now NHS hospitals are warning against updating advice to suggest the public wear masks – like they are in the United States, Europe and across Asia – because of concerns about shortages.

    In an ideal market, there are multiple buyers and sellers. In this market though, there is a single buyer: the state — getting more offers than they can respond. Health Secretary Matt Hancock revealed they are working with just 159 of the over 8,000 offers.

    This is what happens when you apply a Soviet-style ‘command and control’ system to procurement. It may sound lovely at first, ensuring scale and that the right supplies are purchased and distributed. But as we know from history, even benevolent central planners struggle.

    Manufacturing and logistics supply chains are highly complex. Particularly in a time of shortage, it takes agility to identify stocks wherever they can be found. One centralised process cannot possibly have the same capacity as hundreds of different people each leaning into different suppliers.

    The focus on larger orders has proven risky. The UK has been waiting five days for a much-needed shipment of gowns from Turkey. If they had instead commissioned hundreds of local manufactures to produce gowns the risk of failure would have been spread.

    The provision of PPE is also entangled in red tape. While standards are necessary, changing these around and excessive specification makes it a lot more difficult to procure supplies.

    For example, the NHS request for PPE makes no mention of the American-standard N95 masks, instead preferring European standards such as FFP2 and FFP3. Public Health England’s guidance on appropriate PPE fails to even mention the KN95 – the Chinese-standard which evidence reviews find is equivalent. After public outcry, the KN95 has been approved for import and use in the United States. It is also being used in other parts of Europe, but not the UK.

    The public sector’s failure on PPE is in stark contrast to the private sector’s success in managing our food supply over the last month. Supermarkets, which sell tens of thousands of products, have managed extreme stresses magnificently. Earlier shortages, even of much-in-demand toilet paper, have dissipated. The shelves are replenished while social distancing measures have been introduced. Previous quantity limits are being lifted. The various supermarkets have lent into a complex, highly diversified supply chains involving millions of moving parts across the country and the world.

    The Government’s multi-billion-pound procurement system has always been chaotic and excessively complex. This is practically inevitable in a healthcare system like Britain’s. One-size-fits-all often fails us all. As a starry-eyed Boris Johnson warned from the backbench in 2002, Britain is excessively reliant on a “top-down, monopolistic healthcare service.” This leads to much worse patient outcomes than comparable systems in continental Europe.

    When this crisis is over, I hope that the PM will consider making the reforms the system so urgently needs. The fantastic doctors and nurses who saved his life deserve no less.

    Matthew Lesh is the head of research at the Adam Smith Institute

    Top Comment

    gareth hopkins 22 Apr 2020 1:49PM

    My experience of selling to the NHS is that there is no consistency in approach, widespread and massive over reliance on process/box ticking rather than analysis of what the risks actually are and misallocation of resources.

    And the price is never negotiated.

    That is what happens if you let people spend other people’s money with no accountability in a system that chooses to drown itself in red tape.

    I hope this series of debacles lets us as a nation have an honest debate about what we get for £120bn a year.

    1. The cardinal rule in (what remains of the Armed Forces):

      You cannot have Aothority, without Resposibility

      You decide an action. you are responsible for the outcome.

      The Buck Stops with you

    2. An issue with decentralized procurement is that the various purchasers end up competing against each other to place orders. Quite a few US states have been caught out their orders have been cancelled when other states have paid a higher price for goods that are in short supply.

      The Chinese seem quite capable of ignoring committed orders and shipping to higher bidders. The Canadian government lost a planeload of supplies from a Chinese airport when the plane wasn’t there to receive the goods, at which point the items were resold.

      Not that this excuses the total screwup that NHS procurement seems to have become.

    3. Do we even have ‘hundreds of local textile manufacturers’?

      If so why is literally everything in the shops priced under £200 per item made in Asia?

      Centralised procurement is the way to get the best savings on bulk buys. For years people here have moaned that all trusts take care of their own procurement and so don’t have the buying power an organisation the size of the NHS should have. Trusts compete against other trusts for the same resources which simply drives up prices, especially as they are all buying smaller amounts than the NHS would as a whole. But then we have to go back to the Hunt years to see that 33% of ‘managers’ were laid off as they wouldn’t be missed. Well seems we’re missing them now!

      The NHS is only 8 years from the last major top-down reorganisation which was supposed to fix the problems with a ‘monopolistic top-down healthcare service’. It simply made everything worse.

      The NHS needs to be made a QUANGO and the funding increased by about 1k per person to take us nearer to the spending levels of European nations. Healthcare is too important to be left to inexperienced in the world Oxford PPE graduates to run.

        1. They are staying in their home as instructed by the government. those out have alll decided to take the risk as I would.

          1. If they try and lock me away for another year, it is probably a risk that I will end up taking as well,

            But what of the shop assistants that serve you? Accepting the risk for yourself is one thing but there are some that you are putting at risk if you ignore the overbearing rules. You have a choice, some of those working in public facing jobs probably have little chance of other jobs

            Finger problem fixed, laptop keyboard is no better than my tablet

        2. But the lockdown is probably killing all those cancer sufferers whose treatment has been stopped along with those suffering heart problems whose treatment has also been stopped.
          Are their lives not worth as much as someone who may contract Coronavirus?

          1. It’s not the lockdown that’s the problem with cancer patients. It’s the NHS pausing their treatment and operations because they can’t organise themselves. Anyway, I thought private hospitals were supposed to take up the slack with non-COVID patients?

        3. For 40 years we’ve celebrated greed and selfishness. Compassion and consideration are largely only qualities evident in the very oldest.

          2. Yes John as do some of my generation and some of the young, but in general the trend is obvious.

          4. My daughter too. The one real success story in my life. My parents showed me how to be a terrible parent so I did virtually the complete opposite with my child. My wife is a fabulous mother too.
            Amy is intelligent, polite, courteous, a little shy, compassionate, and very caring. It’s incredible really. I keep wondering if she’s really mine 😀

          8. At some point when you feel able, send me your normal e-mail address, so that a) you can’t go off-grid again and b) I can ask you to do something for me (at a price) that I kept saying I was going to.
            Or not, of course. 🙂

          9. Just use the one you have but let me know here you sent something. I don’t do much by email so rarely check any of the mailboxes.

          13. Friday and Saturday night. Should be fine to work this week, but it’s backbreaking work for 9.50 an hour. I’ll end up earning a little over half of what I was paid to watch netflix all night for 4 nights a week while answering a phone if it rang. C’est la vie I guess.

    2. Actually when my group was working under pressure,we would sometimes get up to stupid things as a way to let off steam, it is a pity that we didn’t have any hospital equipment available or we might have done something like that. Senior management wisely turned a blind eye or joined in.

      If they are ICU or ER workers, they probably deserve a bit of insanity to return to sanity. However, if it is your run of the mill front line that are idle because all elective work has been cancelled, then to hell with them.

  108. So they have moved the narrative on to tests per day, nobody cares, they want to get back to work before there is no work to go back to.

    2. Good night Peddy. I’ve almost caught up with your Good Night posts these days.

        1. Thanks for that, T_B. A great clip to greet me when I logged in at 7 am. Enjoy your own day today and celebrate St George’s Day.

  110. I went out into the garden half an hour ago, looked up and saw a dispersing con trail, running south to north.

    First one I’ve seen for some weeks.

    1. When I was sitting out this afternoon (in between weeding and generally tatting) I saw a con trail (with the airliner causing it) pass over heading for Manchester (according to the heading). Earlier there was a military helicopter (presumably from Tern Hill or Shawbury) doing a low level fly over.

        1. I know, but Sleap isn’t military any more (was a satellite for RAF Tilstock bomber training in the war) and has been shut down by C19 I believe. The Army has taken over Tern Hill and Shawbury does all the service training on Junos and Jupiters. I am not au fait with rotary winged craft so I don’t know what this one was (except it wasn’t a Chinook or an Apache).

    2. Ditto. First chemtrail (sic) I’ve seen since the lock down.

      Incidentally, the number of planes coming into Heathrow over our house has gone from one every three minutes to one every 15. That’s a decrease of 80% by my reckoning. Still too many however, especially the Emirates ones – unless they are full of expats coming back from Oz or Dubai.

        1. Looking to fly over to visit Mother. No flights available Oslo-Gatwick until 27 April, but fully booked until June .

          1. But the phone works! Yaay!
            Problem due to fall alarm being installed incorrectly.

          4. CV central.
            Pizza ther is now the Italian equivalent of starry gazey pie.
            Poxy scabby ply.

          9. Last Easter we drove from Oslo via Sweden, Denmark, Germany & Netherlands to the ferry at Hoek v Holland to Harwich, Cardiff and Bideford – and back. Lots of miles! Don’t fancy that again in a hurry, quite expensive, too.

    3. I’ve got the plane tracking app on my phone. Every time I see a contrail I check what the flight is.

      Every time I check it’s Fed-Ex, DHL….

    4. Just checked in four hours later and got distracted. Still many fedex / ups and cargo flights over the Atlantic.
      More Ethiopian Airways flights than other carriers apart from maybe middle eastern carriers like Ethiad.

      Looking over the US, many private planes,a few military flights and not much else. As for Canada, if it wasn’t for overflights our skies would be empty.

      Oh look a China East flight from Toronto,you are not the only ones letting people in.

    1. Well Billy spent years making and distributing viruses, time for him to clean up.

  112. Goodnight everyone! Another day of isolation tomorrow – but at least we have friends here!

    1. Francois Loi
      @FrancoisLoi
      ·
      17 Apr
      Replying to
      @ukcolumn
      I don’t trust Bill Gates to resolve viruses on Microsoft Windows, let alone on people.

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