Life in the time of the coronavirus...

Can it really be only ten days since we were advised to stay home in order to  "squash the sombrero" and ease the pressure on the NHS?  I laughed out loud at a joke posted by one wit: "At school they told me I would not amount to anything - but here I am on my couch, drinking a glass of wine, and saving lives..."

The weekend before, we had been in full-on National Trust volunteer mode,.  I worked all day Saturday and Sunday, giving talks in the morning and serving in the coffee-shop all afternoon, nursing the huge plaster cast encasing my lower right arm.  This must have been one of the most temporary casts ever known, as by Monday I was back in a light splint, full of the joys of Spring, and shopping for left-handed scissors in Chelmsford town centre.

Later that week came the crucial briefing from the PM: we were advised to stay at home, the over-7os strongly advised to do so, and the most vulnerable to be shielded for twelve weeks. On the Friday, the schools closed.  We went to a local nursery to get seed potatoes  and were surprised to see an elderly lady in a wheelchair and a heavily pregnant woman out enjoying coffee in the café as normal.

 Meanwhile, the sun shone, the flowers bloomed and birds sang.  Inevitably, people  took a while to grasp that driving to parks, beaches and beauty spots was not acceptable.

  By Monday, of last week, we were being "Told" rather than advised to stay at home.  That lunchtime we had invited our friend who lives alone to join us for a social-distancing lunch on the patio.  She sat over six feet away and we were able to have a chat and a glass of wine, while eating a light lunch.  Where could be the harm in that?  but it will be a while before such activities can be resumed.

Now, a week in, we have settled to a routine.  Each day we get up and read the papers, following the sobering new stories from Italy and Spain.  We gather ourselves and drive up to the allotments where about four cars will already be parked.  We have planted early potatoes. onion sets, beetroot and parsnips.  We are still harvesting leeks, beetroot, and white sprouting broccoli.  Rhubarb is a real treat at this time of year.  Of course, heavy digging is not possible for me just now, but I can do planting and weeding.  This is our daily exercise.

We drive back for a sandwich lunch, eaten some days in the garden.  We have been at work here too, weeding and pruning. The guttering along the row of sheds, last painted just before our wedding in 2000, has been taken down to be spruced up.  We potter about, grateful to be out in the fresh air.

Each day, we try to catch the briefing at 5pm, marvelling at the speed at which new arrangements can be set in train. Three massive field hospitals established seemingly overnight in London, Birmingham, Manchester...  Imagery of battles, front-lines, invisible enemies is inescapable. Last week, 250,000 volunteers were requested to help in various ways.  By this week 750,000 have been recruited.  Locally, an enterprising woman has a complete support system set up, leaflets dropped through every letter-box and a team of volunteers willing to run errands for those shut in.  This week a call went out for volunteers to make hospital scrubs locally - the fabric and pattern would be delivered to those able to help.  I considered it - I once made ten pairs of white trousers for a show - but then I remembered that I can't actually use scissors at the moment, so perhaps better not.

Before the internet, this kind of lack of social interaction would have been very different. For those actually witnessing the desperately sick being trolleyed into already crowded wards it must be a day to day ordeal. For those trying to cope with children stuck at home in a flat without a garden the whole thing must be very different. And for the vulnerable, where the infection would be fatal, it must be terrifying.  But for us it is pretty much what we would have been doing anyway at this time of year, minus the shifts at Paycockes House, and more frequent visits to the Coop.  At least for now..

A little jacket, knitted with my left hand.

Spring Flowers...

Having a garden is proving to be a real boon as we go into lock-down.  Out there, the birds are singing as usual and the flowers are blazing away, much as they do any year.  These are annuals bought just before the big shut-down, but the flowers which delight and surprise are those which we did not plant, but which come up each year.

One year I did plant some yellow tulip bulbs.  Now these appear, often where least expected.

Primroses tend to seed themselves marching out across the lawn.

And lovely blue grape hyacinths which have been here all the thirty years that we have lived here.

In the sunshine, pink-tipped buds on the viburnum, attracting insects even in March.

What a palaver...

In my last post, a badly bruised wrist.  After a full two weeks, my wrist was still too weak to lift a dinner plate of food, so I took it along to the surgery to have the nurse check it out. She passed me on to the doctor, who explained to me about the scaphoid bone, the size of a cashew nut, at the base of the thumb, which was often a casualty in this kind of fall.  It has a very poor blood supply, apparently.  I needed an x-ray to check this out.

We went to the local community hospital where I had my first ever X-ray.  Very efficient.  Results would be sent to my GP urgently.  Uh, oh, I thought.

The GP rang the next morning to confirm that, although the scaphoid had escaped, there was a compression fracture of the radius.  I would need an appointment with the local Fracture clinic.  Two days later, another call: I was to go to A&E instead, as it was a 3-4 week wait for the fracture clinic.  I was wearing a light splint bought from the chemists.

At A&E, the triage nurse did suggest that after three weeks it was probably healing itself, but we went through the standard procedure of applying a large plaster cast to my lower arm, down to my knuckles.  The triage nurse began by knocking over the bucket of hot water on a wheeled stand, flooding the room..  She needed to be there as the nurse applying the plaster had not done one for five years and needed close instruction.  It was fine, but rather cumbersome.  I feared that things might get worse still once the specialist had seen it.

A&E had lived up to expectations in that, while I was waiting, a large individual had been brought in handcuffed to a somewhat smaller policeman, and with another guarding.  And this was only 10am.

I was given an appointment with the Fracture Clinic for the following Monday. Here, the orthopaedic specialist took a pair of scissors to the giant cast and sent for a light splint, on the grounds that it was probably healing already. I trotted out of that hospital feeling as if Spring had come all at once: no operation to re-set the break, no heavy cast for six weeks, just a splint, not dissimilar to the one the chemist had sold me.

And this is what left-handed knitting looks like.  It turns out that it is still possible to knit with a wrist fracture, and even with a huge plaster cast.

This is a miniature blanket for the local premature baby unit.