Skip to main content

Isolation

 Oh thank Christ, the sun's come out.

Yes, it's been a pretty grim few days at Coastalblog Towers, as we shield the world from our pathogen riddled selves. For, gentle reader, we have the 'Rona. And a nasty little bugger it is too (as you undoubtedly know).

I know! It's all over apparently! How can we have it? Spoiler: it is not.

We first discovered this last week, when we had to cut a holiday short and high-tail it back to our Northern fastness, as Mrs Coastaltown had copped a dose off someone at school, this being the case, it was only a matter of time before yours truly tested positive, and this I duly did a couple of days later. Bugger.

Neither of us were symptomatic at the time of our positives, a particularly wizard wheeze on covid's part, as it allows you a minute or two of false hope before you start with the coughs, the temperatures, the weird feeling in your ears, all that godawful jazz.

I should, at this point, mention that for me it's no worse (at the moment) then an aggravating cold. This is enough of an irritation, tbh, I rarely have a cold, and then it's generally for about six hours, tops. Symptoms hanging around for multiple days is an unfamiliar experience for me, and not one I'm in a rush to repeat. And this, I should point out, is after two jabs. So I can surmise what a horror this was at the start, and offer up a thankful prayer for those unsung geniuses in the lab coats. Hosannah.

But , of course, narrative demands sympathetic scene-setting, so it's been shitting it down with rain for the first few days of our confinement, and misery and woe has been uncontained. The only consolation was that the kids appeared to have avoided it, though, at time of writing, this might not actually be the case.

I suppose there should be more of a point to this blog than a simple announcement of illness, so I'll add a point. As regular readers will be aware, I've been fairly critical of the Government's response, justifiably so, I feel. And now, having copped a dose myself, I'm inclined to take things personally.

I felt at the time of the tabloid-inspired "Freedom Day" that things were going too fast, too soon, and the numbers since seem to have borne that caution out. Despite the best efforts of the Government / tabloids / people who like to kid themselves to insist that everything's "back to normal", it is very apparent that this is not the case. In June, the month before "Freedom Day" there were 398 COVID deaths.

398

August: 3,125

September: 4,014

October: 3,939

Far from everything being "back to normal" it would appear that we are living with a new normal of drastically heightened death rates. As to why this is tolerated by the public, well, that's a question that's too big for me to answer, though you will be unsurprised to learnt that I have some theories. Unfortunately, I'm too knackered to articulate them now, so I'm going back to bed. So, no jokes or ranting today, but please, if you're not vaccinated, please get it, and wear a damn mask. xxx

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A whole new world.

I appear to have moved into the pub. Now, I don't wish to give the impression that this has come as a complete surprise to me, we'be been planning to do so since shortly after I bought it, but still, it's sort of snuck up on me and now I'm waking up and thinking what happened? How come I'm here? The reason for this discombobulation is that this move was initially a temporary measure. Mrs Coastalblog had some relatives coming to stay, and it made sense to put them up in our house while we decamped to the flat. It's still a work in progress, but a mad week of cleaning and carting stuff around made it habitable. I had a suspicion that once we were in we'd be back and forth for a few weeks. As with many of my hunches, I was completely and utterly wrong. As it turned out, once we were here, we were here. Things moved at pace and, now our kitchen appliances have been installed, there's no going back, the old house is unusable. It's left me with slightly mi
Post a Comment
Read more

Mad Dogs and Immigration Ministers

It is with no small degree of distress that I'm afraid to say I've been thinking about Robert Jenrick. I know, I know, in this beautiful world with its myriad of wonders, thetre are many other things about which I could think, the play of sunlight upon dappled water, the laughter of my children, the song thrush calling from the sycamore tree a few yards away from where I type this. Yet the shiny, faintly porcine features of the Minister for Immigration keep bubbling up into my consciousness. It's a pain in the arse, I tell you. A few years ago on here I wrote a piece entitled The cruelty is the point in which I argued that some policies are cruelty simply for the sake of it, pour decourager les autres . I was reminded of that recently when I listened to Jenrick defending his unpleasant, petty decision to order murals at a migrant children's centre to be painted over. You've probably heard the story already; deeming pictures of cartoon characters "too welcoming&
Post a Comment
Read more

20

Huh. It turns out that this blog is, as of, well, roughly about now-ish, 20 years old. 20. I've been doing this (very intermittently) for twenty bloody years. And, I cannot help but note, still am, for some reason. I've done posts in the past, when this whole thing was comparatively blemish free and dewy-skinned looking back on its history and how it's changed down the years, there's not really a lot of point in doing that again. It's reflected what concerns me at the time, is, I think, the most charitable way of phrasing it (a  polite way of saying that it's been self-absorbed and solipsistic, but then, it's a blog, this should not come as a shock), it's interesting for me to look back over the lists of posts, but not so much for you, I imagine. Likewise, pondering how I've changed in the intervening years is also fairly pointless. It's painfully obvious that I was a very different person at 25 to 45, my experience of jobs and kids and marriage
Post a Comment
Read more