Well where to start. Like all cities, towns and places people call home Exeter, Devon in the UK, has taken a bit of a beating this year. Shops shut, people staying at home and all that Jazz. As for me on the other hand I’m now working in the city again that I love to call home, at the heart of the city council in for want of a better word a pandemic planning room.
I work now for the environmental health team answering phone calls and emails for the team directing them to where they need to go to or sometimes I am even able to answer the questions myself.
Business is booming in the office lots of environmentally unhealthy things to deal with, listen to, act on and treat. Though I don’t really want to or cannot go into too much detail because the calls we take emails we get and things we act upon are all really related to people’s lives and are personal to them and strictly confidential!
So during this pandemic when most people are stopping going into the city, I on the other hand turn about face and do the opposite. I sometimes catch a bus to the city centre, sometimes walk (less than I should), sometimes stop in a bar for a beer on the way home (possibly more than I should under a pandemic year but less than I would in a normal year).
I go out to a bar about twice a week and this feels too much like I am taking my life in my own hands with regard to the potential picking up of Covid-19. I am very overweight have a borderline diabeties diagnosis and am nearly mid 40’s so I am not exactly in the young and just passing it on bracket of the pandemic population.
Though I do think that if I get used to not socialising I might permanently not go out. I instead continue to go out and love doing so more for company really than Guinness. I don’t drink at home and still love to meet people and watch punters when sitting in a local bar. My social lockdown beer drinking acquaintances have been one of the joys of this year.
My original group of socialising friends that I used to drink with in a local pub has really gone tits up though. Some are social isolating, some have had mini meltdowns, and others like me are just getting on and making the most of it. Our little group were like ten pin bowls knocked down very quickly by the bowling ball that is Covid-19.
My favourite drinking den and social outlet is still in lockdown as are some of my favourite people. It feels like we might be just about 9 months away still from returning to what I would love to call normal.
A normal Wednesday night for me was when the biggest dilemma might be heading back from the bar after having bought another pint of Guinness, while listening to some tunes from a local musician playing a guitar and waiting to find out whether I had the luxury of sitting in a seat or had to face the slightly more uncomfortable situation of stand up in the outside smoking area. Now I have not had a cigarette for what must be nearly 10 years now and have not missed those pesky nicotine sticks either, but it’s still socially preferential to stand or sit out with the smokers because that’s where all the cool cats hang out in the local pub.
The War On Drugs – Thinking Of A Place
What was once normal I now crave like a nicotine junkie waiting for his next inhalation of a smoke!
So week three into the new job it’s going well lots to learn and lots I still don’t know. I work mostly on the phones and then try to book in what the callers need or take the callers’ information down so that another member of staff can sought out their question for them. A part of me is thinking I am mad to start a new job during covid-19 lockdown wackiness and another part of me knows I would have been even crazier not to.
Back in March I was only sleeping about 2-3 hours a night and I was absolutely wired into finding out all the latest shenanigans in the news, in my head and about life in general were. Working at home at the time was the perfect time to kind of have a blow out and over do things a tad mentally. Now on the other side of that I’m on full battery recharge mode with most evenings and weekends I am snoozing at any given opportunity whilst attempting to top up lost sleep vouchers.
One of the rare gifts of this pandemic has been having the chance to reach out or have people reach out to me from past and present, new and old friends and that has been some of my favourite times.
For those that reached out to me I am very grateful and I hope to those that I have reached out to that they appreciated it too.
Tonight I had a real need to reach out so been phoning some friends and family seeing how they are. Most are doing ok in a lockdown kind of way. But still 9 months or more of this, well thats a might long time in any stretch of the imagination.
The UK Government has a quirky way to not dealing with a pandemic, first telling us to go home and trust the government while bucket loads of UK citizens die and now telling us to come out and spend, spend, spend so we continue to pay for the economy crawling forward on its belly prior to part two of this little smeg show continuing to unfold.
Well I hope you are well wherever you are reading this from and your God or Gods are smiling down on you. I hope we make it to the other side.
Trump gives his supporters liberty while Covid-19 gives them death! If you are still alive after this butchers little escapade please don’t vote him back into office (I’m refering to Trump of course as Death has yet to stand as the President of the USA!)
At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, denial was the default response from the political right. Donald Trump derided it as a “hoax”. Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro scorned the “hysteria” over a “little flu”. In Italy, Matteo Salvini urged people to go on holiday, in defiance of social distancing advice from the World Health Organisation.
The denial has often been tacit. While coronavirus spread across India, Narendra Modi was silent for weeks. The British government argued that the risk of the virus to the UK was “low”, and declined to prepare for lockdown or to implement a full programme of testing, tracing and isolation.
Most governments now reject Covid-19 denialism. Nonetheless, it has inspired far-right groups, and sparked protests against lockdowns, from Michigan to Melbourne.
Why was denialism the reflex of the nationalist right? It makes commercial sense for the Koch family – billionaire libertarians threatened by a more regulated capitalism – to be against the suspension of economic life. But it is not the obvious position for authoritarian, anti-immigrant nationalists to take. The pandemic demands unprecedented restrictions, border controls and surveillance. It offers popularity to any government that takes control of the situation.
Indeed, before the pandemic, nationalists thrived on a fantasy of catastrophe: “white genocide”, immigration “invasion”, “communist” takeover. But faced with a real disaster, they have stumbled.
This is not for want of human enemies to scapegoat. Epidemics are fecund ground for conspiracism. In the Middle Ages, disease was blamed on Jews. In the 19th century, it was blamed on elites. In early American outbreaks of Spanish flu in 1918, rumours blamed it on a German plot. Today, it is Chinese people.
But far from cohering against a new enemy, the hard right is incoherent. Trump swerves between disinformation and exhortations to “liberate” states under lockdown. Boris Johnson urges people to return to work – without explaining how this can be done safely – all the while enforcing lockdown and continuing furlough schemes. Even Bolsonaro is sounding more petulant than defiant. Challenged by the media about Brazil’s soaring death rates, he huffs: “So what? What do you want me to do?”
This incoherence is only partly hidden by Covid-19 jingoism – the invocation of warlike nationalism to fight the pandemic.
Denial is often a form of affirmation. Alongside those who belittle the seriousness of the pandemic are those who admit it’s serious, but suggest that we die for the economy anyway. As Bolsonaro put it, “I’m sorry, some people will die, they will die, that’s life. You can’t stop a car factory because of traffic deaths.”
There have been subtler versions of this argument. Johnson never asked us to die for capitalism. But his government did urge the nation to “take [Covid-19] on the chin” while the medical evidence suggested that such insouciance could kill 500,000 people. The government initially refused to shut schools, citing the claim that a four-week closure would cut 3 per cent off GDP growth.
As Bolsonaro’s example suggests, governments routinely trade off lives for economic growth. Why stop now? This contemporary denialism is ideologically similar to the social Darwinism and class contempt that, as the historian Richard J Evans shows in Death in Hamburg, led to 10,000 deaths in 19th-century Hamburg from an outbreak of cholera.
But the desire to end the lockdown for economic reasons does not explain another significant right-wing trend. This is the emergence of the so-called “Branch Covidians” – those cultish figures on the American right risking death for “liberty” – who are protesting lockdowns.
There is a tendency to dismiss anti-lockdown gatherings as campaigns entirely bought and procured by rich businessmen. In the US, this idea has some truth. Denialists, 5G conspiracists, Trump fan-clubs, evangelicals and militias have enjoyed the financial backing of the American Legislative Exchange Council and even elements of the Trump White House.
In some respects, this anti-lockdown coalition resembles the ultra-conservative, anti-establishment Tea Party movement, which also received lobby money. The slogans, equating social distancing with communism, recall the paranoid vigilantism of that earlier movement. The threats to journalists, and calls to “hang” Anthony Fauci (head of the US’s coronavirus task force) recall its violent rhetoric.
However, the lockdown protesters are acting out of their own convictions. As the Harvard-based sociologist Theda Skocpol has argued, the nationalist far right is a grassroots affair. When rich patrons offer financial support, their role is to mobilise existing networks of activists.
But the concerns of lockdown protesters are not the same as their sponsors. They care less about the economy, as the New York Times delicately put it, than about “ideology”: a polite term for the toxic stew of racism and conspiracism underpinning the movement.
The desire to end lockdowns and restart economies has brought the far right and neoliberals together. This intellectual and political alliance is based on a deep suspicion of “society”; or what the political theorist Wendy Brown calls “sociophobia”. It is why, according to the anti-lockdown slogan, “social distancing = communism”, because social distancing represents a form of social solidarity.
The coalition of Covid-19 denial remains limited. Most nationalist voters support lockdown. But that could change. Test results suggest that only a small number of people around the world have been infected by coronavirus. That means more waves of infection are likely, and therefore further lockdowns. Every month of lockdown cuts growth, adds to unemployment and risks industrial scarring.
Many people are struggling, with little support. On the nationalist right, some of the ingredients are already there for back-to-work denialism. Unless a new economic model is found, the risk is that life under the pandemic will supply the rest.
Richard Seymour is a writer, broadcaster and activist. His latest book is The Twittering Machine (Indigo Press)
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BBC News – How are Brains are processing the pandemic
The Prodigy – Poson
I don’t know about you but nothing feels normal about this year and it is just a little bat sh*t crazy. It seems on the news that one problem was kind of sorted and a new thing would pop straight up in its place a little bit like the arcade game below.
Hammer Hitting Arcade Game – Almost like watching the news during Covin-19 Pandemic.
There are huge holes in lots of charities budgets at the moment both locally, nationally and internationally. I have been trying to help charities that I want to support and have discovered these hopefully useful tips and income streams for charities to use.
You might think that while a lot of shopping is going online that your charity or community building is missing a trick. Well there are many ways and means that your charity can also raise funds on the world wide web. It might be an idea to try and get some help from some more IT literate members of your community that might be able and willing to show you the digital ropes on how to use some of the applications mentioned below.
1) Online events such as a presentations, talks, a local musician and/or band could all possibly be used as online ticketed events to raise money for your charity/community building.
Tickets could be sold online through an account on ticket sales platforms such as Eventbrite (there will be a small charge for ticket events that you charge attendance for).
Once you have sold your tickets you could then invite them to attend through a platform called Zoom where, so long as the person that has bought a ticket has an ok internet connection, they should not have problem joining and enjoying the event.
2) Charities can sell items on the online auction site called eBay and receive payments for transactions through PayPal (including gift aid for those eligible to opt in). On eBay you could sell items by auction or even set up your own digital charity shop to sell items.
Make sure you sell items that can either easily be posted out to winning bidders such as DVDs, CDs or books. Or you might want to sell more difficult to post items locally and advertise items as local collection only. You could make an event of it locally for your charity if you have some special items that would mean a lot to people in your local community, such as locally produced art, craft or local produce or gift vouchers donated to your charity. You could advertise with social media posts or emails or in your local parish magazine about the upcoming auction, when it will be and what will be for sale, so that people in your community can know what to bid on and when and where.
Also, where payment goes through PayPal, buyers can opt into gift aid, so you can increase your income by a further amount that you would be entitled to. If you want to find out more about charities and raising funds on eBay or payments though PayPal just contact eBay or PayPal directly and they will be happy to answer your questions.
3) Finally for all you budding Amazon Parcel purchasers did you know that you can donate to your own charity by setting up an Amazon Smile account. Again, go directly to Amazon and ask them how to set up an Amazon Smile fundraising account for charities. Then ask your supporters to register with Amazon Smile and away you go. Amazon will donate a small percentage of all future purchases to the charity at no cost to the buyer.
So yesterday was a weird one, some awesome news in that I have a start date for a new job which I am so pleased about. I still have my old job and had my job interview for the new one just before lockdown kicked in. It’s all been on hold with Covin-19 taking hold.
So In order to treat myself, celebrate and kick back and watch a Blu-Ray I thought I would get a chicken burger, fries and a sprite. Lush, lush, lush.
So food is on its way driver can’t find me home and I go out to meet said driver and try and direct him to my flat with no success.
But that first meal was not to be. The driver did not find my address, cancelled my meal and buggered off. Gee thanks Drive.
Well next thing that happens is I now had time to deal with the homeless man that had decide to crash out outside the front of my flat complex. This was not a pleasure, honour or problem that I wished to address.
I went up to the bloke asked if he was ok, at this time he was leaning against a wall with his eyes shut and sitting in the hot sun. I lost count of how many people that had already walked past him blanking him like he might have been asking for change which they were not going to give him.
Lots more happened and I don’t have the heart to write it down here but to cut a long story short, I gave him some water in a plastic milk bottle which he took on his way with himself.
I got my meal in the end from Uber Eats and was told it would be free but still got charged for it. I might chase my money back on that today will have to see how I go. They might have cancelled the charge I am not sure yet.
My celebrations ended up being having a bath, watching part of the movie and falling asleep and trying not to sound to pissed off when explaining what the hell happened to my parents on the phone.
I was angry not with the homeless man but for want of a better description God. I thought way give me this sh*t show to me to deal with now. Why not give a guy a break for a change and let someone else act like the village idiot for a change?
Oh well another day another dollar.
If you are reading this I hope you are well and have a good day.
Covid-19 is still out there, people will still die from it and Covid-Zombies still walk the earth thinking they will not get it or that it does not matter to them even if they do.
At first it took one of our basic human needs/natural instincts – that to socialise and be close to one another without fear or risk of spreading death.
Some people were able to obey these rules for a short while but the reasons to not obeying seem to have become even greater to many than the need to obey them now. It’s like a Covid-19 Passover and if you obey the newly developed rules you have an increased chance of living thought this (may the odds forever be in your favour).
Many people choosing to disobey the rules in my city have been getting drunk, peeing and littering areas of nature and/or hanging out together to hug, kiss and probably be extremely intimate together too. I kind of consider these people now to be Covid-19 Zombies.
They are most likely to result in a longer lingering of the virus, an increase in deaths from the virus and an increase in contamination from the virus.
So my government has now in its wisdom announced that in order to travel on public transport from a week on Monday people now need to wear a mask or scarf while travelling.
So I have promptly whizzed onto the internet to order some masks and hand gel for me and my Dad.
It seems our defence against the virus has been raised to yet another level where we were first not meant to have contact with one another; we are now no longer aloud to easily speak or see the lips move on one another when out and about publically transporting one another.
Covin-19 3 wise monkies Hear nothing about the virus, Speak nothing about the virus & See no virus.
This virus feels like it is trying to rob us of our humanity and see what we will do with that and quite simply we are having to adapt to survive or have for thought and vision in order to see our way through this.
May the odds for ever be in your favour? Good luck and God speed
It appears there are large swathes of people the globe over that have manged to justify to themselves the importance of no longer socially isolating whether it be to fonicating, fighting or fraternizing.
The consequences of this choice of action is simply too early to say but I don’t think medical professionals and key works are geared up yet to start nursing the needlessly dying of a second wave.
If I were to be uncharitable I would stereotype right now the very small minority of people most likely to kill you in Exeter is a very small minority of sun worshipers and festival goers or party people, that seem to think this is an exciting time to break the rules, not really mindful of how many viruses they are spreading or who in their family they might now have inadvertently put at risk or are in the process of putting to death, let alone the countless numbers of people they don’t know that might die.
For those that have been working to keep you alive I am sorry about the potential spread by arseholes and idiots and for those that go onto die because of this behaviour I have no words to describe my sorrow.
Death has not had it’s fill on my patch yet!
The south west of England now has the highest ‘R rate’ in the UK. An ‘R’ number for each region in the UK has been revealed for the first time – and the South West has the highest.
The number, also known as ‘reproduction rate’, represents the coronavirus infection rate. If it goes above 1, new restrictions and tougher social distancing measures could be needed.
The South West is estimated to have the highest infection rate with 0.9. The North East and East Midlands are thought to have the next highest, followed by the North West.
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