Sixes and Sevens for Youth

Yesterday we were meant to be going to see my younger daughter in Bristol. It suddenly struck me in the morning that she has a partner and 4 children, meaning that if Hay and I turned up we'd be a group of 8 - two in excess of the Rule of 6. We cancelled, which was a pity, as I'd already made a pot of pulled pork and crackling.

I'm going off a lot of TV programmes. The One Show used to be quite interesting, but they now have presenters I've never heard of and guests who seem about 12, having their 5 minutes of fame and talking about shit I'm not even vaguely interested in. TV has gone all 'youth culture'. I long for the days of Wogan interviewing interesting people.

I think I'll become a youth culture influencer...

What passes for news these days isn't much better. A whole section of Points West the other day was taken up by a report on the funeral of 4 lads from Calne who had died in a car accident. They'd been in a car at 3am and had ploughed into a house when the driver lost control. Everyone was eulogising the boys, whereas they - or the driver, who must have been speeding - could easily have killed someone in the house the car partially demolished. I don't think much eulogising would have taken place had that happened. Their death was news; their funeral, while tragic for the families, wasn't. Is that harsh of me?

Covid. Cases are ramping up, but the massive increase in testing is highlighting more cases than would have appeared without it, so it's not an accurate measure of what has happened, but a measure of now, which shouldn't be compared with the period up to lockdown. Case numbers in the run up to lockdown were, in all probability, far worse than reported. This seems to be shown in the deaths vs cases. Deaths are currently low as a percentage of cases, but there's no logical reason for this, unless cases pre-lockdown were far higher, which would bring the percentage down to current levels. The death figure is what we need to look at, not cases.