S'update! · 11:50am Apr 8th, 2020
Hi, folks!
How are you doing during these crazy times? I hope you're continuing to stay positive and healthy; the mental impact of restrictive measures shouldn't be overlooked, no matter how important it might be to "do our bit". Personally, my heart goes out to those who aren't able to access a green space or garden during this time.
Given the nature of my work, I've been bracing myself for this for some time: this weekend saw me pick up some dubious symptoms, and they've gotten worse over the last 24 hours. I'm mostly just resting in bed/garden and keeping an eye on things; I'm a healthy, active person, but given I've had pneumonia twice now, I'm fully expecting to be hit hard by this, should the symptoms confirm the most obvious diagnosis (not that I think that's what it is; I reckon it's probably just a nasty viral thing). My respiratory system is an absolute joke at the best of times, haha. Maybe this will give it the kick up the arse that it needs. But yeah, I feel like total compost at the moment.
"Better stay two meters away I guess. Uh-oh, how far is two meters again!?"
Honestly, though, I feel like I've been in a weird place during the last month or two. It goes without saying that it's awful that so many people are having to deal with death, pain or distress. But I have yet to really feel any sense of panic or fear myself. Part of this I think is tied into my perception that I think, on a societal level, we needed something like this. I'm sure that isn't going to be a statement that endears me to families of victims; it certainly isn't my intention to belittle or dismiss the gravity of their situations. But when I think about all of the ills in modern, western (for the most part) society, I can't help but hope that we collectively move to a more positive, considerate place from here on. I hope we as a people learn to appreciate things better, to not wallow in excess and consumerism. I hope that the businesses that clearly need to stop being bailed out are finally allowed to die a death, and that more economically viable and contributory businesses and shops replace them. I hope that bloated and self-serving sporting industries like football get the shake up they so desperately need. I hope we reflect on the advances made during this time by the environment, and how we might sustain it. I hope we learn to invest in the things that truly need investing in. I hope we can respect people for their actions without the need to deify, and thus by necessity, demonise others. Put simply, I hope we learn lessons, and learn them fast.
Heh, for a cynic, it feels strange feeling optimism about things like that. 
[Unpublished stories cannot be embedded]
Anyway, I wrote (or rewrote, depending on your history following me on this site), the first chapter of a new story the other day. Thank you to everyone who has read it/commented on it/followed me because of it. It genuinely does mean a lot! I'm editing the second chapter at the moment, but I might take a pause to throw out some cheesy romantic fluff. I feel if nothing else it will hopefully make people smile or feel all warm and gooey inside; given the current world circumstances, that might not be a bad thing. 
Until then, have some cute best pony pictures. Keep well, keep positive, keep caring, keep smiling. 
Sorry to hear you're not feeling that good, hope you get better soon (hopefully it's not *THAT*) & stay safe!
5238527
Hope you're keeping well too.
Ah, thank you! Yes me too. It's not looking overly favourable at the moment, as today has been a pretty rough day, but I'm a tough ol' cookie.
*hugs*
I hope you get through this quickly and come out healthy on the other side.
5238581
I hope you stay healthy and happy too!
Thank you!
Really sorry you're unwell at the moment. My very best wishes for you to get through this (whatever it turns out to be) and for things to improve quickly.
I had a vague thought recently that, in cities at least, maybe parks should be restricted to people who don't have their own green space. It would probably be unworkable, and it's hard for me to say anyway as I'm lucky enough to live on a quiet estate and have a garden of my own.
5238765
Ah, thanks. Yeah, it's unfortunately not moving in the direction I was hoping for, but we'll see what another day of r&r brings. Appreciate your well-wishes!
I don't know if I'd feel comfortable being the person who has to decide who can/can't access green spaces; I'd just hope the fact that a good 15-20% of UK residents don't have a garden will be taken into consideration should the Government make the (incorrect, in my own unprofessional opinion) decision to toughen restrictions further. Speaking from my own experiences, I have had a torrid time of it with my own mental health this last year, the lowest parts being some nasty episodes with self-harming and suicide ideation, and I could see such restrictions ruining me if I didn't have access to a garden. I'm getting increasingly frustrated with this "all you have to do is stay at home and we can beat this" rhetoric; for many people, "staying at home" is a dangerous thing to insist. At worst I'd allow the cynic in me to flourish and say that it's also a pretty classist request.
Sorry to hear things are still not good, but the well wishes are very much renewed!
5239174
I certainly wouldn't -- but then all kinds of horrible decisions have to be made at a time like this. There isn't any option that's going to be right for 66 million people, and that would be the same whatever flavour of government we had. But today I did 7,000 steps in my back garden, plus some reasonably hard gardening. I'd like to think I wasn't the only person choosing to do that to give a tiny bit more space in the streets to those who aren't lucky enough to have the option.
Very true. Quite apart from the mental health toll -- which is surely going to be very great, the "unseen" epidemic in all this -- I saw a high-ranking police officer earlier today saying he was deeply worried about the number of children vulnerable to abuse during this period.
As for the current restrictions, my hunch is that they're about right as they are -- but I could be wrong. One day, when there's time to analyse everything properly, we'll be able to see whether Spain's very tough approach, Sweden's opposite approach or the UK's middle-of-the-road approach has been the right one. (If any of them have.) I really couldn't say at the moment. I certainly expect to be at home for the rest of April at least.
Grimly, I err towards the pessimistic end of the spectrum. Politics in particular has inspired less and less confidence in me over the years. Once the crisis has died away, I predict that business will resume as usual and hardly any lessons will be learned. No major shift in power or policy will have resulted.
And that's not getting into climate change, cropland loss, destructive mining, and corporate corruption that scientists have been fighting (vainly) against for decades; the COVID-19 outbreak, to me, seems more like a harbinger than a one-off. The worst is yet to come.
In answer to your opening question, I'm not doing too badly at the moment. It helps I've got the sort of mind ideal for isolationism (give me a few books, games, and DVDs, I'll be happy for hours), and as much as I've missed work (can't do it at home), I've honestly enjoyed myself. If anything, some of my best days this year have been during the lockdown. I've adapted easily to it.
More to the point, how are you feeling at the moment? It's been a few days since the posting of this blog; hopefully enough time to see some recovery?
5239400
You're very kind, thank you!
Nice. You'll be sick of the place by the end of this. I was reasonably inspired by the guy who "climbed to the peak of Everest" in his house. I know that removes so many of the actual obstacles, but when your actual trip is cancelled what can you do? It's neat, though. Might try and do something similar.
Yep. I work in children's services, and this is one of my worries. Domestic abuse being another. But it also doesn't have to be a defined issue for the risk of harm to be there - that's the troubling thing. Mental health rates in this country are already appallingly high, and all of the applauding frontline health workers isn't going to hide the fact that the NHS is a monstrously bloated, ill-resourced beast that needs some serious overhauling. Well, I say it isn't, but the wilful encouragement of deifying the service is going some way to hide it. But that's a rant for another day, heh.
For sure! I dunno, I was saying to my wife that I think the middle-of-the road-approach feels like the one least likely to be wholly effective, but that's in a general sense (my philosophy has always been 'go hard or go home'); I know that the approach has mitigated demand for NHS resources, unlike what has been seen in Italy, and so that's something.
5240326
That's fair enough too. There's certainly reason enough to be worried about that. As horrible as it must be for victims and their families and friends, the 'problem' with COVID19 (or at least this particular outbreak) is that, in a societal/cultural sense, it's simply not serious or destructive enough to force the change we need to see.
Genuinely glad to hear that, chum.
Hah, snap. Or, at least, that's been the case of late; as I said to a friend, you know you've been living the life of a hermit when a pandemic strikes and you have to make zero changes to your lifestyle, hah.
What new media have you consumed? Tell all!
As for me, yeah I'm ticking over. Had to have a telephone conversation/diagnosis with a doctor today, and they feel from my symptoms that I have the dreaded 19-word. So I'm being monitored and will be up for a field trip to my local hospital if things continue on their current trajectory. Not considered the highest of risk categories, but given my track record of respiratory weakness I'm now 'on the radar'. Wooo.
5240345
Re: societal/cultural problems, I'm putting my trust in what I like to call the Pessimist's Wager: I'll either be proven right or pleasantly surprised.
Guilty as charged. Though that's part of it: the other is that it's because my family's supported each other and otherwise just been lucky (I'm not completely out of the loop). We're still interconnected, and no bad news has turned up (yet).
All in all, the virus seems to have passed us completely by, which is frankly astonishing considering I myself was in London as recently as mid-March, and yet not once have I (or has anyone near me) shown any symptoms in the weeks since. Even though I don't attribute this to anything on my part (if anything, my attitude to COVID-19 was somewhere between "oblivious" and "unimpressed" at that point), sometimes luck can be on your side. Though I certainly don't intend to push mine again.
Mostly revisiting old material. Been working my way through my collection of animated movies (at last count, 111 - or 114 if the Equestria Girls movies are included). The emphasis is on different styles and inspirations, hopefully to give my future projects some foundation to work on.
And because some of these favourites I haven't enjoyed in ages, so why not?
Brushing up on my science, too, and not just in matters related to viruses. To pick a couple of examples at random, it's amazing how complicated plant reproductive cycles can be, and I'm trying to memorize the anatomy of the heart and the double-circulation system involving the lungs and the rest of the body. Mostly biology-focused at present, though I intend to go further over time.
It's a disgrace how much I've neglected my own favourite subject. To be corrected, post-haste!
Fingers crossed it's one of those false positives. Or at least that you make a complete recovery from this disease.
Either way, I hope you get back on your feet soon enough, though it seems like you've been out of it for months due to one thing or another. You're a real medical case, aren't you?
I saw your comment about your phone call to the doctor in your reply to Impossible Numbers. Take my good wishes and double them!
5240345
Oh, I'm sure. Though to reduce it to its bluntest, my aim is basically to be there to see the end of this. Of course, for all I know I may have had the bloody bug already, what with the (uncertain, but at least significant) proportion of people who get it asymptomatically. Until the powers that be finally get mass testing sorted out, which will be who knows how long, I can't be sure. Hence more garden treks!
I must admit I've wavered over the last couple of days as the grim death tolls have been announced. There is certainly a part of me that thinks the UK should have locked down harder and faster -- after all, unlike Italy we had a week or so when we could see the tsunami coming. Did we stay on the "beach" too long? I know we're not the only country to take this middling approach -- Denmark is another -- but Spain, Italy and France all have much tougher restrictions. Someone I know in the UAE has to request a permit in advance (by app, I think) even to go food shopping.
Of course, there's still so much left to know, as Twilight (well, MandoPony) once put it. One example from a selfish perspective: I'd like to know how that high mortality rate for diabetics breaks down. That overall rate is going to include people who weigh a lot more and exercise a lot less than I do, plus people who are much older -- so I imagine my chances would be better. But how much difference would all that make to me? I really don't know. More generally, as mentioned, we still don't really have more than the vaguest idea of what proportion of infections result in symptoms. We don't know how long post-recovery immunity might last. And so on and so forth.
And then there's the logistical question of how countries relax restrictions. As someone with several teachers (past and present) among my relatives, I'm far from convinced, for example, that reopening schools is going to be the relatively easy win some people are implying. For younger children, at least, strict social distancing just isn't workable. And what about the risks to their teachers? Then again, "Let young, fit people back into society but keep the elderly and vulnerable protected" is one sentence that hides an enormously complicated reality. (As a 40-something diabetic with a near-normal life expectancy under normal conditions, if you tell me I have to spend another six months in quarantine, I'll find it hard but I'll cope. If we don't get a vaccine, though, there is no way in Tartarus I'm spending the rest of my life like this. None. I'll reason that my chances are better as a 40-something diabetic than they will be as an 80-something diabetic, and I'll roll the dice.)