I have sold the Peugeot in Hampshire. I was hoping to drive the car down there today, and get the train back. I wouldn't have any close contact with anyone, so while we were in tier three I think it was OK. I could lure Mum and Dad to say the Salt Cafe or something, have a coffee outdoors and then hop on a train back again. That's all off obviously, shame, but probably safer this way.
I slept until 10am today, though did not feel rested. As we had the day off today with not much to do we stayed up a bit too late watching more of The Queen's Gambit. It's been really good, just one more episode to go. Anyway, a bit too late, and then my normal Monday alarms still went off at 6:30 and 7:30. Luckily I managed to turn them off before they woke Clare.
I went to the post office to try and get the cards and gifts that I was thinking I'd take in the car, and that worked OK. A queue in the rain outside the post office in Cheriton, but not too bad. From there I went on to Tesco to get some lunch and maybe a few extra things for the new freezer, no not food hoarding, no not at all. I somehow managed to spend sixty quid today, just on ingredients for some things we're making for the freezer, not even any booze. I did a similar eighty quid shop at the weekend, on not much at all. I can only remember that I bought olives and other snack food, though at least then I did buy a bundle for the food bank (hash tag virtual signal).
Sounds like we could run out of some fresh veg over the next couple of days because of the port being closed. When I'm reading this back in years to come, France started blocking lorries arriving from the UK at midnight last night because of the coronavirus, specifically the new faster spreading strain that we seem to have here in Kent. Lorries are queued up on the M20 as they can't cross the channel. Lorries can in theory cross the channel the other way bringing the veg and so on that we import from the continent, but if they can't then return again they're going to think twice about that. There is probably food spoiling in trucks on the M20 now that we would have otherwise exported. Maybe this is why sprouts were down to 19p in Tesco today. We have enough brocolli in the freezer now to last us for two days. I don't think this is going to cut it.
This current situation is an unfortunate coincidence, but it's all a good trial run for the first of January when Brexit means this will become the norm.
Isn't it amazing by the way that France has managed to take control of it's own border, to stop unwanted traffic coming, while being part of the EU? Yes it looks like we did already have the sovereign powers that people thought they were voting for. Looks like we could have done everything we ever wanted to do without spending hundreds of billions of pounds and splitting the country in half. Who knew? We all got negative results on our coronavirus tests, which is something.
A couple of pre-christmas gig anniversaries today, another Pogues show this day in 2004, and a David Devant gig in Tunbridge Wells in 1996.
| Country | cases | deaths |
|---|---|---|
| USA | 18084356 | 323455 |
| Brazil | 7213155 | 186356 |
| India | 10031659 | 145513 |
| Mexico | 1301546 | 117249 |
| Italy | 1938081 | 68447 |
| UK | 2004219 | 67075 |
| France | 2460555 | 60418 |
| Iran | 1152072 | 53448 |
| Russia | 2819429 | 50347 |
| Spain | 1817448 | 48926 |
Coronavirus weekly death graph for USA + Brazil + India + Mexico + Italy + UK
Paul Clarke's blog - I live in Hythe in Kent. Married + father to two, I'm a full-stack web engineer, and I do mostly js / nodejs, some ruby, python, php ect ect. I like pubs, running, eating, home automation and other diy jiggery-pokery, history, genealogy, Television, squirrels, pirates, lego, and TIME TRAVEL.