Where'd She Go?

The Duchess had gone missing- and her three adult sons- who might have been able to tell us where she was- had gone to sleep and couldn't be woken. As the newspaper I was reading in my dream put it, we were suffering from Duchesslessness.

I'm With Feeble

Now would be a really good time to go through cupboards and have a big clear out, only all the charity shops are shut so I'd simply be moving things into the garage- which itself needs a big clear-out...

Charities are really taking a hit, by the way. Many may go to the wall.

Someone I read (I read so many people I wouldn't know where to look for the reference) was saying that they've started wincing at crowd scenes in old movies and TV shows. I find I'm doing it too. I was watching a thriller from 1945 last night and there was a scene with people all squashed together on the deck of a ferry boat and for a split second I was thinking, "No, no- you can't do that!"

A friend was at Heathrow at the weekend- seeing someone off on a repatriation flight to Australia. The jetliners were standing idle, the cargo planes were coming and going, many of the putative passengers were kitted out as if for a gas attack, the staff weren't even wearing paper masks. The guy she was seeing off was headed for Sydney- where he would spend two weeks in quarantine- and then on to Queensland where he'd be quarantined for another two weeks before being allowed to drive home.

I'm obeying government restrictions; I'm not sure they make much sense. Or even if they're working. Like many older people I find myself thinking, "Well, we've had flu pandemics before- and lots of people died- but we never made this kind of fuss." As Craig Murray writes "'Man in his 80’s already not very well from previous conditions, dies of flu' is not and should not be a news headline." Or, as Francis Feeble the woman's tailor has it, "We owe God a death."

This morning I read a report from Italy- where they've been in lockdown longer than we have- and it seems the mood on the streets is becoming ugly- with the Mafia posed to offer solutions the government can't- on the basis of I'll do you this favour if you'll do this, this and this for me. At present our conversation here in Britain is mainly medical, but give it another month or two and it could be all about politics...

I'm expecting governments to fall.

I wish I knew what was really going on. I wish I had a bird's eye view...