I’m currently on the Ghost Train to Sevenoaks…. only me in the carriage again…
It’s tricky without my Triride. My substitute ‘ cheap ‘ replacement doesn’t have enough power to even get me up the ramp onto the train. The guards always seem a little bemused that I can’t get up a 5 foot ramp and need a push. Anyway they do always oblige… obviously, or else the train wouldn’t be able to leave with me only half on. I do wonder at what point ‘ health and safety’ will forbid them to give me a little push. …
But after 6 weeks I get my Tri back this week! Gawd I’ve missed it, but definitely stayed positive. How? By exercising a LOT. I’ve been cranking for 2 hours a day 5/6 days a week. It’s losing the weight borne of not being able to exercise properly for 7 years that gives me the positivity. After ‘ only ‘ a month I can see glimpses of ‘ the old me ‘ ( physique ) coming back. That makes me happy! I reckon give it another month and I’ll be almost there. Obviously the exercise is accompanied by not eating much. I don’t have a thing about food so it’s not hard… and as time has gone on my appetite has diminished, so Win Win.
And again a massive big huge thank you to my homies that come to my aid when I can’t do stuff. This time around in particular to Rob Stainsby, Toby St, and Marky P.
I’ve just listened to a really good book, one recommended by a buddy of mine whom I saw last week ( socially distanced obviously )
It’s called 12 rules for Life, and has had a lot of critical acclaim I found out.
Whilst all 12 rules seem make an awful lot of sense, there was one which keeps appearing in my thoughts. That rule was Be friends with people that want the best for you.
I then found myself going through people in my head that I regard as my friends. It was quite remarkable actually. All of those who I regard as genuine friends I could easily assign with the ‘ he/she ( definitely ) wants the best for me ‘ And when I thought of people that I regard as acquaintances rather than friends, and asked myself whether those people ( genuinely and definitely in my opinion ) wanted the best for me, every single time time it was a straightforward no that I didn’t have to ponder.
Likewise it was the same in reverse. For many people I know, when I ask that question it’s an immediate ‘ yes, I always want the best for this person’ but for others when I ask that of myself I realise that the same sentiments don’t exist ( and not because I feel an ill will towards them, but just that actually I just don’t think of them in that way ). We all know I think, which people in our lives, upon hearing about some misfortune or downfall ( possibly even their death ) we’d be very upset or concerned for ( devastated even if it was their death ) and which people we wouldn’t have those reactions about. That’s not to say we ever have to voice it out loud, but we DO know. What’s very useful though, is to think of people whom you’ve perhaps wondered about often, that you haven’t heard from for a long time, and then to ask yourself ‘ does that person want the best for me ?’ And again there are those who you are definitely a yes, with the rest being a no, and there never seems to be anyone that you have to deliberate over.
And it’s a really really good exercise in working out who is important in your life, who you should spend your time on, and who ‘ doesn’t merit’ your time in the same way.
It’s not as though it’s possible for you to ‘ be friends’ with EVERYONE, and similarly it’s not possible that EVERYONE cares about you.
Since my thinking has returned to ( close to ) normal, I have no explanation for my few month lapse in brain power. Ive just had the results back from an antibody blood test that I paid for, which said I had not had COVID. I’d put my brain fog down to Long COVID… but evidently it’s not that, and in any case it’s pretty much gone.
Hopefully my usual level of ( hilarious ) posts will resume before long?! 😳😂
Tbh if I had contracted it it could only have been from online date(s) pre Lizzy… as I just haven’t been close enough to anyone else since this all began. Mind you I suppose I could have had it in say March… and not had symptoms… and then had Long COVID ( but you don’t normally have the combination of asymptomatic infection and them Long COVID ) and then lost all my antibodies…. well who knows!?
Having been away in my Bubble for a few days ( riding the ghost train to Sevenoaks ) I do wonder what my lodger, the Porn King has been up to in my lounge. I asked him to make sure he cleaned the room thoroughly before I came back. King Wan I call him.. tho not to his face!
I can’t believe it’s taken almost a year for the Government to declare that it’s going to prosecute those who irresponsibly flout the lockdown rules. I mean cmon, would we really be in the situation we are now in, if that had been the policy all along?
Aside from that, I resumed my 2 hours of arm cranking per day in order to redress the calorie imbalance that existed over ‘ the festive season’, with rapid results. Well if you exercise a fair bit whilst at the same time eat a fair bit less than you do normally. then the resultant weight loss IS going to occur. Two hours a day is quite a lot… and it’s always going to be the tedium that’s possibly the biggest obstacle. Well that’s where Audible kicks in. Ear buds and a book and the time flies by. Currently I’m back to French lessons, and because I have to concentrate it takes my mind off the exercise clock even more. 👍👊
Blimey the trains are empty. I must have caught the Sevenoaks train 10 times by now, and I’ve yet to share a carriage with more than one other person. The train companies must be receiving a fair bit of Government support to keep going. I for one am grateful to them for that. From a business sense it just doesn’t make ANY sense at all to keep services running… but thankfully we live in a country where that just won’t happen. The upside for me is that I now have total faith in the staff to get me on and off. Well I’m the only passenger – how can they possibly forget me?!
Boris talks a lot about us ‘ beating the virus’ What he never does is call out the large slice of the population that are causing the continuous spread. The virus doesn’t spread itself. The virus is spread by people. There’s not anyone in the UK who doesn’t know how they are SUPPOSED TO DO. No one at all. Yet still the spread is rapid. No matter what ‘ restrictions’ are in place across the country, people still by and large do what suits them. There are very few people that adhere to the rules in place. It doesn’t help that there’s vagueness within the rules. For example ‘ you can mix with one family’ … well what do you really think is meant by that ? What would actually be EFFECTIVE against viral spread? Well quite clearly it’s going to be effective if each family has ONE other family that they mutually agree on. What’s clearly NOT effective is that you can spend time with one family one day and then spend the next day with a totally different family, or not even the next day, but later the same day…its quite clear ( in all the vagueness ) that families mix regularly with a whole lot of different families, but one after the other, so are somehow compliant. But it’s not going to work if people do that. It’s obvious that it hasn’t worked. One because the rules are vague, and two because people don’t want to follow them anyway. But additionally there is a huge gaping hole in the ‘ fight strategy’. That hole is the School Hole. Personally I don’t think the adults in the UK are ‘ reckless enough’ to be entirely responsible for the high transmission rates. For sure there’s pretty large scale non rule following, but it’s not enough to explain the huge numbers testing positive. What does explain those numbers is the mingling of the 7.5 million children in school ( pre 16 ) and the further 4 million in ‘higher education’. As that massive number of humans has carried on mingling pretty much as they have always done, is it any wonder that we find ourselves here in this situation? The first ‘ lockdown’ that people in the main took seriously ( because anyone and everyone actually thought they might die ) involved the country almost actually coming to a standstill. The streets were empty, the roads were deserted, and schools were shut. Transmission numbers fell and people stopped dying in their thousands. Had we been ordered to wear masks then the numbers wouldn’t have gone up like they did in the first place. Now by and large people have limited their socialising and adults don’t mix in a pre pandemic manner… but for kids life hasn’t changed very much. They don’t fear the virus because it doesn’t affect them, and they are told going to school is fine. You certainly can’t blame them. True that kids are far less ‘ disciplined’ than they were 30 years ago, but they still have some respect for their parents and teachers’ will, and would comply in the main if they were absolutely told to. However they aren’t told to. Schools are open as per usual ( with some one way corridors and some sanitizers ) but we have 7.5 million humans going back and forth without masks every day inside buildings that don’t have air filtration systems. The teachers have no way to make it all ‘ safe ‘, try as indeed they might. Online learning would seem to only work well ( ish ) for the private schools that have the financial resources to make it happen. The State schools just can’t do it. Do I know the solutions? Well yes, shut schools and give all the kids high speed broadband and new iPads, with a quiet classroom room in their homes, and instil a work ethic that doesn’t come naturally in almost all of those kids. Ensure they all sit at the iPads between 9 and 4 Monday to Friday, and don’t see their friends at all. Let them do their homework in the evenings… and accept that that’s just how it HAS to be for few months. All dead easy, right? Oh and also a parent has to work from home so that the kids are safe. ..
But it’s not going to happen like that. Aside from the fact that nowhere near enough kids have suitable home environments to do the above, the ‘ mental health ‘ of children is given a lot of weight ( though I personally can’t recall ever minding.. being not at school, and I didn’t have 24/7 phone access to my mates ) So of course the interruption to their education has to be dealt with. So why not postpone their exams ( those that have them ) until early August ie by 2 months, and accept that this year there won’t be an 8 week Summer Holiday. Yes, parents won’t be able to jet off on family holidays in July and August, but is that really too much to put up with? Well it’s not, is it? Not really… when the effect is that the spread of the virus is halted here and now by kids not being at school for 2 months, and after that 2 months the vaccination programme will have progressed so far that the balance of ‘ viral effect’ will have tipped our way so that WE, rather than the virus, have control.
Aside from all that I’d like to thank the lovely Lizzy for giving me a family Christmas. It’s been a while since I had one of those! It was lovely to be able to to spend it with her and her 2 lovely children. At the same time though I spent a fair amount of time thinking about last Christmas… pre pandemic of course, when I spent Christmas Day with Chris ( and Rob S for 2 hours at a pub ( imagine?! ) and then with Chris and his lovely Dad ( along with his now Ex girlfriend, and her 2 sons ). We did have a really brilliant day, and I really felt a connection with his Dad. Very very sadly, that super gentleman died 3 months later ( decades after cancer was actually supposed to have killed him .. ) So I’d like to dedicate this post to Chris’s Dad. I took a picture of them that day, and I framed one for them both. When Chris went to his Dad’s house after his death, there in the middle of the kitchen table where he mostly sat was the framed picture I’d given to him.
