Month: March 2021

The sun shone with a return of spring although there was a cold north wind. I walked up my hill to present my adopted horse with a carrot. Returning home I’ve been playing some Captain Beefheart and working on the Harper book. It’s nearly finished. I’m just twenty pages from the end. I’ve reached the point where I just want to get it off to the publisher and concentrate on something else!

Out in Coronaland political madness still reigns.

The women take to the street in protest at violence against women and receive a big dose of violence from the police (who were carrying out the instructions of our wonderful politicians). So much for reducing violence against women.

The new Tory bigwig at the BBC purges left-wing bias from the BBC schedules. The MASH Report is axed. It seems that no criticism of Brexit or the Tories is to be tolerated. All part of the Tory propaganda machine. They really do not want opposition.

The boundary commission are going to alter the boundaries and make it harder for Labour to get elected.

The tabloids are pouring out a stream of pro-tory propaganda.

It looks more and more like a police state with a one-party system.

The mood of jubilation at the success of the vaccination programme and the imminent lifting of lockdown has given the Tories an incredible 7% lead!

How quickly people forget!

I suppose we have to wait and see if people wake up when the reality of Brexit hits home with soaring prices, oodles of red tape and job losses.

Then the way the public services and poor have to pick up the bill for Tory cronyism and bad handling of the pandemic.

Will we ever have an objective review of how the pandemic was handled? – and why we have the worst death-rate and worst hit economy? – and where billions were wasted?

Will we ever have an objective review of Brexit? – how much it is really costing? – how many jobs have been lost? – how business has been affected by red tape? – how many firms collapsed or moved abroad? – how much it is costing the economy?

I suspect it will all be whitewashed!

The corona news is all about two countries halting the AstraZeneca jabs on the basis of fifteen people developing blood clots. That seems crazy to me. With 17 million jabs given there have been 15 reported cases of clotting and 22 of embolisms in people in the weeks after vaccination. That sounds bad but is actually less than would be expected in a group of 17 million people. It sounds crazy to me for countries to halt vaccinating on that basis. The risk from catching Covid is hundreds of times higher than that. I suspect that none of those cases are attributable to the vaccine. Even if they are were the risk is miniscule while the risk from covid is high. Doesn’t make sense.

The good news is that the cases are coming down in both the USA and UK. The most important thing being that the death-rates are tumbling due to the effect of the vaccine and so are the hospital cases. The vaccine is stopping the vulnerable from getting ill!

In Brazil the levels are still high and so is the death-rate. Bolsonaro is a fool.

In Vietnam and New Zealand there are still just the odd cases with nobody dying!

There are big lessons to be learnt!

We still have the opening up of the economy as we come out of lockdown and that will inevitably hit the antivaxxers who will have an increasing risk. I expect a lot of them to get severely ill and die.

For the rest of us who are vaccinated we can look ahead with confidence and book those holidays. All we have to do is not got to places where there are variants and look forward to a booster jab in the autumn.

I can’t wait for things to get back to normal!

Stay safe.