Lockdown: Day 55 - 17/05/20

Well, this has been a strange week, through which we've pressed hard to get to the 10 (TEN) days of annual leave at the other end of, the week where Britain supposedly gets back to work, while lockdown because of the Corona Virus still continues, and for this week at least, there's little indication of there being any difference on the railways, as there's just as few people on the Morley - Leeds trains as there ever were, and no obvious differences on the Leeds - Cross Gates services either. Which is just as well because this is the week that I chose to start shooting video from the windows of my morning and evening commuter rides, as that's certainly something that you can't do on the trains under normal circumstance, unless you are a travel blogger with a semi-professional YouTube channel (and that's not a future I envisage for myself after discovering the brutal upload times which that site has) and it's amazing that you can find along the way of two line, once you factored in the orientation of the train and the direction of travel to give you as many a 16 variations. I can honestly say that I'm not looking forward to public transport getting busy again, as I can't envisage how you're supposed to effectively socially distance on a train when it's at more than 25% capacity, and thus it's relief to see no change through this week, as I doubt many businesses even had a plan to get people back on site in the city when the announcement was dropped last weekend, and the only indication that I can take of there being any real change in circumstances is the locally observed lower number of cars in the yard of my flat block, and the increase in apparent activity at the industrial units and workshops at the lower end of Station Road in Morley. My Friday evening swing around the town, to grab the weekly essential goods shopping at Bond Street Tesco, will thus be my probable last to see the deserted streets in the city centre before the retail sector starts to revive, and the only crowd to add to the regular few people traversing the street is the bunch who empty out of the Albion Street branch of Barclays Bank, ahead of my working week coming to end. The long weeks of being NIW to come should prove a good time to decompress after ploughing a relentless path of work through seven weeks of national lockdown, and the frustrations of the moment are combined by the thought that I ought to be on holiday to walk the Rossendale Way, and the fact that while restrictions of time allowed for exercise have been relaxed, the use of non-essential public transport use is still discouraged, which renders me relatively stranded in Morley for the time being, only fancying a regular short circuit out on Sunday morning, ahead of potentially putting down quite a few more local miles during my week off.

Boar Lane and the Last Chance to see Leeds devoid of life?

As befits the week, my last week of work for the time being also proved to be something of a mixed bag, as it got split neatly down the middle, having the first three days spent at Seacroft, with my colleague still in attendance, despite having received notification to self-isolate at the end of last week due to being in an 'at risk' group, which she figures came from an all patients mail shot that came for a hospital department that she has been referred to but had not actually attended any appointments with or gotten as much as a prognosis from. So with both of us in place, it's possible to get busy in full effect, digging deep into the culling activity, and with the cardiology filing pile running out after Monday afternoon, I'll do my absolute best to double up the amount of files boxed up over the remaining days, meaning that by the end of Wednesday we've gotten boxes piled up in every available bit of storage space about the place, having done virtually four days of work over three between us, leaving the cull at about 58% complete, having done more than 22% of over the twelve days that I was on site. More importantly, I leave my colleague up to date with all her other work after me session, and no backlog of anything else to do once i'm compelled to return to the LGI site to relieve my colleague there as he bags himself a long weekend off, and thus it's back to the Old Site, having thought at just the end of last week that I probably wouldn't be in attendance there again any time soon, to find that it's still as hot as balls in there, and with me flying the office solo, while also having to virtually supervise the team of newbies who've been drafted in to cover the ward paperwork messenger roles. I've got the regular casenote collections to cover, which will take a nice chunk of the two afternoons that I'm around, still providing a decent weight of work, especially as services start to orientate themselves towards starting up some elective and essential services that previously been suspended, and it's also worth noting the relative quiet which still sits over the wider site, and the fact that while some offices have been rearranged for maximum social distancing potential, others still seem to suffer the problem of having people piled up without any regard for personal well-being. Otherwise, I fill out this brief sojourn, with deactivating empty casenotes, as the department's work starts to shift closer to the severe audit it needs, which means we're turning up quantities of notes that belong to patients who have never actually attended any appointments or have managed to pass through the system without generating any paperwork, a particular work bugbear of mine that I've carried for, ooh, two decades now, and at the very least I can be content that I'm not deactivating any of the files that I'd been employed to create or recreate in the role that I'd taken in those distant months that preceded lockdown.

Anyway, we slip into a long week off, with plenty to reflect on with regards the pandemic situation in Britain, as the death toll creeps up to the vicinity of 34,000, against a wider confirmed infection total of almost 250,000, which hardly bodes well for an easing of lockdown that seems aimed solely towards the revival of the economy, rather than maintaining the health and well-being of the general population, and it's discouraging in the extreme when a major public announcement is made and then it has to be followed up with several days of additional clarifications being made. Indeed, even now it's unclear just who is being expected to start returning to work, and how social distancing can be maintained and safety ensured, especially when so many have made the shift to home working and starting up an office or store from scratch could be a prolonged process, and even if retail is due to be revived next month, getting their stock out of storage will be a prolonged task and can their supply lines be relied on in the immediate future? Indeed, many have taken issue with the new government advice of 'Stay Alert - Control the Virus - Stay Safe', which is vague to the point useless as virus isn't something that can be observed, like a rabid animal, and it's really a bit much to start putting your trust in 'the common sense of the British people', when there are far too many people in the country who I wouldn't trust to do the right thing even when told what it might be, and we've already seen far too many folk at the start of the lockdown acting as if the rules didn't apply to them. Otherwise, there's just so much to distress the mind and let one's cynicism run free, like planning to send schools back in at the start of June, starting with the reception years, the literally hardest children to organise in a crisis situation, and against the objections of the teaching professionals, and then there's being told that its your 'civic duty to not use public transport' when so many have not bought into the style of middle class suburban living, or regarding the mantra of 'R<1' sounding like a whole lot of voodoo statistics, just like 'Follow the Science' was the hot air phrase that preceded lockdown. Don't even mention folk being compelled back into work, but not being given the freedom to visit friends or families, and at the very least, the Welsh and Scottish authorities are having none of it, and are not following England's lead in easing the restrictions of lockdown yet, and I do hope that HM Government are not wrong in their planning, as the risk of a second wave of Corona Virus infections and deaths from COVID-19 could be a very real possibility in the summer, indeed, when you allow yourself the darkest moments of reflection, you could fear that we may be on the brink of a cultural disaster, unprecedented in the modern age.

Only time will tell, I guess.


Walks: Morley Social Distancing Circuit. Walked: 17/5 (reversed).
2.8 miles, via Valley Mills, Broad Oaks, White Rose, and Daisy Hill.

5,000 Miles Cumulative Total: 4395.1 miles
2020 Total: 128.6 miles
Up Country Total: 3932.1 miles
Solo Total: 4080.9 miles
5,000 in my 40s Total: 2988.9 miles

Next Up: NIW for a whole week, and aiming at some proper walking again.