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| Snowy January in Leeds. |
With the passing of every festive season, I normally crack wise about hiding away for the remainder of January, and essentially going into hibernation for five weeks that lead us out of the Dark Season and on towards our renewed walking career, but 2021 has already given us enough reason to literally do that, as a renewed National Lockdown, our third since the start of the Covid Pandemic, which means my inclination for keeping out of circulation for the month has no been imposed on everyone else too, and as we look forwards to my Tenth year of walking, I'm feeling deeply uncertain about what's going to come next. Not with regards the pandemic situation, as I can honestly say I've finally gotten a proper handle on that, but with how I'm going to conduct myself as we look to get walking again, as restrictions look like they're going to be in place for a while, and although it seems like severe time limits for exercise are not going to be in place this time around, there seems every indication that local exercise is going to mean just that, and so all the plans that I'd been hatching for 2021 during the late passage of last year are effectively junked to comply with the instructions passed out. So for once, I find myself on the waning edge of the rotten three months of the year, looking forward without a great deal of certainty about where my walking year is going to go, as I'm not immediately feeling a lot of enthusiasm for making more trails around Morley, having exhausted the vast majority of the plausible paths during that long Spring of 2020, with my desire to engage with the walking year feeling like it's at its lowest ebb in along while. I don't think I'd really expected to be in such a place when my last walking year ended, with the country going back into lockdown in the teeth of a second Covid wave that my optimistic brain would have hoped would have never come to pass, indeed my thinking back in March would have had us on the tail end of this pandemic, as it retreated into the background after the effective and well considered actions of governments and health care systems worldwide would have taken a firm grip on it.
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| Add a new wicking vest to the pile! |
So the list for this year isn't going to be one of well-defined plans and concrete targets, as it usually would be, rather more a list of hopes of where we might be able to get ourselves as this cursed Pandemic continues, and hopefully recedes:
- I aspire to make the best of the local paths for as long as is necessary.
- I aspire to trace at least one local multi-part trail.
- I aspire to make best use of my Calderdale Support Bubble for as long as it's needed.
- I aspire to travelling to Leicestershire to visit Mum and walk Down Country again.
- I aspire to opening up the season in May, vaccinations permitting.
- I aspire to trace at least one cross-country trail, by whatever means.
- I aspire to Travelling to Lancashire to visit My Sister and her family, and to walk with them in the West Pennines.
- I aspire to actually holidaying away from home in the late Summer.
- I aspire to walk 500 miles on the year, regardless of what is thrown our way.
- and lastly, I intend to achieve my first 5,000 miles target in 2021, as my Career Total sits less than 260 miles distant, and that has to be attainable this year, regardless of continuing Lockdown and enduring Pandemic.
Naturally, all this will be done while taking all the appropriate measures towards hygiene and Social Distancing, while maintaining adequate attention to self-protection, and not being part of the problem by behaving within whatever restrictions are in force, as I continue to plough my own furrow though theses strange days, looking forwards with hope to that a normal sort of walking year might be obtained somewhere along the way, but with enough cynicism borne of experience to know that that might not be possible, despite our best intentions.
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Pandemic Thoughts: January 2021
Probably the least surprising news on 2021 came with it less than a week old, as on January 5th, Britain entered its third period of National Lockdown, as even the limited renewal of December's shopping and circulation frenzy, coupled to the effects of the new and aggressive Coronavirus variants discovered in recent weeks, brought on another surge in Covid infections as we shifted into Winter (always the worst time of year for repiratory illnesses), causing the hospital population to continue to grow at record levels, while the death toll rose inexorably upwards, reaching the 100,000 marker before the end of this month. At least this time around, it seems that we are not going to get the brief national admonishment that we had in November, and HM Government will be enforcing a much tighter and unbounded period of restrictions, which is about time as they've already had two shots at doing this correctly, which means abandoning the tier system completely and shutting down everything instead, including the schools, which makes you wonder what all those weeks of grappling with the teaching unions was meant to prove, with all the assertions that schools would return on January 4th, come what may. Indeed, school did return, for one day, rendering all the posturing pointless and laughable in equal measure, while the retail and leisure sectors look forwards to potentially months of continuing economic inactivity, while the list of key workers seems to be longer this time, resulting in the train services not getting any quieter (which is never a useful social barometer thanks to its unpredictable fluctuations, it's just the only one that I have access to), and if it means there will be another run on the food shops, I'll be seeing none of that as a combination of doomsday prepping and eating Christmas leftovers means that I don't need to visit Morrisons for all of five weeks. What visual effects there have been can be seen up close on another evening tour or three across the deserted city centre in the wake of having done another week's work cover at Seacroft Hospital, after I boldly started riding the buses again (rather than making trips to and from Cross Gates station in the dark), which thankfully didn't coincide with the blast of snow which seized the city up completely the following week (but did feature having no working heating in the building for the duration, which make me glad to have access to warm winter gear to don), as nature gave us all a reminder of why staying home is really the best option in this or any other January.
So ultimately, we're looking towards settling in for another long haul, and doing our best to stay safe, and on the third time of asking, it at last seems that HM Government aren't going to be drawn on committing to a projected end to this Lockdown, despite the constant bleating from the media, which ultimately helps no one, and do you remember that whole 'Leaving the EU' debacle? as that's already caused a spat, something about access to vaccines that I can't admit to understanding, which is illustrative of the difficulties faced by international businesses suddenly finding border restriction and trade barriers in their way where previously had been none. If there is good news to glean from this long and cold month, it's been the extension of the mass vaccination programme across the whole of the UK, which had looked like it too was about to go wrong at the start of the month, after the DoH decided to extent the period between the initial dose and the booster from three weeks to eleven, which looked like it would put a lot of people into a longer period of uncertainty after receiving their first jab, but that didn't turn out to be the case, as many people, including My Mum and many family friends in east Leicester, all got their second dose without any hint of a delay. So as the national scheme extended to the younger seniors and the clinically vulnerable, the news at the Trust wasn't hinting at a universal vaccination scheme for staff until the invitations were sent out, deciding to give a blanket offer to all staff, even those well outside the groups in immediate need, and once the complicated booking system had been navigated, most of my colleagues were booked in to be vaccinated, among the first 10% of the population, within a week. Most chose to attend the pop-up clinic at the Thackary Medical Museum, but I chose to attend the Elland Road clinic in the Banqueting Suite, rocking up at the apex of a 6 mile pre-seasonal stroll from Morley on the cold and frosty morning of the 24th, to join the queue and be ID-ed multiple times, before checking in and being give the breakdown and risks of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine before being ushered to the nursing station to be injected with the minimum of fuss, observing that they are extremely well staffed and organised,whilst having about 16 stations all going at once, all turning over a patient every five minutes.
There wasn't even a need to wait out after the vaccination to check for allergic reactions, and all recipients were free to return to their homes having not even experienced the slightest of pains from the injection into the muscle of the upper arm, but the warning was laid down of there being a pretty decent chance of getting a physical reaction as the body got to work on identifying and fighting the CoronaVirus protein in the dosage, and on that front they weren't lying, as by Sunday bedtime, I was feeling like hot garbage, and the effect endured for 36 hours beyond that. So I went to work on Monday, knowing that a physical day of labour had been arranged for me, and thus gave all my colleagues and superiors the warning that I felt like absolute shite, as I toiled through, feeling like I'd slept with a heavy weight resting on me, and with a head full of clag, admittedly not too different from how I'd normally feel at this time of year, but apparently a consequence of getting that particular jab, as all other recipients tell a similar story of enduring a physical reaction that at least makes you feel like something is actually happening. All those who elected to get the Pfizer-Biontech vaccine all came out smiling though, and could extract some amusement from the brief suffering and endurance of the rest of us, and we'll now all start to wait for the dates of our pre-booked boosters to come in April and the hope that beyond then we might be freed to resume something of a normalised routine, especially as the take-up of the vaccines has already passed the 10 million doses mark at the end of the month, as the older folk of this country know the value of immunisation, having been young when TB and many childhood diseases were still killers. ~~~ But again with this age of pandemic, are we going to really recall this first month of the year with this breakthrough of relative good news or with what went on the United States, where 6th January will be become their new date of infamy, when the Presidential election results were due to be certified in Congress and the outgoing president addressed a rally of his supporters to protest the outcome and illegally reverse the result of the election that he lost, which predictably resulted in a mob storming the Capitol building with the intent of disrupting the democratic process, and probably worse?
Fortunately, if that is the right word, the certification process was only delayed, but the act of insurrection left five people dead, four protesters and one policeman, which is a tragic and pointless loss of life when trying to disrupt the electoral process (but also seems low when compared to the disproportionate militarized police responses to multiple BLM protests over the course of last year), and even afterwards the outgoing president seems unable express contrition and his ultimate concession of the result appears dishonest, as if it were coerced. And even after the USA got as close as it's ever gotten to its 'Burning the Reichstag' moment and an attempt to impose a dictatorship over the will of the American electorate, the former President's supporter seem unable to accept that election fraud hasn't taken place, and the continued repetition of his pet conspiracy theories ultimately gets him booted from his beloved social media platforms, while Congress attempts to have him impeached (a second time!) for promoting insurrection, which is mostly a symbolic gesture as both indictment and trial were never going to be completed before he left office. It's a pretty terrifying thing to witness, but at a few weeks remove, we can start to feel relief that the last four years of lies and grift, corruption and authoritarianism, have finally come to an end, and the 20th January arrival of a mediocre, and conservative, Democrat in office can allow us the hope that the American slide towards quasi-fascism might have been arrested, though the broken polity and the toxic political atmosphere remains as the issues facing them, and the wider world might be actually addressed, as well as attempting to repair the caused by the outgoing administration. Of course, this is all indirect impact stuff for us, but we all know where America leads, the rest of the world usually follows, but having a new regime that actually feels like providing leadership in the face of the Covid and Climate crises is a good thing, and while we still have many problems of our own in the UK, our hopeless government has actually been promoting widespread vaccinations, rather than outright denying the effects of this pandemic, we can just maybe, perhaps, look forwards to a quieter time of events across the pond, at least until the inevitable next wave of 'Louder, Crazier' comes along.
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