CLOCKS GOING BACK? NOT THIS YEAR PLEASE

The thought of the clocks going back next week is filling me dread. It’s bad enough on a normal year to drag us 100 years back to the dark ages and force us to adhere to this outdated requirement from farmers, but THIS year we are in another league of PLEASE DON’T PUT THEM BACK!!!! The reverting back to Greenwich Meany Time quite often triggers the start of our “winter blues” and this year we’re in a very different level of mental health issues and worries.

Owing to the virus, we’ve basically been told to stay outside, especially if we want to socialise with up to six people, so why make it harder for us? All that exercise, all those school kids, all that walking in the park, why make it dark for us at 4pm and dark in the early mornings too? This is going to disadvantage nearly the whole country.

So I’ve come up with an idea…

With the devolution of the decision making processes regarding the Three Tier System for the Covid 19 levels of lockdown being transferred to local regions, I’m going to suggest that we also transfer the decision making to each individual county as to whether we should go back an hour or not. I don’t think any of us would be any more confused about the rules to be honest. In fact, it might be more fun to give us something else to discuss apart from what all the inside/outside/pubs/restaurants rules mean. For example, it means we could have conversations like, “so if Manchester is now an hour ahead of us, does that mean that they can still go to the pub with six friends and sit outside and it would still be light? If Cornwall is two hours behind does that mean if we drive there really fast we can still have two more hours of drinking in the pub? …..and so on.

Anyway. Sigh. It’s been a challenging few weeks since my last post. Still no news on my furlough situation and my daughter has started her MA, so I’ve been trying to create her a good space in which to work. Which so far has involved turning a bedroom temporarily into her study, sorting out new more efficient wifi (AKA three hours waiting on the phone), moving furniture and buying new bits for her.

The rest of the time I’ve been trying to get into the local park or sit in my garden admiring nature, the only thing right now that’s carrying on as per normal. I’ve discovered that hugging trees helps if you can’t hug people and if you don’t believe me, just look at this AMAZING photo of a tiger hugging a tree – the winner of this year’s Wildlife Photo Of The Year, by Sergey Gorshkov. Unbelievably beautiful, pure bliss:-