Tuesday 31 March:

It’s now more than two weeks since I started this blog and, in that time, it seems as if the world has been turned upside down. Moira and I have been ‘fully self-isolating’ for the past 12 days or so – and we feel that this has definitely been the right decision for us. Over the past week, the government has been urging everyone to stay at home/work from home wherever possible. It’s been relatively easy for us, but it must pose huge problems for so many people (people living in cramped conditions; single parents; people living in abusive relationships; homeless/rough sleepers; people working in NHS-related jobs; police; supermarket workers etc etc). The government has today updated the UK coronavirus figures as follows: 19,522 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 1,228 deaths (compared with these figures from just 10 days ago, 18 March: 1,950confirmed cases, 407 new cases and 60 deaths)… a tenfold increase in cases and a 2,000% increase in deaths.

Very sobering.

note: referring back to the Italy graph, published a week or so ago, which was being used to give an indication of the UK projected figures… well, the projected number of UK total deaths, based on the Italian figures, would now be say 1,809 total deaths (ie. the actual UK figures are some 581 less). Slightly more positive news?

I’ve just started to read Jan Morris’s book “In My Mind’s Eye” (A Thought Diary)… it consists of 188 daily meditations.mewsings/rituals of her existence in north Wales. The subject range is wide (from cats to cars, travel to home etc) and it struck me that these reflections of mine perhaps shouldn’t be wholly focussed on the pandemic! So, maybe I’ll try to be a little open-minded about what I write in future…

Moira woke up on Sunday feeling pretty low – having spent some of the night trying to work out what we needed to do/should have already done (in the event of us being struck down by the virus) to ‘put our house in order’ – in terms, for example, of where to locate our wills, our computer passwords, bank and other money details. It might all sound a bit morbid, but also sensible in the circumstances. Will we actually get round to putting something in place, I wonder?

To underline just how difficult things are becoming for the NHS, the head of the Royal College of Physicians yesterday warned that around a quarter of NHS doctors are off work because they are sick or in isolation… and that this was obviously already seriously affecting emergency departments - and London is in a much worse position than elsewhere at the moment, but it will come to other places”.

Image: Lightwell sketchbook drawing.