Thursday 5 November:

So, the first day of ‘Lockdown2’ – which, mirroring the amazing weather we had at the start of the first Lockdown, turned out to be a beautiful, bright, sunny day. But, somehow, it felt rather different… as I set out for my daily dawn walk, the traffic along Coronation Road was just as busy as usual.
People are obviously far more prepared than last time… shops are far more organised; people are aware of the social distancing rules; face-masks are everyone’s ‘fashion accessory’. But, for some individuals, there’s also a strong sense of “we’ve had enough of this… we don’t care anymore… and, anyway, the ‘rules’ keep being changed and we can’t keep up”.
We always KNEW that, at some stage, the government would end up blaming the population at large for its inability to deal with the pandemic. So it came as absolutely no surprise when today Justice Minister Mr Buckland announced that it was all OUR fault! He remarkably managed to forget all those mixed messages the government had been pumping out for the past several months (‘stay home’/’go back to work’/’back to business’/’act fearlessly’/’world-beating test+trace’/’following the science’/‘turning a blind eye to the science’… and, of course, it was perfectly ok for certain ‘key’ individuals (like Mr Cummings) to ignore the rules. What a huge surprise… the second wave was nothing to do with the government.    
Mr Buckland calmly (but firmly!) acknowledged that it would be a “huge challenge to get the public to follow the strict rules this time”. Damn right it will be! After all the government’s mismanagement of the crisis over the past eight months this felt something of an understatement!
Will the four-week national lockdown in England be ‘successful’? We seem to be living in a strange world of mass national immaturity… in which people seem ready to support the notion that they don’t wish to harm anyone (particularly us oldies!) and yet acting socially as if all the graphs were not going in the wrong direction.
Professor Devi Sidhar seemed to sum up the thoughts of several health experts when she declared: “The UK government’s decision to delay a national lockdown in the hope that this would be easier on the economy defies reality: delaying action has led only to a longer, harsher lockdown. It can feel as though, confronted with this paradox and exhausted by the months of work that lie ahead, the governments is close to giving up without a clear plan or strategy for how to survive in a Covid-19 world”.
I can’t really understand why, after eight months, our so-called Test+Trace system (despite all the government’s initial claims that it was ‘world-beating’!) has been so appallingly inadequate. In my naive head, surely until there’s a REALLY effective, efficient Test+Trace system (which more or less gives instant results) and unless quarantine procedures are PROPERLY followed, then we’ll be back here again quite soon?
Image: pigeons getting into line (lockdown?) on the steam crane.