And Now We Have Tier 4

Work is fairly quiet on Friday which is a good job as I spend almost an hour chatting to a friend who’s about to have his 50^th birthday on his wet and windy doorstep. It was good to catch up.

The weather is foul, as I keep telling MD but who still insists on going out in it. As does L, who keeps bravely venturing into the city to finish her Christmas shopping. Rather than her than me, not that I do shopping in the city anyway, Covid or not.

After insisting for weeks that Christmas wouldn’t be cancelled, the Government cancels Christmas for London and the South East as they move into a newly invented Tier 4. Most of this area was in Tier 2 until Thursday and I’m sure we’ll be in it too before year end, if not before Christmas. For now Christmas is scaled back to one day for those of us not yet I Tier 4. That is, if you’re prepared to risk it.

 On Saturday I bike over to my parents place to watch the match only for it to be cancelled while I’m in transit. The Rotherham squad has had a Covid outbreak, so the game will be rescheduled. At least I got a bike ride in and got to see my folks.

On Sunday we complete our fifth chunk of the Six Pack Challenge in the very familiar surroundings of Holme Pierrepont. Although it started at somewhere called The Hook in

Lady Bay that we’d never heard of before but we have now. It was 9K in total and again we get lost but ad-lib it enough to get round. 

(Sunday 20^th December)

Christmas Light Show

We both off work on Monday, in lieu of the not happening Langdale 10k. L bravely heads into Nottingham to do some Christmas shopping. She goes late and says the city is quiet.

I finally get my Covid Antibody test result from late October. It’s negative although I’ve since had plenty of time to develop new antibodies.

The Lad is not popular after munching his way through half an onion. I’ve no idea how he got hold of that but you don’t currently want him breathing on you.

On Tuesday, after even more than the usual amount of dithering, the Government finally instructs London to join us in Tier 3. Gradually throughout the week even more of the country joins us in the highest Tier but bizarrely Herefordshire are moved down from Tier 2 to Tier 1.

I go to dog training which is our last of the year but with everyone expecting the Government’s ‘Five Days of Christmas’ to deliver us into another lockdown we expect it might be our last for some time.

Wednesday sees L grabbing a swim while she still can. Bizarrely she protests it didn't rain on her in the outside pool. Her day improves though as she rescues an errant spaniel wearing a bow-tie on the way home. These things are obviously big highlights in these Tier 3 times.

I miss the evening’s ‘big’ online treat as Derby’s game is moved forward from 7:45 to 5:30 but no one tells me. They win 2-0 over Swansea.

On Thursday, we head to the Christmas At Wollaton Light Show. After the furore caused by Nottingham’s Christmas Market we fully expected the council to pull out all the stops on this one. So we anticipated a hugely social distanced event with them perhaps letting in only about twenty or thirty people at a time. How wrong we were.

We walked around to the main entrance of Wollaton Park to find that every car park was full and people were even parked all over the grass field with a steady stream of people walking up to the hall. It was the sort of thing you’d expect when you’re heading to a football match but of course crowds at those have been banned since March.

 

We put our masks on, meet Daughter and her plus one, and then join the long queue for entry where the signs stated that you should observe two metre distancing at all times but that was totally impossible. About half a metre was the best you could do. 

 

We then queued all the way around the light show as staff rushed around clearly agitated about how busy it was but clearly powerless to do anything about it because the organisers had sold way too many tickets. As it turned out it was a very impressive light show but it was far from safe.

(Thursday 17^th December)

Mini Staycation

A fraught dog walk on Friday ends up with me having teeth marks on my thigh from a dog who was a bit too lively and missed savaging his target by about two hundred metres.

Friday sees a visit from the gas man who I had booked for Tuesday but didn’t turn up because he forgot to put the appointment in his diary. He did email to apologise. He comes to service our boiler, disconnect the gas fire we no longer need and to hopefully find out why our gas hob won’t stay lit. All of which he does apart from the hob which, typically, won’t play up for him.

The Bosch man makes his weekly visit and spends well over half an hour in the back of his van with the dreaded vacuum cleaner. Which I hope he is administering a good kicking to. He emerges eventually saying he’s rebuilt the whole thing and hands it back to me. He says it will now work and it does but whether it will ever get used is another matter. I have to say he deserves full marks for perseverance.

We would in better times have been in the Lakes this weekend for the Langdale Christmas Pudding 10K, which has obviously been cancelled and we’re not allowed to travel anyway. We decide to keep our Monday ‘off work’ and have a mini staycation.

It is actually typical Lakeland weather e.g. wet. We even skip the Six Pack Challenge this week because of it although L does still go out for a run in the rain.

Sunday sees a 'Freedom Rally' march of about 200 people from Forest Rec to the Market Square. They are protesting against the Covid restrictions although in reality, just like with the council's foolish Christmas Market, all they are doing is ensuring that our Tier 3 restrictions will stay in place for even longer. As the majority of them seem to have come from outside Nottingham I don’t suppose that’s important to them.

(Sunday 13^th December)

Not Tearing The Pants Out Of it

On Sunday we do the third run in the Nottingham Six Pack Challenge called the ‘Mean and Leen 6K’ at Bestwood Park. Sunday would also have been our Dog Club AGM but obviously that’s off.

Nottingham’s Christmas Market isn't off. Well, not until it's closed after just one day when it turns out to exactly the super-spreader event that everyone said it would be. Most other cities had cancelled their Christmas Markets this year but for some reason our council thought this was a good idea when everyone else thought we should be focussing on getting out of Tier 3 instead. 

On Monday, I am regularly disturbed from my work by delivery men knocking at the front door. Pretty soon there are four parcels piled up on the kitchen worktop and it’s not even lunchtime. None of them are for me and most of them look like books. They may be Christmas presents or L may just be using it as cover to get more reading matter into the house. More suspicious parcels continue to arrive throughout the week.

Wednesday is the Lad’s birthday but everyone forgets. He tries to bite through his lead in pure frustration. Mind you, he tries to do that anyway. We all remember eventually; L promises to do him a sausage and he does have dog training later where he can really let his hair (fur?) down.

L asks me to get the Dyson charged and ready to go. She also likes to let her hair down while we’re at dog training.

Dog training is the only thing around here that’s reopened that is beneficial to me. I’m guessing JVT's, deputy chief medical officer, advice not to ‘tear the pants out of it’ probably doesn’t apply to dog training but then there hasn't, as yet, been a ‘Go Dogging To Help Out’ scheme.

Wednesday also brings the TV repair man as I have lost reception to several channels. Apparently we need a new aerial which they install.

On Thursday I have a Zoom Funeral. My Dad’s brother died recently at the age of 95 but my parents have sensibly decided that attending wouldn’t be wise in the current situation. The live stream is a bit dodgy, pausing frequently, but still a good idea.

(Thursday 10^th December)

Knives Out

In a quest to actually do some exercise, despite my injured knee, I cycle to my parents’ house to watch the match. It reinforces how unfit I am as I puff and pant up the (very small) hills.

In the evening we catch up with Knives Out which we missed last year.

The film appears to a homage to the Agatha Christie whodunnits of old, very English in style, yet for some reason set in New England, USA in a house that seems based on the Cluedo board and even includes a very English Daniel Craig faking a (not very good) American accent.

Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is celebrating his 85th birthday with a big party but is later found dead by his housekeeper Fran (Edi Patterson). He has allegedly cut his own throat but the investigating Detective Elliott (Lakeith Stanfield) is not so sure. Not when such an odd ball array of relatives with assorted motives attended his party. He is assisted by Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) but no one knows who hired him.

Suspects include his daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her husband Richard (Don Johnson), his son Walt (Michael Shannon) whose publishing company he is propping up, his daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette) whose own daughter Meg’s (Katharine Langford) college fees are funded by him and Ransom (Chris Evans), the black sheep of the family who was heard arguing with his grandfather that night. 

Then there’s his carer Marta (Ana de Armas), who vomits whenever she is lying and so becomes a useful sounding board for any theories.

The plot is complicated and hugely improbable but I assume that was the point. I mean, who slits they’re own throat anyway? But overall it’s a very entertaining affair. 

Almost Feeling Festive

You can’t beat a fraught dog walk to open the week and we get plenty of those, it's never helped by a little white terrier that we regularly see who does this constant high pitched squealing thing. It never goes down well with the boys and we also struggle to recover our cool afterwards.

The Welsh First Minister announces that from pubs, restaurants and cafes will be banned from selling alcohol because clearly all this is alcohol’s fault. England will no doubt follow suit. Mind you it’s never been easy getting a pint in Wales, some places in Wales only started serving on Sundays in the 1990s.

Tuesday is the 1^st December, so the boys and I open our advent calendars. Doggie chocolate for them, cheese for me thanks to Daughter. L complains she doesn't have her own advent calendar so I fast track delivery of one for her, chocolate of course. Two for the price of one as well, so I can have one too.

Everybody is confused as Lockdown 2.0 finishes a day early. When the Government said it would finish at midnight on Wednesday 2nd December everyone assumed they meant the midnight at the end of Wednesday, not the start, particularly as it all started on a Thursday. So a lot of things aren't opening today, such as our dog training, because we weren't expecting to be allowed to open yet.

Dog training aside, which I will be able to do next week, very little has changed around here and the new Tier 3 seems very like a continuation of Lockdown. Meanwhile three weeks after they announced mass testing for Nottingham and in loads of other areas, the Government seems to have quietly shelved the whole idea.

Thursday sees yet another visit from the Bosch man who... hasn't got all the parts he needs and says he'll be back again next week.

On Friday I look out of the window and it’s sleeting, so almost feeling festive I put the Christmas Tree up. Meanwhile our neighbours have recreated the Blackpool illuminations in our street.

(Friday 4^th December)