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Today’s been one of those very mixed ones where the realisation that what we’re going through at the moment isn’t a passing fancy begins to hit. It’s the weekend (woo hoo!), not that you’d know it – as nothing changes. It’s just another day for those of us who’ve been under house arrest for the best part of the week. For key workers who’ve been busy these past few days and finally get a break it must be even more surreal.
I’ll be honest, I’ve not had the best of days – for reasons that I won’t go into. It’s certainly been an introspective time. Having spent the morning at home sorting out chores I headed off out for my daily perambulation. I didn’t have to do any shopping so I was free to wander ‘lonely as a cloud’. After heading up through our local woodland I ended up at the Promenade on the edge of Halifax. For once, it was almost deserted. The fact the Police had a video van parked up there was obviously pure co-incidence! As you might have sussed from comments in earlier blogs, the ‘prom’ has been a bit of a problem. It’s a favorite haunt of the young who hang out there as they think they’re out of sight and out of mind. Stick a video van there and they just melt away…
As I needed to get a decent amount of steps in I wandered up to a place where you’d be lucky to bump into another soul (unless it’s the Zombie Apocalypse). There’s a sprawling old graveyard below the Wainhouse Tower which a local undertaker has gradually been clearing of undergrowth over the past few years.
It’s a fascinating and sobering place to wander around as it puts our present troubles into perspective. The earliest graves I saw were from the 1820s, the latest were from the 1960s. In our modern age we forget the levels of infant mortality of Victorian times, not to mention the rudimentary health system and lack of knowledge and treatments compared to today. Bugger the people who want to turn the clocks back, just check out an old graveyard to see why ‘Victorian values’ is not a thing to boast about – and thank your lucky stars that you live in an age where we have the NHS and modern healthcare systems.
Having got my exercise I returned home and retreated to the office in pensive mood. I can’t help wondering what the world will look like when we come out of the other side of this pandemic. I’m 60, and I’ve never known anything like this. Shit, when I was a kid the one thing we worried about was us all getting wiped out in a nuclear war between the Americans and the (then) Soviet Union! In most scenarios where that played out you’d get sod all warning and if you were lucky you’d have had just enough time to kiss your arse goodbye! Forget ‘self-isolating’!
Funny old world, isn’t it?
Paul Bigland 
It’s strange for us all. My wife is finding it harder than she thought as she’s someone who lives to work so to speak and enjoys the human contact side of her job. I’m fortunate / unfortunate depending on your viewpoint to have 9 day shifts out on the railway coming up from Monday, will be interesting to see how that goes??
It’s interesting to see some of the HS2 Anti’s jumping on the “the world has changed and home / remote working will save us from HS2” bandwagon without the slightest realisation that perhaps 10% or less of the population is in a position to even do so and that of that 10% a good proportion were already doing so anyway. Throw in the fact that people are noticing how much pollution levels are down with so little traffic around and I suspect any loss of traffic to technology change will be more than mitigated over the medium term by other factors.
Some very good points Phil. Of course, one of the ironies of people working from home is that they’re utterly reliant on the people who can’t work from home! The humble supermarket employee has become a key worker, along with the staff of the NHS and the people who keep our transport systems working.
The more I see of HS2 antis in this crisis the more obvious it is just hoe badly they’ve miscalculated this one. They literally can’t see the woods for the tree. They bang on about the tiny % of ancient woodland which will be affected by HS2 and completely ignore the fact that without the new line we don’t have the rail capacity to cope with the modal shift from air/road to rail that we need to permanently cut transport Co2 emissions!