ADs take the National Express when their lives' in a mess, it will make them smile

[BogRollBOGOF]

🎤On the National Express
There’s a jolly hostess
Giving porridge free
She’ll provide you with shots
amaretto or what
You like to seeeeee...

Going out was in style
Now we’re stuck in this aisle
Dream of being free
And it’s hard to get by
When your arse is the size
Of the furlough feeeeeee🎤

Bah ba ba la
Bah ba ba la

Tomorrow belongs to meee...

Welcome to the 17:38 to freedom, stopping at virtual hugs, critical discourse, and random tangents along the way. ETA unknown...

An otherwise sensible friend explained to me that you get Covid by brushing past someone who had it on his clothes and it would get on yours.
She couldn't explain why you might suddenly start inhaling your clothes or rubbing them in your eyes

We are always squeezing past each other at work how on earth have we all survived?

Our local panto always has "Five toilet rolls" in their version of the Twelve Days of Christmas

It was about that stage of the performance while watching Neil Morrisey chucking bog rolls around the auditorium that I realised that I wasn't having Braxton Hicks anymore...

A recollection that came back every time DS watched Bob the Builder, which was very frequently

People seem to have lost the ability to think rationally about things. I wonder how much of that has to do with the newspapers and social media. I have Mumsnet and Pinterest but don’t do Facebook, Twitter, read the papers much or watch live tv. Am I missing out on drama?

@Taswama

What is the memo about formites? If there's a link from a reputable source about how you aren't going to catch covid from a piece of paper, I'd love to send it to the headteacher!

I was being flippant, but the risk of transmission through surfaces is far less than was originally suspected.

The trouble is I've read that many articles this year I can't remember where, when and how reliable any particular piece of information I came across.

But the Hands, Face, Space was criticised as being the wrong order of priorities. Space is by far the biggest defence. Face of variable benefit depending on the environment, covering and usage of. Hands, not that effective, but frequent washing through the course of a day is no bad thing for general health (frequent, not obsessive and damaging your skin).

Out of the risks in school, by the time you'd get enough transmission from school bag or Christmas Card, how infectious is the child in comparison. I suspect that handling objects in there is left in the schools' guidence as an "easy", cheap look like you're doing something measure because the number of affordable, practical measures that don't massively compromise learning and entrench disadvantage are rather thin on the ground.

@Taswama

What is the memo about formites? If there's a link from a reputable source about how you aren't going to catch covid from a piece of paper, I'd love to send it to the headteacher!

I lurk on these threads (thank you ADs for saving my sanity) but don't often post, but just saw your question.

There's this from the Lancet

www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30561-2/fulltext

And also this, study by Imperial found no surface contamination on tube/buses

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-london-tube-buses-tfl-research-b1619402.html

To add my own experience, my mother is in a care home (dementia) and I have taken loads of stuff in for her - cards, chocolates, toiletries. I hand the bag to a carer on the doorstep. I don't know if they sanitise or quarantine it, but they have never refused to accept anything. They have had no cases of Covid.

The BBC seems full of drama and doesn't explain things very much at times. Same with e.g. the Guardian and the Daily Mail. They all seem the worst for 'covid drama'

Met my elderly neighbour the other day in the park, as we walked back a bit apart some people cut through between us and she did a kind of jellyfish like all over body wriggle at them

She told me later it's great being old you don't care what others think. A letting agency was showing round someone for the flat downstairs and she boomed at them 'we don't want short term lets thank you'

She is ultra posh though and sounds like the queen, says 'one' in general conversation, so maybe that helps too

I have pretty much zero connection with MSM now. The covid hysteria made it unbearable very early on.

There's been a great DM article about how Covid Survivors could develop life threatening hair dye allergies.

In other news anyone, Covid or not could develop life threatening hair dye allergies, hence always having the advice to patch test in advance as there is always a small potential for a reaction to occur.

My scalp started getting sore so I use henna now. Think that was just age though. Not covid.

Isn't it a kind of neuroticism where stuff is pinned on external sources?

The Metro says Rishi is proposing a second "eat out to help out".

Sigh.

Does he think we've forgotten that the Three Bellends used "eat out to help out" to BLAME THE PUBLIC for the rise in infections?

It makes me want to make a point of NOT eating out to help out, to highlight those who are hanging on to their money with good reason, because they don't know if they'll have a job to go back to, as Saint Boris snatched them away.

I don't know if a second eat out to help out would work after last time, but I won't be partaking. I can do without being track and traced. Basically my life is work, school pick up / drop off, walk on a weekend, weekly trip to supermarket. That's literally it. It's driving me slowly insane.

There's been a great DM article about how Covid Survivors could develop life threatening hair dye allergies.

That's it, I'm not leaving the house again until everyone is vaccinated, the risk of having to stay grey is too great!

I've just been catching up with the thread and I noticed Percy Pig was mentioned. I have a Percy Pig Christmas tree! I was M&S on Thursday and couldn't resist a completely non essential purchase. I then went the long way home as it was too nice a day not to put the roof down and get some fresh air, non essential extra miles of course but it cheered my up!

(I'm very jealous of the poster who had their shopping delivered in a Percy Pig van)

The Metro says Rishi is proposing a second "eat out to help out".

I think Rishi's on manoeuvres. Cummings going weakens Johnson, and I think the knives are out for him now. The Tories do love to eat their own prime ministers periodically. Rishi Sunak is the only government politician who can be judged to have had a 'good crisis' in public perception terms.

Thanks so much @Shellingbynight !!

The 'it's on my post' freaker-outers drive me nuts. Our local Ban Hammer wants all courier deliveries BANNED and supermarket vans sprayed with some kind of antiviral solution before they're allowed on our road. Because 'you can't be too careful'.

And those poor people locked up in care homes. No visitors, no singsongs and now no bloody post either.

"Something's arrived for you here, Connie. What have you got?"

"Well Margaret, I wanted a 1,000-piece jigsaw of Shawn Mendes in his smalls but I seem to have been sent this little bit of virus in the post."

Doubt many would be able to afford to eat out then

"Out of the risks in school, by the time you'd get enough transmission from school bag or Christmas Card, how infectious is the child in comparison. I suspect that handling objects in there is left in the schools' guidence as an "easy", cheap look like you're doing something measure because the number of affordable, practical measures that don't massively compromise learning and entrench disadvantage are rather thin on the ground."
I think a lot of the measures, whether they are in schools, shops, or wherever, are exactly this. They appear to be doing something active to tick a box for the "covid-secure" agenda, & to instill confidence in the public /customers.

I passed a secondary school at home time yesterday, & questioned the point of their staggered home times. The school (like all the secondaries round here) is built near a major crossroads with traffic lights & crossings, where any walking school children end up in a bottle-neck. There were dozens of kids tightly packed by the crossing, waiting for the lights to change, all breathing on each other. I don't blame the kids- they were waiting patiently, & social distancing is probably the last thing on a 14 year old's mind on a Friday at 3.30pm. I don't blame the school, either- kids aren't on site, they can't police them all the time, & shouldn't have to.

I just questioned the staggered home time approach, & wondered what difference this, & things like banning Christmas cards, actually makes to managing the virus?

@NastyBlouse
Loving Connie & Margaret!

The only good thing I can see about Rishi's proposal is that Cafes, bars and restaurants would actually have to be open. And they're so vulnerable at the moment. Just back from our local outdoor market with additional Farmers Market. There was a general request via facebook that everyone wore masks, but since it was pissing with rain, and very windy, and as a result very empty, I couldn't see the point, and neither could anyone else. Rain now lashing at windows, so I don't think I'll be out again today.

The school' staggered starts have been great for my social life with 10 mins at the end of each day while we wait for siblings.

Well until the masks happened a couple of weeks ago and I can now only hear certain voices with fabric penetrating qualities which disjoints the conversation. Then of course everyone is clustering closer together to tey to understand each other. Doh.

It's hard following DM's conversations as over half her friends are called Margaret, Barbara or John

@BogRollBOGOF

There's been a great DM article about how Covid Survivors could develop life threatening hair dye allergies.

In other news anyone, Covid or not could develop life threatening hair dye allergies, hence always having the advice to patch test in advance as there is always a small potential for a reaction to occur.

Thats true about developing hair dye allergies. Happened to me. Coloured mu hair my whole adult life then in 2016 ended up in hospital.

The more I read the Corona threads (I know, I know) and other social media the more it seems that people don't want people to 'stop being selfish' to reduce the spread of Covid, they just want them to do what the poster wants them to do.

So many of the precautions that they want people to take, for example everyone going to the supermarket, rather than some shopping in a local shop that's added essentials to their non-essential stock, seem, if anything, to be likely to increase the spread of Covid. Or avoiding meeting people out of doors when no one involved has been in a situation where they are likely to have caught Covid.

Increasingly the demand seems to be 'risk your job, your mental health, your social contacts, etc to protect me from my fear'. Which, of course, is impossible, because the only person who can do anything about emotions is the person feeling the emotions. No matter how stringent the precautions, the fearful would remain fearful.

And, for the benefit of lurkers, I'm not suggesting abandoning social distancing and masks for those who can wear them and shopping at quieter times if possible.

@Ancissima
I agree with your comments about, "protect me from my fear." I have a highly anxious friend who was terrified of people on the bus who weren't wearing masks. And then she said to me, "but it's my problem that I'm upset by it, I have to deal with it."
I have a lot of sympathy with people being anxious (been there myself), but it's when everyone else is labelled as "selfish" - that gets annoying. Another person's perceived selfishness is often more complex than it appears.

For all fans of Percy Pig, here he is, hard at work in our store recently.
I'm sure there will be complaints about a pig standing on the deli counter.
Don't get too close to that bacon slicer, Percy...