ADs shelter in The Sleeping Swans and have a group hug

[BogRollBOGOF]

Another installment in the saga.

Maybe following up with an Indian, Korma please, but protect the naans...

My cat sat on my chest and batted me with her tail. I got fur up my nose and sneezed. Clearly Covid

So yes, let's all test

Apparently we are going to get quarantine free travel from amber countries for the double jabbed from the 26th July.

Around when parliamentary recess isn't it? Coincidence?

to them

@LivinLaVidaLoki

Apparently we are going to get quarantine free travel from amber countries for the double jabbed from the 26th July.

Around when parliamentary recess isn't it? Coincidence?

Funny that... Also all parts of the UK will be on holiday then, although some a good way through. Not much notice to make new arrangements. Promising for us getting to see family at the end of the month though.

@BogRollBOGOF 🤞

Italy has said no to Euro football fans from UK. When they state cases at 27k today who can blame them.

I personally think that cases from all diseases should be stated daily for perspective's sake.

I think we are living in a bizarre Puritanism where we are all diseased sinners and only the blessed lockdown/vaccine will expiate our sins. There's no optimism about the fact that humans are quite innovative and inventive animals so maybe we can figure out how to live without fear. Just you're bad and you should feel bad.

Also, Zac Goldsmith has condemned people for wearing plastic disposable masks instead of sustainable ones. Well, mate, here's an idea to prevent wastage. Ditch the damn masks.

The masks need to go. Although we've been told in Wales masks and distancing will remain until the end of the year. I'm hoping they'll at least go in classrooms. Poor kids.

@ISaySteadyOn

Also, Zac Goldsmith has condemned people for wearing plastic disposable masks instead of sustainable ones. Well, mate, here's an idea to prevent wastage. Ditch the damn masks.

He doesn't need to worry about me. I, er, get plenty of use out of the disposable ones. Incidentally, the blue disposable masks don't disintegrate if they go through the washing machine.

[quote ISaySteadyOn]Thought this was interesting lockdownsceptics.org/if-youre-not-one-of-the-few-experts-then-youre-one-of-the-many-functionaries/[/quote]
That was interesting. I think in a society which increasingly isn't religious, for some people "science" has replaced religion. The problem with that is that science doesn't work very well as a substitute for religion. It can't actually tell you what to do in a moral sense (e.g. how to balance Covid risks and freedom) and its tenets must be open to challenge or it ceases to function well.

I'm inclined to say that science is a good servant but a bad master.

Our council's fb page says you can take your disposable masks to places like Morrisons. Strange way to deal with virus laden medical waste. Surely if they are catching viral particles so effectively, they need yellow biohazard bags and to be taken off for incineration?

I'm in a strange mood this week. Last week was anger at the double standards of the rich and powerful. This time there's a whiff of freedom in the air... and I'm in a worse state than this moment last year because of the stupid school isolations (albeit still illegally going to playgrounds at very quiet times late in the evening)

I'm not micromanaging the home learning. I'm still too burned out after 6.5 months of that. I am facilitating, but I'm not doing the psycological war of trying to engage, differentiate or cover a reasonable amount of balance.
DS1 just wants to relive the winter of constant youtube/ gaming, and without respite, or external structure, that's too hard to fight.
DS2 is slipping back from his recently restored sunny, cheerful sparkle to being surly and testing his luck.

I'm so fed up of circumstances ruining our relationships. We're now struggling with even basic home/ school overlap like reading. Because I've never got my balance back to date, I don't have my full emotional energy to fight back and assert myself fully, and I'm so tired of triggering meltdowns or DS1 monologuing at me (not helped by abundant tech time and loss of social contact, and I'm pretty sure that his speech patterns have regressed subtly)
I'm so very fucking tired of this and all the uncertainty which means you can't look forwards to anything.

@BogRollBOGOF 💐

I decided last spring that I’m my boy’s mother not his teacher. I’d rather his schoolwork slid than our relationship so quit any arguing with him about it. I needed to take the pressure off. (I was bonkers at the time too, cos of lockdown).

I really do hope freedom awaits soon.

That was interesting. I think in a society which increasingly isn't religious, for some people "science" has replaced religion. The problem with that is that science doesn't work very well as a substitute for religion. It can't actually tell you what to do in a moral sense (e.g. how to balance Covid risks and freedom) and its tenets must be open to challenge or it ceases to function well.

I thought this pre-Covid, with things like environmentalism, veganism, politics. Even atheism can be hrld as ferverently as religious belief.

Faith itself is rarely a major problem, most religious values are pretty positive guides to life. The human constructed organisations and their self-protection issues tend to be the practical problem.
The advantage of religious belief is that it's easy to recognise the beliefs and expectations.
The fact that just about every human society has formed a communal belief system and rites (usually including life stages) indicate that this is a pretty fundamental part of being human.
And that's fractured now.
So people apply that instinct in different directions without realising.

Things like OCD behaviours could have been accomodated more subtly within religious practice, they were always there, but whipping out your rosary beads and saying some hail Marys for ritual reassurance is more socially normal and accepted than ritually wiping down your toilet seat or having particular patterns for wiping your shoes as you enter the house to avoid contamination.

I do think the move away from organised religion affects society more deeply than we realise (and atheist societies, usually communist replaced that with the cult of the leader)

[quote WouldBeGood]@BogRollBOGOF 💐

I decided last spring that I’m my boy’s mother not his teacher. I’d rather his schoolwork slid than our relationship so quit any arguing with him about it. I needed to take the pressure off. (I was bonkers at the time too, cos of lockdown).

I really do hope freedom awaits soon.[/quote]
I've got professional pride in the way!
I know what I'm doing and how to do it and even know what a fronted adverbial is... I just don't have a willing audience.
And they're pretty obliging at school.

DS1 is his sweetest when I help out in school.
I used to collect him for his dyslexia intervention and he'd want to hold my hand down the corridor. Or when I came to do swimming, he'd peck a kiss at me when he walked past. Sometimes there's upsides to his quirky social outlook. What's really lovely is that his classmates aren't fazed either.

@GiveMeNovocain

The masks need to go. Although we've been told in Wales masks and distancing will remain until the end of the year. I'm hoping they'll at least go in classrooms. Poor kids.

I think that's more to do with flu, norovirus etc and keeping hospital admissions down than covid.

Now this would be an interesting statistics

That’s lovely, @BogRollBOGOF 😊

I think it was G K Chesterton who said “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

I've seen that demonstrated over and over.

And, having a science background, I'm shocked at how science has changed from the best explanation currently available to fit what we have observed up until now, to man-made projections backed up by carefully selected data, often enhanced by mathematical models - again, man-made. And, apparently, a previously ever-changing and changeable discipline can now become 'settled'.

That really terrifies me. Settled science can lead to very bad places

Talking of data did you know that in the UK and USA particularly university folks are putting survey questions up on social media getting mugs to fill them in then presenting them as scientific evidence to anyone who will buy it. My FB just now the university of Maryland asked me to fill in one. Kerching

Lookie here

I absolutely don't fill those things in. For a start where I am having a case of covid could mean DS is removed from me and that in itself has messed with my mental health. But who knows who these researchers are or what they want.

But I do wonder, with the religion thing, if I would be happier in a cult. I think unquestioning obedience would remove a lot of my anxiety, I just don't think I'm capable of it. Which, logically, is probably a good thing.

Article by Laura Dodsworh

www.thesun.co.uk/news/15460497/government-terrorised-lockdown-now-we-need-plan-for-recovery/

"Is the NHS on the verge of collapse" The newsreader on an episode of 1970s sitcom Man About The House.