Star date: 18th April 2020

REASONS TO BE IRRITATED

Elderly Salford resident, Alice, has been in isolation for over a month now, and after last week's reasons to be cheerful she now has reason to be irritated about tracing and testing for the virus. But add a spoonful of The Beatles and even a note from her doctor stating she needs another twelve weeks of isolation can't stop her imagining...

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Time goes on. 35 days. That's five weeks of isolation and today I received a personal letter from my doctor to say another twelve weeks!  Trying, but here's my grumble for the week...

The news topic this week has been testing. We all understand testing. Tests dominate our lives. Gosh we even test our pre-schoolers to see if they know their colours. We stress with our children facing SATS, their GCSEs and maybe A levels. Then comes the driving test and on and on go tests.

We are experts at tests and we understand what they are for. We know they are necessary for understanding the state of things and to help with progress. South Korea used tests and rigorous contact tracing in its plan to control the virus and it is now the success story of the world.

So why, oh why did our Government have difficulty setting up a national testing system, to follow the path of the world's most lethal virus? Gosh even the WHO, or World Health Organisation, advised TEST! TEST! TEST! on March 16th! 

It was 12th March when the Government stopped tracing where the virus came from. This was the day before I went into isolation. I thought then 'Why don't we need to know where the virus came from?' To my thinking, testing and then tracing should go together and should have been early steps in the plan. Lives could have been saved this way. 

Now we have a belated rush to test and the prediction is that the UK will have the highest number of deaths in Europe. A daily briefing on the number of deaths is not comforting, and when we hear of the late testing of our health workers we regret, with sadness, that this could have been earlier.

Just to change the sad topic to an optimistic one. Whist I have been chuntering to myself about this, I have also done things to distract myself from the irritation. The answer has been music. I have searched through my old CDs and even antique audio tapes and alighted on some favourites. Top, of course, were from the 60s.

You can't beat John Lennon's Imagine and The Beatles All You Need Is Love, and even Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water. 'Sentimental' ,you may think, but listen to the words and be serious and not cynical. Maybe I will play them loud through my window on Thursday evening, instead of bashing away with my wooden spoon on a saucepan.

My final thought this week was to remember Mandela and his 27 years, most in isolation. Then he left to run a country. Why am I moaning?  

*See previous episode's of Alice In Salford Isolationland...

Part Four – click here 

Part Three – click here

Part Two – click here

Part One – click here