Socially Distant Diary Day 5

(oops, you know, I’m gonna stop numbering these diary days, five days in and I’ve already confused myself)

Didn’t go out – well, not true, nipped to the shops for Mother’s day. Felt odd, realised it’s because I’m not buying for my mum (who passed nearly 16 years ago now, I suppose) but buying for my wife. Nathan and Thomas have such different personalities it’s kind of fun picking cards for them to give to Annette (how different? Well, Thomas would happily pick or even draw his own card, Nathan will just about sign a card and give it to Annette and not really think about it).

I haven’t had a stomach ache in a couple of weeks, but it feels like there’s one bubbling under right now. I’ve been trying to keep a food diary, but the further it gets from the last attack the less reliable I am at keeping it.

I think if there’s a culprit – based on my notes – it’s either the stack of buns and chocolate I ate, the burger (which had barley in it, which contains gluten though I’ve been told it’s more likely IBS with a wheat trigger than a gluten trigger) or it’s just something my stomach does every so often and there’s almost nothing I can do to prevent it.

That’s why I’ve been keeping the food diary, what did I do today that I’ve done before, what did I do today that I didn’t do last week.

Maybe I’ll be lucky, but if not, I’ll be curling up around a hot water bottle (which is about the only thing that seems to make any sort of difference, pain killers don’t help)

Normally I feel pretty lucky if I’ve been left alone to work all day, but it usually comes with the price of either knowing I could’ve been out with the family somewhere or I’ve accidentally ignored them all as they wanted to go out and I didn’t.

Today, and I think the next who-knows-how-many days, it’ll be knowing everyone wants to go out and feeling like I should too.

One thousand people diagnosed in the UK over the last 24 hours. I set up my spreadsheet 10 days ago, when there was 83. Simply multiplcation (previous days numbers * 1.23) would tell you right now to expect 1k. The fact it’s tracked so closely shows you why the government are trying to put this genii back in the bottle. At this rate, in another 10 days you could see 9-10k Diagnosed PER day but that figure would rise daily, and 10 days after that you could be looking at closer to 100k per day.

Unless we do something. And the measures of shutting everything down is one of only tools we’ve got, right now, but we’ll not see results from that for at least a week (possibly longer).

No legal obligation to lockdown in the UK yet. But it’s pretty clear there’s a very large amount of the population see the governments “social distancing” advice as notional. Kids out congregating together, a clump of 8 people walking from the park (packed tightly, chatting away).

Lockdown is coming. I can’t see how we can do this without enforcement. But Northern Ireland, famously, tends to react badly to police enforcement.