After the New Normal

As I write this opening line it is 17:15 on Wednesday, 10th March, 2021. This blog is now fifteen years old, give or take a week or so. I have written nothing for it for six years. I have forgotten how to use the platform. Things seemed to have been changed in my absence. The template looks different. I've intended to write something for the past fifty weeks, since Friday 20th March 2020, when the first of the Covid restrictions were announced and the Coronavirus act was under brief discussion. I cannot remember if we'd all been primed beforehand, however, I do remember sitting in Wetherspoons with my wife eating dinner. We are not huge fans of Wetherspoons, however, the food is cheap and when staying away, we find that dinner there and breakfast at McDonalds is often our only affordable option. Until the 'pandemic', my wife often worked away, her employer finding accommodation for her in budget chain hotels. 

The weekend of the 20th to 22nd was the last occasion we were able to do this. On that Friday evening someone in Wetherspoons announced that they would be closing early. I think we'd expected it so perhaps we were all aware of what was coming the next week. I really cannot remember. I do remember thinking that since similar thgings were happening round the world something big was about to happen. My thoughts then were that money was about to be abolished and so it was necessary to prevent people from congregating on the streets. A fake pandemic, which I had no doubt it was, presented them with a golden excuse. It's been a tough year for us. We've got through, just, but we have taken a severe financial wallop and, together with other factors, the alleged pandemic has dealt a blow to our plans and hopes and dreams. We are both in a very low place, however where we are now and where we have been are as nothing to where I fear we are going.  The first lockdown was for ten weeks. Our income collapsed, in ten weeks our income was £200.00. The bank was almost emptied (Our total financial reserves fell to a few pence above ninety pounds) and had we not sold things we would much rather have kept we should have run out of money a month or so before the money started coming in again, at the end of July, almost two months after the end of the lockdown. There was no 'holiday' on the car road fund licence or insurance, they had to be paid. We had just £90.00 in the bank and had paypal taken any longer to pay us the proceeds from our ebay sales (that's not how we earn our living, just how we survived the first lockdown) we would have been unable to pay any of our bills.

  

 Covid forced inoculation: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-56379383