State of alarm - Day six

I didn't need to go to the shops for anything today. I'll wait until Money and go to San Jose and check with the chemist what needs to be done to obtain medication when the tablets I brought with me run out. I'll have to buy them, if they'll let me have them. I may be able to obtain a prescription by email from King's Road surgery if this is a prerequisite. And I will have to pay. Goodness knows how much.

Counting the number of turns around the house for my daily walk gets mind numbing after a while, so I decided to play music off my phone SD card instead. I have 1.6gb of music MP3s on it, and so don;t need an internet connection to listen to music out of wi-fi range. I have all of Mozart's piano concertos there, rendered digitally from a set of tapes a keen audiophile made for me early in my time working for USPG. The tapes got much playing while I was driving to parish appointments all over Wales. Most of them are half an hour long. Four is sufficient to hear during the two hours it takes to cover my daily 10k target. It makes exercise refreshing quite a different way.   

This evening, I joined in the British ecumenical call to prayer about the pandemic, in which all who can are invited place a lighted candle in a window while they pray. As I did so, I saw, in the field the other side of the road that someone had lit a large bonfire and was piling branches on to it causing the flames to go high. Then I noticed a second fire further away, and wondered what was going on. 

I was somewhat concerned as the church car is parked on a patch of bare land opposite the house used for car parking, and wondered if I should move it, just in case it got out of control. Silhouetted against the flames however, I could see three men working in the dark, and one of them had a hosepipe and was spraying water around the fire. Tree and hedgerow pruning has been going on quietly over the road, and now dead vegetation and branches are being disposed of. 

On recent walks by day before the lock-down I noticed people outdoors working on their fincas. Some. if not many, would already have stopped work and were taking advantage of unexpected free time to tidy their land. When Sarah rang me later, I asked her about this and she said this was the natural time of year to do this. Fires are officially banned in the height of summer because so much of the early uncleared vegetation has died and dried out.