Staycation round two, day fourteen

A text message from the Spire hospital this morning, with a link to questionnaire cum declaration about quarantine compliance, and other preliminaries to admission tomorrow. All straightforward, except for a question which referred to whether or not the respondent was an 'in-patient' or a chemo patient. All the NHS correspondence refers to the recipient as an 'out-patient' or a 'day-patient'. A private hospital is entitled to build its own strict disciplines and develop its own vocabulary, but such a simple thing when dealing with NHS outsourced patients has the ability to sow confusion. I sent a message to the Spire to ask for clarification. 

I didn't receive an email response to my question, but later on the hospital phoned to asked if I could be there an hour earlier. I agreed we could, and then spoke about the web page ambiguity to the person who called, and asked if she could pass the feedback on. Whether it'll get reported or not is anybody's guess.

The weather was overcast, and I completed my day's walk outdoors early afternoon in a spell between showers. Before and after supper I spent on writing that elusive last chapter of my novel, a couple of thousand words, but the time I finished just before be, but still not finished, I'm full of questions about all that I've written. For the most part the story seemed to tell itself, slowly unfolding with all its twists and turns as I wrote. It's the story of an extraordinary person who lives an ordinary life, never becoming famous or rich, but enriching others nevertheless, with their creativity. Writing an end of life scenario is relatively simple compared to that of writing a brief account of the impact of one such life on others. That, I guess, is what I'm finding difficult to imagine. It's not coming naturally.

Good news about vaccine trial success. The media are reacting with great great excitement about the prospect of a return to some kind of normality next spring. It's foolish to be over-optimistic and to under-estimate the complexity of the mass manufacturing, distribution and application of the billions of vaccine doses required to made a substantial difference to the world's population. First there are priority health workers and most vulnerable people, working down to those who least need it. And there's still to be determined, how long the vaccine protects people in different age groups, and whether it will curb the ability of unwitting super-spreader victims to infect others. We've seen a superb breakthrough in getting a useable vaccine made in record time, thanks to international scientific collaboration on a scale hitherto unimagined, but there's still a long way to go yet, perhaps longer than we want to think.