A bright sunny day with a temperature worthy of July, with the temperature in the upper twenties. I posted my Morning Prayer YouTube link to WhatsApp before 'Thought for the Day', and then got up to organise breakfast. I called in Tesco's to buy this week's food bank donation on the way to St John's to join six others for the Eucharist. Fr Sion told us that when he returns from his holiday trip to Arizona, where his eldest son in training to be an airline pilot I believe, the St John's Eucharist will be on Wednesday at noon, straight after the one at St Catherine's. He needs more free time for sermon preparation. Such are the pressures on his existing tight work schedule, some of which it seems he has no control over. How he'll manage if there's a call for a morning funeral on either Wednesday or Thursday remains to be seen. I said I would cover for him if needed. I'm not going away anywhere for a good while, after all.
When I got back, Clare was out somewhere, having prepared the veggies and left sausages out to thaw and cook. I continued where she left off, so all was ready when she returned. I seem not to have slept so well last night, but made up for it after lunch by snoozing for over an hour in the chair. Then a walk, several times around Thompson's Park. On my way home, I called in to see Diana and Pete for a chat and a cup of tea, It was just on seven when I walked through the door, in time for supper and the Archers. Another short walk after we'd eaten, then a spell of looking back at what I wrote at the start of the pandemic in the first weeks of isolation in the Can Bou chaplaincy house.
It's a co-incidence that the first report from the covid public enquiry was published this morning, telling the story of government failure to be prepared for the kind of pandemic we actually experienced, having planned for something different. All this in the light of the SARS epidemic twenty years ago, which hit Asian countries and was a different variant of the covid viral strain. Lesson learned from that about best practice response were not learned, with lockdown ordered too late to prevent more untimely death than should have been the case, and insufficiently diverse opinions sought about how to manage the spread, and the impact of lockdown, economically, socially and educationally.
Thankfully British scientists rose to the occasion of innovating vaccines in partnership with others internationally, far quicker than might have been thought possible, thanks to Cloud computing, new technologies rapid production and a programme of vaccination which helped curb the impact of a virus surging through the population. It's just so tragic that an under equipped, under funded hospitals and their staff were taken almost to breaking point, and the NHS is still struggling to recover. Let's hope the new government can do justice to the real needs of staff wanting to do their jobs properly, and to the huge number of people still waiting in the treatment queue. With all this to reflect on, it was soon time to turn in for the night.
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