Red alert - chicken soup time

I.

Clare repeated her lateral flow test yesterday morning and was still positive. I hadn't noticed any change in the way I feel, as I've had a runny nose and a thick head since a surge in local blossoming trees a week ago but I agreed to take a test. It turned out to be positive. Automatically, this means my cataract operation can't take place for three more months. According to sister in law Ann, covid infection can leave residual inflammation in body tissue for several weeks - to be avoided when eyes are being worked on. I called St Joseph's hospital immediately to let them know. Saturday's Wriggledance show is ruled out for me. Maybe if Clare tests negative Friday and Saturday she can go. We'll see.

I attempted to register my test result with the Track 'n Trace app, but the test code it sent me was rejected. Later in the day I had a phone call from the Track and Trace call centre, and complained that the app had not worked as designed, so info I provided was entered manually. The call cut out however, as it was about to conclude and wouldn't reconnect. Had the call handling system called time out? Or did my phone signal drop because I was at the range limit of our domestic black spot signal booster? I'll never know. There was no call back and I couldn't raise the number displayed by my phone. 

Anyway, I had a text message from Track and Trace ten minutes later confirming that I should self-isolate until 4th April. So that's another Sunday when I won't be able to celebrate Mass at St German's. What I can't know is when I was infected - maybe 24 hours after Clare, as we had almost no contact with each other in the time between her negative test and the onset of her symptoms and positive test. But maybe later, as we made an effort at mutual isolation. It will take whatever time it needs for our bodies to deal with the virus. I still wasn't feeling any worse than I have done over the past week, so I got on with next week's Morning Prayer video upload, in case I get too poorly to finish it off. 

Over the day, the symptoms I have been living with for the past week intensified, or were over-ridden by a similar reaction to the coronavirus - the body working overtime expelling alien substances. I cooked  chicken soup for lunch, the fabled 'Jewish anti-biotic'. It's certainly comforting that's for sure. In the evening I watched telly but found it hard going, so went to bed early and slept quite well. 

II.

I woke up late and posted this week's video link nearly two hours later than planned. Track and Trace twice sent me a text message and and email urging me to enter the test code into the NHS covid app, although the data had been collected manually yesterday. I tried entering the code and again it was rejected. Then I thought - what if an app update has been issued and I've not been notified of this. But why the hell shouldn't an update be installed automatically anyway? - I thought, as I checked on the cluttered nagging inferno which is Google's Play Store.

Yes, there was an update, correcting a parsing error in the data input line which auto-corrected anything the user entered. Incredible! With the app updated, I tried again and the code was rejected on the basis that it was past its time expiry date. Admittedly, small print in the first text message tells you to do it quickly. Easy to overlook if you're poorly, or distracted trying to rearrange your life around a red alert. Evidently, manually input data takes time to add to the grand database of contagion, but doing so doesn't cancel the auto-generated nagging reminders to do something that's already outdated by NHS digital's own criteria. Auto-generated confusion spreading I call it.

Chicken soup again for lunch, then I returned to bed and slept uncomfortably for the rest of the day with symptoms no worse than my last bout of 'flu.

III. 

Clare tested negative this morning, but is now in agony, having pulled a back muscle sneezing after poking a swab into her nostril. Sadly that rules out a trip to Bath for the Wriggledance show altogether. My head is clearer and not so congested today. The fluey aches and pains aren't so pronounced. Whether or not I'm over the worst remains to be seen, but at least I'm able to catch up on writing about the last two days, before cooking another round of chicken soup.

Wasted viewing time

I slept quite well last night and woke up at six thinking I had an hour and a half to snooze before listening to 'Thought for the Day'. The next time I looked at the clock it was eight fifteen, half an hour too late to hear it live. I'm most thankful for the BBC Sounds app, enabling me to catch-up. It's go easier and easier to use as it has developed over the past decade. Streaming BBC broadcast content, audio and video began fourteen years ago, and has become very comprehensive and sophisticated beneath its several changes of name and appearance since then. A triumph for free public service broadcasting. I'd be lost without it.

For lunch, I cooked a spicy chickpea and veggy stew with potatoes, then walked for an hour and a half around the Fields. Another overcast but mild day. Outside the SWALEC stadium were were lots of parking stewards in hi-viz jackets hanging about, waiting for cars to arrive and park for which I presume is an evening cricket match. There were no signs yet of spectators arriving on foot. BBC news is driving me crazy, obsessing about tonight's soccer game between England and Germany. Meanwhile, Wimbledon and cricket get relegated. 

It's as if we our faces are being thrust into the hype around the Big Game, as if it represented something significant for the future of the country post-brexit. There's been so many backward glances at the 1966 World Cup final in which England beat Germany. I find it quite disturbing, subtle propaganda surrounding justification for leaving the EU, insinuation that Britain is better than all of them over the Channel, as the heavy price for departure is already starting to be paid, politically and economically. A slow awakening is taking place to the reality of the deceit. You can't fool all of the people all of the time.

We had a call from Owain this afternoon. He's taking a few days of his week's leave making techno tracks with a mate in a recording studio with a view down in Devon, then coming to us to celebrate his birthday on the weekend. At least, that was the plan. His NHS app pinged him for having been in contact with a covid infected person - he thinks it's a vinyl record store owner in Bristol. He now has to self isolate for five days when he returns to Bristol tomorrow, and won't be with us for his birthday after all. We're all disappointed. Another Zoom or WhatsApp birthday party instead, but no means to get a cake to share with him on the day. At least, he doesn't think he's infected, but he'll have to get tested at the end of his quarantine period, before normality can take hold again. What bad luck. 

Since I bought the Honor laptop the Friday before going to Aberaeron and installed the essential apps that I bought it to be able to use better, I've not switched it on and used it, despite taking it with me. Doing a full Windows 10 setup with one's own accounts take time and concentration. On purchase, the laptop was set up for a single user, independently of any Microsoft account, an option when a factory reset is done if you don;t want to commit the device to an account holder with an established file system. The task I have been putting off since setting it up initially was to make the laptop an account holder to the same account as I have on my desktop machine. It took me over an hour to work out how to do this and get it to mirror my desktop. 

I'm pleased with it now. It's quick and has a beautiful crisp display. I can now consider converting my desktop machine to Linux Mint. It will never run Windows as quickly as the laptop unless I change the hard drive for a SSD, I'm not sure how to do that. Besides, it's unlikely to run as fast as a much younger laptop with higher specifications. On the other hand, I've already found at that the desktop will run much faster using Linux Mint, as its not as dependent on high specification hardware. Windows 11 is about to be released, and I get the impression that it may not work or maybe work less well on my desktop device, but I'm confident of a better outcome and a longer life for a five year old machine using Linux. It's a matter of finding time to do the job.

Clare returned from her afternoon walk with four pounds of strawberries, on special offer at the Co-op. After supper I got to work preparing them for cooking, a very pleasant task enveloped in the aroma of fresh summer fruit. Fruit is now stewed, jam tomorrow!

After supper I finished watching 'Time is the killer' - not so much a psychological thriller as promoted as a complex whodunnit with some surprising twists. The whole story could have been told in six rather than eight episodes, to prevent boredom setting in. The worst aspect was actually the implausibility of the central narrative thread, entailing the forcible abduction and incarceration in isolation of an innocent bereaved mother presumed killer for 25 years, without her going insane or succeding in escaping. Worse still, her face has no sign of ageing despite her long grey hair, and she looks acceptably clean and tidy in her secret prison. Totally incredibly ridiculous. And this key element of stupidity was evident from episode five of eight. Pathetic.

Risky planning or planned risks?

I finished the sixth course of antibiotics this morning with a prayer that I won't need any more. It's hard to tell what difference this course has made right now, due to what the cold does to my head.  Once this goes completely away, I'll know from my blood pressure and how clear my head is whether it's worked.

There are signs that this wretched cold has done its worst. My nose wasn't streaming quite so heavily and I wasn't coughing as vehemently as I did yesterday. To my surprise however, any time I did cough was painful, not because of any soreness or inflammation in my lungs, but because every single muscle in my rib cage was stiff from the effort of coughing so much the day before. I felt as if I'd been in wrestling match and lost| It's a long time since I've had such a heavy streaming cold with so much coughing, there's no way to avoid stiffness in old, less used muscles. I was something unexpected and I'll have to live with it for a day or so, rest more, and cut down 20% on my daily walk.

It was a lovely autumnal day, a little on the cold side. The fresh air and sunshine did me good. Lounging in front of the telly all evening as I tend to at the moment does me little good, sitting for lengths of time generally ends up painfully uncomfortable, but I get fed up of spending so much time just lying down to recover if I'm tired. 

DuoLingo today pitched me an ad about the new NHS covid-19 tracking app for my phone. How public spirited! It was pleased not to have to hunt for this download, so recently launched, and now it's on my Blackberry. Saying that Cardiff is at a medium risk level from the virus.

As the second wave of contagion spreads around the U.K. as it has around much of the E.U. Cardiff and Swansea will now have travel and group meeting restrictions imposed this weekend, similar to those in force already in neighbouring local authority areas. But the app hasn't yet notified my of the coming change of risk level, only the news media. Just as well I'm not using the app to make plans for travel or work this weekend. I'm reminded of how NHS Wales took two days to email me instructions about self-quarantining, after my return from Ibiza. Two days for digital data to get from Heathrow Teminal 5 to Cardiff Bay and out to me. Two days in which, if I had been unwittingly infected, I could have sown chaos. I was in isolation four hours after landing, with a home run by car.

The new restrictions should have happened earlier in my opinion The authorities wait until evidence shows a critical growth pattern rather than cautiously anticipating the inevitable. Following the evidence when scrutiny reveals that on times evidence gathering contains inconsistencies, can rely delaying action. The track and trace system is at last improving, but not rapidly enough to keep up with demand generated by schools and colleges, as a growing number of localised outbreaks are reported daily. 

Much is been made of Universities welcoming the return of students. All that travel and socializing on arrival add to conditions promoting contagion. Such anxiety to resume a measure of normality, where caution would perhaps be more of a life saver. Of course on-line learning at every level all the time is hardly desirable, but wouldn't it have been better to avoid these institutional mass gatherings until real-time monitoring is actually working and in place?