Boarding @ Home: Day 50/84: Let's try ZOOM as well as paper/ email iterations

Zooming along...or not? Tried hard this AM working online with Mathew to see how we could set up a Meeting of Prestonpans Battle Trustees. Concluded to invite them to contact one another as they wish for this May meeting but with plans to get something better for June. The hope is that it can supplement the paper/ email iteration that I have now mailed off to them all. There are important things to resolve for our 275th Commemorations. General Sir John Cope insisted there were important things to resolve as he sought to outmanoeuvre The Prince in the Highlands and claim the £30,000 Reward. He wanted to cover his backside though so he got all his officers in August 1745 at Ruthven to agree and sign that he was making the right decision not to enter the Corrieyarick Pass and confront The Prince there. It was of course a disastrously wrong decision but, like Boris' modification of lockdown this week and The Prince himself at Derby four months after he'd outwitted Cope, they all had to be made. Fascinating how keen Boris is to get us all to exercise … even have us making a habit of it and thereby reducing the nation's obesity.

Boris says: 'Use common sense! After his nationwide broadcast on Sunday night it was today at 3.30pm that he spoke in Parliament with the Leader of the Opposition opposite; Keir Starmer wanted more clarity so that one and all knew just what they were being asked to do as they travelled on a train or reached the Welsh or Scottish Borders and hesitated to cross. There are now 50+ pages of Suggestions to help us get to work; and to garden centres; and even to Weymouth as long as we come back the same day. It's all conditional, many ifs; it's dependent on how steadily infections and deaths continue to fall. Honest truth is that we really have got to get back to work and take the risks that entails or we are on the way to the most minacious, threatening and horrendous economic setbacks. For most of us at the outset Covid19 was a terriculament, a small frightener, that the government's STAY HOME campaigning has turned into a monster that must be slain. If that means wearing face masks [and Avril ordered a packet online today for us] to make us feel more confident so be it. After all Dad's Army was issued with wooden rifles in 1940 because there were no others to give. [I just learnt that last night on the Antiques Road Show.] STAY ALERT is the new messaging and frankly for us it makes sense, common sense.
But what is common sense? Thomas Paine in the American Colonies suggested it was the sense held in common by common people - in his case, that they should be independent. It's not unusual to be able to arrive at a consensus of what the sensible thing to do actually is and I keep urging our leaders to let those engaged at work and in pubs/ restaurants to make their own judgements with the support of their customers - altogether arriving at the common sense as Paine would have it. At poker it has been suggested, unhelpfully at this particular juncture, that players learn that sometimes both science and common sense are wrong. There is such a thing as absolute premonition of cards, a rock bottom surety of what will happen next. If so, lets have some now please - rock bottom surety; do Avril and I have an absolute premonition about the next steps? Well we're only at Day 50/84 so I'd be doing myself out of 34 more blogs if I said we had. We do know we liked corn fritters which were presented for lunch from a surprise recipe which were most welcome with some Barbecue Sauce to spice 'em up
Windy weather threatened our bookstall today. It was a tough decision on whether to confront the weather. 40mph gusts even blew over the mini-Bay Tree we have close by. But we are pumped up with success. Avril's scheme to move books around the community has netted £14+ for Air Ambulance in donations and seen a goodly few books in circulation. It didn't rain either which was the other possibility of course. [I skipped exercise today what with all the excitement but Avril did the honourable village mile walk in truly cool weather - barely 8 degrees.]