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FUNNY how little things can cause heightened anticipation and excitement in these dreariest of times. Take last weekend, for example.
Among the take-away pizza flyers, clothing catalogues and all those advertorial letters we receive regularly about everything from new cars to care homes, our postman also dropped an officiallooking brown envelope through our letterbox.
It lay there address side down in the entrance porch for a few days (yes, call us paranoid, but we do leave all our mail for a while before opening!) giving rise to various speculation by yours truly.
The worst-case conclusion I came to was that this was a missive from those cheer-bringing souls at the Inland Revenue about next April’s tax coding, while other options ranging through my mind included a road tax notice, or even some traffic infringement fixed penalty of which I was unaware.
However, taking a more optimistic stance, whilst consuming a large stiff drink after listening to PM Boris’s unleashing of his latest nationwide lockdown, I gave more thought to what this missive might contain.
Trying to cheer myself up while staring six weeks more social shutdown in the face, I began hoping it might be the one really important communication we at Chez Davey have been waiting for – along with everyone else – a summons to go get immunised with one of the available Covid-thrashing vaccines.
Well, we held off until after the Boris broadcast before flipping it over and opening it, only to have those heightened hopes of mine quickly dashed. It was a letter from the Office for National Statistics.
They were, it explained, running a survey about our society at large and the economy, and would be contacting us again in a few days inviting us to participate in their online study.
Disappointing as it was that it was not our official vaccine notification, the upside is that our participation will presumably provide some welcome distraction from the current abysmal conditions now prevailing in the world outside our front door.
There is also one additional small plus for all our online effort imparting info to them – they send each participating household a gift voucher at the end of its completion.
A gift voucher from a government department, has to be a first, doesn’t it? Now only one question remains. Will there be anywhere open to spend it?
THE Premier League is said to be the richest league in football. Some of its players earn far more cash in just one week than most non-sporting mortals earn in a year.
You might think, therefore, that holding such a privileged position within society they would show some more social consideration and responsibility during this
Covid-19 crisis. Think again.
During the festive season there were a number of news reports about players being caught out ignoring the rules and regulations which the vast majority of us strive to live by in a bid to halt the epidemic currently enveloping us all.
You might also expect the response from the clubs themselves to such behaviour would be an especially robust one. Not necessarily. One, describing their players’ breach of Covid rules, said they were “disappointed.” There, that’s really telling them!
TAKING my daily stroll around my neighbourhood it has been good to see something positive occurring in the optimistic sense of the word: The snowdrops are out!
Not only that, but the everexpanding rookery occupying the group of tall trees near our cottage is alive with the sound of their raucous squawking as they squabble and jostle for their old nesting and roosting sites from last year.
Spring, surely, must be just around the corner.