I thought that it was deeply sad when Joe Boden introduced one of his grand daughters as his dead son Beau and the crowd still cheered. So yes, elder abuse.

Minimal information and looking for dating while married? That rates a 0 in my book.

The member is no longer, so probably quite soon .

Not for long, you can be sure.

7c (feels like 6c. Rising to 9c and falling to 4c overnight). Mostly sunny, with a light 11kph NW wind.

Wales, Scotland and Ulster have their own Parliaments and broad legislative powers within their region, so they do have different rules. In England, the rules were quite strict but did relax a bit towards the end of the first lockdown when the numbers of infections and deaths began to fall significantly.The lockdown was supposed to last six weeks but lasted six months instead.
I think that with this new lockdown, the rules will be relaxed for a week around Christmas before being imposed again until sometime in March. The last person to ban Christmas was the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell in 1640 because, as an extreme Puritan Protestant, he considered it a frivolous, gaudy and gluttenous offence against Christianity.
No sane politician would risk that kind of comparison, it's worse than being caracatured as Ebeneezer Scrooge from Dickens.

5c (feels like 2c. Rising to 7c and falling to 3c overnight). Cloudy, with an 80% chance of rain and a light 14 kph SW wind.

🥂

Happy Birthday!

Religion is bad, mmkay?

Yes it must be an unenviable task to have to decide the balance between individual freedom and protecting the lives of over 65 million people in the UK but governments are constantly faced with doing just this, especially during a pandemic. I think that you should prioritize saving as many lives as possible but this is where my confusion begins.
The Covid restrictions mean that the NHS cannot run normal clinics and routine treatments. According to government projections, this lack of routine treatment and surgery means that at least twice as many people will die from this as will die from covid-19. As an example of this that I know about, my oldest brother who is sixty five has two worn out knee joints that need replacing and a bowel hernia that needs surgery. He tells me that the pain wakes him screaming at night but has been told that he can't have pain meds because of the risk of addiction due to the eighteen month to two years backlog of patients. He also tells me that he doesn't think that he can stand that much pain for that long.

We would undoubtedly have a much better capacity to cope with the current crisis if successive governments over the last thirty years hadn't reduced the number of Hospitals, despite our growing population. In the town where I grew up there used to be two large Hospitals and several Hospices for the terminally ill. There's now one Hospital and no Hospices. This is something which happened across the entire country.
We would also be in a better position to cope if many of the most senior consultants and surgeons hadn't been exposed during the first Covid crisis earlier this year. Several of the people that my younger brother worked with were exposed and subsequently died from Covid.

During the last lockdown all 'non-essential' businesses were closed for approximately six months. About a third of local businesses never reopened, while Amazon increased its profits by a third, this bringing us ever closer to a few monopolies controlling the majority of business, something that is in no one's interest except for these monopolies (which mostly cleverly avoid paying taxes). Monopolies inevitably lead to increased prices and poorer service because they have no competition and the legislation intended to control these situations has been largely rendered toothless.

Unemployment due to the loss of businesses directly related to lockdown restrictions is expected to triple or quadruple, leading inevitably to increased poverty and other related problems. Many of these people will have families and mortgages but these mortgages will not be paid due to the legislation that says rent can be paid but mortgages cannot. The results seem inevitable.
Universal Credit, which has been slowly introduced by this and previous governments pays £73 per person per week (except if you're part of a couple when it pays less). Earlier this year, the processing backlog for these benefits was running at between five and six months before you received your first payment. That was before the pandemic, so how long those newly unemployed because the government ordered their businesses to close, will have to wait for payment is anyone's guess.

The toll on mental health during the last lockdown, where people were only allowed to leave their homes for "essential" purposes or to exercise for one hour a day, is said to be enormous but since mental health treatment is run by the NHS, it will not be available for the foreseeable future.

I can't help wondering how many additional deaths will be a direct result of these two things (unemployment and poor mental health).

As it stands, if I were of school age then I could and must attend school despite evidence showing that the recent spike in Covid infections is directly related to this.

If I worked, I could and should attend work (unless of course the business that I worked for had been shut by government order).

If I wasn't being responsible and self-isolating due to being infected with Covid, I could wander around a supermarket with hundreds of other people (wearing a mask).

The only thing that I can't do and would be fined for, is visiting my family.

What do I think would be a more measured and reasonable approach to the current pandemic?

How about, if all those who were elderly and vulnerable were supported and encouraged to self isolate and the rest of us were allowed to go about our business subject to whatever precautions were deemed necessary, such as masks, hygiene etc?

Of course, all of these poor decisions could be due to simple incompetence but this begs the question. Should such incompetent people be allowed to govern so many millions of people or escape punishment for such remarkable failures?

8c (feels like 4c. Rising to 10c and falling to 4c overnight). Cloudy, with an hundred percent chance of rain and a moderate 24kph W wind.

Or be punished .

It's entirely your choice and you don't have to do anything that you don't want to .

This would seem to make a personal reply pointless. I'm not interested in conspiracy theories as most of them require too many assumptions as well as a level of competence that you simply don't see in government or people in general. However, the response to Covid makes no sense whatsoever given the threat level and in this case I am forced to the conclusion that something else is happening.

9c (feels like 6c. Rising to 14c and falling to 9c overnight). Cloudy, with an 100% chance of rain this afternoon and overnight with a moderate 24kph W wind.

Thank you

Very nice.
I'll be performing a short commemorative rite for my familial dead later this evening.

You're right, I was forgetting about the two metre rule

Never approach them straight on. Instead, adopt a slanting crab-wise approach and speak to them diagonally from two feet away. Works every time .

R.I.P. A long and distinguished caree. My favourite film of his is "The Man who would be King" with his old friend Michael Caine.