Bottoms Up

The government ordained orders to Stay Home have been lifted. I think the Stay Local orders may have been lifted too. I’m not sure what exactly the orders are at the moment. It’s not clear. I couldn’t even be sure exactly how Stay Local was defined. But we’re definitely still not allowed to go abroad just yet. We hope that will change at some point this year. But if it doesn’t, we have a Plan B. We have purchased Historic House Association membership for the year. The houses won’t open till mid May. But the gardens are accepting visitors right now. So we have been visiting. Minterne Gardens last week. Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens this week.

Things are looking up in the UK. Less so elsewhere is Europe where infection is getting into peoples respiratory systems quicker than the vaccine is getting into their arms. Parts of the US are playing with fire. Latin America is burning. Mexico especially, where the latest wave seems to be taking off with a brand new level of ferocity. Brazil has a worse press, but that’s largely because Mexico is doing such an abysmal job of both testing and record keeping. The excess death tally for Mexico over the last year and a bit is close to the 400,000 mark. Second only to the United States. Hugs and kisses.

It seems to me there are three types of opinion with regards the coronavirus. The first two are political. People who blindly follow the party line, unaware that they are doing so. And people who complain about other people blindly following their party line, but then blindly following their own party line. The third group? Those who follow reason. It’s a smaller group than the first two. I make a conscious effort to belong to this group. I’ll let you into my secret, as to how I do this. I listen to and learn from reasonable people. I think I largely err on the side of reason, but you can be the judge.

The photo is from the small, very old and typically English church at Minterne. You are looking at the stones in the floor marking the spot where the first Winston Churchill lies buried. It was his son John who went on to turn the family name into something of a national legend.