Resuming Normal Business ?

After the irritation of discovering - by trial and error that one of the three browsers I was using no longer supports this blog system, which resulted in the last but one very unprofessional transmission, I am now hopefully back on track and so capable of resuming normal business. Whatever 'normal' means these days ! It's become a word that's much bandied about. The latest sign is the return of kids to school this week and the promise of UK universities doing the same quite shortly. The first must be a cause of some concern for despite all care and attention it might very well 'kill a granny' - or in my case grandpa- or in fact quite a few of them, since while kids don't usually significantly suffer from Covid 19 (they do sometimes of course) they can pass it on as well as anyone else. But the argument that they should return to school anyhow is a strong one. But I really don't think that argument applies to the Universities to anything like the same degree, since your average student falls into the category (as in some ways they should !) of being the least likely to obey the mitigation regulations. More importantly, students they come from all over the place and are not geographically restricted in the way that state schools are. Accordingly there's more chance of nat outbreaks rather than more containable local ones. In that respect, public school pupils are the same of course, but obviously it would be ioohibitively difficult to treat schools that have a local pupil cohort differently from those that don't. What really set me wondering about the universities is the contrast between expectations in the UK about this and the service academies in the US, including the Naval War College my own. At the moment, Newport is doing virtually all its business on-line and distantly, and the campus itself is closed for all but 'mission essential' personnel (cleaners, security guards and the like) and we have been told not to expect significant change in this for months. The contrast between this and local schools is stark. So how come institutions focusing on steely-eyed war-fighters are so much more risk averse compared to schools ? It has some my US colleagues wondering I must say. The only reason I can think of is that the US Navy doesn't want to do anything that might compromise its real mission. This isn't educating its people (that's just an enabler); instead it's maintaining the fleet at sea, and there have been several much publicised examples of where the spread of the disease has made that difficult. Because they don't want less-important (or at least less urgent) activities to get in the way, they prefer us to hunker down for a while. Especially as the Chinese Navy seems largely unaffected by Covid-19. Getting back to the point, I don't really understand why UK Universities are taking the risks and why they can't try to do the same as Newport. It would be very nice to shrug all this off and trust the government's recommendations. But since a recent report I have seen puts us at 155th in the league of 179 countries measured against how well they are handling the pandemic, blithe trust isn't that easy. But away from all this gloom and despondency, much of this suits me very well of course and life is good. I can still do what I would have done in Newport perfectly well here in the UK. In fact in some ways I am more productive here than I would be there, since I have all my books and other material more readily available (though there are still instances where the book I want is the other side of the Atlantic - but that is less true now). Also I don't have any wasteful commuting time (though to be fair that that is less much less than an hour a day in Newport). However in Newport I don't have to cut the grass, look after the house etc which I do here !. But all the same on balance I can function perfectly well in this new normal. Aided, of course, by the fact that all my colleagues around the world, are all in the same boat. I'm slowly evolving a new routine flexible enough to cope with the changing circumstances. it starts with an earlyish pre-breakfast perambulate around the estate to make plans and to get the steps up on my pedometer, pick up apples, feed the fish etc. Since I've been back Breakfast has been based on various kinds of fruit from around the garden and is still going strong though the end is in sight I think as the blackberries ripen and the plums fall.

I'm hoping that the big family get together for the apple-pressing weekend will be able to go ahead as usual but suspect it might be the last big gathering for some time. In the meantime I had a late summer visitation from Team Powell which was nice and allowed some returns to favourite places such as the New Forest and Avebury. Sorry it's all come out as one paragraph again, but at least there are photos this time !