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Post by racingteatray on May 22, 2020 17:54:23 GMT
I said that. I just noted that we particularly fetishise it.
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Post by Bob Sacamano v2.0 on May 22, 2020 18:04:08 GMT
I said that. I just noted that we particularly fetishise it. Do we? Or do just a small number go on about and a larger number jump on it use it as a stick to beat us all with? I’m 54, there’s been no real Empire in my lifetime and I can’t think of any of my contemporaries who has ever referenced it in my presence. The press loves to mention it or, in the case of the liberal press, mention that the country seems obsessed with it like some self fulfilling prophecy.
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Post by Deleted on May 22, 2020 20:58:22 GMT
I thought the Empire was a cinema setup.
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Post by Alex on May 23, 2020 14:45:35 GMT
I thought the Empire was a cinema setup. It's actually a type of apple I think.
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Post by Deleted on May 23, 2020 15:02:14 GMT
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Post by Deleted on May 23, 2020 15:02:51 GMT
Or a Potato?
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Post by ChrisM on May 30, 2020 12:15:19 GMT
A lot more traffic about today and the food shops are busier, big queues to get in everywhere including the nearest LIDL to me for the first time in my experience. Many more people are not too concerned with the 2 metre spacing from what I have seen, although they are respecting some form of "distancing" but there are still a paranoid minority who scamper away and hide in shop doorways etc when they see someone getting close to them.
How the numbers are set for customers allowed into each shop seems top be a black art, from my enquiries this morning it appears to be by consultation/agreement between store manager and the Police. We have a small bank with a sign stating max of 4 customers at a time (visible through the locked door as they no longer open on Saturdays or afternoons in the week, a few doors away a very large Smiths with post office in it, limiting to 16 where it must be at least 20 times bigger than the bank, and a large Wilko limited to 24 customers when it's probably twice the size of the Smiths.
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Post by racingteatray on May 31, 2020 23:12:07 GMT
A large proportion of London doesn’t seem to give a fuck.
We went on our usual walk yesterday, which would normally take us through Imperial Park down by the Thames. I got to the gates of the park, took one look through them and decided not to enter. It was literally heaving with people, none of whom was paying the slightest attention to social distancing. Likewise a later part of our normal loop takes us through Westfield Park, a small park along Lots Rd. Also heaving and with a large party going on in one more secluded corner.
Not being the world’s biggest fan of my own species at the best of times, it just made me want to go very far away indeed.
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Post by Bob Sacamano v2.0 on Jun 1, 2020 7:18:03 GMT
A large proportion of London doesn’t seem to give a fuck. We went on our usual walk yesterday, which would normally take us through Imperial Park down by the Thames. I got to the gates of the park, took one look through them and decided not to enter. It was literally heaving with people, none of whom was paying the slightest attention to social distancing. Likewise a later part of our normal loop takes us through Westfield Park, a small park along Lots Rd. Also heaving and with a large party going on in one more secluded corner. Not being the world’s biggest fan of my own species at the best of times, it just made me want to go very far away indeed. My brother was having a rant about this in York yesterday. I'm pretty relaxed about it. We know the virus doesn't transmit well outdoors, especially on warm days with high UV levels, so as long as people aren't sitting on top of each other and keeping that 1m gap as much as they can, I'm not worried. I think over the last 10 weeks or so we've been trained to recoil at getting close to others so when we encounter a busy park the alarm bells go off when there's really no need.
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Post by michael on Jun 1, 2020 8:03:02 GMT
I do have a lot of sympathy for those in places like London, many of whom will live in small homes without outdoor space. It must surely drive people stir crazy? Lots of the local beauty spots have had crowds gather who have left a load of litter and mess behind them, they ought to be shot.
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Post by racingteatray on Jun 1, 2020 10:00:25 GMT
A large proportion of London doesn’t seem to give a fuck. We went on our usual walk yesterday, which would normally take us through Imperial Park down by the Thames. I got to the gates of the park, took one look through them and decided not to enter. It was literally heaving with people, none of whom was paying the slightest attention to social distancing. Likewise a later part of our normal loop takes us through Westfield Park, a small park along Lots Rd. Also heaving and with a large party going on in one more secluded corner. Not being the world’s biggest fan of my own species at the best of times, it just made me want to go very far away indeed. My brother was having a rant about this in York yesterday. I'm pretty relaxed about it. We know the virus doesn't transmit well outdoors, especially on warm days with high UV levels, so as long as people aren't sitting on top of each other and keeping that 1m gap as much as they can, I'm not worried. I think over the last 10 weeks or so we've been trained to recoil at getting close to others so when we encounter a busy park the alarm bells go off when there's really no need. 1m gap? You've got to be kidding. Not a chance. There were people hugging, dancing, sitting on top of each other, big groups of small children playing together. And in between it all were the runners, half of whom are exhaling with the gusto of a whale's blow-hole, trying to run down the paths they've got accustomed to having free rein of for the past few months and thus whisking past your elbow at touching distance in a gale of sweaty panting.
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Post by racingteatray on Jun 1, 2020 10:03:01 GMT
I do have a lot of sympathy for those in places like London, many of whom will live in small homes without outdoor space. It must surely drive people stir crazy? Lots of the local beauty spots have had crowds gather who have left a load of litter and mess behind them, they ought to be shot. Yes, I have sympathy. But there's going outside and then there's going outside and ignoring every single bit of advice about behaving sensibly. The latter is not excusable behaviour. Our local common looked like a refuse tip when we walked across it at dusk on Saturday evening.
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Post by michael on Jun 1, 2020 10:09:08 GMT
I agree a lot of people are exercising zero common sense and yet when the rates go up it's the governments fault... My mother came over yesterday for a socially distant visit - a day early for it to be legal but I think it was an essential visit for her own mental health. She's been pretty much housebound since early March as I'd told her not to go out as my father is on the shielding list. Fortunately she had an emergency stockpile built up as a result of Brexit and her experiences when we lived in Italy. She said that leaving the house actually made her feel slightly scared which I thought was really sad. She did seem to benefit from an hour chatting in the garden so I'm glad she did it.
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Post by johnc on Jun 1, 2020 10:21:43 GMT
On our walk last night we passed the house of friends who are both consultants and saw them in the garden. We had a socially distanced chat and they both expressed concern that the current tests might not be accurate. About 70% of those tested positive are asymptomatic and have few anti-bodies which they felt was far too high a percentage: if people have had the virus they felt they should have had much higher anti body results. This brings in to question whether the initial positive results are truly positive. Death rates in ITU run at about 80% whereas the normal rates (pre Covid) are closer to 60% so for those who are badly effected by the disease the survival rates are pretty low.
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Post by PetrolEd on Jun 1, 2020 10:35:23 GMT
I agree a lot of people are exercising zero common sense and yet when the rates go up it's the governments fault... I really hope the government push back at the public on this issue. I hope we don't, but if we do see a second spike, its the public fault. The government can only advise and we have to open up to survive financially. It seems as though all caution has been thrown out of the window and we're all carrying on as normal. I feel this attitude is a very British thing and can only explain why our numbers are where they are.
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Post by Tim on Jun 1, 2020 10:38:08 GMT
I've noticed that the people least likely to practice any form of social distancing are those who appear to be in their late 60s and onwards. I've seen them advancing down the centre supermarket aisles, ignoring any one-way system and not having any form of protection.
We went to the garden centre yesterday and while I was looking at hose connectors 2 older women approached and apparently expected me just to shift and it was only so one could show the other which connector it was she'd ordered online. There were quite a lot fo them just wandering round aimlessly.
EDIT We had friends across on Saturday, sat outside with sensible distances between us the whole time and the strangest thing was that after 10 weeks of not doing that it felt perfectly normal.
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Post by garry on Jun 1, 2020 11:07:39 GMT
I think the government are being purposefully confusing and vague on the communication of the rules, making it almost impossible to enforce, if all goes well, rules will continue to relax. If cases start to creep up , they can tell us it’s our fault for not following the rules.
For what it’s worth I don’t think they’ve got any chance of forcing another lockdown, second spike or not. The fear has gone for most people because they personally know no one who’s died (in fact in my network I don’t know anyone who knows anyone who’s died). You’ll be hard pushed to make people fear a killer thats not striking anywhere near them
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Post by PG on Jun 1, 2020 11:19:38 GMT
Our local common looked like a refuse tip when we walked across it at dusk on Saturday evening. It's a pity that CV-19 can't discriminate and only affect those who litter.
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Post by ChrisM on Jun 1, 2020 11:35:04 GMT
Our local common looked like a refuse tip when we walked across it at dusk on Saturday evening. It's a pity that CV-19 can't discriminate and only affect those who litter. ... or who drive in breach of guidance, or who drive to "test their eyesight" etc etc
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Post by racingteatray on Jun 1, 2020 12:08:07 GMT
It's a pity that CV-19 can't discriminate and only affect those who litter. ... or who drive in breach of guidance, or who drive to "test their eyesight" etc etc This article in The Times on Friday made me laugh: " Damned Gollum’s ruined my precious lockdown" The roads were empty and the Remain bores silenced but then Johnson’s melon-headed stick insect had to go for a drive
Giles Coren Friday May 29 2020, 5.00pm, The Times " That bloody swivel-eyed, melon-headed psychopath. Bloody stick demon made of coat hangers and charity clothes with a lightbulb for a bonce. Why did he have to go and spoil everything?
The bony, supercilious bastard. I was really enjoying lockdown. Loving it. No downsides at all for me. Empty roads, empty parks, loads of exercise in the sunshine, didn’t have to see my dreary friends or review poncey restaurants any more, shops full of food and no queues to speak of except at middle-brow supermarkets I wouldn’t use anyway, cooking great meals, drinking great wine, reading great books, none of the usual summer misery of feeling left out of everybody else’s fun, because nobody was having any, Tories in charge now for a generation to the delicious chagrin of all my media pals, Remain bores silenced, Corbyn dead, Twitter lefties on the run . . . I was living my best life, and no mistake.
And then he goes and spoils it all, by saying something stupid like, “I had to go for a long drive to a castle with my family to check I wasn’t blind.”
And, just like that, my lovely lockdown is over. Furious at the notion that there should be one rule for the shiny Martian who “did Brexit” and one for everyone else, everybody else decided to break the rules too, because that’s obviously the mature way to level things up, and so they poured out on to the lovely quiet parks and commons and heaths with their shirts off and their horrid tattoos and their loud music and their beer and their stinking spliffs and nitrous oxide balloons, shouting “yo yo yo” and “fam” and killing the 18th-century rus in urbe idyll stone dead.
And so now we are in a worst-case scenario, vibe-wise. Because at least if the lockdown had been actually lifted, these feckless halfwits would be at school or at work. But thanks to old Bubblehead we have entered a nightmare period of no school and no lockdown, so they’re all just out on the streets. It’s the Night of the Living Stoned.
And also, just like that, the roads of which I have had the run since March –— whizzing all over the sunlit city like it was the 1950s, while the masses cowered in their homes for fear of a nasty cough — are jammed with motorists, empowered by the fall of the simpering Mekon to take to their wheels, even though there is still, demonstrably, nowhere to go. In short, the rage and noise and air pollution are back, but still no economy — cheers Dom!
Worse still, Boris’s pet alien (can anyone swear for certain his index finger doesn’t light up red?) has given the left something to cheer about. Lots, in fact, to cheer about. He has single-handedly woken the Corbyn zombie legions from the six-month hemlock coma in which I had hoped they would remain for a century. He’s got Twitter cock-a-hoop, for Twitter loves a proper villain, a genuine pantomime Death Muppet to beat up with the blunt weapon of its wimpy likes and retweets. All week, it’s been the same unfunny men and women off the telly tweeting their unfunny jokes about Barnard Castle and frotting off on the resultant follows from their fellow idiots.
That is the worst thing this mini-Himmler has done (I’m pointing up a physical similarity, not equating their political ruthlessness in any childish way): he has given a dart of defibrillation to the almost-dead Remain movement. Their nemesis is coming down in flames before their eyes and I think they truly believe this might reverse it all. As if a stake through the heart of the Vote Leave vampire might turn back time, like when “Bad Superman” is defeated in the second Christopher Reeve movie and “Good Superman” reverses the turn of the Earth to bring back Lois Lane from the dead.
I don’t care one way or the other about Brexit — we’re all going to die and the lucky ones alive today will do it before the world ends, so it hardly matters how much tax we pay on cheese — but I was so bored with both sides and enjoyed seeing at least one of them smashed, sad, silent. I even managed to enjoy Boris’s thumping election victory because of all the shrieking wazzocks it made so miserable and the long period of conservative smugness that I planned to kick back and take part in.
And now Old Balloon Head has ruined it. He’s made Boris look like a weak, craven, desperate idiot just when I was planning to say, “There you go, he isn’t so terrible after all.” And he’s made the unelected elite look bad again, just when people were starting to forget about us.
I don’t care that Cummings drove to Durham and got out for a wee. I myself have been interpreting lockdown in my own way since the beginning, just as I have always interpreted all laws. Not busting them outright, but turning a blind eye to myself when I was the only one there to notice what I was up to. I have treated the lockdown rules as similar to those relating to speed limits, recreational drug use and what can and can’t be set off as expenses against tax. Which is to say, I comply in spirit but give myself the benefit of the doubt in tight spots.
We went for a walk in Richmond Park, for example, when that wasn’t the done thing, because one more circuit of Hampstead Heath and I think I might have killed someone (we parked the car under a bush, like spies, and walked with conviction, like locals, not using Google Maps or anything). We occasionally had neighbours into the front garden for a beer. And it never occurred to me to take too seriously the “only once a day for no more than an hour” rule. I read that as a guideline, like a dinner invitation that says “8 for 8.30”, but everyone knows that means you’re OK till 9pm. Possibly even a few minutes after.
So, yeah, no problem with Gollum’s actions in themselves. It’s the not-immediately-resigning when he saw the damage that his stupidly getting busted was going to do to the lives of narcissistic, right-wing rulebreakers everywhere that infuriates me. Dominic Cummings has ruined my lovely lockdown and, for that, this malodorous volleyball-headed eater of babies should be strung up by his heels from an Islington lamp-post and eaten by bats in front of his family.
And that’s not editorialising. Ask Emily Maitlis. That’s just facts."
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Post by Bob Sacamano v2.0 on Jun 1, 2020 12:31:25 GMT
It's looking increasingly like Boris was right to refuse to sack Cummings as the campaign against him is starting to fall apart as these things only hold together for so long. The police have investigated and said he "might" have broken a minor lockdown guideline (in other words, he didn't but they are trying to save face), one witness has admitted he made his story up, another was found to be travelling 250 miles to see his daughter and the whole stack of diatribe whipped up by the press is starting to crumble away. Well done Boris for holding your nerve, yet another win.
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Post by michael on Jun 1, 2020 12:35:02 GMT
The DC outrage was only ever about Brexit.
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Post by garry on Jun 1, 2020 12:53:24 GMT
The DC outrage was only ever about Brexit. I don’t agree. The media might have made him more of a target because of his links to brexit, but the general public are simply pissed off that he was in breach of the rules as they’d understood them. Argue all day long that they didn’t understand the rules, but that won’t wash with them. Many are truly angry about sacrifices they made whilst he decided to break them.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 1, 2020 12:58:01 GMT
And the backlash has been evident, the news reports have been full of reporters lapping up the complete lack of social distancing at public sites around the country. When we get the second peak this is likely to bring, who will be blamed?
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Post by michael on Jun 1, 2020 12:58:22 GMT
I don't quite agree with that. There have been numerous high-profile breeches of the guidelines but this was the only one that captured six of the leading stories on the BBC new app at one point. It seems clear DC was far more a target due to Brexit and that's before considering his motives for travelling to Durham were entirely legitimate.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 1, 2020 12:59:37 GMT
Well, I see it that he was telling people to do something he himself could not be bothered to do.
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Post by ChrisM on Jun 1, 2020 14:06:28 GMT
Well, I see it that he was telling people to do something he himself could not be bothered to do. Indeed - the message I hard was very short and clear "You must stay at home" .... no driving to "other" homes that you may have, no unnecessary trips at all, certainly initially, you were only supposed to go out to buy food or exercise (or attend a health-related appointment). If you had somewhere safe to stay, driving 260 miles was out of the question, at least that is how I understood the Boris message of 23-March and it appears that very many others also heard the same message
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Post by Tim on Jun 1, 2020 15:33:04 GMT
The DC outrage was only ever about Brexit. I don’t agree. The media might have made him more of a target because of his links to brexit, but the general public are simply pissed off that he was in breach of the rules as they’d understood them. Argue all day long that they didn’t understand the rules, but that won’t wash with them. Many are truly angry about sacrifices they made whilst he decided to break them. I agree with this, Brexit has been silent for long enough for most to have (temporarily) forgotten about it but here's the guy at the centre of the 'Stay At Home, etc' message actively doing the opposite of what he, presumably as head of comms, has told all the ministers to stand up and say. So now all the people who haven't done things they would've liked to do - visit family, friends, go to the bedside of dying loved ones, go to funerals - are pissed off because they generally obeyed the message and apparently they didn't have to. More than any other reason I think this is the one why there'll be no way of enforcing a second lockdown if needed. All those people who now feel they had the piss taken out of them will just think 'fuck it, I know the suits in Whitehall/Parliament will do whatever they want on some flimsy pretext so I'll do the same from day 1'. As a communications bod he should understand he's completely undermined the credibility of the Government's communications dept.
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Post by chipbutty on Jun 1, 2020 16:07:50 GMT
I am surprised by some of the continued attitudes towards social distancing despite the damage it will continue to inflict on day to day live, the economy, children’s mental health, etc.
This all comes back to the fact that this virus poses little threat to anyone other than elderly folk with existing morbidity – and before the chorus of “ it’s not about you, it’s about spreading to others “ starts up like a broken record, consider the following:
Hiding healthy people away and teaching them to treat each other like leprosy ridden filth bags is ridiculous given the above, if anything it’s weakening our immune systems which are normally under constant bombardment due to our usual, regular social interactions (so I think we will be more susceptible to the usual snuffles and coughs – ask anyone what the first 6 months of when their kids started school was like). The sooner healthy people are exposed to Covid (under normal life circumstances), the faster it will burn out (virus mutates, becomes less virulent so it can spread faster) and that’s better for everyone – especially those who do need to isolate.
Seriously – what is the alternative ?, we play virus hide and seek for the next 3 years until the next cough pops up and the whole sorry cycle starts again ?
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Post by Deleted on Jun 1, 2020 16:39:42 GMT
That is what we started off doing but the media soon scared people into demanding lockdown.
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