Week six of the lockdown !

The lockdown here in France was extended by another 4 weeks to 11^th May following a speech by President Macron on TV. Like Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland he makes a good leadership display, contrasting sharply with the UK and, even more so, the USA.

Macron has given a relatively clear way forward and details are announced already, for schools, colleges and lycées, and old peoples homes to accept visits from family to their residents, which will save a lot of anguish. Borders may remain closed long term, particularly to non-Shengen countries.

For the time being all any of us as individuals can do is abide by the social distancing rules, look after ourselves and each other, do our best to keep our immune system working as well as possible and keep physically strong. Good nutrition with real food, some supplements – Vitamins C, D, B1, zinc and a few others are gaining recognition in this regard – keep exercising to maintain as much physical and mental strength as possible. And reduce if you’re overweight or obese. Obesity looks like it will be the commonest factor in the death count everywhere. Other underlying health issues, age and BAME appear to be secondary but contributory to this.

Our own bizarre life is becoming depressingly normalised. There were a few moans and groans around us about a month-long extension to its oddness over here, but a common feeling is ‘we’ve done a month, so we can do another month’. On a personal basis that is true for many people. But for a bigger ‘many’, real hardship is kicking in. Many people cannot work and earn an income when they cannot be in contact with other people, so they can’t pay their bills. Those that lose a regular income may not be able to make it up afterwards and government help is not universal or easy to get. Self-employed people in small service roles are in particular difficulty financially. Some people are getting clinical depression and other mental health issues through the inability to work and to socialise, which continues to be close to impossible, and we and others are missing it more and more.

This is a growing situation as many people have had enough of isolation and won’t tolerate it for very much longer, so there is an increasing risk of the rules being increasingly broken regardless of the threat of fines or the increased danger of passing on infection. As the government visibly starts to relax the lockdown people may, hopefully, feel more positive even though relaxation might create a new wave of infections. That will put the number of ICU cases and deaths back up, so then the government might re-impose some rules or they may just let it run as long as hospitals, particularly ICUs, can cope with the numbers.

At home, the potager is showing many of the veggies planted there, and its progress provides a developing topic for conversation by phone or over the fences. Talking about it being time to earth up the potatoes becomes highlight of the day. Potatoes, onions, sweetcorn, peas and beans are all showing their heads and our annual watering task has commenced (though paused for a few rainy days since). Our well has been providing copious amounts of water following the rains over the winter. We’ve done lots on the garden more generally, and it is looking tidier than usual, which is nice but there’s only us to see it. Our sheep are not keeping their grass mowed sufficiently so I’m still mowing some of their space as well as the rest that they don’t have the run of. However the early warm weather has brought forward the day that they need shearing by some weeks so a new task is to find a shearer.

Getting on with jobs around the place is slowing down a bit as we run out of materials and search out places we can get stuff delivered from. As a result we’re getting down to some tasks which are low on the priorities, not because we’ve done all the others.  We’ve even removed the huge wood pile we had in our hangar since the demolition of the grange some years ago!  That has enabled another job, to rebuild a shed that our builder demolished, and enable us to pass some wood on to others.The shed rebuild will, of course, require other materials as well, of course, so it won't be completed very soon!

We’re still doing a supermarket shop in person once a week and don’t feel that we’re in danger ourselves or being a danger to others by doing so. There are access and distancing controls in place, and very few cases in our département.  Only a few products are in short supply and in general we have no hardship in that respect. We have not increased our stock of anything to a high level and we’ve seen no sign of panic-buying anywhere. Getting rid of waste is slightly more difficult. We can take bin waste to the village containers, usually when we’re on a shopping trip, but we are expected to keep glass for recycling at home until the lockdown is lifted. We already have a big bin full of bottles, and we’re not the biggest drinkers in our community. Another month or more may get quite embarrassing! Bonfires are banned now but some of the dechetteries, including ours, are opening by appointment. Unfortunately we are without a means of taking a trailer-full there at present.

Ordering stuff remotely for delivery is more difficult. Amazon was still working but their own delivery times had gone out and reliability of deliveries is much lower, but what else would one expect. A French court effectively shut down Amazon’s five French depots for a week or so until the firm deep-cleans & disinfects them, and put in place better means to protect their workers, under threat of a fine of a million euros per offence per day!  Meanwhile the business is enjoying a bumper pandemic regardless, and Bezos is coining it personally, but the firm is not paying its way socially in the countries in which it operates, through its taxes. Their ‘marketplace’ providers are still accepting orders but their deliveries, where not through Amazon’s French warehouses, are subject to longer lead times. Some supermarkets, DIY stores and builders merchants are accepting orders for collection or for delivery of certain products and we know of a few people who are reliant on this. But it’s not necessarily next-day.

Keep safe, everyone.

Early April - life is changing

The lockdown continues and people are starting to be more questioning about the tardy response of their governments to the COVID 19 (CV) pandemic. Approaching four months into the disease and nearly a month of lockdown here, the figures being produced daily look ever more suspect and lots of attention is being given to getting behind them. Complaints about how the ctrisis is being handled are increasing, though more in the UK than here in France, unusually, but public support for health service people must be at an all-time high, quite rightly.

Without getting into the arguments, the best any of us can do is to follow the advice and look after ourselves. And help and support others where we can do so while trying to keep safe in the process. We need to keep ourselves safe not just selfishly but for the others we are in contact with so that we do not infect anyone else and maybe kill them.

On top of that, of course, we have no defence against it other than each individual’s own natural immune system, and it will be more than a year before there is a vaccine that is proven both safe and adequately effective. 

So the solution for each of us is:  keep your immune system as strong as possible, stay young, don’t get any other diseases or conditions which either weaken or over-stimulate your immune system, and don’t go into an old people's home. For the next 18 months.   Impossible, obviously, for many of us but it's worth doing as much of this as we can.

But as I am tempted to get into a rant about the way it’s all been and is being managed politically and the appalling treatment of dedicated health service personnel in the UK and elsewhere, for the last several years, through lack of numbers, shortage of facilities and protective gear and the current blatant disregard of Health and Safety requirements for them, then I’ll just focus on what it’s doing for us, for now.

Mostly, three weeks into lockdown, in this part of France, life goes on in a bizarrely unreal way. We are at home with very few excursions out. Just one of us goes to the local supermarket once a week. We are allowed out together or separately for exercise once a day on foot – ie not on bicycles, despite France’s obsession with cycling – for up to an hour a day so long as we stay within 1 km of home. Otherwise we can only go out if we have a legal or medical requirement to do so. We each have to carry a signed, dated and timed official form certifying that we are only doing what we’re allowed to do. The government has just enabled this to be done on a phone app, so they obviously think the cost and effort is justified as the requirement will continue for a long enough period to have been worth it. It’s potentially a 300 € fine if we don’t carry it or if we are doing anything that’s not permissible.

But the worst part is No Socialising, not face to face and certainly not physical contact with anyone not living in the same household. Telephone, Skype, FaceTime, Facebook etc. and seeing neighbours across the boundary hedges, fences or, in our case, the stream, are helping us a lot, but it’s certainly going to have a long term psychological effect on a lot of people. There’s virtually no effort going into the mental health outcomes of all this anywhere, so far as I can see. We’re lucky, with plenty of space in a nice part of the country, but lots of people are confined to tiny houses or flats with little or no outside space and no contact with anyone at all. As well as seeing neighbours across the respective boundaries, there are dog walkers and other exercisers passing along our lane, and we exchange and experience a good deal of mutual concern for each other. 

So we’ve been getting on with things at home. Jeanne has got the potager into fine shape and we have a little polytunnel in which she has been getting new seeds going, ready for planting out soon. The potager looks a bit bare in the picture but is actually full of seeds, including potatoes and onions, and lots more starting to sprout.

The uncommonly tidy potager.

Inside the polytunnel.

The polytunnel has just a few flower seedlings left now as most of the vegetables are in the ground.  We did manage a trip to the agri-shop for food for the hens and supplements for the sheep, and picked up some tomato plants and veggie seeds. Grow-your-own veggies are ‘essentials’.

 

I have been making progress on the wall. It’s been going on for so long it feels like The Trump’s wall, but it’s actually nearing completion at last, and it will do what we need it to do, unlike the other one! However I have now run out of sand for the mortar and getting supplies of non-‘essentials’ is nearly impossible at the moment. The wall has another two courses to go on this side, then the top has to be tiled in the local way. It's been in progress so long that the lower courses already have the blackening from the local cognac distilleries' 'angels share', so it will need a jetwash or sandblast.

But there’s plenty of other stuff to do. We’ve been improving the land along the stream to make it into an attractive area for relaxation and aperos. We planted dozens of tree saplings there which need a bit more attention that they’re now able to have. Between the stream and the house our five sheep are not keeping the grass down in their paddock so we definitely need more, so we’re having to mow, albeit not as often or as much. But to keep more than five legally we’ll have to register as a farm and breeder and do all the EU identification and record keeping for each animal. I was booked on a lambing course last week but travel to it was cancelled due to the CV, but I have a potential arrangement already to rent a ram next autumn to serve our four ewes. (Our own ram is missing his vital bits!) In the meantime we are improving their fences and gates.

Jeanne had a YouTube success this week! The dishwasher has been making a noise and not cleaning too well. In the past we would have called someone out, paid them a lot of money to fix it or to tell us it was on its last legs and try to sell us a replacement. But she looked it up on YouTube and found a video in which some minor dismantling was done, which she followed, and found two olive stones in the works. Easily removed, no cost except 15 minutes work. The machine is now working better and without noise. But how did they get there?

We cannot go to the dechetterie at present so are having to do our own green waste disposal, though we have always used compost bins, but now we have a mountain of tree cuttings to shred or burn. We don’t want to put smoke into the cleanest air we have seen for many many years! Every cloud has a silver lining, but we have no clouds currently, and no aircraft vapour trails. And brilliant clear night skies, with more stars visible than I've seen for years and Venus looking amazing in the western sky at night.

Keep safe, everyone.

Lockdown !

We’ve been in lockdown for two weeks now, to try to reduce the spread of the coronavirus COVID 19. We have to stay at home and can only go out individually, for a limited number of specifically permitted reasons, and not for anything else, under threat of fines and even imprisonment. We have to complete a French government certificate for every single trip out that we make, for inspection, and such things as shopping must be done as infrequently as possible and by only one person.

Only shops selling ‘essentials’ are open. We have seen no signs of panic buying and the shops that are open seem well stocked. Petrol and diesel prices have plummeted but no-one is buying much as we aren’t allowed to do any journeys. President Macron’s and Prime Minister Philippe’s speeches and announcements all along have been conducted in a strong, direct, positive manner making things very clear and giving confidence. Unlike in the US and in the UK until the last day or two.

The number of cases and the number of deaths here in France as a whole is the third  highest in Europe, but our region and department have lower than average numbers. France is a week or so ahead of the UK, Italy and Spain on the deaths timeline; the cases and deaths are running at about double the UK's rate but only a quarter to a half of Italy and Spain's numbers. However there are marked differences between the countries of the number of tests being undertaken, so there are not really comparable measures of case numbers.

The Chinese authorities, having taken very strong measures to close down movement and contact, now appear to be coming out of their crisis. Indeed they're sending medical supplies to Europe and elsewhere and are displaying greater world leadership on this crisis than the USA, which has hitherto always aimed to hold that position. Most European countries took nothing like as positive action as early as they should have with the result that many are suffering worse than China. Italy has been devastated and Spain has pretty nearly caught up with Italy now. France took a strong stance two weeks ago – a bit late but much more firm than most others, so is experiencing a slower build-up of deaths - trying to flatten the curve, though for most of Europe it still looks close to exponential growth. It's not a true exponential, of course, as it will flatten out at some point, but we need to see an inflection in the numbers before we can estimate when that will be.

Here in south-west France we are little affected other than locally coping with the lockdown. We are not aware yet of any cases nearby nor any deaths in our vicinity, but everyone here is abiding by the rules, so far as we can tell, to keep it that way. We can’t go helping anyone or having anyone here to help us, so most contact is by phone, message and Facebook. We can't go out for the day. One neighbour passes by the front of our housewith his dog, daily. We see another three sets in their respective back gardens, to speak with at a safe distance. Only one couple of British second-home owners here have stayed rather than going home to the UK. They are happy to stay here for the duration. All the other Brits here are residents and most are staying long term.

Our region, Nouvelle Aquitaine, is able to take cases from elsewhere in France - mostly the east and north - that are much harder hit, with a train full of serious cases just arrived in Bordeaux. 

We’ve lost a few events that we had planned, but it's best to minimise risk, we believe. Brittany Ferries have been their usual reasonable selves moving a booking back by six months; the course I was booked for, similarly. Ryanair, of course, were full of difficulties getting things done. They’ve promised a refund within 7 days but are now saying there’s a delay. Surprise, surprise!

So we’ve got lots of time on our hands.  I’ve got some more work done on the big stone wall but will run out of sand for mortar before I can finish it. Building supplies don't count as essentials (so most builders are out of work even though many of them are singletons who could work alone on their jobs if they could get supplies). And I’ve been doing some more fencing for the sheep, cutting up wood, cutting grass and trying to keep our pool cover from blowing away in the winds as the makers can’t come back to refix it until the crisis is over. Jeanne has been doing more work on the potager, which is now looking perfect, with most of the ground full of seeds for the season’s vegetables. But there’s space for tomatoes, courgettes, squash etc when and if we can buy seedlings from the garden centres.

The weather has been fine but has taken a turn back to wintry conditions with a bitter north wind today and snow forecast for tomorrow, whilst most of the spring flowers have finished and summer ones are budding.

The French government have announced a further two weeks of lockdown and increased fines for non-compliance, and we suspect there’ll be at least one more 2 week extension.

Keep helping to flatten the curve. Stay safe, everyone.