charles barrow's writing

Back in February I wrote a post about preparing to move home, and making plans for the future. Well, what's that saying about God laughing while we make plans? As I was writing that, Covid-19 must have been in the news, albeit as a problem on a distant horizon, a problem that would surely never affect us here in England, but it clearly wasn't alarming enough for me to make mention of it, or think for one moment that it would affect the whole world to the degree that it has. I had no idea either, of course, that I'd lose my mum less than two months later. She was poorly, but she'd been poorly several times before and she'd pulled through. So circumstances change, and plans change with them. Back in Feb I was planning to find a new job, a new challenge to take my life in a different direction. Now I plan what I might have for lunch, what I could cook for dinner that would make a nice change. I plan to visit the supermarket, two days hence and remember the celery thi...

It is seems wilfully obtuse to put up a post here and not acknowledge what's happening in the world right now. I was going to write about moving home, which I will be doing in a couple of weeks time; moving county, moving from an island to the mainland. I will probably write about all these things in the coming weeks but it seems besides the point to write about them now. Having said all of that I'm not sure what I want to say about what's happening. I could get very angry and rant about how the British Government is ploughing its own dangerous furrow when it comes to responding to the emergency. It's gone full Brexit in ignoring everything other European countries are doing or, in fact, doing the opposite. If they have closed it, we have kept it open. While they are still testing people, we have stopped. It seems bloody minded, and perverse in the extreme - but then that's Boris Johnson in a nutshell. Someone suggested I should take the opportunity to promote m...