Covid

I have decided to divorce my wife after 31 years on scientific grounds. Though perfectly happy, on reassessing my original decision to enter matrimony it has emerged that at no point was that choice subject to peer review, there was no randomised control trial, the experiment could not be replicated and the data-set on which I based my decision failed to provide the levels of statistical confidence required. In reality, what you don’t know is always more critical than what you do I don’t think my decision to marry was bad, but it was definitely unscientific. Most important decisions are. Indeed if one phrase has most irritated me in the past few months, it is ‘the science’. What is ‘the science’ on masks?

The whole of Surrey and south-west London seem to have gone abroad on holiday so I’ve got my sanity back. All the people who were working from home because they couldn’t risk Covid-19 but who had to go out walking and cycling in the countryside all day long have simply vanished. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of the Covid-phobics have got on planes and enthusiastically breathed as much re--circulated air as it takes to get them to a villa by the sea. The cyclists and the runners and the ramblers with backpacks with cooking pots sticking out of the top have all evidently decided they didn’t need to bother me any more by trespassing through my horses’ field, and have gone somewhere they really wanted to be. That was half the problem.

A nurse friend recently finished six weeks in a Covid intensive care unit where she witnessed many deaths and always ensured that nobody died alone. She sat holding a hand, listening, reassuring. Now on leave, she is writing down some of her experiences with the dying. A wise priest I knew said that no matter how strong your faith, your view of what happens at death and ‘the life of the world to come’ should be an agnostic one. But he still recounted some remarkable things he witnessed when sitting with the dying, and my nurse friend described similar experiences.