If it's Tuesday ...

Every Tuesday, regular as the tide, the ONS produce a set of figures, they're not exactly entertaining figures, they are the death toll for the week before last. They make for a grim read but if you want to get some proper idea of the what is going on these days, these figures are essential. If you were, for example, to have only the daily figure announced at the Coronavirus Update briefings held by the Government (each afternoon, a 90 minute exercise in futilty and self-preening) you would be seriously misled. 923 dead for the day they will say or some number, it matters not what the number is because it is a meaningless figure. It gives the impression that such and such a number died in the last 24 hours when the figure given actually represents the total accumulated that they counted in the last 24 hours. A man could die on Wednesday and not be counted until Friday, indeed a man could die one week and not be counted until two weeks later. These daily tallies serve no purpose other than to scare children and those with no sense. Indeed a weariness spreads that says "Hey Ho" when the figures come out. But figures do matter and the figures released by the ONS on Tuesday 14 April were very disturbing. Let me quote from the report:

• The provisional number of deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 3 April 2020 (Week 14) was 16,387; this represents an increase of 5,246 deaths registered compared with the previous week (Week 13) and 6,082 more than the five-year average.
• Of the deaths registered in Week 14, 3,475 mentioned “novel coronavirus (COVID-19)”, which was 21.2% of all deaths; this compares with 539 (4.8% of all deaths) in Week 13.
  
  

Why is this disturbing other than the large rise in COVID-19 figures? Well what isn't shown quite so clearly is that the rise from week 13 (total deaths 11,141) to week 14 in Non-COVID-19 deaths is 2,310. Since everyone is supposed to be sitting comfortably under house arrest how come so many more are dying? Could it be that the measures taken to save lives are, in fact, taking lives? The A&E departments at our hospitals report that they are hardly seeing any patients, acute surgical wards in hospitals are lying empty, patients with chronic conditions are simply not going to hospital. And given that daily and nightly bombardment of nightmare stories of deaths on TV who could blame them? We seem to have "Saved our NHS" for the sole purpose of killing COVID-19 patients.
I read that the peak number of cases was passed on April 8 but that figures are not falling (well they won't if you keep adding in cases from two weeks ago). The law keeping us penned in our bathrooms is due to be reviewed on April 16, it's reckoned there'll be at least three more weeks of this murderous economic suicide.
Of course, one week's figures do not mark a trend and it may just be a blip (I love that word "Lies, damn lies and blips!"). We shall see, that's if we are still around. Hey Ho!

Poor Sam

Poor Sam.

There he was impaled on street railings outside a tall apartment block. The spikes clear through his bloody abdomen and penetrating an eye socket in a most distressing fashion. Poor Sam had died by falling off the roof, it was clear.
Yet in Sammy's right hand a cut throat razor and on his neck several shallow cuts and one huge slice across the arteries and wind pipe. Poor Sam had cut his throat, nay nearly sliced his head off and  then fallen off the roof.
Still and all next to poor Sam's corpse a broken glass and a bottle of wine with a strong smell of almonds. And Sam, well he stank of booze. His bloods, when they were eventually done, showed he'd have died of alcohol poisoning if the cyanide hadn't gotten to him first.
At the inquest the jury heard that the safety rail on the roof was faulty and  had given way and juries, it is well known,  hate to give a verdict of suicide so poor Sam was deemed to have met a death by misadventure.
But the coroner, who, like you, had listened to all this with an increasing sense of disbelief, and who was aware of increasing numbers of similar deaths in the area and that there was a rash of sudden railing impalings (but not in Sweden where railings were padded as a precaution) wasn't having any of it so he sent poor Sam back to the pathologist, a Dr Mallard, who told to me this sad tale, at great rambling length.
This time it was  found that lodged in poor Sam's mushed up brain were the remains of a .22 slug; from the kind of gun, it is said, that is favoured by a lady.
Soon after they arrested a Miss Otis, there was gunshot residue on her velvet gown, and so they took her away to the jail but an angry mobbed lynched her and hung from an old willow tree but that is by the way.
As for poor Sam ... well there was yet a further examination and it seems that on his way down from roof to earth Sam's last breath  took in a passing  virion, which lodged in his airway and was later mopped up by a swab and taken to a lab and expanded by magic into millions of strands of virus nucleic acid. Poor Sam, unlikely as it may seem, it turned out poor Sam died of Covid19, sure he did, it says so on his  death certificate.
He lies forgotten in an unmarked but much disturbed hole, a caution against straying down Lover's Lane, watching too many detectives on TV and jumping to the wrong surmise.

Red, White and Blues

The weekend in black and white is here.

... to look at things in bloom

On this fine April Saturday, whilst the dead Christ is allegedly off on the harrowing of Hull, I thought some cheery blossom would be apt. Nobody has ever put cherry blossom and Easter together before, have they?

Oh very well then, if you must ...

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

                                    

                                  A. E Houseman  A Shropshire Lad

Fish and Chips

Fridays are usually the busiest days for chippies, some say it's a throwback to Christian dietary interference on eating meat on that day or maybe Friday was payday and money was available or, and I think is more likely, good fish and chips are simply delicious and irresistible!  This Good Friday, however, many chip shops are closed and I suspect they will stay that way forever due to Government interference on civil liberty. Life after this phoney plague and unnecessary mass house arrest will be dull and impoverished; you might almost wish you had died.

This jolly sign was on Greevegate, Hunstanton. No trip to the seaside is complete without some fish and chips so we dutifully consumed some in a restaurant just down the road from here. Well I have to fully research my posts don't I?

St George's Guildhall, King's Lynn

As if the guildhall I posted yesterday wasn't enough there's another one just along the road, St George's Guildhall on King Street. This too is early 15^th century and claims to be "the oldest and largest complete medieval Guildhall in England with an unrivalled history as a venue for theatrical production." A local story has it that during a plague in London Shakespeare came to King's Lynn to stay at a mate's house along with his merry band of cut throats, imps, pimps and banjo players and performed one of his plays (what he wrote) here. It's a good story and King's Lynn has been dining out on it for centuries. Now academics seem to support it and academics have a direct line to God's own truth as we all know.
The place as you might imagine has history, a history which is too long for me to even attempt to condense and you can read all about it here.
It's now a gallery, theatre, arty smarty place with a cafe in the cellar (or undercroft as the locals like to call it) where subversives meet to plot the downfall of western civilisation, smokers can stand outside...

The Guildhall, King's Lynn

I posted the Guildhall on the Saturday Market before, here, but I don't think I came close to showing its full splendour. This stitch-up is, I think, a bit better. It's a little gem, no strike that, it's a big gem, a Koh-i-Noor of building. It dates from the 1420s with later bits and bobs. There's a dry as dust architectural description here but you can skip that and just stand back, let your eyes feast on its beauty.