by Nearly 900 deaths were added to the UK figures today, just like yesterday and the day before. Nine hundred. Nine Hillsborough disasters. A dozen Grenfell Towers. Every day. Granted, some of the deaths, perhaps 100 a day, are people who die with Covid-19 rather than from it, but there are also vast numbers dying in care homes who aren’t being counted. The daily tally of people dying from Covid-19 is surely well over 1000.
Those numbers are terrifyingly high. But what really shocks me is how normal this seems to have become over there. What has happened to the country I was born and bred in? How has life in the UK become so cheap, all of a sudden? How has being unable to breathe and drowning in your fluids, while your family can’t even say goodbye to you, become so acceptable so quickly?
Here in Romania we’ll be in lockdown, with armed police, until mid-May at the earliest. I’m glad of that. I agree with whoever said that lifting the lockdown now would be like flushing half your antibiotics down the loo because you’re feeling a bit better, and anyway we’re yet to even properly reach the “feeling better” stage. A huge hole was blown in my teaching hours in mid-March, but my volume is starting to pick up. Yesterday I had that lesson with Cosmin’s friend – it was probably as good for my Romanian as it was for her English. Now she wants a lesson every day including weekends (after all, what is a weekend now?). She should improve quickly.
It’s my 40th birthday on Monday. Yikes! All this social distancing means I won’t be having the massive rip-roaring party I would have had otherwise.
Timișoara really is beautiful in spring, and here are some more photos of the bits of Timișoara that I’m still allowed to set foot in.
