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Thursday 30th 47F, heavy overcast, with light drizzle and an easterly breeze.
How do I count our 48 days of very careful isolation now? When I had to break mine [and ours] yesterday to collect a parcel.
Two parcels have to go back. So I shall have to take further precautions to return them to a packet posting center. Today I wore disposable gloves, safety glasses, a little-used waterproof jacket and a dust mask. There was nobody else in the village shop at the time. Except for the jolly, lady shopkeeper of course.
A number of parcel delivery services and online dealers are showing zero customer care in this pandemic. If you pay for home delivery then that is what you should get. Not having to risk your life going to a shop, supermarket or petrol station. Where you have to queue just to collect a package in a peopled situation because nobody really seems to care about the death toll.
Once home, the parcels and the items were treated as highly suspect until wiped down with soapy water. Plenty of hand washing to follow. We are both feeling a little unwell again. With headaches, sore throats, general tiredness and malaise. No shortness of breath though.
Our symptoms seem come and go at random. It could well be agricultural spraying. We go outside all the time. So could be recontaminated with toxins at intervals. Farmers never give a damn about spraying in a gale. Or close to homes and schools when everybody is there. This is probably why they closed all the rural schools.
I have witnessed dozens of cases of farmers spraying in gales. Even right beside a packed, coastal holiday park. With hundreds of children playing on the other side of a low hedge as the spray visibly blew across the entire park. As an octogenarian lumbered around in his rusty old tractor with the spray bar 3' above the crop. There is no requirement for them to have a large noticeboard on their spraying machine. Clearly stating which [possibly] illegal substance is now on the air. They are constantly finding residues of substances in the drinking water which were never licensed for use in Denmark. I was often sprayed while out cycling. I would round a corner to find a huge machine spraying right right up to the verge.
We had another, large, food parcel delivered from a distant, online supermarket. My wife washed everything, where it was possible and put it all away. Items with a long shelf life, which cannot be washed, are stored on open shelves. Hopefully to lose any likely contamination before use. Not sure how well that works . Particularly given the news about the Jinping virus still being found in the air and on surfaces in Wuhan.
We are limiting ourselves to once a fortnight orders with this online supermarket company. With more regular online shopping from local branches of another national chain. The one which uses "personal shoppers."
A fresh bag of our favourite, organic carrots was white with mold when we opened it. When you can't just "nip down to the shop" any more, that makes a huge dent in our diet. We tend to have carrots instead of boiled potatoes these days. Organic potatoes have been the size of grapes recently. Which is far more work than they are worth. We used to eat a lot of organic lettuce too but it has not been available for well over a year. Not even when I was still shopping myself. Finding an edible cherry tomato in the supermarkets is all but hopeless. They always taste rotten from day 1.
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