03/08/20 Thorndon Country Park and personalised letter

A slightly cooler day today, and the "fatigue" back to normal so after lunch we went to Thorndon Country Park in Brentwood, expecting it to be reasonably quiet. How wrong can you be? Car parks pretty much full, and glad of the Blue Badge for getting us a spot. Visitor Centre open again (we didn't go in) and more people around than I think I've ever seen there. Had a good long walk but too many people for comfort, and constantly having to think about distancing and avoiding them takes much of the pleasure away. In fact I think about COVID-19 risk so much that it tends to drive cancer right out of my mind - unreasonable really, as one of them will probably kill me in time and the other one probably won't.

So now we await details of Boris's "enhanced shielding" for the elderly (apparently that now means over-50!) and vulnerable. I await my personalised letter with my individual risk rating, which has to be pretty high as I'm over 70 with a blood cancer.  I doubt it'll make much practical difference to me, as I had no intention of rushing out to shops and pubs and cinemas just yet. I shall continue to use my best-informed common sense as far as I can and if that coincides with government advice, so much the better. If it doesn't, that's just too bad. There's a long way to go before I shall feel safe doing anything much different from what I've been doing for the last three or four months. Basically I'm holding on for a vaccine that works for immune-compromised people and at least one effective treatment for early-stage COVID-19. If that takes us well into 2021, as I think it probably will, that's just too bad. I can wait...