A Liberal Sprinkling Of Outrage:A Very English Scandal.

The Sexual Offences Act 1967 legalising homosexual acts between men over twenty-one (in private only) was passed, in England in Wales, the year after England had won the World Cup and two years after the serving Liberal MP for North Devon, Jeremy Thorpe, and the serving Liberal MP for Bodmin, Peter Bessell, had confided in each other that they were "a pair of old queens".

Both considered themselves bisexual but whereas Bessell felt himself to be roughly 20% gay, Thorpe estimated an 80% preference for the same sex. In A Very English Scandal (BBC1/iPlayer, originally shown back in May and June of 2018 but now available again because its sequel, of sorts, A Very British Scandal, is airing) we revisit the story of how Jeremy Thorpe's political career was completely ruined because of the lies he told himself about his sexuality, the lies he told his colleagues about his sexuality, and because the society that he operated in held homosexuality as such a gross, transgressive, and taboo act he felt he had to.

There's also the not inconsiderable fact that he conspired to have his former lover, Norman Scott (though, sometimes, Norman Josiff) murdered. Directed by Stephen Frears, from a book by John Preston, and written by Russell T Davies it is played out, of course, as something of a romp, Murray Gold's score is alarmingly jaunty and the inclusion of such luminaries on the soundtrack as Alvin Stardust, Mud, Dawn, and Paper Lace takes you down nostalgic musical avenues rarely visited these days.

We begin with Labour's Harold Wilson in power, in a world of smoky dining rooms serving inedible looking food to grey men in grey suits. Jeremy Thorpe (an excellent Hugh Grant) is being blackmailed by his ex-lover Scott (Ben Whishaw) for the princely sum of £30. Flashbacks to their "very heaven" affair reveal Scott to be a naive and confused stable boy who makes up for what he lacks in confidence by retreating into fantasy worlds.

He is a confused young man with clear psychiatric issues. When he visits the House of Commons with his beloved Jack Russell, Thorpe shows him a kindness he is not used to, puts him up at his mother Ursula's (Patricia Hodge) nice country house, before moving him into something of a grace and favour property. Thorpe gives Scott James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room to read, calls him "little bunny", and asks him to get on the bed and bend over while he applies the Vaseline.

Which Thorpe calls "every bachelor's friend". Frears and Davies very much have their cake and eat it with A Very English Scandal. They're almost indulgent in showing how hard life was for a gay man in the sixties and seventies (words like buggers, queers, and poofters are bandied about freely and without fear of censure, and when Thorpe described himself as 'musical' it's not because he's a keen violinist) but, at the same time, it's always made abundantly clear that though Thorpe may be a victim of the era's homophobia he is, in every other way, very much the powerful, and guilty, party.

Thorpe and Scott enter a passionate, and risky (kissing on the bus, hand jobs opposite the House of Parliament), affair but as Thorpe's political career goes from strength to strength, and what I felt had parallels with the dysfunctional relationship between Joe Orton and Kenneth Hallliwell in another Frears' piece - Prick Up Your Ears, Scott begins to feel sidelined, abandoned, and Thorpe starts trying to bin him off.

When Thorpe tries to pack Scott off to France, Scott becomes angry and enters a state of denial in which he informs people he's been "infected with the virus of homosexuality". So Thorpe calls Bessell (Alex Jennings) in to do his bidding for him. Bessell will pay off Scott and Thorpe will be kept entirely out of it.

But Scott is too much of a loose canon and as Jeremy Thorpe rises to become leader of the Liberal party, we see Scott move to Dublin, overindulge in drink and drugs, and try and inform the police of his and Thorpe's affair. They're not interested. Thorpe falls into a relationship with Lyn (Michelle Fox) who sets him up a some kind of swinging Sixties Austin Powers figure from her boutique and when he lets her down too many times he ends up living in a caravan in Wales where he starts an affair with vulnerable young widow Gwen (Eve Myles).

Thorpe, for his part, enters into a sham marriage with the young and naive Caroline (Alice Orr-Ewing). They have a child, Rudolph, but Caroline, distressed after a call from Scott, has a fatal car crash in Basingstoke of all places. Later, Thorpe marries again. This time to the more formidable, and more worldly Marion (Monica Dolan) but Bessell and Thorpe's plan to pay Scott off and keep the story of their affair secret isn't working.

Scott, quite simply, won't stay quiet. So Thorpe and Bessell hatch a plan to go much further. They hatch a plan to have Scott killed but that plan, for various reasons, does not go well. A Very English Scandal tells the story of what went wrong with that plan and how that affected both Thorpe's and Scott's lives as well as the lives of very many people close to them.

I'd known a bit about this story for years, I was a child when it came to court and didn't really understand it, and though A Very English Scandal surely takes artistic license when it feels like doing so, it also does a very good job of taking us back to a time when Anthony Wedgwood-Benn (still his name then) could be summarily dismissed as a 'Trot', and a time when people were made to suffer so badly for their sexual preferences that their lives and the lives of their family could be destroyed on a whim.

A horrifically scabrous father of the bride wedding speech and a virulently homophobic judge, Sir Joseph Cantley (Paul Freeman), show how unenlightened the times were but A Very English Scandal doesn't dwell on that once it's made its point. There is humour too. Scott and Gwen making their caravan rock, and 8th Earl of Arran (David Bamber), and his house full of badgers, describing how he's received a parcel of shit, "human shit", through the post.

Arran's wife Fiona Gore (Susan Wooldridge) is good to, proudly beaming as her husband boasts of her having power boat racing skills to rival Donald Campbell. Credit too should go to Blake Harrison as bungling hitman Andrew 'Gino' Newton, Michele Dotrice (Betty in Some Mothers Do' Ave Em) as Edna Friendship - a landlady that looks after Scott, Peter F Gardiner as David Steel, Paul Hilton as David Holmes - a slightly daft accomplice of Bessell and Thorpe, and the always excellent Jason Watkins as Emlyn Hooson, a Welsh Liberal who covets Thorpe's job.

Arran actually gets the most passionate speech in the entire piece when he speaks movingly about young gay men killing themselves. It's not suicide he says, it's murder. Murder by the laws of the land. That Stephen Frears and Russell T Davies have told a story about such a bleak time in our history and still filled it with laughter and capers does not detract from A Very English Scandal but simply adds to its power. I'll watch A Very British Scandal soon. It'll do well to be as good.

Fleapit revisited:Apocalypse Now.

"This is the end, beautiful friend. This is the end, my only friend - the end" - The End, The Doors

Francis Ford Coppola's epic 1979 film Apocalypse Now (shown recently on BBC1 and still available on iPlayer) is the film that, infamously, starts with the end. Not just The Doors song The End but what looks something like the end of all reason and sanity.

"Saigon. Shit, I'm still only in Saigon" - Willard

If not an end to hostility. Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) wakes up in a Saigon hotel room, surrounded by booze, war paraphernalia, and, most of all, memories. Memories he can't escape. He pours more liquor down his throat, punches a mirror, and writhes around drunkenly on his blood stained bed sheets in his pants. Quite remarkably, Captain Benjamin Willard is one of the more sober characters in Apocalypse Now.

He is summoned to Nha Trang and ordered, by Lieutenant General R. Corman (G. D. Spradlin) and Colonel G. Lucas (Harrison Ford) - as well as the mysterious Jerry (Jerry Ziesmer), to "terminate with extreme prejudice" the command of Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando). 

Kurtz appears to have gone rogue, very likely insane. He's crossed the border from Vietnam into Cambodia with a Montagnard army he's assembled who worship him as a God. His methods, if they can be called that, seem to have gone too far. For the US military. During the Vietnam War. Willard is told his mission "does not exist" and "nor will it ever exist"

"I was going to the worst place in the world - and I didn't even know it yet" - Willard

Still, he accepts it. With some trepidation. Willard had killed before. Plenty of times. But never an American. Never an officer. He boards a boat captained by the officious Chief Petty Office George Phillips (Albert Hall). Its crew are boys forced to live a life that would break most men.

Gunner's Mate 3rd Class Tyrone "Mr Clean" Miller (a young Laurence Fishburne) is a cocksure seventeen year old New Yorker prone to singing and dancing along to The Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari, Gunner's Mate 3rd Class Lance B. Johnson (Sam Bottoms) is a California surf dude fond of hallucinogenic drugs, and Engineman 3rd Class Jay 'Chef' Hicks (Frederic Forrest) - a New Orleans sauce chef who reads Henry Miller's Sexus and would rather be anywhere in the world than in the Vietnamese jungle fighting a war.

That's understandable. Other than mangoes, very little comes out of the jungle. There are tigers, there is the threat of malaria, there are the Viet-Cong, and, in this world, there are US soldiers who have gone completely loco. If there is one small criticism of Apocalypse Now it is that there is not one Vietnamese character who is fleshed out, ascribed motivation, or even given more than a single cursory line to speak.

If the film was made now, I suspect it would be a different matter. But Coppola's intention is to tell a story not specific to Vietnam, but universal in its reach. Adapted from Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness about a European sailor on the Congo river in Africa during colonial rule, Apocalypse Now explores themes of alienation, power, morality, and what war does to men.

We see beautiful landscapes (shot, I believe, in the Philippines) but we see those beautiful landscapes scarred by man's hostility to his fellow man. We see forests of palm trees burning down, we see entire villages torched, we hear the sound of helicopter rotor blades, and we see those helicopters (one emblazoned with the legend - DEATH FROM ABOVE - in a film set in 1979!) fly low over Vietnamese men, women, and children as desensitised teenage American soldiers fire bullets into them.

The constant shots of Budweiser (product placement or is Coppola making a point about American values here?) and surf talk sit uneasily with this industrial scale murder. Not least when Willard and the men he is travelling up river with encounter the deranged, violent, and surf obsessed Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall). A man who, after napalming a village, calls the Vietnamese "fucking savages" for having the temerity of retaliate.

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning" - Kilgore  

Kilgore is desperate to surf in the blood stained waves of the South China Sea and the fact that "Charlie don't surf" means he can excuse flying over entire villages of Vietnamese (Charlie is far from the worst racist slur they endure, elsewhere we hear the Vietnamese referred to as "gooks" and, Jeremy Clarkson's old favourite "slopes"), blasting out Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, while summarily executing each and every person he sees.

If a man as clearly deranged as Kilgore is allowed to stay in position, Willard starts to wonder in a voice over provided by war correspondent Michael Herr, then just how bad is Kurtz? Can he really be worse than Kilgore or is there another agenda? Is Kurtz insane or is war itself a form of insanity? Are the insane ones the only ones who can survive, thrive even, in such inhumane circumstances?

Kurtz thinks, and we see Willard begin to understand his logic, that the US are fighting the war as tourists. They're drinking, dancing, surfing, smoking dope, dropping acid, and lusting over Playboy Playmates who have been helicoptered in to keep morale high while the Viet-Cong are left to lead far simpler lives with a far simpler motivation to fight.

Because if they don't they will lose - and they will die. It's quite an ask to suggest that the US military should have fought the Vietnam War, one that resulted in somewhere between one and four million human deaths, with even more lethal force than they did but the fact that this question is even asked shows what war does to a man's soul.

Willard certainly starts acting as if he's bought into that line, Kurtz' line, of thinking and as his boat journeys further into the interior of the South East Asian jungle we also journey deeper into the interior of Willard's, and - by extension - man's, soul. It gets darker, it gets weirder, and it gets strangely beautiful. Coppola has filmed scenes of massacres and bloodshed in an almost balletic fashion and when Willard finally reaches Kurtz's HQ in an abandoned Angkor temple it is more reminiscent of Skull Island in the 1933 version of King Kong than any normal military facility.

There's an element of Jonestown to it as well, and a feel we have reached Dante's Seventh Circle of Hell. The endgame, it will come as no surprise, does not look promising. Willard is primed for an existential debate with Kurtz following an overnight stay at a colonial era plantation owned by Hubert Desmarais (Christian Marquand) in which wine and accordion music soundtrack a philosophical debate about the rights and wrongs of colonialism, Communism, war, and life itself.

Willard is even treated to a rare night of passion with the young widow Roxanne Sarrault (Aurore Clement). The debate is heated and, unseen, we must assume the sex to have been too but it's only a primer for Willard's eventual, long awaited, meeting with Kurtz.

"Are you an assassin" - Kurtz

"I'm a solider" - Willard

"You're neither. You're an errand boy. Sent by grocery clerks. To collect a bill" - Kurtz

Brando is, of course, captivating as Kurtz. He uses his charisma, his reputation, and his acting smarts to completely own the scenes he's in. He even demanded, apparently, that Dennis Hopper (who plays a photojournalist in thrall to Kurtz) was not allowed on set at the same time as him (it's a rare film in which Hopper only plays the fourth most bonkers character).

But not even Brando can entirely dominate Apocalypse Now. It's an ensemble piece in which each and every character, no matter how big or small, punches above their weight. It's a dark, often uncomfortable, ride into man's complex nature and how war allows us to indulge our most transgressive desires but, at its heart, it remains a sense of humanity.

When a leading character dies for the first time it is handled with grace and panache but it is rendered shocking, pointless, and a tragic waste of life. Many of those waging war in Vietnam had no idea what they were fighting for yet died senseless deaths fighting for it all the same. War doesn't make sense. Why should those fighting it expect it to?

Growing Up Absurd:In My Skin S1.

Drinking in the park, throwing up, eating chips on rainy streets lined with nondescript shopping parades, trying to avoid bullies, and hanging around in playgrounds you've long since outgrown because there's absolutely nothing in the small town you've grown up in for you to do.

These are the recognisable rites of passage for almost everyone who grew up in the UK and Kayleigh Llewellyn's dark comedy In My Skin (BBC3/iPlayer, originally shown in spring of 2020 - not quite sure how I missed it back then) paints these rites in a way that is both bleakly familiar and, somehow, grimly romantic.

If the story that In My Skin tells is quite specific then the background it plays out against is anything but. Welsh teenager Bethan Gwyndaff (a hugely impressive Gabrielle Creevy) is, on the surface, a fairly normal girl. She's not one of the popular kids but she's not without friends either.

She's got her gang. There's openly gay, in a very homophobic environment, Travis (James Wilbraham) and there's Lydia (Poppy Lee Friar) who seems hellbent on getting into each and every piece of trouble available. They have a bond of love and trust between them that seems solid. But Bethan's home life is far trickier.

Though she lies that her parents have a house in Italy, take her to ballet, and make her watch Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse the reality is that they are dysfunctional beyond belief. Her mother Katrina (played by Jo Hartley with, according to my friend Michelle, the dead eyed stare of Paul Daniels - I'd agree but also throw Willie Nelson into the mix) is severely bipolar, prone to saying cruel and hurtful things to Bethan, and to washing the car in the middle of the night while blasting out New Order's Blue Monday.

Father Dilwyn (Rhodri Meilir) is worse. A cider swigging Hell's Angel who hates 'poofs', neglects both his wife and daughter in favour of grim drinking sessions in rough estate pubs, and has an abusive streak to boot. He makes Frank Gallagher from Shameless look the absolute model of decorum.

Bethan, understandably, lies about her father's drinking and her mum getting sectioned to friends and teachers alike. When she gets one of her poems published in an anthology, Bethan - a budding writer anyway - comes to the attention of the most popular girl in the school, Poppy (Zadeiah Campbell-Davies), which causes Bethan's anxiety, and obsession, to go into overdrive.

Bethan worries she's too common for Poppy but it's clear, or at least as clear as anything can be in a troubled teenager's mind, from the off that but Poppy and Bethan like each other. Not just as friends but, potentially, physically and romantically as well.

Which isn't easy as neither of them consider themselves to be gay. But an even bigger issue is whether or not the tangled web of lies that Bethan has constructed to protect herself, and her family, will eventually be her undoing. Will she remember what lie she told what person and how will she stop people finding out the awful truth about her life? Would it not even be better to simply tell the truth?

The potential unravelling of Bethan is the crux of a drama that takes in such typical teenage fare as calling older people 'crusty old dicks', backchatting teachers, having periods in gym class ("Auntie Flo's in town"), and trying to make sense of one's own feelings for others just at the same time as you become more self-aware than ever.

Creevy's performance seems effortless as she shows us how Bethan navigates this minefield with, despite a few almost dreamlike sequences, nothing more than a pensive stare here or a throwaway comment there. She captures, and In My Skin does too, teenage awkwardness and teenage heartbreak, perfectly. Bethan is a sixteen year old girl but one who, in many ways, circumstance has made wise beyond her years.

By the second episode she receives, or appears to receive, some utterly shocking news that will set her life on a different course entirely but she's still young enough to joke in the park with Lydia and Travis about a girl who rumour insists has had sex with a frozen sausage that then snapped off inside her. 

Some of the supporting cast are painted in broader strokes than others. Aled ap Steffan plays school bully Stan Priest as if a compilation of every school bully that's ever lived's greatest hits and Laura Checkley's PE teacher, Mrs Blocker, is ludicrous and (initially) cruel without a single shred of self-awareness. As the series develops Checkley seems to lean heavily into this caricature and the results become ever more rewarding.

If you suspend disbelief while she's on screen at least. That's perhaps the biggest problem with In My Skin. Billed as a 'dark comedy' I didn't laugh out loud once during five entire episodes. There were amusing lines for sure - not least poor Alfred (Dave Wong) in his tuxedo obsessing over Charlotte Church - but the darkness outweighed the comedy to such an extent it could almost have played as a completely straight drama.

But where would that have left Mrs Blocker and Stan Priest? Even Nana Margie (Di Botcher), Bethan's nan and the only sympathetic character in her entire family, is played as a classic sitcom character right from the off. If this had been an American series there'd have been canned applause every time she appeared on the screen.

Credit, too, should go to Alexandria Riley as Bethan's supportive English teacher Mrs Riley, to Suzanne Packer as a nurse, Nurse Digby, at the psychiatric hospital Katrina ends up in, to timid victim of school bullying Lorraine (Georgia Furlong), and to Richard Corgan who has the unenviable task of embodying the viler traits of toxic male behaviour in Tony Chippy, a man who'll give a schoolgirl a free chip butty if there's a blow-job in it.

Some of the crude behaviour and jokes sat uneasily with the often sensitive subject matter but that's, as far as I can see, how life is. A series of hugely important, and emotional, events stitched together with humour and friendship so that those events become bearable. Kayleigh Llewellyn, and Gabrielle Creevy especially, did a fine job of illustrating that. In My Skin series one ends with a very obvious signpost towards what might happen in series two. I'll be finding out very soon if I've been sold a dummy.

A Very Covid Xmas.

Staying in is the new going out. That's what they've been saying for years now but it's never been more true than it has since March 2020 and the beginning of this seemingly endless pandemic. But even in the peak of the pandemic I got out for my allowed hour, or sometimes not even that, walk each day.

I'm not a fan of staying in. Staying in is not my idea of fun. I go a bit stir crazy. I don't have a garden so I miss the fresh air and I miss seeing other people - even if they're only walking past me. But if I was to be forced to stay in I would definitely choose to be forced to stay in during winter rather than summer. 

Christmas or not. So when, last Tuesday, I started to develop a tickly cough when visiting the National Gallery to look at a Poussin exhibition I feared the worst immediately. I'd managed to avoid catching Covid for over nineteen months of the pandemic but this cough, which was soon followed by a sore throat, a headache, a runny nose, and tiredness, seemed to fit the description of Covid a little too well.

Specifically the new omicron variant that is rife in London and starting to infiltrate new territories in our woefully governed and divided nation. So instead of going for a pint and taking in the Icelandic film Lamb as I'd planned I got on the train, went home, got in bed, and fell asleep.

Later that evening, when I woke up, the coughing had become raspier and more regular so the next day I walked down to the Lewisham Lorry Park in Catford (incidentally on Canadian Avenue, the road my friend Bugsy's dad grew up on) and got myself a PCR test. I had used my last lateral flow test kit and nearby chemists had signs in the windows explaining they had none and were not expecting any any time soon.

Supply chain issues caused by the government and their careless Brexit or panic buying caused by the government and their appalling handling of the pandemic, who knows? As I walked to Catford and back (a two hour round trip but I couldn't go on the bus and didn't fancy cycling) I started to feel much better and convinced myself it was probably just a cold.

When I got back home, out of that fresh air, the symptoms came back quickly and surely enough the next day it was confirmed that I did, indeed, have a positive case of Covid. I'd not been out much and I'd worn masks everywhere I had to but this omicron (if it is that, I can't be certain) is very transmissible as we can all see by the record breaking number of cases each day. Yesterday, the UK topped 100,000 positive cases in one day for the first time in the whole pandemic.

I did host a Xmas dinner for a group of friends in Brixton Saturday last (and I have since discovered that Lambeth, Brixton specifically, is the epicentre of the omicron outbreak) but, thankfully, not one other friend in attendance at that event has caught Covid as a result of that. So I'm not sure if I picked it up there, on the bus home that night, or somewhere else completely. I'm just glad my friends are okay.

Most people who catch Covid will never know where they caught it and, mostly, it doesn't matter. Luckily for me, and I write this with cautious optimism and the knowledge that I may soon be proved wrong, omicron seems to be a milder variant than previous ones. Either that or the fact that I have been treble jabbed (I got my booster in two weeks ago today at the Tessa Jowell Health Centre in East Dulwich) means my symptoms, though grotty, have not been particularly debilitating.

I'd taken a couple of days (Friday and Monday) off work anyway (with the idea of attending art exhibitions) but my boss kindly allowed me to convert those to sick days. I also had to cancel plans to attend my works Xmas dinner at ASK in Basingstoke and to meet with my parents the next day for a Xmas meal at The Spruce Goose pub, also in Basingstoke.

I won't be seeing them, or any family, over Xmas so I was looking forward to that as I was the calzone I'd ordered for my dinner at ASK and the company I'd have spent the evening with. The booze too, to be honest.

As the week carried on the symptoms took turns. It started with a cough (a title Hot Chocolate firmly rejected for one of their biggest hits) but the headache that came next was the most painful. Not least combined with constant coughing which created the effect of feeling like my skull was rattling. Thankfully, ibuprofen, in the form of my favoured brand - Nurofen Express, not only mitigated against the worst of it but pretty much got rid of it completely.

The runny nose never got too bad, the sore throat threatened but never really developed into anything that Strepsils couldn't deal with, and the tiredness was a bit annoying at first but soon developed into something almost serene. I could just lie on my bed, or sofa, and drift off into a world of fantastic fevered dreams. 

I had a dream about boxing last night. I'm not a fan of boxing but in my dream I loathed it with a passion and couldn't understand why I'd decided to sign up to fight a professional boxer. The other symptom, and people don't seem to talk about this one, I've enjoyed is having the shits.

Not to the degree that I am likely to shit myself in public (and not just because I'm not going out in public). But just needing to go more often. In the last ten days I've performed more 'movements' than a touring classical orchestra.

Sunday was the first day that things really started to pick up and on Monday I even ordered an Indian takeaway from Babur. I had dal makhni, pulao rice, chapati, onion bhajis, and an Alphonso mango lassi (who is Alphonso?) and it was delicious. I was excited enough just to be able to taste it. Even though my sense of taste never completely left me food, until that point, just tasted a bit weird, a bit different.

I went back to work, I watched The Manchurian Canidate, All The President's Men, my favourite quiz shows (University Challenge, Only Connect, and Mastermind) and lots and lots of news. My Dad did a Kahoot quiz for his friends and I managed to win that which proved to me that my neither my brain nor my reflexes had been affected by the Covid.

I listened to a lot of music (Late Junction, Huey, Craig Charles Funk and Soul Show, Out of Limits, and the Freak Zone as well as ploughing through some selections of Seun Kuti's Baker's Dozen from theQuietus and investigating the Kronos Quartet and their collaborators) and I received loads of lovely messages from friends and acquaintances on Facebook and WhatsApp.

I was also cheered up immensely by the North Shropshire by election result! Best of all, were the calls I received from Adam, Shep, Michelle (and Evie, very excited to have a wobbly tooth and awaiting a pound coin from the tooth fairy), Mum and Dad, Simon, and Ben. I received some lovely Xmas cards and even got Strepsils and Nurofen through the post (thanks mum) as well as a couple of lateral flow test kits.

Best of all (even better than getting Co-Op to deliver me San Miguel at 9am on a Monday morning - I didn't drink it until twelve hours later) was Michelle's wonderful 'care package' of Snowdonia cheeses. There was Green Thunder (Cheddar cheese with roasted garlic & herbs), Red Devil (Red Leicester with habanero chilli and peppers), and Black Bomber (extra mature Chedder). They came with two choices of chutney (balsamic onion and fig and apple) and some fancy savoury wafers.

I've just started on them and they're bloody lovely. Such a lovely gift and such a touching thought. I'm saving some for Christmas Day as, for the second year running - and the second year ever, I'll be spending that day alone. I'd rather be somewhere hot and sunny but it won't be too bad now I can get out for a walk - even if rain is forecast.

In fact, as from tomorrow, I am 'free'. I'm allowed out again. A couple of days back, they changed the rules so that with two negative lateral flow tests twenty-four hours apart you can end your isolation after just seven days (thanks to Doreen, Kathy, Cheryl, and Rob for all giving me the heads up on that. That rule came in a little too late to make much difference for me but, truth be told, this isolation has not been as bad as I feared.

I'm one of the lucky ones. I didn't get particularly ill. I didn't die (like over five million people worldwide have done already of this bloody thing) and everyone was really nice and kept my spirits up. I even caught up on some sleep and saved some money.

Having said that though, I am really looking forward to going out and getting some fresh air tomorrow. I'll probably just go for a walk (I can't rule out stopping for a pint but a solo drink on Xmas Eve may be a bit bleak) and then, with antibodies as my friend, I'll be free to hopefully do some social stuff over the next week or so. That's if we're not forced into another lockdown but having done fifty days without seeing anyone at the start of 2020 and even longer at the start of 2021 this ten day period has flown by.

All being well, Xmas will pass off pleasantly and quietly and for New Year I'm hoping to be up in Wales. I'll enjoy it all even more for having this little brush with Covid. Once again, thanks to everyone for being so bloody lovely. Have a great Xmas and let's hope 2022 is, finally, an improvement.