Slave labour

What better way to wish Happy Birthday to Mrs Ottawacker than to give her the pleasure of shovelling the snow off the drive first thing in the morning. And, of course, to have the indefatigable Ottawacker Jr to help her?

One day, and this day will come sooner than I fear, one of these two is going to ask the question: just what the feck do you think you are doing standing there with that camera while we are killing ourselves clearing the drive? That is a bridge I will have to jump off when I cross it.

Some might have spent the day before a 5-week trip doing things related to the trip – like, say, packing. Not me though. Despite being well enough to shovel more of the drive than his mother, Ottawacker Jr was showing definite signs of being sick – and so we kept him off school as a precaution. So we went to McDonald’s for breakfast (haute cuisine all the way) and basically did a few errands, including plenty of reading (I found a Brave and Bold book on eBay that I remember having as a child – tales of Beowulf, Sinbad and other heroes – so we read this together, he correcting my pronunciation where necessary, me offering to stop reading if he wasn’t happy).

But mostly I spent the day in silent second guessing myself. Should I be going on this trip at all? The mother of a friend of mine had recently posted on Facebook a polemic by some right-wing American nut (is that tautology?) claiming that the coronavirus Covid19 was a sort of biological warfare-related mistake by the Chinese government. Essentially what he claimed was that Wuhan, being the centre of Chinese biological experiments, has a centre in which the novel coronavirus was hatched and developed. It was then, primarily due to slack security protocols, released into the general environment by underpaid workers selling the test animals to street vendors for a little extra cash.

If you get beyond the casual racism of this – and the lazy stereotyping of the Chinese as incompetent, underpaid, unscrupulous slobs who’d eat anything if it was fried up in a wok – you come to an even more startling road block. Despite having landed a rocket on the dark side of the moon recently, the most devastating virus the Chinese could come up with was not a variant on Ebola, anthrax or the black plague, but a new coronavirus that kills some 2% of those infected.

But still… 

So I talked it over with Mrs Ottawacker who helpfully said it was up to me. I know I am not in any of the major risk groups – and neither is anyone else with whom I am likely to come into contact – but the risks are, I suppose both real and unknown. It is a brand new paradigm and I am not sure what to do about it.

I have sort of imagined self-isolating for 14 days on my return (should I make it to Spain unscathed) – but that is not going to be easy. The risks far outweigh the convenience of not doing it. I shall, of course, be pretty much self-isolating while I am in Spain.

Then I updated my will and decided to go.