The climate cairn

It's a Stroud thing. By the canal near Capel's Mill. I stumbled across it while walking home via a scenic route.

The market was not busy today. Quite a few people came in and out without buying anything. It will be ever thus until we have more stalls, and the date seems to slip as to when this will be allowed to happen. The Delta variant stalks our streets.

I had iced latte after work with a mate, down by the canal. I thought it was going to be peaceful, but a duck had got separated from its chick, which was swimming in the lock below, and half of the staff and customers of the cafe seemed determined to try and rescue it. The duck was making a dreadful distress call and flapping a great deal. In the end, she simply flew down to the chick. Then a wood lorry came along to the road bridge and my friend seemed convinced that it was going to crush a parked car. I could see that this wasn't going to happen because there was a cyclist passing between the other side of the car and the bridge, and he didn't look in the least alarmed. Surely he would have got out of the way if he had sensed an imminent crushing?

I wonder if some of us are suffering from CoVid-related trauma. I certainly went through a phase of thinking I recognised people in the street, only to realise that I had mistaken the person for someone else who had died during the pandemic, whose death I had not had the headspace to process fully. No one else has admitted to seeing 'ghosts' post-pandemic. But wait a minute,are we in the post-pandemic era? The virus is now endemic. That means we'll be living with it for the foreseeable future. Remember the good old days?