Visiting the optician, and then a cafe, when you're awaiting covid-19 test results, and have been advised to self-isolate at home.
THREAD...
I was in a favourite cafe of mine this afternoon, and popped upstairs - there was only one other person there, a middle-aged woman, so I went and sat in the opposite corner of the room from her.
After half an hour, she rings a number, on speakerphone. It's a testing helpline...
She confirmed she was waiting to hear back on a covid-19 test for herself, and was ringing because she'd been promised a callback half an hour earlier.
They (understandably) got very agitated when they asked her where she was speaking from & she answered it was a cafe.
She was yelling at them that it was an empty cafe with no-one else in the room (a lie), and they were yelling at her that she was under doctor's orders to quarantine and not leave the house, and asking why on earth had she gone out in public, and why was she in a cafe?
She gave them a sob story about a lens having fallen out of her glasses, and going to the opticians to get them fixed, then stopping off at the cafe as "I didn't want you ringing me back at 4 with my corona test results while I was still on the bus, and I fancied a coffee!"
It was like a Dialogue of the Deaf. She was yelling over and over again "Did it come in? Have I got it? What did it say?" And they were yelling at her, "You shouldn't be in a cafe, you should be at home. Our records say someone should have called you", over and over again.
I packed up my things and left. I'd been diagonally at the opposite end of the room, a good 6-7 metres away the whole time, & on the way out I told the cafe staff (who'd been very on-the-ball with track & trace) what had just happened, and to steer well clear of the upstairs.
She wasn't wearing a mask, either, and she looked thoroughly out of it.
I really do despair at our chances of making it through this pandemic when this level of stupidity is on display. Covid carelessness affects other people - and kills.
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We often don't realise just how many private members' clubs London has - I count 130+ today, and 600+ historic ones.
And we walk past ex-clubhouses all the time, i.e. the🇨🇦High Commission on Trafalgar Square was the Union Club (1824-1924).
The purpose of this🧵is to offer a walk past some of the surviving ex-clubhouses, still hidden in plain sight - 'Clubland' helped mould the London we know today.
Since the topic of women in clubs has been in the news, I'll start with the heart of 'Ladies' Clubland': Dover Street
1A Dover Street - the first floor of No. 1 - was for a time the Victoria League Club (1916-9).♂️
This evolved from the Raleigh Club at 16 Regent Street, offering accommodation to overseas forces (1879-1914). That relaunched in 1915 under the new name, moving here in 1916.
I get a lot of questions on the portrayal of private members' clubs in Yes, Minister.
I'll try to answer them in this thread.
We see at least 9 club rooms in Yes, Minister & Yes, Prime Minister; though they could be portraying as few as 3 clubs. Read on for more details...
Which clubs are they meant to be?
The books are much clearer on this than the TV series. Sir Humphrey & Sir Arnold are both members of the Athenaeum. That’s explicitly stated in their diaries, whenever they meet at “The Club”.
Permanent Secretaries have long been found there.
It’s further complicated by a couple of instance of Sir Humphrey meeting his great rival, Sir Frank Gordon of HM Treasury, for lunch at the Reform Club.
But the clear inference is that Sir Frank is hosting both of these lunches at the Reform, where he is a member.
On #JamesBondDay, the 60th anniversary of Dr No, I'll be starting another of my "Clubs in film" threads, looking at how clubs have been an essential part of the James Bond films.
Lest you think this is tangential, Dr No literally starts with 3 assassins turning up at a club...
But before I get too deep into the James Bond movies, it's worth recognising how clubs were an essential backdrop to the Bond books.
M's club, Blade's, recurs in several books (esp. Moonraker), and is clearly based on Fleming's club, Boodle's. (Seen here in the 50s comic strip.)
Indeed, readers of my new book may recognise that the front entrance of Boodle's, which inspired the fictional Blade's, was used for the front cover.
The PM is set to be “cleared” over “allegations of soliciting a donation from Brownlow”. But that wasn’t the accusation. It was that he’d lied over knowing where the £ was coming from, & lied over the existence of WhatsApp messages.
Instead, the exclusive FT report from @SebastianEPayne suggests the only way Johnson could be “cleared” by his adviser was by framing the report around something he’d never been accused of doing in the first place!
@SebastianEPayne A further complication - as several journalists can attest - is that "the Cabinet Office denied [the WhatsApp messages] existed". As we found out this month, they exist.
The appointment & remit of Lord Geidt as Johnson's Independent Advisor on Ministers Standards. THREAD...
The process of recruiting Geidt was all quite informal. No advert for the post.
As FoI to @cabinetofficeuk shows, he had an informal meeting with the Cabinet Sec on 29 March
Remarkably, no minutes or notes were kept of that meeting. Not even any briefing notes.
That meeting on 29 March came 10 days after my @openDemocracy report, which revealed there were no signs of any steps taken to recruit an Adviser since vacancy in Nov opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-…
@openDemocracy Lord Geidt, who was announced in post on 28 April, was himself asked about this very casual appointment process at his Post-Appointment Hearing before @CommonsPACAC in May.
My grandmother died in France in January. She wasn’t v mobile in her last few years, so I always went to her at least every couple of years. I’d last seen her in 2018 & was due to go in 2020. Covid hit, with travel restrictions. Downing Street laughed. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquelin…
I wasn’t able to go to the funeral, either: UK wouldn’t let me leave, and Switzerland wouldn’t let me in (she was on the Swiss-French border). Parish was so overwhelmed with deaths, they didn’t have the capacity to do something over Zoom (had to bring a priest out of retirement).
This was not an unusual experience over the last 18 months. Nor was it the worst experience by a long shot - others suffered a lot more.
But it makes the cavalier and contemptuous attitude of the Downing Street party-goers all the more unbearable.