Day 8 in the BMJ House

Oh to be (out and about) in England, Now that April’s there

Things I have learned in the last week and a bit.

1. Joe Wicks is A GOD. Not only has he made it his mission to keep the nation’s school-children physically active for half-an-hour-a-day (and their far less fit parents), but his #PEWithJoe sessions are beaming round the world, attracting millions of views on YouTube and gaining him TV coverage across the globe. Along with all those YouTube views comes a huge spike in his advertising revenue. All of which, he says, is going to be donated to NHS charities to help in the fight against the coronavirus. A God I tell you.
2. Teachers should be paid £1m a year for having to put up with teenagers for six hours a day. Even the nice, fairly well-behaved ones are turning feral. The teenagers, not the teachers.
3.  If you run around my back-garden 100 times, you’ve done 5k. In your face parkrun. (Scrub that, I miss my parkruns)
4.  The back of one’s freezer is a treasure-trove of delights. Not always the delights one would automatically put on a plate all at once, but, needs must sometimes.
5.  There are upsides and downsides to working at the dining room table during a lockdown. The fridge and the larder are way too close. (Hence the need for 3 above). On the plus side however, I now have beautifully alphabetised cookery books.
6.  The world is a good and kind place if you know the right people. Just look at the hundreds of thousands of us who have signed up to volunteer in our local communities.
7. This industry is chock-full of fabulous people, determined that those who are more in need get looked after. Manufacturers switching to produce ventilators and PPE, merchants donating their PPE and staying open to serve customers dealing with emergency repairs, using their distribution expertise to get food to food banks and helping NHS England to turn the Excel Centre into the London Nightingale Hospital. I won’t deny I got a bit lumpy-throated watching how excited Chief Nursing Officer Ruth May got about it on the news last night.
8. No matter how horrible it all seems to be getting (and it is unbelievably crap at times), there are people out there who are making the best of it. Social media can be a lovely thing. Ladies and gentlemen, even if you’ve seen it before, you need to see it again, I give you, The Marsh Family.