It’s often beautiful here at dawn and then goes off through the morning, so getting up at 6.30 and enjoying being outside early is wonderful. I can then retreat inside by the fire when it turns wet or windy without having to fight the weather to do the morning tasks around the animals.

Alas, my elderly ferret Bane, who has been quietly declining for some days, died in his sleep last night. He outlived his original cage mate, Joker, by 2 years and was probably about 8 or 9 now – they came to me from the SSPCA and the best guess was he was probably 2 or 3 then. He went peacefully, choosing not to eat or drink but appearing to be free of pain and quite with-it mentally, in the loving embrace of his friends and cage mates, Ajax and Achilles, who’ve hardly left him for several days, but when I saw them downstairs in the other hammock this morning, I knew Bane had gone. He’s buried near Marley, the other ferret who’s died since coming here.

It was windy but fairly warm and sunny, so the horses have spent a lot of the day out in the field. This allowed me to pop in and barrow 5 loads of muck out this afternoon.

I have a few jobs I need to work on next.

Firstly, I need to separate the ferrets somewhat for the summer. Ajax and Achilles are fine together. Angus, my familiar ferret (or, as he’s affectionately known, ‘my presumptuous’ – familiar is far too mild a term for a ferret!) is fine. Fido and Rambo, however, are intact males and they’re currently sharing a cage with Angus and the two intact jills, Holly and Ivy. Holly and Ivy are both coming into season but they’re not quite there yet – but before they are, I want them separate! I can’t cope with litters of meepers (the more common term for kits amongst ferrants, aka ferret keepers). The jills will need a hormone jab each to bring them out of season, and then they’ll be fine. The boys will be okay in a different cage until they, too, come out of the rut. There is an added complication here – ferrets are horribly susceptible to human respiratory infections and I don’t want the girls catching covid-19 from anyone and bringing it home! I have to wait until the second week of their season, however, for the hormone jab to work.

Secondly, I have all the bits now to build a rabbit hutch and run with a linking tunnel. I just need to put chickenwire on the bottom of the run to prevent tunnelling bunnies, then attach the flexible tunnel to the hutch and the run, and then Nightshade and Mistletoe can go out on the grass.

Thirdly, I want to start planning how I might safely contain all the poultry in the buildings in case of avian flu, when the government may issue lockdown orders keeping all domestic birds away from wild birds to try and control an avian flu epidemic. This will be a complex plan that will probably have to involve pieces of paper and sketches, since I need to have separate quarters for each cockerel with his own little harem, each of the drakes ditto, and then there’s the geese. The quail are easy – they have their run anyway, they’re not free-range (quail don’t survive in the wild in this country). The ducks and geese need water to bathe in. Nestboxes of various sizes and shapes need to be provided in appropriate places. The geese and ducks would need fresh grass providing daily – they’re grazing animals. It’s particularly difficult when some of the hens and ducks sleep in the rafters and there are holes in the roof, with wild birds nesting in the rafters as well!

Should keep me occupied in spare moments for ages, that one.

It’s been interesting looking back over the time since George came to me as a very angry young man, back in August 2018. He arrived so tense his nose (on the rare occasions I could touch it) was more like a lump of concrete than a soft, prehensile, manipulative organ of discovery, as a horse’s nose should be. When we first began targeting work, he whacked the target clean out of my hands at first with his hard, taut, muscular top lip.

He whacked me with it several times, too. It hurt!

Gradually he relaxed a bit and learned to merely touch the target… then to just thump me with his nose rather than slamming me like a stray brick passing by… then to touch me without any thump.

His top eyelid often has a triangular shape to it, which is another sign of tension in horses.

I’ve often wondered if he has ulcers. He is a very hangry horse, always grumpy if he’s short of forage (he’s never short of sufficient calories – but if the hay is low, he can be a real tetchy grouch!) and often hates having his flanks and tummy handled. I’m not going to subject him to the vet sedating him, poking a camera down his throat and finding out that way – but I decided (a) I’d make sure he is never without forage and (b) I’d do some healing work specifically aimed at his tum.

That has helped considerably, but on Friday last week I happened to be near our local crystal shop and fell in through the door.

They had a bowl of Golden Healer tumble stones (golden healer is a form of quartz that contains some iron compounds) and one piece was calling out to me. I picked it up and felt sure it was for George’s stomach, so I bought it.

A good soak in cold water from my spring and then some sunning on the window ledge later, I took the crystal out and introduced it to George, and George to it. He was in an expansive, friendly mood, and had no quibbles when I put the stone on his neck, under his mane, while feeding him nuggets with my other hand and telling him I’d got the crystal for him and it would help his ulcers heal. I also told the crystal, of course, that this was George and please would it help him. After this, I put the crystal on a ledge in the stable shed – out of critter reach, unless a particularly athletic rat is involved – and left them to sort things out between them.

His eyes have relaxed and gone so soft and deep in the past few days. His nose is the softest and most flexible velvet. He cuddles me with it and licks my hands. He even licked my cheek this morning! I know there’s no science to back crystal healing, I know what they say about psychological effects…. but how else could anyone explain this? George’s crystal has done him a power of good in just a week! I know now what stones to get for him when I make him his own set of rhythm beads – it’ll look stunning, too, against his lovely red coat and primrose-coloured mane.

(Now, where’s my vet? I want to discuss placebo effects….)

I suspect I will spend more time on introspection than usual over the next few weeks. Or possibly months. I’ve been watching WHO briefings on you-tube and it’s clear they expect the danger to remain high possibly for the rest of this year.

We have a month’s feed for the critters, apart from rabbit pellets and two more sacks of fibre beet. I will be picking those up on Tuesday afternoon.

I’ve cancelled Mum’s nurse appointment for Monday morning – the surgery put out an alert yesterday by text, asking for everyone to stay away whenever possible, phone consultations only unless for urgent hands-needed cases, absolutely nobody with any respiratory symptoms to go to the surgery. Her hypertension clinic visit can wait until things stabilise, too. The podiatry appointment on Wednesday morning still stands – it’s going to be hard enough on us without adding ingrowing toenail problems to the collection! The Community Psychiatric Nurse is also due to visit on Wednesday, which is kind of important.

That’s it. After that, we’re moving to maximum lock-down. Hay deliveries, groceries deliveries weekly, animal food monthly – and nothing more.

The postie delivered a parcel from Amazon this morning – the new mailbox. I’ve screwed it up on the outside of the gate, so from now on he’ll put our letters into it and nothing more. I explained why we’re turning into a pair of hermits here and he fully understood – and told me Royal Mail have issued instructions to posties now that they are to ask everyone if they mind having the postie sign for things, so they don’t hand over their signing gadgets. They’re to label such signings as ‘covid-19’ and the surname. Kudos to Royal Mail for coming up with that plan, it cuts out a massive opportunity for a virus to nip from one hand to another via the touchscreen thingy!

It feels quite scary. I am absolutely certain this is the right thing to do, but there’s a tight knot in the pit of my stomach. I think, whatever happens, the world will not be the same After as Before. I’ve been reaching out to various friends via social media and many of them are either already working from home or about to start working from home soon. They’re scared, too.

My daughter’s in self-isolation. She has mild flu-like symptoms. I hope very much that she has flu – which is a strange thing for a parent to wish on their offspring, but better flu than covid-19.

I wish they’d picked a more emotive name for this disease. Covid-19 is dry, dispassionate, remote – it doesn’t give a sense of the emotional baggage that surrounds the disease.

Not mine. More people messing me around and the messing-around of politicians.

Katrina brought Mum home Tuesday night, regardless of me telling her I had appointments in Aberdeen on Wednesday. That meant I spent Tuesday running around catching up on the shopping and generally not snuggled warmly at home seeing off the last of my cough (so I still have the damnable thing).

I’m still waiting on the people who said they’d come and collect the dishwasher out of the kitchen so I can get a washer-drier in that space and avoid needing to go down to the old house to do the washing. For crying out loud, all they needed to do was turn up, I’m not even asking any money!!

The meeting with Jacquie and Kay from the social work team is now today, so they’ve been messed around too. Amusingly, they actually requested reassurance that none of us had been in areas where the coronavirus is loose. The virus is everywhere – bar some particularly isolated Pacific islands, perhaps. I’ve just had a call from Jacquie to say she has a chest infection so they’re moving the meeting to Skype – sensibly! I hope it’ll make things more palatable for them, though, when I tell them today that I’m not depending on the idiots in Westminster for leadership, I’m locking us down now, ahead of the curve, as soon as Katrina’s out of the gates tonight.

There again, there’s a lot of messing around. The pathetic response by Westminster to a global emergency means we are already condemned to a massive healthcare problem that will kill a lot of people.

If we go the way Italy did – and we’re far less on the ball with trying to control the virus than the Italian government was at the same stage – then by next week the NHS will be struggling to survive, with every bed in every ward full of pneumonia patients, not enough oxygen to go round, all elective medicine cancelled. I’ve heard from an acquaintance who’s a pathology lab-rat. They’ve been warned they’ll be put on the front line in a few weeks. Not only is he a scientist, not a medic – he’s not a doctor or a nurse, he’s a virologist – but that means his normal work diagnosing illness will stop, so nobody will know what people are suffering from and therefore they’ll have to be treated on symptoms, not on what actually works. Yet he’s going to be shoved into scrubs and expected to go treat people on a ward.

You only have to look at Italy – whose health care system is much better than ours – to see where we’re going.

They’re reached the stage where they have run out of ventilator units. Nobody over 65, nobody with an underlying illness regardless of age, is being even looked at – just put them aside, they’re going to die and there’s nothing can be done. There’s not enough oxygen to treat the patients they have, nor machines to pump the oxygen through. The people already attached to those ventilators are going to need to stay on them for 2-6 weeks before they’re fit to come off supplemental oxygen, so anyone who catches it from now on just has to (to quote the moron in Downing Street) take it on the chin. Doctors and nurses are working round the clock and now they’re ill too. The system is overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

The only way to avoid being stuck in that now is to delay catching the virus as long as possible. It will still peak, that’s what virus infections do, but we need to slow the rise in cases down, spread them in time so the system can cope. As a rough rule of thumb, you can assume that for every case that’s symptomatic, detected and recorded, there are about 15 more that slip the net – either not noticed, or shrugged off as ‘it’s just a cold’. Everyone who has the virus sheds it, so they’re spreading it even if they don’t know they have it. Everyone who catches it spreads it for up to a fortnight before they know they have it. If we wanted to avoid a pandemic, we needed to stop letting people into the country at all last week – but now it’s here and we have

If you’re the effing Health Minister and you have symptoms the day you sign the effing paperwork making it a notifiable disease and then don’t tell anyone for 5 days while still having meetings with other ministers, your constituents and the media, you should be (a) sacked and (b) charged with, at the least, attempted manslaughter. Kudos to the shadow minister who went into self-isolation when she found out. The blasted PM who says he’s fine despite meetings, doesn’t need a test, won’t be self-isolating because he sings the National Anthem while washing his hands regularly, should really be in front of a firing squad. With leadership like that, who needs enemies?

Frankly, I can’t afford to catch this virus at all, though if I have to (and I probably do) then I need to survive it, so I need to avoid catching it until after the pieces start being picked up again, after the peak. With asthma, I will probably be one of those people needing hospitalisation (and Mum definitely would need that!); I have all my animals and Mum to look after, and who’ll do that other than me? I can’t do it while flat on my back in a hospital bed for weeks on end. So… social distancing. Don’t be within 2m, that’s 6 feet, of anyone outside your own household. Further if they cough! Disinfect before touching anything other people have touched, like shopping trolley handles. Disinfect anything that comes home – before it gets across the threshold. Spray the mail with dilute bleach and let it sit for half an hour. Nothing in the post is that sodding urgent, ffs! No home carers, no day care. I will need to make brief forays for food both human and animal, but otherwise I’ll be keeping us safely inside our gates as much as possible.

I have nitrile gloves, I have a (very few) face masks, I have plenty of hand gel, soap, endless hot water, a few hundred disinfectant wipes. I have a lot of motivation!

Fingers crossed.

In other news, there’s another three and a half dozen eggs dried and stashed.

Risk is defined as likelihood of something happening multiplied by the consequences if it does.

For example, the risk of stubbing your toe is how likely you are to do it (practically certain, if the timescale’s long enough!) times the pain you suffer when you do (which, really, isn’t that bad and doesn’t last that long).

We’ve taken a fairly drastic step today (deciding to ignore advice from the InGlorious Idiot-in-Chief in Downing Street and quarantine now to avoid getting Covid-19 until after the worst is over and the system is functioning again to look after us) and I need to do some planning as to how to best quarantine ourselves.

I can avoid people coming into the house easily enough – I just don’t open the door. That means the work I’ve done so far inside the house with Detail wipes doesn’t need doing again – doorhandles, lightswitches, edges of doors, worktops, sinks, taps, power sockets are all disinfected and will not be picking up fresh colonies of ‘outside’ microbes, providing we don’t bring them in ourselves.

There will be some inevitable contact with the outside world. I’m thinking we’re probably going to see system overload set in within the next fortnight, since we’re about 13.5 days behind Italy (where did the government get their 4 weeks figure??) and Italy’s now swamped and struggling to cope. That means I have to assume we’re looking at 3 months of disruption before the worst is over and things start to subside, going by China’s experience. It would be really, really nice to think we’d learned from China’s experience, which is that nothing stops the virus until you lock everyone down hard, but apparently Idiot-in-Chief and his think tank advisors disagree and believe it’ll be fine provided nobody over 70 goes on a cruise. (What??)

I don’t have storage space for 3 months of supplies. So, resupply. Which means contact with the outside world, which means risk of infection.

How do I mitigate those risks best?

First off, the best information I’ve been able to find is that the virus particles (virions) don’t have a long life-span outside the host’s body – in air, about 3 hours. On copper surfaces, 4 hours. On paper/cardboard, 24 hours, and on plastic or steel, 3 days.

Let’s start with the how and then think about the how-to-improve things.

Hay – this is the bulkiest thing and the hardest to store because of that. I get it delivered, it comes in huge bales bound together by machines, it’s brought on a lorry, a bloke wearing gloves and boots shoves it off the lorry, I pick it up and take it inside to stack it. Realistically, if I wear gloves to carry the bales (and I do, because baling string is not the most comfortable handle in the world) then the risks of picking up virions (virus particles) is fairly small. Easy enough to sort, I wear nitrile gloves inside work gloves, dump the work gloves into a bucket of hot soapy water, strip off the nitrile gloves and bin securely. As usual, I shall have to take care not to touch my face while wearing the gloves, but I can put safety glasses on (I have wraparound shooting glasses or DIY goggles, either’s fine) and a scarf over my face while I work will help remind me. Hay is dusty stuff so a dust mask (I have a few FFP3 masks I picked up some years ago when there was an Icelandic volcano erupting) that will ensure I don’t inhale the dust while I’m carrying the bales. Scarf can go in the bucket, mask goes in the bin. Once in the barn and stacked, I need to leave bales 3 days and then there’s no real risk of the virions still being viable. I currently have 11 bales, so at slightly over 2 bales a day, I have enough to last 5 days as of tomorrow morning. I’ll get a double-delivery (42 bales) delivered on Saturday and then ask for a regular weekly 21 bales going forward, which means this will be a once-a-week problem and I’ll have a 7-day buffer so I can leave new bales to de-virus, if that’s a word, without issues.

Animal Feed – I’ve been tracking what I buy the animals for the past 2 months and can easily put together a big order of everything we’ll need for a month’s feed, ask Longley’s to deliver that and again, it’ll be a one-off gloves-over-gloves don’t-touch-your-face issue. I have enough of everything to last 3 days, so I’ll put that order in tomorrow and the sacks can sit for 3 days, which takes care of even the plastic sacks easily.

Human food – this is actually the one that worries me most. Relatively few hands touch livestock feed along the production and distribution lines, but supermarkets? Urggh. Dozens. Maybe more. Plus a delivery driver potentially coughing in the vicinity. So, this is the one that needs the most care. I put in a big order from Asda that came on Tuesday night, we’re going to need a few more bits and pieces – fresh milk; I can only store one 4-pinter in the front, 1 in the kitchen but I could put a couple in the freezer. 4 pints lasts us about 2 days (Mum drinks a lot of tea!!) so 4 cartons would be a week’s worth. Fresh veg – frozen or tinned for the duration won’t kill us. Fresh fruit – harder to replace. Some we can get round with tinned fruit, but bananas are Mum’s favourites and that’s tricky. Packets, tins and cartoons will be easily dealt with, to be honest, because I can just wipe them down briskly with the Dettol wipes and that’s sorted. The plastic trays the stuff comes in will be a big risk area and I’ll need nitrile gloves for that, but I can ask the bloke to leave the trays on the doorstep, I then empty them with gloves into a bin bag inside the house briskly, and once he’s off the premises I can wipe stuff down at leisure and either bin the bag or wash it and put it outside in the coal shed to dry and sit for a week until next time.

If I can reduce our human contact to three brief visits a week (plus any necessary medical appointments) and we’re meticulous about gloves and washing, then we’ll be well ahead of the game and stand a good chance, I think, of pulling this off.

I’m off to compile some lists for making orders.

…of my holiday. Stop panicking.

Katrina messaged me yesterday to say Mum’s enjoying herself but getting very tired and thinks she’d like to come home on Wednesday, so that cuts 2 days off my break. Oh well! I need to contact the social work team and see if the meeting arranged for Friday can be moved forward to Thursday so Katrina can go home to Skye earlier. Fortunately I had already arranged a big delivery of food from Asda which should be delivered Tuesday evening, so at least I don’t have to scamper around stocking up from the shops in daylight.

Also thankfully I’m definitely over the worst of the vile chest and head cold that one of Mum’s carers kindly gave us ten days ago! I spent yesterday huddled over a tissue soaked in olbas oil so I could breathe and I’m now coughing up muck rather than just coughing. There will be a complaint going in – it’s ridiculous that they insist on their workers taking infections around and won’t give them time off to be ill in private, particularly when they know most of the people they’ll be dealing with are elderly and more vulnerable to infections! In my case, my asthma means any cold I encounter brings on a week of wheezing and if I do actually catch one, it’s horrendous and debilitating for ten days before I’m over the worst. Prescription requests for new inhalers are in, since I’ve used up the ones I had!

I still haven’t had time to sort out the bunny housing on the lawn, though I have worked out a scheme and acquired a concertina plastic bunny tunnel to link a hutch to a run securely. I still need to figure out how to block the end so they can’t leave their house at night, in case they manage to stage a breakout from the run under cover of darkness – this will probably involve a sliding wooden hatch over the end of the tube where it leaves the hutch.

I’ve discovered where the aracauna hens have been laying, so that’s another dozen eggs picked up! I need to do another batch of drying.

Once Mum’s home and settled back in, I think I need to do a daily tip run to get shot of all the rubbish that’s been building up – plastic feed sacks, miles of baler string and so on – but at least I have two shelves up in the office so most of the clutter there is off the floor, giving me room to move again! There’s still some horse stuff to move out to the stable shed – when I figure out where and how I’m going to store it safely there. This may involve baler string to hang things over…

I have three and a half dozen eggs drying in the dehydrator at the moment – half the stockpile that was taking over the pantry shelves. I thought it might be a useful process to document, since it’s a good way of preserving eggs when you have a glut.

First, crack some eggs into a bowl or jug and whisk thoroughly, then pour into a moderately hot pan with no fat (this is an important point!!) and scramble them until thoroughly cooked and dry (another important point – no juicy scrambled eggs, we want them on the verge of overcooked!)

Transfer the cooked egg to your dehydrator.

Turn on the dehydrator and leave until the egg is hard and brittle. It should snap in your fingers. At that point, break it up as finely as you like (anything from lumps to powder) and store airtight and dry. I often vacuum pack it but I’m out of bags just right now, so this lot will get smashed to powder in the blender and then packed tight in hot jars and the lids tightened down while the jars are still hot. As they cool, the lids will tighten and maintain an air-tight seal.

If you don’t have a dehydrator, you can dehydrate by spreading the scrambled egg as a thin layer on foil or a baking tray (or even both) and putting it in the oven on the lowest setting with the door cracked open a little. Watch out for marauding pets, though – dogs in particular adore stealing it.

Being of a frugal bent, I hate throwing away egg shells. I rinse them under the hot tap to get rid of any egg white still in there, then chuck them into a baking tray and leave them at the bottom of the oven for a few baked or roasted meals.

Once thoroughly dry, I pull them out and crush them to a powder, then leave it in a tub for the poultry to help themselves to all that lovely calcium-rich grit! It helps ensure they have enough calcium in their diets to produce nice strong shells on the next batch of eggs.

Crushed less finely, they can be used as a slug deterrent on your veg, too. I don’t have any veg beds here (yet) and the ducks are hoovering up every slug their beady eyes spot anyway, but I’ve used this method before and it does work provided you spread the eggs shells thickly enough.

Lynn came over this afternoon and we’ve now cleared the last of Abe’s stable, so now I have to figure out how to get the horses to stay away from the rest of the stable shed while I muck that out.

I’m working out how to get Nightshade and Mistletoe, the two pet rabbits, out onto the grass for the summer. I’ve moved one of the bunny runs outside onto the lawn by the lounge window, but now I need to work out the weatherproof housing bit – while still keeping it all light enough to move regularly and easily.

Mum’s off on holiday for a couple of weeks so I’m enjoying a lot more critter time – although with major impediments.

I planned on taking all Michelle’s stuff down to her on Sunday but that got scrubbed when the car threw a flat. I got it fixed Monday and headed down yesterday instead, which turned out to be a harder job than I’d hoped but I’ll get to that later.

I’ve had the dehydrator running, drying mushrooms, Brussel sprouts and peppers so far – I plan on drying some of the egg backlog today so I have some egg boxes back! The hens are up to 8-10 eggs a day now so keeping up with them is getting harder.

The geese are definitely taking over the hay store next to the feed room – which is a bit of a headache as Hannibal defends the territory ferociously after they’ve gone to bed… which is before I do last checks and hay nets for the horses. We’re discussing this – but the hay is being stored in the big dairy shed again. I saw Hannibal ‘treading’ Lucy yesterday, so they’re of the opinion Spring has Sprung, anyway – though they’re not alone, the larks have been singing their hearts out for a fortnight and last night I heard a curlew somewhere in the fields, while the road verges and roundabouts are sporting a small population of ‘fleepers’ (the family name for oyster catchers) who’ve arrived to pick out nest sites.

I’ve been getting all the leather horse gear cleaned, coated in hide food (a mix of lanolin and beeswax which feeds, softens and waterproofs the leather) and back out to the feed room ready for use as the weather opens up. This has cleared space in the office, so hopefully I can get some shelves up in there to help organise stuff better.

My trip to Glasgow was ok – on the whole. My daughter’s flat is right in the heart of the city and the nearest parking was in a multi-storey – and I had something like 24 bags of clutter, plus microwave, vacuum, clothes dryer, desk, desktop and screen! (On the plus side, though, she is literally a hundred feet from a big cinema and it’s a nice flat). We carried the bags over in batches – admittedly, the parking was only 5 minutes’ walk from the flat – but then we decided to risk plunking the car on the ‘no parking no loading’ bit of side road just by her building to get the heavy, bulky stuff in, rather than carrying it all through a shopping centre, across two roads and then into the building.

We managed that and it was a lot less exhausting than the walk, but just as I was heading out after the last stagger up the stairs, one of her new neighbours dashed up to warn me there was a traffic warden.

My first ever parking ticket. I need to pay it today – it’s only £30 if paid within 14 days, but £60 if I leave it longer, so there’s an incentive! Michelle transferred the funds into my account to pay it, of course, since it was incurred on her business.

George was very tetchy when I got home – I’d left them with four nets of hay as well as the hay box, so they still had plenty of food, but I was an hour and a half late with their evening feed buckets! Disgraceful! He forgave me once his nose was buried in his grub, though, and the other horses merely looked mildly curious about me getting home in the dark. I did a quick round of the bunnies and ferrets, refilled water buckets, apologised to the dogs for abandoning them all day (and cleaned the lounge floor!) then collapsed into bed early.

I’ve been doing a little prepping for the corona virus, stocking up on disinfectant surface wipes (the virus can be picked up by handling things infected people have touched – like shopping trolley handles, petrol pumps, touchscreens, hand rails – so I snaffled some Dettol wipes from Asda on a rollback – £3 for 110 wipes, and they include corona virus in their list of ‘things this kills’ on the back of the packet. It’ll undoubtedly be one of the other coronaviruses they’ve tested but they all share some physical characteristics – being unenveloped RNA viruses, for example – so it should work against this one too. Alcohol based hand gel is practically turning into rocking horse excrement but I managed to find 3 bottles of a rather swish one in Asda as well; the ingredients listed 79% ethanol, so that’s good enough. I’ve ordered aloe vera gel and 99% pure isopropanol off Amazon to make my own version, and that should start arriving today/tomorrow. That will give me something like 2L of the stuff – the recipe, for anyone interested, is 2 parts alcohol to 1 part gel. I already have nitrile gloves on hand (sorry) so I’ve put a pair into a pocket, in case I need them. I haven’t bought a face mask – they only work once, they only work if properly fitted, they’re getting incredibly expensive and, in any case, they only work if you also have all the other kit. The best use for one would be to stop an already infected person coughing all over you, to be frank, and I don’t plan on standing close enough to anyone to let that happen anyway! Now I’ve done the trip to Glasgow, that’s my socialising for the duration. We have plenty of soap and I’ve practiced singing Happy Birthday twice while hand washing against a stopwatch – it does give the requisite 20 seconds plus of washing, which is the purpose.

The weak spot in any kind of preparation for this pandemic is human contact – and I can’t totally avoid it. Mum has her home carers coming in every morning who’re prime candidates to carry anything going, since they’re visiting dozens of people daily and spreading anything they pick up along the way (thank you for the nasty cough last week, btw – both Mum and I got it, damn you, Suzy!) and being low-paid and without statutory sick pay for the first 7 days of any time off, plus they get criticised for taking time off, they don’t call in sick even when they are sick. We also have to go to the nurse and GP regularly, and there’s the twice-weekly daycare sessions.

I’ve done some reading around and crunched a few numbers on my own account, and for the general population of fit healthy people, the death rate for COVID-19 is about 2%. For people with pre-existing heart, lung or immune problems, or who are elderly, that rises dramatically. All three of us – my mother, at 87 with Alzheimer’s and mild heart failure, me with asthma and my daughter with type 1 diabetes – fall into the high risk bracket and our chance of dying if we catch COVID-19 is nearer 10% – and nearer 100% for my mother. The good news about those figures for most people is that actually pushes the ‘general population’ risk even lower – and the fact that so high a proportion of cases are so mild the patient doesn’t even know they have it and don’t get tested, so don’t get into the figures puts it even lower again. One group in South Korea tested out with 87% of the symptomatic positive for the virus – and 70% of the asymptomatic also tested positive. (There were about 1300 with symptoms and 700 or so without, so a decent sample size).

I had a chat with the GP on Monday at a prescription review meeting and we agreed that there are simply too many asymptomatic infections to contain this pandemic because they’re still infectious and still spreading the virus but slipping right past the testing criteria – it’s going to get everyone, sooner or later. That being so, working on boosting your immune system makes more sense than trying to hide from it, so I’ve been conscientious about my multivitamins (and made sure Mum takes hers every day – and suggested to Michelle she stocked up on them too… which she has) and I’ve been making garlic infused honey. Garlic is a known and proven microbial, though nobody’s tested it against this coronavirus to my knowledge, and so is honey. I’ve simply combined them by peeling three cloves of garlic, bruising them (to start the development of allicin, the main active ingredient) and letting them sit for 15 minutes while it gets to full strength, then pouring on raw unpasteurised honey. Roughly, I want a third of a jar of garlic topped up to two-thirds with honey. After that, it’s a case of stir twice daily to keep the garlic coated in honey (stops it going off) and wait.

Sometimes this mix will ferment but my kitchen’s not quite warm enough for that. It doesn’t really matter if it does or doesn’t – except if it ferments you wait until the fermentation stops before using the honey, while if it doesn’t, you can get in there after a week. I’m adding a spoonful of honey to a spoonful of unpasteurised apple cider vinegar (another long-standing well-known immune booster) and diluting them in warm water as a nice tangy drink each morning.

Fingers crossed – but I need to make some contingency plans for looking after the critters if I’m laid low.

I was beginning to think we were going to have a Scottish winter with no snow at all! We’ve only had a dozen days of frost, which is ridiculous. As it is, the snow’s peely-wally slush, not the proper white stuff, and it’s neither sticking nor, slightly lower down, even white. I took Mum to the nurse for a leg check at lunchtime and it was just rain there!

Still, the hens are standing about looking like (sorry to have to say it) a bunch of wet hens, the ducks have been shaking their heads rather a lot and the geese are cross. The horses have just stood in all day – I took Abe and George’s buckets up to the horse barn for them tonight, rather than ask them to stand out in the yard!

Wicket the Wicked Whippet lived up to her name this morning and tried to nab a duck by the tail in passing – the entire flock lifted off and flapped loudly away, with the geese flapping and running in their midst, and I berated the errant hound ferociously… though if it moves under her nose, she tends not to try and resist her ancestral hunting-dog instincts very hard. There are good reasons I take the whippets out on leads, not free-running around anything grabbable!

I hope tomorrow’s weather forecast is accurate – George is getting his flu jab done at lunch time and if it’s hurling slush on him, it’s going to be unpleasant for all. Poppy probably wouldn’t keep her distance if I tried to get him jabbed in the barn – and then I’d have George scampering for distance, rather than standing quietly for the annual stab!

I shall have to talk to the vet about the ferrets, too – it’s the time of year for ferrets to come into season and Ivy is starting to – Holly’s usually a few days behind her sister – and I don’t want ferret kits, so I shall be separating the hobs from the jills very soon, arranging for the jills to get hormone jabs to bring them out of season and keeping the two intact hobs, Rambo and Fido, separate until they, too, come out of season. There isn’t a nice cheap hormone jab for male ferrets, alas – I could get hormone implants for them which work very well for Ajax and Achilles, but they’re mighty expensive and just now I can’t manage £120 per ferret for implants! £7.50 per jill is much easier to deal with.

Every time we leave the room Wicket makes another bid for the chair… she’s mastered the art of keeping perfectly still and rolling her eyes when told ‘off!’ too – highly amusing, but I’m trying hard not to laugh. It’s hard enough getting her to move without creasing up in the process!