Nothing to do with my headline but Bill Taylor, in his latest (and 10th) report on how things are just now in Toronto, has the same thought that will have occurred to many of us about people previously taken for granted or dismissed, unvalued, as unskilled.
However important the health service personnel whether or not medically qualified, supermarket workers, care home staff, quota-driven delivery drivers, binmen and cleaners (and yes, lots more) seem at this. moment of crisis, it is pertinent to ask how long that acknowledgement of worth will last. Will employers - and the 'society' Boris suddenly notices, at odds with conventional Tory wisdom, does exist after all - act accordingly or just go back to being grateful that 'unskilled' or 'taken for granted' also means grossly underpaid?
The full Salut! series of Covid-19 diaries can be browsed here ...
Unplugged notes from the trenches:
Can anything be certain in an age of uncertainty? Rhetorical question.
Silver linings/clouds… This isn’t an original thought but it bears repeating: when we think we’re finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel, better make doubly sure it’s not a train coming.
This week, we’re told, might offer an early indication of whether social distancing is having an effect in Canada. Tiptoeing around that one – daring quietly to hope but not saying too much about it. Let’s not bet the farm on a single number.
Clouds/silver linings… The refund from our flights to and from Rome went back onto my Visa card. So my latest bill is zero. It’s due April 17.
It’s now so obvious that there are NO unskilled workers. We can all just do different things and in their own way they’re all important. I wonder how long we’ll remember this.
I wonder, too, what Doug Ford and the provincial Conservatives will remember (I hold out no hopes for the federal Tories). I’ve become so used to seeing the worst of Ford and expecting no better, it’s a surprise how he’s been doing a halfway decent job of stickhandling the pandemic.
Surely he must realise after this that the ruthless and purblind cuts he was introducing do not and cannot work. That a livable income is a right, not a privilege. Or am I stupidly naïve? I’m certainly not holding my breath. Or even crossing my fingers.
It may just be in our neighbourhood but some people are no longer cleaning up after their dogs the way they should. Another reason to watch where we’re walking.
Needs must, but I didn’t expect to find myself hanging up a fake wasp nest out back.
We had a bit of a problem last year, nothing major but an annoyance. While it seems that wasps are unlikely anyway to return to an old nest, they’re territorial (apparently also short-sighted and dull-witted) and if they see what looks like another swarm’s nest, they’ll steer clear. That’s the story, at least. So I’m trying to enforce/reinforce a little social distancing.
Lesley, dourly: “You think they’ll be fooled by that, do you?”
Time, of which we have plenty, will tell. Maybe they’ll peer myopically at it and think, “Hey, this looks cozy” and send for all their friends and relations. As always, we can only hope for the best. Doing a lot of that lately.
The welcome mat is out, meanwhile, for bees and butterflies. Which segues neatly into another quotation from Wilding, Isabella Tree’s wonderful book:
“The sound of a single butterfly is imperceptible. But tens of thousands have a breath of their own, like the backdraft of a waterfall or an accumulating weather front… If the beat of a single butterfly’s wings can raise a hurricane on the other side of the world, one wonders, what might tens of thousands do in your own backyard?”
What indeed? Worth pondering.
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