Friday 20^th March, 2020 1340

I said Italy would top the charts in two days and so it proved to be. On the face of it, the situation is dire there but delving deeper, it seems the mortality rate is inordinately high for a few of reasons: One, they have the second oldest population in the world and the vast majority of fatalities have been the elderly, most of whom have one, two, three or more other conditions and the healthcare infrastructure is stretched and two, their classification of deaths differs from other countries. It doesn't however make it any less of a tragedy.

I have had to streamline my marking process, it was swamping me. My problem was that I was trying to be too diligent and was making considered remarks on each work. Now I am emending and highlighting and appending “good”, “VG” etc, sometimes with a brief comment. It works. I have cleared my desk this week so far, although I am expecting two more classes to submit their assignments later today. I can deal with those tomorrow morning/lunchtime and have a relatively easy weekend.

Jody returned from campus last night with the thrilling news that she has heard we will not reopen now until mid-April! Three or four days ago this revelation would have seen me going into core meltdown but now I have found a less time-consuming way, I actually don't mind. Of course, I would much prefer to be face to face in the classroom. I await official confirmation of this.

We are off out for dinner later. Deniro texted last night to ask if he could visit. I didn't want that happening. He is a teacher (I'm not sure whether our school or not) and with Jody living here we are not advertising the fact. So I suggested dinner at the restaurant I like around the corner. I haven't been for ages obviously but I don't go often because the portions are huge and I'm always on my own now all the students are on a different campus. With three of us we stand a chance of finishing! His wife and child are not coming, she's a nurse and will not let the toddler out at present.

Having read about UK supermarkets opening for an hour each morning to allow for fossils-only shopping, I saw the photos of enormous queues outside Aldi, Costco etc before they opened! It put me in mind of 1979 when we went to Novorossiysk in the USSR in the Black Sea. Huge queues of people waiting outside bakeries and the like because there was no food. Except this was the UK. When did people become so overwhelmingly selfish that they create a famine where there need not be one?