Stay Alert

^Locally in Birmingham,I have read that single-decker buses can only SAFELY carry 5 passengers and obvs double-deckers,10 people due to social distancing...surely this is not financially feasible in terms of profit and loss?As others have said,the use of buses is going to be a logistical nightmare...due to my epilepsy I cannot legally drive so how on earth do I safely cover the journey to work?

Black cab style taxis with a divide between driver and passenger might be okay, not car type taxis though. Getting one can be difficult in some places, I remember going to see a Punchdrunk thing in Norfolk, where I had to book a taxi days in advance so that I wasn’t stuck at a train station miles away from the venue.

Let the mask buying begin

Llanymynech golf course in Oswestry straddles the Welsh/England border so apparently due to restrictions in Wales you can only play three of the holes on the course from the English side...what a farce😂

What's so ridiculous about that? Different countries have different laws, so you'd expect to to have unusual situations at the point where the rules change. There are places on the Belgian/Dutch border where shops and cafes straddle the border and so different sides of the shop have different opening hours. There's a village on the US/Canada border where the gas station is in the US but can only be reached from Canada, so anyone wanting to fill up has to check in at the US border point (which is on a different road) before they can enter the US to buy petrol. There's a footpath in Germany that's actually part of Belgium.

Picking out a special case and sneering at it because it sounds odd doesn't imply anything about the rules in force everywhere else. Special cases are always going to sound odd because they are special cases.

Rules are rules

I thought this was the UNITED Kingdom.

The response from Scotland and Wales clarify the purely political nature of the change in advice.  It was inevitable that the anti-lockdown movement would point to the apparent drop in death toll as evidence that lockdown was unnecessary- utterly ignoring the fact that lockdown was designed to reduce the rate of death from the virus.  Sadly, even the positive figures are debatable- the O.N.S. has published data that contradicts the government's lower figures today.  I suspected in mid-March that the equation this government was balancing was fear + anger vs boredom + financial pressure.

And fundamentally, nothing has changed since the day it was decided lockdown was necessary.  We are back to the guidance we had for 3 days prior to lockdown!  Yet again, even with weeks to formulate the "road map", the government (which, incidentally, envelopes itself in political spin to avoid criticism- so let's not talk about "playing politics in a national emergency"), has come up with a vague approach, pushing responsibility for the nation's well-being back on the individual.  Compare this with the strategies in New Zealand, Germany and South Korea, for example.

The fundamental fact is that the virus has not gone away.  So we have the choice

a) isolate in lockdown to reduce transmission   or
b) ALL follow specific behaviour to minimize risk

We don't have such a protocol from the government- we have vague slogans (what exactly are we being alert for?  clouds of germs? someone having a single cough? someone who looks a bit dirty?) and contradictory recommendations: look at the crowds on the Tube- how are those people supposed to "go back to work" (since they can't work from home), AND avoid public transport (there are not enough Ubers in the country to cope with that demand), for instance?  What happened to the hints of staggered work hours?  What about public transport running at 10% capacity?  Such things require co-ordination, not individual choices.

The UK government has demonstrably shown itself to be incompetent during this crisis- we could consider early complacency, delay in banning mass gatherings, mis-use of resources, the PPE and care home scandals, bungled procurement, MPs being unable to interpret the government's advice correctly etc etc etc.

Is it any wonder there is so much anxiety about lack of faith in this latest plan?

Presumably no love scenes allowed!

As most of the action takes place in the pub, bistro, café etc in soaps it will be interesting to see what they do!

^Was discussing this resumption of filming soaps etc with a friend who used to work for Granada on Corrie.One solution would be to have a single character in a room doing a monologue to camera interspersed with flashbacks from that characters’ life from previous episodes.The only problem would be that it could get very tedious if every episode was delivered within the same concept.

I read of one plan to isolate all cast and crew together to resume filming. How practical that is though remains to be seen!