Day 41 – Overkill

There is no doubt that when it comes to health and safety – especially at the moment – more health and safeties is better.

My usual supermarket was closed today because one or more of the staff had tested positive for Covid-19 and they were disinfecting everything. I was forced to go elsewhere, and what I found wasn’t great. Limited opportunity for social distancing, because the checkout queues ran right down the shopping aisles, a security guard at the door so distracted that he let anyone and everyone straight in, and worst of all, plenty of staff with face masks around their necks instead of over their faces. It just all felt really unsanitary and unpleasant.

And let’s not even mention the old lady that touched my arm.

(Everyone survived.) (So far.)

Anyway. What I wanted to announce is that our favourite sushi delivery service is back in business under Level 4 and emailed us yesterday to tell us so. They’re taking H&S very seriously, but maybe they have gone a little overboard…

I mean, just because you can do something, doesn’t necessarily mean that you should do it, right? Check out the last paragraph here:

You’ll be sharing what now?

What on earth am I meant to do with that?
Congratulate him on being alive? Offer him a jumper?

Seriously, what use is this? Because presumably, if his temperature is hovering somewhere around the 40 degree mark, he’ll either not be at work, or if he is, you will have decided not to send him out to my house on an infection delivery run.

I would hope.

The rest of those precautions sound fairly robust though, and we might treat ourselves later this month, depending on how the money is going. And just so we can see how hot our driver is before he even arrives at the front gate.

Today…

…we have mostly been helping out in the garden.

image
I always find it interesting that people here stick rigidly to the local health and safety legislation, while happily flaunting the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

Child labour remains an important part of modern British life.
The chimney needs sweeping tomorrow, and guess who we’re sending up to do it?

H&S – African style

The ‘Elf an’ Safety people in the UK (who are not actually as bad as Jeremy Clarkson and the Daily Mail would have you believe) would have a cadenza if they saw this on a building site over there.

In this image, you can gauge ground level from the guy in the bottom right corner of the photo. The gentleman in the yellow cap and his companion are busy rendering the outside of a newly-built house. But the two units of scaffolding that they’ve brought along to the job just doesn’t cut the mustard as far as height goes, so – in a typically African way – they have adapted the setup so that the mustard is cut.

For the record and in case you can’t see (although you can view a larger image here), here’s a detailed run down of what they are standing on:

  1. Four bricks, which are balanced on
  2. A plank, which is balanced on
  3. Four more bricks, which are balanced on
  4. Another plank, which is balanced on
  5. Two barrels (prevented from rolling by four more bricks), which are balanced on
  6. A third plank, which is balanced on
  7. Two units of scaffolding.

Thank goodness they are all wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets.

Seriously though, this does sum up one of the major differences I have noted over here. The willingness and ingenuity to make do with the materials available. In the UK, they’d still be waiting for two more units of scaffolding to be delivered to the site. (Or, yes, they may have been more organised in the first place and just brought 4 units out). Here, they just found a way of getting to where they needed to be and getting the job done.

I was just disappointed that they didn’t start juggling while they were up there.