22.04.2020

Ahoy! Avast ye maties!

I want to keep this brief today, shipmates, because I have an essay to get on with for my course. I have a couple of bits of news to share though.

Yesterday I did my video interview for the hospital job, and this morning they rang and offered me a job as a hospital porter at the Royal London, just up the road.

It’s not as good as the job at the Nightingale at the ExCel, because it’s a zero hours contract, pay isn’t as good and I’m not sure you get the weekend bonuses. The ExCel never seemed to go anywhere, but I’ve seen in the news, they’ve been having to turn patients away because there’s not enough ICU nurses, so no surprise they haven’t hired more support staff. If they do come back I’ll go to work there. Also this is working for Serco not directly for the NHS, it’s no surprise, but all these kind of jobs seem to be outsourced, so I think in terms of cost to the NHS, Serco will be taking a pound or two off my hourly rate. Fuck it, it’s a job.

The interview was odd in a sort of fully automated communism kind of way. It was supposedly a ‘video interview’ but it’s the only interview I’ve ever had where you’re the only one present. You just record yourself answering a couple of questions and that’s it. They review it later. Makes sense if they’re hiring large volumes of people. I seemed to do ok.

I’m slightly nervous about the job though. It’s given me a bit of insight into why young guys signed up to fight in wars when they didn’t have to. There’s this big historic thing going on, and I didn’t want to miss it, sat in my flat on the dole for a year and I actually genuinely want to do my bit to help, so I applied, if I’m honest with a bit of a sense of bravado, because I knew it would be dangerous – but I can hack it. Now I’m not so sure. I don’t quite know what I’m letting myself in for.

Hopefully it will be mostly moving boxes and equipment round. They said they’re building two new covid wards there, so I might need to work there, but if I do I’ll get all the protective equipment I need. I think I said this before though, there’s risk everywhere, and at least in a hospital they take it seriously, and I am likely to get sick anyway, at least this would be for something. I don’t think I will have actual contact with patients, so I don’t think it’s as dangerous as being a doctor or nurse.

It will be a real honour for me to work for the NHS, even though its in such a reduced state.

I need to check how to make this blog as anonymous as I can too, because I am going to chat some shit.

One chicken shop has opened back up in Shadwell, which is good because now the mice have something nice to eat. They seem to have given up breaking into our flat for now. The downside is I quite often have to pull rancid chicken carcasses from the clenched, unyielding jaws of my hellbeast Yorkshire terrier.

This morning the Financial Times put an estimate of the real number of dead from coronavirus in the UK at 41,000, which is appalling. I think they based it on the overall excess mortality year on year, which obviously is significantly up this year. It’s very scary.

I also saw on the news this morning that the Fire Brigade have been doing extra duties that might usually be covered by the other emergency services, like removing bodies from homes. That might explain why I’ve seen so many zooming past the end of my road. Fuck.

And overnight something interesting happened to do with what we were talking about yesterday. By the end of the day the FTSE100 was down around 3%, which usually would be big, but this year, not that notable. It was a similar scene in the US markets I think, following the price of oil capsizing. But it must have been on the verge of plummeting again because over night the fed injected another $500bn stimulus, and the FTSE 100 is now up 1.5%. It’s insane. I think the fed has now printed $6.7tr in this crisis. There must come a point when the spell breaks. Bare in mind, the GDP of the British economy in 2018 was $2.85tr.

I wonder how long that shot of adrenaline will keep the dollar alive for, and how long the one after that will, and after that, and how many times it can be revived, or if there’s ever any going back.

The other thing I read was the US putting an import embargo on Iranian oil saved the Iranian economy from oblivion, whereas the Saudi, Kuwaiti, UAE and Qatari economies, who were all trading freely, have been wiped out. I don’t really know enough about geopolitics to comment, but this must inevitably change the order of the world. Who can say which governments will survive and which won’t?

It’s another one of those things that seem like it might be optimistic, some vile dictators losing power, and maybe the funding for their disgusting wars, but history tells us, these things usually leads to carnage, and it’s the poor that pay the bill.

Back in Shadwell, the nightmares are getting real. Last night about half twelve I was reading about Conan battling four dark wizards, when I heard a blood curdling wail from the next room. At first I thought it might have been an auditory hallucination because it sounded just like a noise one of the characters in the story having their soul wrenched from their body and cast into oblivion. It carried on, I went to investigate. I started to recognise it, I’ve heard it before but never this terrifying. My partner was having proper night terrors.

It’s the last day of her job today, she’s getting furloughed, so hopefully she can look after herself a bit.

Shiver me timbers! Forward ho, three sheets to the wind, AHOY!