It’s now a month ago since we were whisked back from Sri Lanka to the UK and safety. True, it was good to get home in a very difficult situation for there are  still hundreds of Brits stuck in various parts of the globe waiting to get back to their loved ones.

At the time, however, Sandra felt that Sri Lanka was the safer place to be in. I replied that it wasn’t and, besides, that if we caught the virus it would be a totally unfair weight on the local health services which, anyway, wouldn’t be half as well-equipped as our own NHS.

This morning I looked again at the world statistics illustrating those affected by the pandemic and was somewhat surprised. Sandra was indeed right!

The UK has now exceeded the 20,000 limit of deaths from the virus which it thought would contain it. Sri Lanka, instead, has just 7 dead. OK, the population of the UK is 65 million and that of Sri Lanka is about a third of that at 21 million. In this case, however, either the UK should have had 21 dead or Sri Lanka should have had a thousand times more deaths than its actual figures.

What does this mean? Clearly there are other factors involved, one of which is the point that those returning to the UK are still not being properly checked, that the first UK deaths were reported two weeks before Sri Lanka’s first victim and, most importantly, that the figures in the two countries may not accurately reflect the real situation.

Nevertheless, I cannot help feeling that, as the nation with the fifth highest number of deaths from Covid-19, there is going to be a need for unravelling loads of explanations and investigations when the pandemic terminates (if it ever really going to end entirely)….

Meanwhile our beloved leader is back in no 10 after his spell in ICU and jollifying up the nation with his unique brand of rhetorically enhanced humour, his expansive bonhomie and his unperturbed sang froid. How long further are we going to believe him?

I conclude with a further load of hot air, this time from the festival of hot air balloons held annually in the autumn at the Villa Mansi. I discovered these photographs of mine dating from 2005. Could that be really have been that many years ago!