The 'New Normal' ??

you sounds like you have everything sorted,,,,,,,  right ?

Firstly re window cleaners they turned up when I first moved here and I needed a window cleaners anyway so said they could do them as they were the cheapest.  I won't give a number to strangers and wear hearing aids to block all outside sounds due to extreme sound sensitivity, they assume I'm deaf so the expectation of 'social chit chat' tends to disappear along with the expectation that they can just phone anytime they want....suits me

I prefer a very isolated life these days. I've been going out early to walk my dog and we've had the village and fields to ourselves its been absolute bliss!

Although I don't like too much contact with others routines like going out with family for birthdays and xmas day are important so I know where we are in the year as I spend alot of time dissociated. I have different alters who swap alot so Iose track of how many weeks/months have gone by. so although I want to meet up with family I don't want the social expectation to allow others into my home as I'm mostly housebound and would never meet people in public places anyway before the lockdown.

I've worked out a way round avoiding contact with people I don't want contact with anyway now so it doesn't matter and Boris did mention it on TV the other day.

I don't have any contact details for them they just turn up.

I would guess that many of us here are quite good at normalising ourselves. I've spent most of my life reacting to supposedly stressful situations by just putting the kettle on, and drinking myself out of my catastophising tendency. ;-) Can anyone even begin to suggest why a love of certain routines and rituals might not be the constructive thing to do? OK, it comes over as a bit too cool, controlled and callous quite often, but if it gets a few of us through the 'crisis', why not? it's something I'm good at; and there haven't been too many other things at which I obviously excel. 

Boring though, isn't it!? Well, no, it isn't, actually. I must have a very ingrained survival instinct, which has seen off a few decades already.

I'm not really very interested in all this old & new normal stuff; even though I suppose SOME of it might be helpful to some other folks. I reckon quite a few people are actually coping quite well with this crisis anyway.

Kit McDaydream said:

Should window cleaners be coming to homes where people are self isolating? Surely they are potentially bringing the virus to you? They also don't seem to consider if you haven't been out for 2 months you haven't been to cash machine to have money to pay them!

...Hear Hear!!

Also - There is no such thing at this time as "The new normal". This is because things have not yet gone back to any kind of "normal". Keep that in mind, and come back to it (to this Thread?) around November, and that should be a "normal"... But then come back in a YEAR, and that should totally be "The New Normal".

Me, Just saying.

The 'new normal' doesn't exist. It's a term being used to describe an anticipated future state, without needing the details of what that future will entail.

If it helps, replace 'new normal' with 'future' in your head when you read or hear it.

every time they say "unprecedented times" I always think  "the 1918 epidemic ! "  

As I said before, no precaution is infallible. Individual discretion is always necessary, and constructive. But it sounds like we might actually be in agreement on how much the current regime can be trusted. I applaud Sweden's different approach, but it wasn't without its internal critics.  Very few people realise just how bad the 1918 flu epidemic was. But looking at the archive material, the arguments for and against certain precautions haven't changed much. Some countries got it massively wrong. Only a few really benefited from a slightly more proactive approach.

Even the architects of this criminal lockdown/house arrest have admitted the masks are more of a placebo.     Even being used correctly, they have a usage time of about 30 minutes - after that, they become a soggy magnet for anything airborne.    Almost half of all victims are from nursing homes where known-positive patients were sent without informing the staff - so they didn't use any PPE with them and spread it around to all the others.    Almost all the rest were from people within households observing the lockdown rules.   

Sweden, with no lockdown has found the death rate is actually lower than the annual influenza bug in 2000 - don't remember a worldwide lockdown back then.....  

Phew! So much resistance to simple face masks in the UK. Of course they are not perfect, but recent research in Hong-Kong again suggests that they are a ..... sensible precaution. (And tests on face shields indicate that wearers are less vulnerable to infection, but they are not quite so effective at stopping you from infecting others). I note that in the UK they are still only advised. Here, you have to wear them in public, but at home its up to the individual. I know of no one here who has been placed under any real duress through not wearing them. (I note the case of a ticket-seller at a London station who died with COVID-19 after being spit on by a customer . Why no ticket window, I wonder? Perhaps she had stepped out on the concourse to try and ease the confrontation. Screens are also widely used on shop and office counters here.)

We got used to wearing face masks here in the SARS era, but they are also useful in areas that receive the Indonesian smog haze or which have observable air pollution problems. You can always take them off when exercising, if distanced from others. some personal discretion is both practical and allowable.  These precautions can also be used for working in dusty and splash/splatter-prone 'old normal' environments. Many people also just use scarves and bandanas.

I  favour gradually returning to more normal work and social activities, but  some 'distance' still seems necessary to me. Some key industries have been allowed to keep working thru' this crisis with a few precautions. i have yet to hear this was a mistake.

Low death rates where I live would tend to indicate that masks, distance, and a bit more exposure to sunlight & open space have all helped.

The subject of this thread is appropriate to me because that term 'new normal' is now being bandied around almost everywhere; even in countries that usually speak very little English;and not even translated into the local script in most cases. I'm normally wary of such fashionable buzz-words; but haven't yet found the authorities here to be too overtly coercive  I reckon a certain amount of light coercion is acceptable and welcome here, because there are so many scofflaw tendencies; frequently initiated by people with hidden libertarian and quick-buck agendas.

These days, the radical tendency is also calling most of the shots in UK government.. Same as it ever was, really!. You can only ever really trust most old school tie types about as far as you can throw them. But my current sticking point  with them is not yet facemasks, face shields or social distance.

Most of what people are calling laws and rules are just rough guidelines that the media and all the 'Karens' are trying to enforce on everyone else - and the police are making up the rules as they go along - with their illegal fines that people are too stupid to challenge.

It's all just another form of bullying.

It affects us most because we have an over-blown need of following rules - we prefer black & white and everything is grey. 

The lockdown was crazy, the mask thing is scientific garbage, social distancing is a joke and the hysteria being pushed every day is unbelievable.

Be sensible, take sensible precautions to look after yourself.

It seems to me that new normal will look like old normal pretty soon. It’s going to be called “new normal” but people will behave as they’ve always behaved and soon the “new normal” will be no different to the “old normal” (apart from being called “new normal”)

As for “rules”... Looking at people’s behaviour over Bank Holiday weekend I started to think there are no real rules, just guidelines. So do whatever your “common sense” is telling you (and apparently I don’t have any common sense, ha!)

And my workplace new normal is exactly like the old normal, apart from Covid19 memo in the kitchen about hand washing (so maybe new normal is just more frequent hand washing? In theory only because who’s going to check that?)

I’m seriously fed up with everything. What’s the point anyway?

For me I don't pay much attention to media trend phrases. They're just put out to get attention. As for the updates If they don't mention a change for a specific group it means there is  no change for that group. A certain amount of aspie over thinking going here I suspect .

Not sure about your window cleaner point. (I don't have one.) Surely they only come round if you ask them to? Can't your windows wait until it's safe?