To make bread you need ingredients, a supply-chain uninterrupted by crooks and profiteers. Fuel, on ration, to fire up the ovens. Bakers to get to work... not held-up at road blocks. The public, feeling safe enough and willing to queue outside the bakeries, without the fear of being shot by a sniper.
'Give us this day, our daily bread...' depended on all those factors. The price fluctuated in accordance with the risk. The longer the ceasefire, the cheaper the bread.
Pick the right indicator and a world of wisdom is yours!
District nurses are involved in pre-care, post-discharge care, long-term conditions and face-to-face contacts that makes them a barometer for the wider NHS.
Calibrate a DN's work and you you have a proxy for what and how the NHS is doing.
In the last couple of days, BoJo's been creating a proxy for Covid recovery. How many coffee shops are up and running. The coffee-shop-calculator, his new science.
If offices are closed, no one pops-in for a breakfast-latte. No one nips out for a lunchtime-wrap. To stop the coffee shops going broke, people have to be back at their office desk. To do that they have be confident enough to travel, in the rush hour...
Such is the concern for BoJo's baristas he is ordering the Mandarins back to Whitehall. Pressuring companies to oblige staff to leave the safety of the kitchen table and risk getting back to a desk... to keep the coffee shops going.
He's ignoring his own advice; don't use public transport. Work from home... unless you are a blacksmith or an astronaut.
All the heady-thoughts and grand aspirations you might have had that Covid might have produced some real change to the way we work and live... BoJo doesn't give a row of Kopi Luwak beans for.
The BoJo Coffee-Shop-Ometer will tell him we are getting 'back to normal'. That's all that matters.
Dare we ask, is this a 'normal' we actually want?
Were you thinking something good would come out of Covid2020, like a greener world, a world without the wretchedness of being packed, like sardines, on public transport.
Covid, shoving us into a digital era. Even the Queen does Zoom! Technology, been given the opportunity to show us its real value.
Covid-change, a rehearsal for a better future, or just an interruption of old ways?
A different normal; E-commerce, on-line-learning, teleconferencing and video-medicine. Investing in up-skilling low-waged earners. Reducing overheads, capital costs and real-estate.
No going back? Forget it. BoJo's luddite leadership will take us back to the past because coffee shops need the businesses.
I am sure they do, but...
Covid could be a fulcrum point, levering us into a new world where we spent more time with the family, not on stinking tube trains, traffic-jams and filthy railway carriages. We might have worked without polluting the world for our kids.
A company survey on remote working tells us; a handful report a small negative impact, 22% claiming no impact or a positive impact and points out;
'... COVID-19 has had a profound impact on how work gets done... the longer term implications for employers and employees are far reaching... employers have found employees can be just as productive away from the office, it's increasingly likely we will see an accelerated shift towards agile working, with reverberating effects across the economy..."
Apparently, BoJo doesn't think working from home is efficient. Strange that, because it's what he does... anyway, he's wrong.
Post-Covid invites us to say some tough goodbyes to ideas nurtured in the 70's and 80's.
Out of the ruins of Covid comes the chance of an efficient, effective, productive better life that can be measured in so many ways, not only in cups of coffee.
