Unheeded

My letter went unheeded.

"Then wars shall cease and savage times grow mild, / and Remus and Quirinus, brethren twain, / with hoary Faith and Vesta undefiled, / shall give the law. With iron bolt and chain / firm-closed the gates of Janus shall remain. / Within, the Fiend of Discord, high reclined / on horrid arms, unheeded in the fane, / bound with a hundred brazen knots behind, / and grim with gory jaws, his grisly teeth shall grind."

As one who, in a tangled brake apart, / on some lithe snake, unheeded in the briar, / hath trodden heavily, and with backward start / flies, trembling at the head uplift in ire / and blue neck, swoln in many a glittering spire. / So slinks Androgeus, shuddering with dismay.

My hearing, my child, has been sharpened by my blindness, and I can now draw conclusions from the slightest sounds, which formerly reached my ears as unheeded as they now approach yours.

The TSSA said that access to the furlough scheme should be reinstated for the cross-Channel operator to protect jobs, while the RMT said a financial 'safety net' was needed to prevent Eurostar "tipping over". It follows similar but unheeded calls made at the very start of the pandemic, when international travel fell by more than 95% and Eurostar was forced to scale back its operation to just one service between London and Paris each day.