The Second Coming.

  

 It’s highly likely if God was contemplating a second coming he wouldn’t make the same mistake again. Far less risky to take an old testament approach, pestilence, famine and such like, which leads one to wonder if this is it. Covid and climate change have a far more tangible urgency than anything metaphysical. Feeding thousands on three loaves and a fish sounds more like a promise Boris and Trump might make. No, God would be more Sodom and Gomarrah this time around, cities destroyed by homosexuality. OK that might be the finger of pious men rather than God but no one as far as I know is blaming Covid or climate change on queers. God would be more direct, “You have fucked up, so die”, an approach that, quite rightly, has got our attention. But his infantile creation is still evading the truth of it. ‘We’ll stop using petrol cars and make a billion electric ones instead.’ “No that’s like blaming the homosexuals again! Jesus Christ!! (Yes father?) It’s OK son I’m talking to the crets. You are all consuming too much. Stop it! Consider the lilies of the field. (I tried that one father) Not now. Do they need 100 channels of TV, a car and central heating? No. Each one of you is consuming several thousand times that of even an elephant. There are still elephants right? (There were when I..) Stop it son. I created earth for enjoyment, even your domestic cats and dogs know that. Trees are having a lovely time. See what I mean? And you’re all making the whole place miserable, including yourselves. It’s time you all grew up and figured out what happiness is, what it’s made from, how to build it. But no, you’re all stuck on old fashioned ideas of economy, whatever that is, earning and spending and wanting more. Do you know how ridiculous that sounds up here? (They even make a virtue out of it) I know. [laughing] Mrs God would smite the lot of you if I’d let her. She thinks I’ve been silly waiting this long. So come on guys I’m gagging for a shag!

The Trumpian Civil War.

Trump is sure. There is not one person in the whole USA that is more sure. People who don’t know stuff are unsure and people who do know stuff are also unsure because that knowing includes the realisation there are many things one doesn’t know. That leaves Trump; totally 100% sure in a daunting world. He attracts people who want to be sure but don’t know stuff and haven’t realised there are many things they don’t know. He gives them cast iron surety without question or effort in finding out stuff. He is so sure he is above being challenged and his followers, in following his lead, also become beyond challenge. Any challenge that does occur is thus by definition false and must be expunged. Trump supporters have found the ultimate answer, surety, something we’d all like to find but can’t. We can’t for good reason. We either don’t know enough to be sure or know enough to realise it’s a false concept, one can never be 100% sure. But Trump has proved the immense attraction of feeling sure and the apparent success it can bring, apparent because he has not been at all successful in real world terms. His life has been a litany of failures and abuse. So the scene is set, the ‘sure’ against the majority unsure, but the ‘sure’ have the strength of surety on their side, a feeling they would rather die for than give up. I’m guessing Trump was a frightened youth brought up on high demands heavily policed emotionally, hence his highest fear as an adult is showing his fear and admitting failure. His followers love his fearlessness, which is merely his fear of showing any, and his success, which stems from his fear of admitting failure. So what to do? His followers will be angered by jokes at his and their expense and easily dismiss ‘false’ claims that run counter to their beliefs because they are in a similar state of fear. Difficult. ‘How does your fear give you strength?’ ‘You’re not alone.’ ‘ We are all afraid too.’ ‘Why does Donald looks afraid?’ ‘Would I wise to believe everything you say?’ Phrases like these don’t confront, they puzzle. They induce a question, ‘why are they saying that?’ and questions stimulate a need for an answer. They work in the mind of the listener when alone with no external pressure. Well that’s the best I can come up with.

Devastating Logic.

Last night realised caring for nature, politics and our environment is mostly a middle class concern. It’s led by TV personalities for people with enough money and time to act. They, we, consider it the right thing to do because of education and awareness. All well and good, but. Those who’re struggling to make ends meet, who don’t have the time to think about it or the education and awareness to appreciate our upcoming problems consider it differently. We’re, ‘the one’s who have too much time on our hands, have a bee in our bonnet, are too comfortably off to understand the real practicalities of ordinary life.’ They definitely don’t think, ‘they’re better educated and know more about these things than I do so I’d better listen to them.’ So it all becomes a well intentioned shot in the foot. Have we become the creators of Trump supporters and Brexiteers? A chill descends. Only Greta Thunburg escapes this puritanical umbrella. And the wealthy are no better. They’re so comfortably off and equally uneducated to worry about global warming; they already have an air conditioned chill-out room, home cinema and gym. It’s hard to know what to do for the best. The best I can think of is laugh. We’re not wealthy but comfortable enough to survive Trump and Brexit, and even the pandemic because we’re aware, we think. It’s the unthinking unaware that’ll take the brunt of all these problems. So manya manya manya thickos you brought it on yourselves! You should have thought about it. Tough love I know but someone's got to do it.

Covid Conspiracy

An acquaintance of mine posted on FB a supposed Italian doctor (white coat/Pizzeria accent) warning that Covid19 is a plot to dramatically cull the majority of the human race. “Don’t be tested or get a vaccine jab. You will slowly become ill and die.” Well that’s clear enough. This isn’t the first conspiracy she’s unearthed from the mountain of amazingly useful information on social media, and as a socially concerned citizen she’s been super keen to share it with the rest of us. Luckily we have a filter for such like. But then wouldn’t we all look a bunch of silly billies if Dr. Pizza Express was telling the truth. In 2001 I followed 9/11 in some detail. When ‘Pilots for Truth’ came out saying airliners couldn’t fly those flight paths, civil engineers said no steel building has ever collapsed like that, demolition experts said the buildings ‘were pulled’ and there were surprising amounts of thermite in the debris I began to suspect the official version. Even then I didn’t imagine a conspiracy, at least not a Bond villain hatching a single dastardly plot. Basically humans aren’t that bright. No for me it was a bunch of people who knew what a bunch of other people were going to do each hatching a subplot of their own because it suited them. They then co-opted others because it suited them and so on; a sort of tree structure. Ben Laden hatched the trunk, the Twin towers owner found a way to demolish obsolete buildings and get an eye-watering insurance payout, the Israelis helped because it fingered the Arabs, money men made profits on the info and someone ordered the military techy stuff. They each took care of business. That way everyone of influence in on it didn’t spill on all the others who were in on it: Keep it secret and there’s bound to be a dumb ass not in on it who’ll spill the beans. And as for Covid19 I doubt it’s Dr. Pizza Express. And, just in case he’s right, shock horror, post extinction I wouldn’t want to live in the same world as the low-life scumbags who hatched such a dastardly plot and be slapped on the back by Henry Kissinger, secretly kept alive by the serum extracted from babies, as “one of us.”

Trumps Tone.

Have you noticed the change in D. Trump’s tone of voice? It’s become the monotonous thudding monotone of incessant bombing of waterlogged trenches, each word a far off explosion muffled in mud. It somehow carries the depressing inevitability of an approaching doom. As he orders more federal forces to quell the protestors of a different opinion he appears to perceive himself inching ever closer to an Armageddon. But who are the sides to this final conflict? For sure he must be depressed at the thought of his glorious personal play’s final act coming to nothing ‘sept a squabble, a stabbing, a soliloquy. Obviously he’s not a fan of Elizabethan theatre, though he definitely has the girth and swagger of a Shakespearean character. At least he had in previous scenes. As you can see I’m padding this out in an attempt to reach my daily 300 words. So who are the sides; that’s my concern. Trump v USA, Trump v China, Trump v the World or Trump v Trump? The rants, the slurred speech, the 3am tweeting, the skewed holograms of reality and now this monotone are pitiable in the homeless asking for a handout. They don’t have the collateral to harm, but this is Shakespeare. Will he be Macbeth, King Lear or Bottom? There’s a range. Or a childhood doll whose stuffing is escaping with its use, or a zip around balloon who in its last gasping fart falls lifeless limp to the ground. No Will has better ways of saying it.

“Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage”

“The time of life is short! To spend that shortness basely were too long”

The Unfearful and the Avatar.

Fear is natural, a sort of, “I’m not going there again” response. Fear of lions, falling a thousand feet from a ridge etc etc. Learning to ski for example, first 4mph is the fear limit, then 10, 15 and so on, each in turn an invisible barrier that one contrives one way or another to not exceed. The situation is assessed, fear triggered and a knee collapse called for. But a different fear can arise from many sources other than physical: fearful of a parent, a teacher, a subject, a situation. In all of these there can be a ‘knee collapse’ called for. And one barely recognises the counter response of self- justification; it wasn’t fear but circumstance. The fear is justified, externalised, buried and once buried only the justification remains. And the justification is a lie. Thus fear teaches one to lie. And lies make reality into a dichotomy of truth and fiction. And this fiction born of fear forms the ego, the fictitious person in the same body as the real: One person holding two identities: The Unfearful and the Avatar. The rat race, which incidentally is very unfair to rats, is the result of Avatars playing reality as if it’s a game of Grand Theft Auto, and unfortunately wealth and public office induce levels of fear unknown to ordinary people. And, sorry to go on, Avatar fiction can seem far more appealing than unfearful truth. So at this moment under the universal fear of Coronavirus the world is in a right pickle. By the way the fruit of the tree of knowledge is not about steam engines and transistors, it’s about our unique human capacity to create our own Avatar, so we can’t say we’ve not been told. In conclusion we seem to be at a cusp, a sharp change in the direction of a curved line, or at least the possibility of one. Like Shylock Avatars can be smelt and once smelt can be outwitted. All we need is a Portia. No not the car dumb ass!

Global Population Decline.

Experts in Global Population Decline are prophesying doom by Global Population Decline. This is important because if 2 people don’t create 2.1 new people populations will fall, there’ll be more 80 year olds than babies and babies can’t look after 80 year olds. Fertility rates are set to fall further causing Japan for example to halve its population by 2100. But if that seems extreme what year was our current world population half of what it is today? Go on make a guess. 1975. Yes we’ve doubled our human population in the last 45 years!! No wonder the other experts, the ones in Global Population Growth, have been prophesying doom for years. So if we’re doomed either way all that proves is we’re rubbish at achieving a stable, appropriate population. And now the experts in Global Population Decline are saying humans will die out in 300 years. This proves, assuming you are alive when reading this, that you’ve lived in the ultimate period of human existence. True the traffic is bad but today’s motorcycles are amazing; 131.4mph average round the TT on a stock BMW! And musical instruments. Never before could so much be created with one finger! Honestly even if a dreadful circular saw accident left you with only one digit you’d have no trouble. And worried about Covid-19? Relax; the Black Death in the 14^th century killed 200 million Europeans and we’ve only had 5 in our area so far. True the weather in July has been shite but next week looks better. And the pubs are open. Familiar faces and language if you wrote it on Facebook would have the police around. Context is everything you dumb Scottish judge. Ooops. So in conclusion don’t have children but if you do try not to have it on public transport, though that might be safer than a hospital, but only if it’s an easy birth. Caesarian births might offend fellow passengers. And obviously have sex but observe social distancing: That’s very important.

What We Can’t do.

We can’t lift half a ton. But we can with a forklift. We can’t know absolutely any unit value without the aid of a thermometer, scales, a light meter, ruler etc etc. We are at a loss with numbers unless we know the rules of mathematics. All these vastly expand what we can do and we tend to forget we can’t do it without external stuff. So why make this pretty obvious point? Well what is it we or say I bring to the party when playing with all this equipment? I suggest experience, inventiveness, intent and an ability to visualise and compare. These are what you might call our soft ‘human’ skills, our unique contribution to this man/equipment interface. These skills basically reduce to intent and comparison. Only we can question, “Is it brighter outside?” and only we can answer, “Well brighter than it was.” We can’t measure lumens without a light meter and normally ‘brighter’ or darker is what we’re interested in. We might feel one weight is heavy and another heavier but we’d need scales to determine their absolute weights. Our senses of light, sound, taste, smell and kinaesthetic all work on comparison without any ability to know any absolute values or really appreciate them sensually. Sure we can read a printout of 110 decibels but our ‘felt’ value can vary wildly from deafening to fine. Basically we’re soft feely animals who’ve invented tools to augment our ourselves. And we’re still soft feely animals. So? Well we’re so the sorcerers apprentice. We’ve mastered spells with no idea of their results. Dum di dum di dum di da da da. Sure we have spreadsheets, balance sheets, calculations and machines but… Did anyone think in the 50’s when they invented plastic that lasts 400 years how much there’d be in 400 years time? Do billionaires calculate how much shopping time they’re going to have to do to spend it all? No! Because we’re still soft feely animals. We can read numbers but our senses can’t really conceive of them. “I have a large number so I need a larger one.” That’s how simple we are. And we have to acknowledge that. That is our limitation and the sooner we accept it the sooner we’ll stop the damage we’re causing.

Music.

I’ve been steeped in music for 64 years now but recently I’ve been upscaling my education. I can now make faces go pale with confusion in seconds. Two amazing things. One there’s only 12 notes in an octave and a realistic range of around 60 to 140 beats per minute: that’s it. And two, people who know nothing about music can be moved to tears, remember a host of songs, when they heard them and what they mean to them. I guess it’s only like watching TV and not knowing how it works but then there’s a whole pantheon of music from classical to jazz to pop. Another obvious but amazing thing is you can’t stop sound and look at it like a picture. Stop it and there’s nothing. In a way that’s quite rare. Stop a chair, it’s still there, a tree and it’s still there. The nearest I can think of is strangling a chicken: one moment it’s there, the next it’s stopped, visible but lifeless, which I guess puts music in the same category as life. (But then in music a guitarist will soon start up twiddling again) Another strange thing is when the bass player stops the whole band tends to stop. Vocals, guitar even drums can stop no problem, but the bass? Why? And Joni Mitchel. Men, even jazz players only use ‘sus’ (suspended) chords in passing. “Never go from a sus chord to a sus chord”. Then Joni comes along and she’s sus to sus to sus. Sus chords are emotionally unresolved and men can’t cope with that, whereas Joni, who’s emotions were permanently unresolved, rarely needed to go to a major for comfort. Hence in Love Actually Joni taught Emma Thompson “how to feel.” And just like Emma thousands of women felt the same not knowing anything about sus chords. Jazz players play 2-5-1 chords incessantly because they sound cool and are real easy to riff over. “Nice.” When the director first heard the composer play the Jaws music he said, “Is that it!?” Which of course it was. And pop? Suffice to say it’s got so generic there’s now a whole industry suing people for infringement of copyright. Anyway hopefully I’ve not made your face go pale. And yesterday Ennio Morricone died. I bet you can’t picture Clint Eastwood without hearing his music.

The Last Civilisation.

Every great civilisation dwindles and falls. Rome, Greece, Persian, Ethiopian etc. all fall in the end. They start youthful, energetic. They move to maturity where the rulers become a law to themselves and the lower class become so occupied putting food on the table they become tired, disillusioned and unable to call their rulers to account. In old age the rulers become fearful and full of strange self-serving ideas. This demise viewed from today is seen as sad, pathetic even funny but with little empathic connection. When it happens, is happening, to our British civilisation we’re in it rather than seeing it through the pink haze of history. Covid plus Brexit are the last two nails in our coffin. Covid will leave us with a huge bill and Brexit will cripple our ability to pay it off. What I personally rose on the back of, free and supported further education, working social services and the NHS are all shadows of their former selves. The optimism of “We’ve never had it so good” has been replaced by the depression of seeing Johnson and co frittering away our chances on some hair-brained scheme to get the wealthy better returns. Our new allegiance to America will only abuse us further. But this is the way of civilisations. We each have our day in the sun and our days in the dark. And the brash British youth of the industrial revolution has left the world, like Covid, much depleted. Humans have in effect become the Covid to much of nature killing off more than Covid ever could. Where those who call for empathy and awareness are voices on the wind those who believe the future lies with AI etc are lorded as profits of a new age. I despair. The world is and we are nature, as much as a squirrel, a tree, a mountain and its streams, all built from the same DNA. To leave that fold for binary silicone, however much it tickles our fancy, is to envisage an alternative universe and our wish to travel there. We’re building the algorithms, 5G and Windows 666 rocket as we speak. But we’ve become confused, disillusioned, unable to call our rulers to account. It’s a shame, and I suspect shameful to be the Last Civilisation.

They Never said they Loved Me.

Whether it was growing up in the fifties, being northern or their own problematic relationship but my parents never said they loved me. To be honest I wouldn’t have known where to file it if they had, though I knew I was loved. They never said I was great or good looking either, just ‘do your best, that’s all you can do.’ It’s hard to know if I’ve missed out on these expressions of affirmation. The absence of them though has left me to go about the task of being me the best I can without these external reflections. I’m still ambivalent about their worth. On the negative side I never thought of myself as good looking or great and I have probably missed out on opportunities without the confidence of these verbal affirmations. On the plus side I’ve had to grow my own without any strings that may have been attached to them. ‘You’re good looking if… we think you’re great for… we love you when...’ Even without these strings I don’t like external reflections. My duty to myself feels sacrosanct. This is probably why I dislike social media so much, so many people reflecting other people reflecting each other in a sort of cognitive incestuousness. Hence our growing totalitarian polarisation. Thinking about it masculinity doesn’t go in for affirmations in general. That’s not to say we can’t have huge affection for each other. But it’s somehow between ‘me’ and ‘you’ without, or maybe with the fear of, reflecting each other emotionally. We are born of female and at some point have to break that primary identification bond to identify oneself as male. Or not. We bond as fellow emigrant travellers on this path. In this new country of masculinity we make our new life noticing its different customs and mores. Then again there’s a genderless disposition to meet the roots of ‘you’ without the flimflam of reflections. So on the whole I’m happy they only said, ‘do your best, that’s all you can do.’ Which I did and I think they’d love me for that: Even when what I did do wasn’t exactly to plan.

This is Reality.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000k94k

Over the twelve or so years we’ve been watching ourselves in reality TV progs like TOWIE, Made in Chelsea etc etc we’ve been learning, not just about life in Essex and Chelsea but how to perform in our own reality. This is Reality. The above radio series lays this progression out beautifully. Though the producers of these shows explain, ‘These are real people in real situations with real emotions’, the finished product is manufactured to a brief. This is Reality. But the emotions are real otherwise, “it would all just be very bad acting”. In these twelve years the mostly young audience have been drifting towards seeing life in these terms. Sure you might be “not from New York city you’re from Hunters Bar”, but the emotions are real, which they are, and emotions are universal, right. The rest is now accepted as pretty fake. This is Reality. So one is left watching a merry dance of entertaining emotions and one begins to accept that emotionally is ‘how life is led. This is Reality. Well yes it is for some people but most, under the slings and arrows of experience, gain a maturity that puts reality first. It’s a,‘If you don’t rule your emotions your emotions will rule you’ kind of thing. (they’re formed in the reptilian part of the brain) This performing emotively in your own reality is appropriate for soaps but it’s become so pervasive in America few American actors can play big roles requiring real character depth so they often turn to English actors. And if that’s the effect it has on actors ordinary people can’t be far behind. This is Reality. Sure it is but it’s a fake reality. With thanks to Donald Glover. This is Reality. Dope.

Black Lives Matter.

Yesterday I was dismissed as being a white, heterosexual male, the most privileged group in our society. Most British fathers I know are and I find it nothing to be apologetic about. But women have ‘me too’, homosexuals have gay pride and now ‘black lives matter’. We’re the only social group left that doesn’t have a social media victim banner. And we’ve missed the boat on that one. ‘Proud white fathers’ would probably be met by universal derision, though I’m still proud to be the father of three. I was accused because I introduced some nuance into the BLM debate. That nuance apparently indicated I wasn’t 100% behind it. I find that strange. Nuance is only thinking, peeling the onion, finding complexities, implications and different perspectives. It’s definitely not being an apologist. I would be failing my privileged education to do otherwise. And white America takes some peeling. They arrived as immigrants around 1600 and in the next two hundred years decimated the indigenous native Indians, and the British slave trade supplied the southern states with free black labour until 1865. White America is built literally on stolen land, slave labour and stolen birth rites. As a result they hold a deep fear of the ghosts of those barbarian deeds. Hopefully BLM can make a difference. But how? In rodent experiments researchers gave rats drugs. They got high and aggressive, the rats that is. The researchers then gave the rats activities to do and the rats stopped using the drugs even though they were still freely available. Blacks even after gaining liberty remained poor, poorly educated and with high unemployment for generations. Gee Officer Crupky sums it up beautifully. They along with native Indians and poor whites become ‘trouble’ that ‘must be policed.’ Yet many live good lives and, given opportunities, prosper. Given all this BLM demos and knocking down old statues, in the UK at lest, seems a cost-free comforting emotion, a Facebook emogie. What’s needed is empathy, better education, opportunities and employment. In this pandemic some rough sleepers were housed in unused uni halls of residence and an unexpected almost miracle occurred. They dropped their alcohol and/or drug habit naturally. You might say they were re-civilised by their surroundings. Rogers would say it’s our natural inclination to grow. But that growth costs money, time and effort far more than a demo and knocking down statues. So are we prepared to give our money, time and effort to people who, in many cases, are angry, belligerent and telling us to fuck off? Statues don’t do that.

The Great Reduction.

Our brains are amazing. Countless synapses, countless more pathways, unfathomable complexity and subtlety. Why then do we typically use them in mundane simplistic mode? I’m not talking about picking up a cup of tea, that in the scheme of things is pretty complex, I’m talking about judging simplistically, black or white, profit or loss, rich or poor that even a tree would be ashamed of. I say a tree because science has shown their roots are connected over large areas by fungi that helps them pass nutrients from strong to weak, older mothers to younger saplings to ensure the health of all; a World Wide Web combined with a National Health Service, all done silently and seamlessly under our feet. And this generosity is across all species. Nature has countless pathways of unfathomable complexity and sublime subtlety. Yet we just see a tree, $200, a cow, £150, an acre of land, £2,000 and so on in a reduction of breathtaking simplistic stupidity. Commoditisation at this level misses all subtlety. Matchbox toys, a company I once worked for, borrowed to expand but became so over-geared it couldn’t pay the interest even in good years, and went bust. Experienced engineers became insurance salesmen, one got a fish round, another sold double glazing. A vibrant ecosystem of skill and friendship died, corrupted by accountants. Schools have also been corrupted by numbers. What was once an enjoyable mutually creative endeavour has become a fearful scrabble for a league table position. Another ecosystem corrupted by simplistic accountancy. Whatever we do in the name of numbers corrupts because of its gross simplicity. Where old forests flourish neat rows of conifers grown for profit become diseased like cows and chickens, and if Britain measures us by GDP we won’t flourish either, and neither will our GDP. And now this pandemic is attempting to destroy the many million small ecosystems under our feet that bind us together in countless unfathomable ways. Jobs, sport, pubs etc, all gone in weeks like rows of ailing conifers stoically standing two meters apart. This great reduction, our reliance on crude simplicity to underpin our judgements of value stubbornly remains as driftwood to cling to having forgotten how to use our brain’s ‘countless synapses, even more pathways, unfathomable complexity and subtlety.’ And luckily Coronavirus has give us six months to think about it. We must surely become gardeners of ourselves not accountants of all we survey. Now think of a bank statement and then listen to this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KC3GrzoQG9U

“Sorry it’s Company Policy.”

Do you know that helpless hopeless feeling when some nebulous authority says there’s nothing you can do but capitulate? Now history. Back in the 1600’s Europeans invaded the Americas, the homeland of its countless resident Indian tribes. These noble explorers set about carving their future in the face justifiable resistance from the Indian inhabitants. There was a sort of corporate sensibility within the incomers, a feeling of being ‘other’ in this new country. They decided they were superior and the redskins were savages. Only by this trick of branding could the incomers justify their despicable behaviour as good and acceptable efforts to ‘civilise’ them, as opposed to killing and pillaging which would have felt very upsetting. After a hundred years of being brutalised, lied to and corralled the majority of Indians have become demoralised, subdued and constrained into ever diminishing reservations. America is now white and still policing a poverty stricken Indian population ravaged with drug and alcohol problems, and thus justifying this result as, “they brought it on themselves”. But basically they were screwed by the incomer’s ‘company policy.’ Aborigines in Australia, Indians in India, Palestinians in Palestine all screwed by the same branding and conveniently justified by, ‘sorry it’s company policy.’ And African blacks transported, traumatised and sold for the strength of their backs. They also had that same, ‘helpless hopeless feeling when some nebulous authority said there’s nothing you can do but capitulate’ in the face of some foreign governmental ‘company policy.’ Individually we also do it. “I hit her because she was asking for it”, “I did it to teach him a lesson”, “she had it coming” etc, all justifications for actions that would otherwise sully our own rosy view of ourselves. We too can think “they brought it on themself” and conveniently overlook the part we played in causing their perversity. This for me is the root of prejudice. ‘We’ unilaterally made the rules of engagement that ‘they’ must play by. That these rules appear just and fair is no tribute to our justness and fairness but rather our inability to appreciate the difference of others. That we rule by them is the very definition of unfairness, which then produces a perverted history, a mistake in the knitting pattern that at some point must be carefully unpicked and put right; no easy thing when generations are involved, and the generality exists under a mass of individual differences. Are ‘they’ Marcus Rashford, Stormsy or a drug gang member? Are we David Attenborough, Tracy Emmins or a drug gang member? And how many generations have we been in the making? We are all in parts family, opportunity, personal quality and luck, thought the latter is mostly dependant on the former. Families we must foster, opportunities provide, personal qualities must be judged fairly, and trust to luck. And wealth? In these terms it’s immaterial but in terms of its capacity to grossly deform the structure and well being of society it has no equal. It’s the very essence of the, ‘nebulous authority that says there’s nothing you can do but capitulate.’

Sound Economic Principles.

It appears to make so much sense. Most industries from air travel to corner shops are powerless against their rising debts. It’s as if time itself needs constant feeding £’s. A theatre for example plunges into the red. It’s a 100% going proposition except for no audience. It could continue its income stream in two weeks if that audience returned, but right now it’s bankrupt, like a TV you can’t keep up the payments on. It’s ready for the bailiffs. It’s purchased at a knock down price and the new owner plugs it back in. It’s no wonder Jacob Reece Mogg considers this pandemic to be a once in a lifetime opportunity. It’s supported by our public money as far as possible until the inevitable happens. We’re left paying off the debt, accepting lower wages and conditions and, if we have any cash left, buying tickets for its new production of The Merchant of Venice. And it’s all based on sound economic principles. So how come our ‘sound economic principles’ can lead to the biggest land-grab in history? Meanwhile Black Lives Matter and the statues of slave traders are torn down. Do we know something we don’t know we know? Are we all being bought and sold in some secretive existential slave auction? And dying in thousands to boot. If it hasn’t been the story line of a Bond movie already it should be. The filthy rich want even more money and the world to themselves to spend it in. See Ayn Rand’s book, Atlas Shrugged, circa 1930’s. I haven’t read it but quoted it enough times. So maybe viruses are the new thing to get you what you want, like plastics. I calculated the amount of plastics in existence once. It was countless billions of tons because every ounce of plastic since 1950 is still here somewhere. (360 million last year alone) So maybe there’s something wrong with our human understanding of ‘sound economic principles’. For sure cats don’t abide by it.

When I was born we had none of these.

Yesterday I was spurred into recalling my own brief three-quarter century of history. In my grandparent’s soot-blackened terraced house I was tin-bathed and outside-toileted. I remember street men, knife sharpeners, rag and bone men, men selling sugar and salt carved from blocks, milk and muffins, poes under the bed and sitting by their cast-iron range till my legs got red raw, school and Sunday school. We were good Lancashire mill workers, Methodists with no swearing or alcohol. My mother could lip-read because of the noisy looms and probably glowed in the dark from licking radium tipped paint brushes illuminating watch faces as war work. Car ownership was twenty years off, it was walk, cycle or bus. There was a radio with, for some inexplicable reason, odd foreign places like Luxembourg and Hilvers on the dial. Wages must have been around £5 a week, houses £300 and there was rationing. I was born chubby but soon leaned out. No one had a waist measurement over 32” except the mayor. By the time I was five things were on the up and by fifteen, 1958, I had a second hand bike, £3.50, we had a back and front garden, an ancient wooden garage and a black and white television, but my mum still wrote all weekly expenditures in a book. And then and then, and then now. And ‘now’ is both amazing and frightening, luxurious and wasteful, permissive and puritanical, comfortable and stressful, connected and disconnected, concerned and confused. Could our brains have been heated up by the lead in petrol or it’s toxic substitutes? A more prosaic explanation might be the Monte Carlo effect. In Monte Carlo they’re so wealthy they’re left with only their whims to consider, a sort of self-incestuousness. In a recent documentary on this wealth haven an oik had a T shirt emblazoned with, ‘Don’t make friends make money’. As well as being out of date before he was born, it somehow proves his only friend is money, which as everyone knows is the only remaining friend to those who have lots of it. So have we all over the years become to some extent self-incestuous? In short, American? Most likely. We can’t watch TV without its mandatory 15 minutes of lessons every hour, magazines with pages of them and now an internet dedicated to them. When I was born we had none of these.

Pillory Me.

This ‘tear down statues’ thing has made me re-examine my own past and it’s not pretty. My parents and grandparents worked in Manchester’s cotton mills profiting from the cotton picked by slaves. I myself felt proud to be a Scout leader for a short time, a movement lead by Baden Powell who has been labelled a Nazi sympathiser and racist. My parents were in the war effort under, a long way under, Winston Churchill, a man with dubious family connections. I personally made a lot of money out of American children’s pocket money. And finally I currently buy cloths and many other goods from high street chains made by children in far east sweat shops. Maybe even my pride in being British is misplaced. At least I didn't vote for Brexit and the Conservatives. Yes I’ll miss the bronze reminders of our British past, being able to read the plaque and mutter, “Scum” but in truth it would only be to heap on their heads my own smaller profiteering from those of lesser circumstance. And if I refuse to buy from Primark it will only lower the workers wages, as if they aren’t too low already. In the end I feel I must admit to being born into a species, I suspect the only species that knows the concept of slavery. And of shame, duplicity, usury, nobility and greed without end. These are my ultimate regrets. But then we can cherish, love, laugh, care and create amazing art and science: We’re not all bad. No, the past is always a mucky place just as this present will become in the years ahead, each one to be judged for our human failings and successes. The rich will be pilloried and envied in equal parts, but the past, if erased or cleansed, will not be there to lean from.

Covid Emotionally Speaking.

I sense we’re feeling emotionally attacked by this pandemic. It’s become a background bully, miasmic and impersonal, a constant frightening odour we can’t discern the source of. So in a conscious search for a culprit we just become emotional and attach it to some one or something we can be emotional at. Emotions are like that. They’re just there and our conscious attributions to them are, well quite frankly irresponsible. But we do it anyway. Domestically, governmentally, even racially we’re attaching this growing Covid emotional miasma believing they are the true source of our feelings. I for one can’t stand the icy interruptive white female voice of BBC 4’s morning news, I want to stab her with her own icicles. And now the brown smirk-faced professor on Piers Morgan’s morning inflammation who wants to tear down all our bronze historical figures on account of they were imperfect. Sorry fella history’s like that. The only way to be perfect is to do nothing. To imagine we automatically admire every bronze man on a plinth is simplistic. Mostly we just think, “Man on plinth, nice sculpture”, but even if we read who he is, ‘Best UK slave trader, 1795’, we don’t think, “Mmm nice idea!, why didn’t we cover that on my MBA.” So maybe as time goes on we’re becoming increasingly the victims of Corvid induced emotions and our consciousness's inability to sort the wheat from the chaff. If you find yourself crying or your homelings making you consider divorce I suggest you shout, ‘Fuck you Coronavirus’ as loud as possible. I do seriously wonder if emotion will be the demise of humans though. In one Star Trek episode Captain Kirk sent his crew out to get the dead body of an ex crew member while, wait for it, being attacked by numerous ferocious 30 foot animated telegraph poles. “An unfortunate decision Capen” said Spock. “That’s the difference between us Spock, we have feeling, we’re not just logical like you” Kirk replied. Thanks only to the script writers no one else died but I certainly wouldn’t fancy my chances against even one 30 foot animated telegraph pole.

Time to watch Metropolis Again.

Stock markets up, Prospects down.

Strangely stock markets are still rising as the whole world goes into recession. Very odd. If you have a pension or investments the people who look after them are very keen to make your pot grow, otherwise they’d be out of a job. TINA stands for ‘There Is No Alternative’ meaning the only game in town is stock markets. Basically a huge amount of cash is chasing the best return and as that’s the stock market it’s driving prices up. I’m trying to get my head round it all by typing this. OK but shares are in companies that are busy trying to survive, laying people off and closing plants etc, and we’re all acquiring ever more titanic government debts by the day. I have to say this smacks of Trumpian economics; ‘This is going to be great- invest in me- Oh sorry, unforeseen problems- I’m off- thanks for the cash.’ I imagine he’s currently working on some Martian real-estate scam. So what does the future look like? Mmm, scratch. I think we’ve created a system where the old adage, ‘the rich get richer and the poor etc’ has gone into overdrive: A sort of aggressive slavery (slaves aren’t always black) where the poor, however hard we work, become more indebted and the rich reap the benefits of our labour AND the interest on our debts. Of course this is unsustainable and probably the underlying reason for the current mass demonstrations. Mmm, another scratch. So what can be done? OK what did the black slaves do? Oh this is even more depressing. They couldn’t do anything, and those that did got strung up. They were categorised as lesser beings and subject to different disadvantageous rules. Their subservience was treated with abject fondness and their objections as ‘thugery’ in Preti and Boris speak. It’s the same old ‘ruling logic.’ So? It’s all a jigsaw puzzle where the picture shows ‘Home sweet home’ but the pieces have been rammed into reading ‘Homo swet heet me’. Not great but I am making this up as I go along. So now I’m seeing the working poor demonstrating, six abreast, together in a slow deliberate swaying march like that classic old film Metropolis. It looks hugely intimidating; an organised, unstoppable mass of bodies. No random, disjointed, frenetic, outwardly aggressive milling crowd, just unstoppable. Not leader and followers just homogenous humanity. It would make a great graphic too. We’ll get Stormzy to do the music. Interestingly Fritz Lang’s original screenplay for Metropolis was altered in the American version to show the down trodden workers as the villains. Surprised?

Privilege Matters.

Just watched an American video; a field, a line of young people, a man saying “if …...take 2 steps forward.” The questions were about your start in life, parents married, often hungry, that sort of thing. It was pretty clear by ten or so questions the disparity of starts, the poor at the back, the comfortably off at the front. It was also clear there was a bias towards black people at the back. Of course there are many famous people who had poor starts and made something of themselves and others who squandered good ones, but the majority are profoundly influenced by it. Poverty causes stress which in turn causes family arguments and break up. It provokes lawlessness in an attempt to make ends meet and promotes anger and fear in equal parts. But again it sometimes doesn’t. It often limits one’s horizons and possibilities leading to the helping hand of alcohol and narcotics. But often the reverse is true. And in time there arises simplistic labels that in no way truly reflect the individual. So what is Black Lives Matter a response to? Poor parenting, poverty, skin, race, the dubious validity of law versus lawlessness, prejudice? For me it’s the destruction of human values by overbearing deviate states. We want almost viscerally a good home, loving parents, equality and fareness, understanding enough for a decent life, if fact the return of decency itself. Maybe Black Lives Matter is a French revolution of sorts, a fight for universal privilege. If that’s the case Donald, Boris and Dominic had better take heed.

A Very British F-up.

It’s actually happening, running its course, like a nose. We have a class system, obviously, as exemplified by the famous pre-Monty Python, “I look up to him…..but down on him” sketch. Upper - Middle – Lower or Public school - University - State school or Nanny/Mother – Mum - Ma. I’ll omit the colonials though they did a jolly good job in the war. This breaks down to one’s use of; privilege - intellect – cunning, which in turn is exemplified by who one runs to in times of trouble; nanny/matron (paid professional carer) – mother (unpaid harasser) – ma (jovial unpaid sporadic harasser). So this is how the British F-up runs. To begin with we’re all led by the Upper class as they have the bravado and necessary cash but lack the competence and experience. As they fail to deliver the Middle technocratic class step up to organise the muddle having had the foresight to study epidemiolanodigology at university. They though realise that everything is imprecise however much one knows, but set out a better plan of action. This gives the lower class a basic framework on which to apply their cunning. Being used to jovial unpaid sporadic harassment this takes many forms. Most use their initiative to stay safe, look after their mum and family, tighten their belts, and save/acquire cash wherever possible. The minority, thankfully, believe what they heard while they weren’t listening and flout any useful advice. But luckily knowledge and awareness, unlike money, does trickle down with time. So in the pandemic we’re now in the latter stages of this process. The upper class have proved useless, the middle class have shown the way and the lower class have a decent grasp of what’s going on. And the final stage? This is when the cunning of the lower class and intelligence of the middle class join forces to create a bottom-up solution based on locally based action where local GP’s, health care professionals and co-opted organisers arrange testing, tracing and lock-downs virtually street by street. Lets face it we’re all pretty computer literate by now, we’ve local knowledge, got the pandemic picture and most of us are sitting at home with time on our hands. We form the greatest single (unused) workforce we’ve ever had and most of us would do it for nothing! So for god sake forget the 20 thousand centralised tracers watching Netflicks at £10/hr waiting for some expensive centralised computer system to work. I could write a spreadsheet for 1,000 people in a few hours and email it to every GP in the country for nowt. Sure China has draconian powers but we have the great British nous. We’re known for it. (along with a world crass government)

Dominic Cummings.

I watched Dominic Cummings in front of a select committee hearing. My view? A severely damaged individual. What do I mean? He disassembled every question like loosening the wheel nuts on an oncoming car making it career off the road before it got to him. Time and time again they tightened them and he loosened them making it appear it was their own machinery at some kind of irrational fault leaving him untouched in the middle of the road like some blank faced Midwich Cuckoo. This is not acquired political expediency, it’s a childhood survival mechanism. A lot of kids try it on but for it to remain the survival mechanism of a full grown adult suggests a fearful overbearing parent and a very damaged child. If anything I was damaged in the reverse way. In the face of overbearing illogic I now use logic as a means of survival; harming but not as dangerous. So Cummings will never show weakness or contrition and will use his considerable intellectual abilities to defend and manipulate anything that he perceives as overbearing, importantly irrespective of its rights and wrongs. As a hired gun he’s perfect. Tell him Remain is the overbearing establishment and he will cut it at the knees, Corbyn is soft, ditto, and the British public are clods and he will coral them like sheep. Caught in Durham he will concoct a heart warming explanation. And when Boris is pressured to sack him? Who knows, but what he’s given can be taken away, ‘know what I mean.’ No one’s born bad we just achieve it by our learnt defences. That Dominic dominates is forty years historical. What I’ve learnt in seventy odd years is however it’s explained certain people are best avoided and definitely not exploited for their childhood damage.

Leakage.

Covid19 relies on leakage. In one person it either kills and/or is extinguished in less than two weeks, not counting convalescence. In the first four days you don’t know you’ve got it and your not contagious, after that you are but severely hampered by feeling like shit. But it sure as hell knows how to leak from one person to another. Somehow in the face of this one exploit our current government looks like a confused geriatric Dodo. Several million travellers entered the UK un-quarantined after we knew it was leaking world wide. Huge leak. After a further leaking delay we went into lock-down which was also leaky because we could go shopping etc. After three months we’ve got the leaking steady at about one for one which in itself is dangerously close to exponential leaking. And now in a reckless attempt to make this whole governmental mess appear successful we’re being offered more opportunities to leak. And this is probably a month before we have a workable test-trace-whatever thing. Another huge leak forward.

It’s not that politicians are stupid it’s that they have totally the wrong skill set for dealing with a pandemic. They are trained in self-confidence, privilege, rhetoric and parliamentary procedure. They have no understanding of the scientific method, real world problem solving, how the majority of us live and in this case the vital importance of timing. They are far closer to actors living off approval than other professions that live off results. They have converted any expert ‘advice’ unknowingly into a fragmented muddle primarily aimed at making their performance look good to the audience. So what have we learnt? It’s nice having a slower paced life rather than frenetic pressure. Zoom etc makes working from home more viable than we thought. Far less traffic is a godsend and the air feels cleaner. The garden’s looking amazing in the sunshine. We can get so many ‘home’ things done. Fashion’s not that important. We know how courageous and valuable our NHS is. Celebrities at home are no different to us. We’ll know what to do when the next pandemic comes. And possibly most important of all, we know if we sleep walk into a poor, corrupt Parliament people will die and our kids will pay for it for decades.

Yesterday I watched the final race in the 2016 British Superbikes series. It was a titanic struggle between two guys showing ultimate skill, commitment and bravery. The winner was drained and in tears and the loser was the first to congratulate him. They had brought out the best in each other. It’s like that in sport; it’s honest. Our Parliament is corrupt because it’s not like that in our politics. It has become, ‘who can dupe the populous best’, and honesty can’t win at that game.

Get Cummings Done.

One can only imagine the Dom/Boris conversation. ‘She’s coming down with it/ We can’t do without you/ Can I take her to her mothers?/ Of course dear boy.’ One could also imagin a news headline the following day, ‘Advisor’s family rushed to grandparents by official car to safeguard government.’ But true to DC’s way he opted to do it himself. I imagine he sees himself as a Bletchley Park back-room operative making history without being a visible part of it. He’d cracked the code of British political propaganda, the three word phrase, and it’s ‘All gone Pear-shaped.’ (ignore the hyphon) So is there a deeper truth here, that if you live by subterfuge you will die by subterfuge? And the same goes for being too clever by half. The distortions used to win the referendum and elections, the deceptive vacuous assertions that underpin our current government’s political rhetoric are coming face to face with their maker. Dominic Cummings actions on that car journey were best justifiable and at worst immaterial but the public outcry of genuine anger is palpable, if unfathomable by Conservative ministers. It’s a reaction to the rank puss of their own disingenuousness; the oily smell of a dead body. But it’s their time in the sun, their culmination, each one clinging to the lead Lilo of the office they’d so long dreamt of. Yes they’re out of their depth but the British public could forgive that. Being deceived, duped, lied to and treated as stupid we won’t forgive, especially by those ‘who serve us’ in public office. So could the man who handed power to the Conservatives have driven it away in 220 miles? Can we be saved from the UK being the 53^rd US state with Boris as State governor rather than our own PM? Can Keir Starmer hold the dagger of calm truth to the throat of this gang of rogue boys? Series two will be out in the fall, sorry autumn. And now to the commercial break.

The Other Pandemic.

We all know the words; dishonesty, duplicity, deception, spin, misinformation etc, all the million names we have for lying. Honesty is speaking and acting on what you know to be true irrespective of repercussions.

Ever since the human brain expanded to cope with our complex socialisation we have had a dilemma, to act for the common good or for our own personal advantage by means of deception. Deception is our unique invention as a species, at least at the levels we employ it. As such it defines our social order from the rich and powerful to the turf wars of drug gangs and the millions in-between. it’s that part of our brain that asks, “How do I get the better of the rest?” In our many hundreds of years of history this question has been played out like a contagious virus many million times. It’s hardly a coincidence then that we’re experiencing two pandemics at the same time, one the Coronavirus and two a pandemic of untruths where the ‘healthy’ truth is almost dead and buried by an explosion of duplicity. This non-coincidence is because at every stage in its progression Coronavirus has been aided by our growing capacity for falsehood.

One can condemn lying on a moral level as we’ve done for many years, but when the escalating effects of it could well lead us to extinction by virus, global warming and environmental destruction the result becomes far more explicit than a debatable moral judgement. Basically we have thought and still think ‘we can get away with it’, but this humanity changing circumstance is proving we can’t, not any longer. But it’s hard for those who prosper by lieing to throw off that protective cloak: Profits may suffer, I might lose my job or be crucified on social media, my country might be weakened, I might lose popularity, I’m frightened; all things that appear to require multiple layers of dishonesty to continue. In my own lifetime I have seen this pandemic grow as dishonesty becomes the bedrock of success and the avoidance of failure, from the selling of chocolate to the acquisition of wealth and propagation of state power: all based on deception. The problem and the reason for our jeopardy is that that thing out there called reality only works on truth, it is it, it defines it. And when we shout, “No this is the truth” when it isn’t is like a little kid fighting a bear; the poor thing ain’t never going to win the argument, and likely as not will die. And reality has way less sympathy than a bear. So while we’re busy fighting the Coronavirus as if our life depends on it could we also formulate a vaccine to expunge dishonesty?

Quiz of the Week.

What do you call a bosom buddy of Donald Trump? OK what do you call a person who engineered Brexit to further his own career? No? Right, what do you call a guy who’s trying to make out he’s the second coming of Winston Churchill? What do you call a fallacious falanderer? Really still not got it? OK what do you call a man who calls a situation unprecedented when experts have been warning him about it for at least four years that it’s going to happen? What do you call a chap who’s been underfunding and quietly selling the NHS off to US health companies? No? I thought that might give it away. Right, OK what do you call a guy who comes across as a befuddled buffoon? So what do you call this person who is a befuddled buffoon? Oh come on I thought you might give it away! OK what do you call a befuddled buffoon who uses his position to lie to the British people? And downgrades Coronavirus from a dangerous pandemic to a general flue so the NHS front line can be given poorer PP equipment and get ill and sometimes die to mask his government’s failure to stockpile the proper PPE? Oh come on you should have got it by now. OK, he doesn’t possess a comb? He says he’s following expert advice when the WHO and numerous experts say he’s wrong? He promotes a friend to Health Minister who has no experience in that area? He’s going to pay out billions of our money and expecting us to thank him for his generosity? He’s been through a near death experience and not learnt a thing? Right that’s it, the quiz is off. If you can’t be bothered to try I’m wasting my time. But here’s a taster of next week’s quiz. Who told everybody you can inoculate yourself against Corvid19 by drinking bleach and sticking a torch up your arse?

Matt and the Nation’s Picasso.

Matt Hancock’s previous experience is in computer software, economics, and more recently culture and sport, and even more recently health. Dealing with the Coronavirus must be like being asked to fix the nation’s Citroen Picasso when all he’s ever done before is drive one. In panic he calls the AA, Kwik-fit and a local garage. He finds his AA membership has lapsed, Kwick-fit only do tyres and exhausts so he takes it to the garage. He relays the dealership information to the nation, “It’s probably the coil packs or possibly the mass air flow sensor.” Scrabbling for authority not knowing what any of that means, and to deflect any personal blame in case it all goes tits up, he calls in the expert mechanic to the stand. He says we’ve got the coil packs on order but there could be a delay because of the high demand. Matt retakes the helm and says we’re doing all the right thing at all the right times with the authority of a person who’s never heard of them before and says, "Could we have the next slide please." The expert again, “We fitted the coil packs but that didn’t fix it. We’re going to replace the clutch.” Meanwhile other garage mechanics, hearing of the nation’s predicament, suggest it could be an air leak in the throttle body causing the O2 sensor to go off scale. This is reported in the Guardian. Matt refers this suggestion to his mechanic who dismisses it as the work of an idiot as the O2 sensor is in the exhaust and wouldn’t cause the problem. He adds he’s replacing the camshaft and crankshaft sensors and sorting out a small oil leak in that area. A person in Chipping Sodbury says on This Morning that once his Picasso wouldn’t start because a mouse had made a nest in the exhaust pipe. Matt says it’s heartening to hear you’re all trying your best. At the 5pm grilling Evan Davis asks why we didn’t buy a German car and Sir Keir Starmer suggests Brexit was a big mistake and that car spares are readily available in Europe. Meanwhile Evan further suggests the EGR valve may be stuck from carbon build up and has the government cleaned it? Matt passes that one to the mechanic, the only one out of the three who knows what it is. “Did that while we were fitting a new alternator.” Evan, “And the cam belt?” “What about it?” asked the mechanic. “Well er is it still holding the cams up?” Mechanic, “Yes its fine and the cam braces are fine too.” Evans thanks him for the extra information. The mechanic finishes with, “This problem wouldn’t have occurred if you’d had it regularly serviced.” With thanks to Edmouse for the technical information.

A Virus Methodology.

The government are doing their best, poor things, which isn’t great because they think they have to govern, and governing means, “We must tell the imbecilic wretches what to do. Without us it would be chaos.” Well it is chaos and the imbecilic wretches are doing a fine job thank you very much.

Lets pretend the public are intelligent (which we are) and we’re prepared to do what’s needed to beat this virus. (which we have proved) OK we all know our local area and could exist in a defined area of streets containing say2,000 people, like a postcode. That’s 30,000 areas country wide. The government defines these areas and says from a certain date, say 1^st May, you must be prepared to not go outside your area for 14 days whilst maintaining your current lockdown conditions. Each area includes a shop or depot, chemist and doctor. This defines two levels of quarantine, households (1 to~4) and areas (2,000). In the 14 day period individuals must notify symptoms. Areas with no symptoms are assumed clean and in areas showing symptoms all individuals are tested and carriers extracted. The household quarantine will identify those possibly contaminated, and any possible cross contamination outside it explored. These two levels of quarantine provide an overall manageable number of areas each containing locally manageable household units. Under the current lockdown conditions the roughly twenty million household units each able to cross contaminate in undefined ways is chaotic, and with limited testing it will remain chaotic. The second level of isolation identifies carriers within boundaries and focuses action where it’s needed. If in the first round 50% of areas are clean and carriers identified in the other 50% extracted, in the next 14 days there would probably be another 30% clean. We are relatively quickly focusing on 20% of the population, or 6,000 areas. After 6 weeks the virus is definable and limited to say 5% of the population or 1,500 areas. With the government and the public in these areas focused on eradication the virus has nowhere to go. All the while experts are gaining data, the government is dealing in manageable numbers and the public are included and active in the process. Our limited capacity to test individuals is focused where it can do most good.

If this was actioned 1^st week in March we’d be 7 weeks in and dealing with less than 5% of the population and maybe two weeks away from eradication. As it is we have 3 more weeks and will still only have the curves of tested cases and deaths to go on.
These numbers are plucked out of the air but it defines a possible methodology far better than what we’re currently doing.

Lockdown- That’s it!

News at, well basically the C word any time on Radio 4. Interview; woman kneeling outside care home talking to her 90+ grandma, her bed rolled appropriately, on the phone through a window. Lovely grandma and they ended singing ‘We’ll meet again...’ That was it. Basically the poor old dear will be in lockdown while there’s contagious people people still running around. When is that going to be? Yes there are vulnerable people, the gov is supposed to have sent us all a letter so they know who we are, though I haven’t received mine yet. Meanwhile our collective future is crumbling before our eyes, which I have to admit has some positives to it: the stocks of summer fashions will all be going straight into landfill. But, Bolero Hot Pants aside, this current situation is bad for everyone. Enter the Stiffmouse solution. End the lockdown today but give the over seventy fives and other vulnerables cart-blanch to have a field day. Give us each a few grand, nah a hundred grand, free tickets to Saturday Night Takeaway, an evening with a star of our choice, exemption from speeding tickets, and a new vehicle. Honestly it wouldn’t cost that much. Most of us would be pushed to spend ten before I had a coronary from meeting Sandra Bullock or wrapping my new Ducati round a tree. And the rest would go to my kids and straight into a new house building boom. We’d all go out happy as Larry on a new batch of memories.
And the guy I saw today ‘kinda’ running down the road in shorts looking every inch he’d never exercised a day in his life before could go back to his lethargic ways.

Lockdown Diaries day:= f(y) + integral sin x dx.

The limits of the integration are between 0 and the day before yesterday and the y is the basic existential question. Jerry, my new black current child is doing ok. Actually I was briefly concerned I may have committed bigamy with a black current bush but I guess I’m only fostering Jerry so that’s.. oh and my religion states I can marry one of any species so it would have been ok anyway. And the worms are still worming so that’s ok too. Did you know you can cut and bore through granite with a copper mandrill connected to a vibrator? (true-Youtube it) Obviously not a ladies one, a more industrial type. Some think the shepherd’s crook object oft seen in Egyptian hieroglyphs is a vibrating stick for such a purpose. Apparently DeWalt are working on a plumbing fitting strapped to a boombox playing Black Sabbath, but that hasn’t been confirmed. And the reason Cusco, that’s Cusco not Costco, rocks fit so well together is they found some organic sediment that softens rocks, so whack ‘em together and in fifty years they fit like a glove. And of course, the pyramids were built under water. When the floods came they floated in the foundations and as the waters rose they added the next layer and the next till at high tide they topped it off with polygon. You learn a lot on Youtube. (actually it’s a polyhedron, but ‘polygon’ seemed funnier) Anyway I’ve now realised the government’s policy for Corvid-19. It’s like a Y9 disrupting a class. “Right that’s enough! Go and stand outside the door. It’s not useful and it’s not funny!” And when that happens in 2035 they’ll all be asking, how come your parents called you Corvid Johnson?

Lockdown Diaries day 8 or 9.

I have a new friend. After digging out 50 cubic feet of a plant you could weave a suspension bridge out of I found a black current plantling about 50cm tall with roots and a few green shoots. In fact it’s more than a friend, it’s my child. I dug a hole and nacellid its roots into, as it were, its cot, patted down its duvet  and watered it, and told it its mum will look after it as she’s only a meter away. That was yesterday and its shoots are still a healthy green. In fact I’m talking to things much more in general. The cats obviously and my bike, Rosa, but also the 50 cubic foot plant for not being at all cooperative. With a hundred 2.5mm green strands per handful, each one able to trip me up, immobilise my spade or garrotte me, I had to give it some rather bad language, which I’m not proud of. I’ve apologised to the shed for not giving it a coat of preservative, thanked some plastic sheet I got from Toolstation, which now sports a bouncer and a trestle table to click-and-collect from by the way, and worms. Everything I move has worms under it so it’s, ”Sorry worm, but here’s an exciting new thing called air travel, which you’re unlikely to have experienced before, into one of the raised beds. Oh and I cooked another banana loaf, this time with more modern ingredients. It all went well till I forgot about it. But it’s surprisingly lovely considering it got 90 minutes instead of 30. So, to finish, thankyou keyboard. Considering all the crap that must have fallen in all your little gaps you’re doing surprisingly well. Good job, but don’t let your Backspace key stick ever again or you’re out the window.

Lockdown day? Your donkey can't count.

I have a book called, ‘A Mind of its Own.’ It’s a while since I read it but in these crazy times it might be worth revisiting. One’s brain is after all in the ultimate lockdown, in a pitch-black soundless skull relying only on incoming signals from the senses. From these it has to decide what to do, and it’s so busy doing that it only contacts your consciousness with its decisions after it’s done. And you thought you were in charge. Nope. Only when your conscious receives the result does it then go to work inventing a reason for it. ‘I’m afraid- I hit out- why did I do that? – oh because you’re being stupid’, or ‘I see black flakes falling past the window- no information- why? – must be building work.’ No, the building was on fire. This post rationalisation gets us into all kinds of trouble, especially when we’re prone to believing every word we say. After three weeks of intensive therapy training my most useful conclusion was, “I have a donkey head!” and I must use my limited conscious intelligence to interrogate the donkey’s braying rather than swallow everything it’s telling me. I mustn’t ignore it because it’s my donkey but, well you know what donkeys are like. So therapy can suggest ways of perceiving one’s donkey’s bad habits and training it out of them. A simple way is to ask, “Why the fuck is my donkey telling me that?” But be kind to it, donkeys have many ways of not cooperating. Be kind but firm. Gently explain that the last time, and all the other times, it told me that another drink would be a good idea didn’t end well did they? After our current crisis when the old donkey habit of wanting more and more starts up again it’s worth explaining that we’ve been the most profligate generation in human history and should be deeply ashamed. And it’s all down to our donkey’s inability to count. Sure our consciousness ‘knows’ about numbers but an untrained donkey just thinks, “Have I finished my last meal? Right then, must be time for my next.” It, I, you, we can’t really conceive of counting. That must sound ridiculous, surely we’re surrounded by numbers. True but we basically conceive of numbers in a ‘more’ or ‘less’ fashion. Take £3 or £4, which would you rather have? The decision is easy. Then take £275,442 or £275,443. The decision feels immaterial because neither is sufficiently more or less than the other. Whatever your worth from £100 to a £100 million a change of 50% is highly significant, 20% is significant and 1% is insignificant. That’s the rule not the amount. Only when we realise our donkey can’t count, only compare, can we lose our profligate ways. In fact I’ve come to the conclusion our brain organ functions totally on comparison. Our synapses create dot-to-dot meta pictures where only a change in the ambient marks the difference between happiness or misery. Basically our brain only developed in the first place as an aid to finding our next meal. So be aware of your donkey but for god sake don’t believe what it’s telling you.