Anyway, as I was saying: news came yesterday of evidence of Covid in Milan in December 2019, while news of it was still only creeping out of Wuhan. In the UK it didn’t get a mention in New Scientist until early January, and that was in relation to Wuhan. So, while there is no evidence of the presence of the disease in the UK before February, it wouldn’t surprise me were it to have been here by New Year. Certainly there are anecdotal accounts of people with similar symptoms in the UK in December/January
Bor to be Wild (on the road to Sainsbury’s)
Obviously this is conjectural, but let’s assume it is true for the sake of a rough thought experiment.
We know that a significant proportion of those infected by the virus are contagious while also asymptomatic or presymptomatic. These people would not have been spotted at airports or other points of entry even had there been checks, and would have mingled in the community (as public health experts such as Dr Jason Leitch here in Scotland argued in March, as I recall). Therefore community spread could well have been well-established in the UK well before we saw what was happening in Wuhan and then in Italy. By the time UK authorities realised what was happening in March, it was, possibly, already far too late.
The disease is still not well understood, but the understanding in February/March was worse. In particular the focus then on sudden coughs and fever missed that there is a much larger range of possible symptoms. For some people it is not just a respiratory disease but something with more serious systemic effects. If the conjecture is valid, then, although we can criticise the UK government on basis of their response to the advice they were being given, we also see that, even had they responded perfectly (itself a problematic notion), it would still likely have been too late.
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Writing: I wrote 970 words, longhand, this afternoon, and typed them up this evening. That’s a decent session. It’s mostly dialogue, though, so I’ll have to come back and break it up a bit, which will, naturally enough, expand that word count. It all draws on the background work I’ve done during the last three days. Fingers crossed this is an indicator that I can get back into the groove.
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Music: Everything But The Girl play Paul Simon. Only Living Boy In New York was originally on Bridge Over Troubled Water, an album which is now more than half a century old. Imagine that. Someone my age in 1920 could not have slipped on a recording of a favourite artist made half a century previously in 1870, because audio recordings weren’t possible in 1870; Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. Technology, eh?
Anyway, Ben and Tracy stick pretty close to Simon and Garfunkle’s original, but smooth out some of Roy Halee’s more eccentric production, most obviously for the drums.
The coronavirus was present in two large Italian cities in December, more than two months before the first case was detected, a national health institute study of waste water has found.
That suggests the virus appeared in Italy around the same time it was first reported in China.
Researchers discovered genetic traces of Sars-CoV-2 – as the virus is officially known – in samples of waste water collected in Milan and Turin at the end of last year, and Bologna in January, the ISS institute said in a statement seen by AFP on Friday.
Italy’s first known native case was discovered mid-February.
The results “help to understand the start of the circulation of the virus in Italy,” the ISS said.
They also “confirm the by-now consolidated international evidence” as to the strategic function of sewer samples as an early detection tool, it added.
The results feed into an effort by scientists around the world to trace the virus’s family tree.
Let us assume that (a) the above is true and (b) the virus travelled relatively quickly from Italy to the UK and began to spread during or shortly after Christmas and New Year, with any consequent deaths being attributed to pneumonia or other respiratory diseases. Does this mean complaints about some aspects of the government’s appalling handling of the crisis are thrown into new light? It is still appalling, based on what they thought they knew, but it could be that what they knew was even more wrong than they realised. I have thoughts about this, but I’ve had Portuguese red wine and am not thinking entirely coherently, so I’ll save them for now.
On an adjacent subect, I’ve talked a couple of times here of privilege, and how I’ve benefited from it. This Guardian article from yesterday reinforces that position:
Last night and early this morning, a new character started to suggest himself for the work in progress. I spent a lot of today, and 1150 words, drawing out his back story. This was huge fun, as it involved inventing lots of ’60s and ’70s bands and records with which he was associated, before he retired to his Oxfordshire mansion for a life of dissolution and depravity.
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Music : I had something like this 1967 hit in mind when creating that character: Simon Dupree and the Big Sound, a psychedelic pop band, none of whom were called Simon Dupree, who got bored and reinvented themselves as one of the great progressive rock bands, Gentle Giant. They did not, of course, retire to Oxfordshire mansions for lives of dissolution and depravity.
Sorry, this will be a bit niche. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves.
I’ve spent most of today at my desk trying to remember how to write, or, at least, to get to the state where I can write some stuff that isn’t too awful and can be revised later. That’s the trick, really.
For the most part, the writing was picking up on some of the ideas generated yesterday, and I used pretty much the same technique of putting a timer on and writing whatever came into my head for half an hour. That gave me quite a bit to think about. My feeling is that the 1300 or so words that I speed wrote over the past two days will, in time, generate a substantial return in story terms.
I was talking online yesterday evening with some friends about an aspect of this that I didn’t include in my post yesterday, and afterwards I had a nagging memory of a session at the old Civil Service College in Sunningdale years ago. I found my note of it in a journal I kept at the time. The session was with an occupational psychologist at a development centre, in early March 1999, and it was the trigger for forty-year-old me to change jobs and move to the then Scottish Executive in early 2000.
In essence, my insight at the time was that I would stick with and work at the project I was then leading for so long as it took until it looked as though it was self-sustaining, but by then I would be bored and looking for other challenges. I think that’s always been true for me: once the puzzle is ‘solved’ I look for something else. It was certainly true when I changed again in 2008 and again in 2011.
How is this relevant to the pleasure in worrying away at something until a story drops out?
Because it underpins a certain ambivalence I have about publishing (including self-publishing); my personal sense of reward and satisfaction comes from the process of creation, of figuring it all out and working at it until it’s done, or as near done as I can make it. At that point I start to lose interest in it and look for something else. That’s not to say I don’t like people saying nice things about what I’ve written, just that it isn’t what I do it for.
Were I to overthink it (surely not!), I’d say that crafting the inputs are more important to me than marketing the outputs. Of course, I can and do come back later and revise work once I have some distance from it, but the corollary of that is that the bulk of my attention will already have shifted to something new.
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I went to the supermarket tonight for my walk. There were more people around, but my impression was that more of us were wearing masks or facecoverings. Some were blue ‘medical’ type masks, but lots of us were wearing handmade ones. I wonder if wearing of them is a function of availability in that more people are making them. I suspect that people might be less shy about it as masks become more commonplace. They’ll be compulsory on public transport from Monday anyway.
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Music: This feels fitting; it’s also Paul McCartney’s birthday.
Regular readers may remember that I curtailed my long walks in the evenings because a tendon in my foot was showing signs of playing up. I rested it and have, recently, been doing a relatively short walk when I’ve gone out. Tonight I decided to go for a longer distance again, although still only about 2 1/2 miles, along the old railway line and back.
It was a nice walk and I had no problems except on the latter part, coming up our hill, when my knees both decided to complain at the same time,
Carrick Knowe
The route of the walk goes by Carrick Knowe golf course, which, as their website says, is a lovely open area containing mature trees. The trees, alas, are desert islands in a sea of grass, but there we are. For the duration of lockdown the course has been closed. This had the effect that the course area was used as a giant park by families with children, who could go there for their daily ‘exercise,’ safe in the knowledge that social distancing is built into such a large area. I used to include part of the periphery of the course in my longer walks too.
The course is now open again and the impact has been immediate: no families with children, just blokes knocking balls around with sticks and paying for the privilege. I’m happy for them that they have their game back, but can’t help feeling that, in the bigger picture, something has been lost.
One thing about going out in the evening, is that the main road remains largely clear of traffic. The other people out walking were all taking care to maintain distancing, and I enjoyed that we all gave each other a nod or a smile of acknowledgement. Although I’ve become pessimistic regarding a lot of things about the coming months, I’d like it if this loose sense of community, however tenuous, prevailed.
Coming back, I could see a haar rolling over the brow of the hill. Otherwise, it was a sunny day, and I had my tomato plants outside in the sun for a lot of it.
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I spent a large part of the day working on the ‘work in progress.’ I didn’t write many new words, though I finished a scene and set up the next one, but I did come up with a new character and something of his background. Now I need to figure out how he fits into the story. Or maybe I should just write some interactions with him and see if more of his personality and a story come out of that.
He emerged from a writing exercise I set myself, one I used to do a lot but haven’t for a while. Essentially you set yourself a topic and write, without stopping, for half an hour. No revision, just stream of consciousness on the topic, a bit like brainstorming. Previously I’ve done this with colours; today my single word was ‘magic.’ The outcome was the suggestion of the character I just mentioned, a metaphor I hadn’t thought of before (that gives rise to another potential thread of the story), and a suggestion of a theme for the story as a whole.
Of course, all of this is buried in stream-of-consciousness ramblings that only I will ever see, but it spurs the creative process, which is what it was intended to do.
Meantime, thanks to those of you who said nice things about Beside The Seaside yesterday. It makes up for the almost immediate rejection of a submission by one of the agents I talked about.
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Music: I was listening yesterday to an old compilation cd I got off the front of Mojo magazine in 2002. Everything on it was early 1970s reggae on the Trojan label. I used to have a Trojan compilation album of early Bob Marley and the Wailers, Rasta Revolution. I don’t know where that LP is 🙁 This track was on it.
I mentioned the other week that I was going to submit some writing to literary agents. It’s taken a while to check the manuscript again, but the submissions went off today. Making sure I had the covering letters in order, cutting synopses down to the required word count, making sure I had the correct names and email addresses, was all a surprisingly time-consuming activity, All of which is fine, but it doesn’t make for daily blog content, or at least nothing that anyone but me would be interested in.
So I also revised a short story I wrote in 2017. I remember I wrote it very quickly and liking it at the time. Looking at it today, I still liked it but it was obvious it needed work. Anyway, I’ve added it here. A reminder that I can’t control the formatting here on WordPress.
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