Talking about the apparent resurgence of covid-19 in some parts of England, Professor Chris Whitty, CMO England, said:
“We have probably reached the limits of what we can do in terms of opening up as a society… The idea that we can open up everything is clearly wrong. Choices will need to be made… if we need to do more things in future we may need to do less of some other things.”
I suggested previously, (Irk The Purists and others), that, in the end, this is all about balancing harms of various options, none of them good, and that has to be a political decision. Looked at over the UK as a whole, we have a government led by an unelected weirdo to whose tune the Prime Minister dances, intent on pushing through a hard Brexit despite the economic shock of the pandemic, appointing toadies with no obvious competencies, and enobling apologists for murder. That doesn’t bode well.
Here in Scotland we have a First Minister who has done the communication thing very well, while the actual outcomes have been broadly similar, and who leads a party commited to adding yet more economic harm on top of Covid and Brexit.
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Not a lot got done today: it was slow and sultry, though not as hot as parts of England. Did some wandering, made some bread, read Private Eye. The evening ended, as I thought it might, with a sudden downpour, The rain has stopped for now, but I suspect there may be more to come. I’m tired, so maybe it will lull me to sleep later.
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Music: shall we have some Creedence Clearwater Revival? Yes; I think we will.
After last night’s post, I had a look at Birds Of Prey, a sequel of a sort to Suicide Squad. Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn was the best thing about Suicide Squad so I thought it might be worthwhile. Alas…
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We went for a walk down by the Forth this morning. The tide was fully in and terns were diving just off shore. Thanks to drizzled-up glasses I could tell if they were Arctic or Common terns though. The sea was grey, as was the sky, and for half of the walk my glasses were sprayed by drizzle. I loved it.
This afternoon, this week’s garden list added a pair of great-spotted woodpeckers. It’s getting crowded out there.
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Pulp Fiction
Not much writing today, just some tidying up of what I did yesterday. I watched an old BBC documentary on YouTube (this one) about NEL pulp fiction of the early seventies, featuring especially ‘Richard Allen’ who wrote Skinhead. Allen was really James Moffatt who published at least 290 novels under 40+ pseudonyms, writing 10,000 words a day when needed. We are not worthy, etc.
There’s an interesting thing lurking beneath this: Skinhead, published 1970 probably had a much broader cultural impact than that year’s Booker Prize winner (J.G. Farrell, Troubles, I googled.) One of the books mentioned in the documentary, Sandra Shulman’s The Degenerates (also 1970) is well-written in 75,000 words or so of sharp, vivid prose, as commercial pulp fiction required to be. Neither would get a look-in when the usual suspects put together their lists of best fiction of the year/decade etc.
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Music: the documentary plays out with the Specials; this is the original of the song from 1967, Prince Buster: Enjoy Yourself
I’m struggling to think of much that happened today that’s worth noting here. Maybe if I’d watched the news or something I’d have something to say. But, well…
Most of my time this afternoon and this evening was spent writing; 1700 words today, which is good progress. Kirstin came in at lunchtime to find me in the living room with a notebook, listening to a Cannonball Adderley album from 1958 (Something Else, on Blue Note. Miles Davis is in the band.) She commented that I was obviously busy, and it seemed pointless to say well, actually, I’m noting the sequence of the next couple of scenes…
I mentioned a couple of posts ago that my wildlife observations on an evening walk was restricted to a single bat, not even a cat. I know bats are hardly rare, but they’re not that common in quantity around here. I occasionally see them swooping around lit streetlights but, until recently, that’s been about the extent of it. Last night on a walk, at the same spot, there were at least half a dozen bats. It’s getting dark now, but I’m tempted to wander round there and see if they’re still out. I’d like to think they’ll become more common a sight too.
I may have mentioned before here that I like having wildlife, such as the usual badgers and foxes around the place. They can be a nuisance on occasion, but I find that a small price to pay for that thing I mentioned about the comet, the sense of being part of something bigger.
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At tea time, I watched Suicide Squad, only four years after its release. I remember that at the time it got a lot of snotty reviews. Surely it can’t be that bad, can it? I thought. Well, yes it can. Good cast, but just a mess from start to finish. It reminded me why I prefer Marvel to DC (the only one from DC I’ve enjoyed was Wonder Woman, and even then I had reservations.) I have to say, though, that Margot Robbie was very good throughout and stole every scene she was in.
Also, Lindsay commented that I haven’t mentioned her for a couple of weeks, so I just did. I know Amy reads this too. <waves>
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Music: today I mostly listened to Blue Note jazz–Cannonball Adderley and Kenny Burrell. I was tempted to put some here, but I posted Stan Tracey last night.
This is John Renbourn. I posted a version of this 10 years ago, but that version seems to have disappeared from You Tube. Renbourn does a sneaky retune on the fly; South Wind is played in DADGAD, Blarney Pilgrim in DADGBD.
I thought it did a decent job of looking at some of the issues and, notably, had some high-level interviewees from the Chinese government. I also thought it missed some interesting things in presenting its core narrative that the ‘late’ confirmation that the virus is human-transmissable in January was a causal factor in the situation we’re in now, particularly as that came after the mass travel of the Lunar New Year Festival. That may be so, but there remains the, apparently credible, identification of Covid-19 in sewage and waste water samples in northern Italy in December. It is also reported that genetic mapping indicates the introduction of the virus into Italy was not directly from China and wasn’t a one-time event. It remains the case that the consensus view is that the virus made the jump from animal to human sometime in October/November.
Given the proportion of people infected who are asymptomatic and thus not known to be infectious (including those who are pre-symptomatic), even January might have been too late to stop the spread, although it might , of course, have substantially reduced it and lessened the death toll. Much as I appreciated the Panorama investigation, I think there’s a lot of this story still to tell.
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No rain today, but blustery wind. I wrote some 1970 music posts and tried to wrestle ideas for a scene in the work-in-progress into shape. Getting there, but slowly.
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Music: famously, The Fast Show parodied the approach of British TV to jazz with Jazz Club in which an over-serious hip host introduced various avant garde musicians doing their thing. Tune? This is jazz, says Jackson Jeffrey Jackson before attempting to suck a melody through his trumpet. The parody worked because it hit the target with respect to both the avant garde element in free jazz and the TV tropes. I know because I remember the original programmes.
Crazee.
I have a vague memory of seeing Stan Tracey on one such programme in the seventies and thinking wtf? And not in a good way. Then one day, many years later, I heard some Stan Tracey and thought wtf? I need to get me some of that.
It rained today. When it stoped raining, it rained some more, then rained again. I’ve noticed before that the bird feeders become popular when it’s raining, and today was no exception. Not counting gulls, fifteen different species came through the garden today, including lots of juveniles. I got some photos to prove it, and I’ll put them up on my other blog in the next couple of days.
For the most part they came through in mixed flocks, and managed to achieve peaceful co-existence at the feeders. The exception was a female bullfinch who bullied any other finch that came close, though seemed content with, for example, blue tits at the same feeder.
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I caught a little news today, though not much. What I saw focused on travel restrictions to and from Spain. I struggle to get excited by it: I’m not sure what bit of deadly virus spread by, amongst other things, extensive travel in confined spaces my fellow citizens fail to grasp. I get the economic importance of the travel sector, but it developed on the basis of a set of assumptions about what constitutes safe behaviour that, for the moment at least, no longer apply.
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I went for a quick walk tonight, between bursts of rain. There was a very distinct autumnal feel about the colour of light under the clouds, the tickle of drizzle on my face. More often than not I meet a fox on the walk, but the only wildlife tonight was a bat. Although traffic has picked up in the daytime, it was pretty quiet on the whole, principally because there is almost no airport noise.
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Music: I was thinking about ‘rain’ songs and, by a roundabout mental route, settled on this one. In this case we’re not really dealing with rain at all and, in any event, it’s metaphor, but that’s OK. I’ve gone for a later version than the more bombastic original on his first solo album. I have no problem with the first version, I’m just more in the mood for this one.
Is it really 40 years since I saw him perform this at the Odeon in Edinburgh? Yes it is. Peter Gabriel; Here Comes The Flood
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