On 11 September (Words On paper, Words For Crooks) I wrote this:
I put the following on twitter earlier:
GIven the rise in cases, and what everyone said about Britain's slowness to act in March, the logical choice is either (a) restore lockdown now ahead of the curve or (b) implement an effective alternative. Given the lack of (b), I presume lockdown is now imminent.
— Ian Burdon (@Cosmic_Serf) September 11, 2020
My pal Keith on WhatsApp reckons us oldies will be asked to shield but there’ll be no general lockdown. He might be right, but, as Harrison Ford is wont to say, I have a bad feeling about this.
And lo, it came to pass, but six weeks later than it should have, at least in England; Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland have all been going our own way for a while now.
I saw the other day that the dominant strain of the virus now in circulation is almost certain to have been brought back multiple times from Spain when we thought it was crucial to let people fly away for their two weeks in the sun (see rants here passim). Then off it went into the community to build critical mass because it was desperately important to keep the pubs open.
An anonymous Tory minister (they’re always anonymous, it goes with being gutless) is reported to have said tonight:
The incompetence is another level. Is this a deliberate destruction of the Tory Party? People only vote for us because they think we don’t care, but are competent. Lose the competence and we’re fucked. We’ve lost the competence. And we are fucked.
There are several aspects of that statement that stand out, but I’ll restrict myself to saying that I don’t care if the Tories are fucked; I do care that these fucking fuckers have fucked the rest of us.
And that’s it. That’s the post.
***
Music: back to Renaissance Scotland tonight, and the great Robert Carver. This is his Mass Dum Sacrum Mysterium for ten voices, completed at some time between 1506 and 1513, and may have been performed at the coronation of James V at Stirling in 1513.
I have a vampire story in which the vampiric protagonist says:
I remember one evening in St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh, listening to a choir sing the few known works of Robert Carver. The voices of the sopranos and countertenors carried my heart high into the vaulted roof, rising on whispers of incense.
A creature after my own heart.
I was interested to see who had edited this but was disappointed to find it wasn’t Kenneth Elliot, one of the lecturers at Glasgow University when I was a student, who specialised in early Scottish music. https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/13036638.dr-kenneth-elliott/
It certainly wouldn’t have been written down looking like this in 1513!