The Sun is Up, the Sky is Blue
It’s turned into one of those late spring days when the sun is out and the sky is blue, but the air temperature remains chilly. Nice, though. I spent most of the morning reading and this afternoon revising, which is why I’ve fallen back on a set of links below to things that caught my eye. The other reason is a very large glass of 14.5% Primitivo with my supper that has scrambled my thought processes for the remainder of the day.
The revision has caught me by surprise. In January, I printed the three substantive things I’ve written, thinking that two of them were pretty much done. Inevitably I spent all of the rest of January, February and half of March doing much more extensive revision than I expected. I’m on the third now, and revision is a three-stage process: go through the whole text sorting out duff sentences, redundant paragraphs, typos, cut and paste errors and all the rest; secondly consider/apply comments made by two trusted first readers, and third, leave it aside for a couple of weeks then get deeper into the guts of it. I’ve just about finished the first part of that process. Then I really must get back to writing something new.
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Links and extracts from four things I read this morning:
Sometimes In The Recent Future, by John Brunner in New Scientist, 10 April 1993
As far as there are any guides for science fiction writers wanting
to make their near-future societies credible, the rules of thumb that have
proved most reliable in my experience are these. Take it for granted that
the government will disregard long-term dangers (such as those affecting
the environment) in order to cling to power; that the citizenry will do
the same because thinking is too much like hard work; and when the handful
of Cassandras are proved right, they will be held to blame and very likely
stoned or shot. More briefly: assume things will get worse before they
get better, and that they won’t get better without miracles.
Almost third of UK Covid hospital patients readmitted within four months, Ian Semple, The Guardian
Researchers at University College London, the Office for National Statistics, and the University of Leicester, compared medical records of nearly 48,000 people who had had hospital treatment for Covid and had been discharged by 31 August 2020, with records from a matched control group of people in the general population.
The records were used to track rates of readmission, of deaths, and of diagnoses for a range of respiratory, heart, kidney, liver and metabolic diseases, such as diabetes.
After an average follow-up time of 140 days, nearly a third of the Covid patients who had been discharged from hospital had been readmitted and about one in eight had died, rates considerably higher than seen in the control group.
The Guardian also reports an estimated 1.1million people in Britain experiencing ‘Long Covid’ to some degree.
Ebola: disease killed patient six months after his recovery, Associated Press, in The Guardian.
A man in Africa who developed Ebola despite receiving a vaccine recovered but suffered a relapse nearly six months later that led to 91 new cases before he died. The case, outlined in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, adds to evidence that the deadly virus can lurk in the body long after symptoms end, and that survivors need monitoring for their own welfare and to prevent spread.
“War on woke”: the meaning of the Alba Party, by Rory Scunthorne in New Statesman
This is the only way of understanding Alba’s existence, its potential appeal, and its likely function in Scottish politics. If all that’s needed is another pro-independence party on the list, more left-wing and internally democratic than the SNP, why not support the Scottish Greens? The answer is that the Scottish Greens are too woke; Alba is the new vanguard party of Scotland’s “war on woke”, a bekilted ally, whether its supporters like it or not, of Faragism and the right-wing gutter press. Scottish politics is usually a decade or so behind England’s – the centrist SNP is only now enjoying peak Blairism – and it was perhaps only a matter of time before we had our own, indigenous culture-war electoral force to match UKIP and the Brexit Party.
This is too kind to the SNP, one of the features of Blair’s Labour Party was that in domestic terms it had significant achievements it could point to in its first term, before Iraq and hubris took over. Also, an opinion pole for the Dundee Courier this evening gives Alba a 3% voting intention.
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Music: I wasn’t sure what this was going to be until I wrote the first sentence of this post and inadvertently gave myself an earworm. Paul McCartney may, or may not, think this is the best Beatles cover he’s heard. It’s certainly in my top ten. Siouxie and the Banshees : Dear Prudence.
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