I’m conscious I’ve been a bit coy for the last week and a half, but I had a good cause. The reason we were isolating was because my daughter tested positive last week, a couple of days after her first jab–she probably picked up the virus a few days before. She had to isolate and so did we. She asked that I didn’t say anything here until it was over and she was on the mend.

As I said last week, there’s a nice irony in this happening right at the end of fifteen months of daily blogging but it’s also a good quite a good bookend. I started the daily blogs on 15 March last year (Dear Diary) and I’ve decided that the last entry of the daily Covid diary will be Monday 14th, and so will cover exactly fifteen months. At some point I’ll do a retrospective, but not yet.

In that first entry, I wrote

I am not an expert on any subject relevant to strategic responses to a widespread outbreak of a virus to which humans have no resistance. I have not the foggiest idea whether the government’s response is the ‘right’ one or not. But I’ve seen an awful lot of comment, some ‘expert’, most not, that looks to me like councils of perfection, questioning and whatabout-ing everything in the name of the hypothetical rather than the very real situation that people are, in good faith, trying to address. None of these, that I have seen at any rate, have seriously grappled with the notion that there might not be a ‘perfect’ response or, if there is, that it might only become clear in retrospect. I suspect that the UK/Scottish government response is as good and as bad as any other. And no, I don’t think Boris wants to cull the elderly and vulnerable.

 

This isn’t helped by thoughtless headlines from journalists looking for the next Exclusive/Breaking/Latest story and publishing without, apparently, any thought for the consequences.

I still think that there was no perfect response and we were victims of circumstance and bad luck in some respects–but not all respects. Even allowing for public health experts doing their best in appalling circumstances, it is clear that there were many blunders along the way at a political level (and if blunders seems too mild a term, I’ll save discussion of rank incompetence and bad faith for another day).

***

Music: Stefan Grossman last night was something of a hit with at least one of my readers, so… The late, great Dave Van Ronk worked out arrangements of several ragtime-era tunes for guitar, in part as a technical exercise for practice. As well as obvious piano pieces like The Entertainer or Maple Leaf Rag, he also had a crack at a tune by Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers called The Pearls.

This is Ronk’s biographer, Elijah Wald, playing it as taught to him by DVR himself. Below is the 1927 original.