Nov 28, 2023 | Covid-19 Diary, Dead Water, Writing
I realised at lunch time that I had made no posts here for a month. That isn’t because I don’t look in on the site – there is the daily behind-the-scenes task of cleaning out the pornbots that attempt to post in the comments; thankfully, they get caught in spam traps making deletion easier but they are a continual pest.
The main reason I haven’t posted is indolence and, to be fair, the distractions of writing.
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I have dipped in and out of the Covid Enquiry livestream on YouTube. It has been interesting for many reasons, but one struck me the other day as I was walking through a packed shopping mall near us, and that is the contrast between the calm, almost abstract questioning of witnesses on the one hand, and the behaviour of people in shopping malls on the other. What I noticed was that a stranger, who’d been away in isolation for a few years and went shopping, would probably not notice anything at all had happened in the interim and wonder what the enquiry was about.
The stranger might note the vaccination centre in an empty shopping unit, but that could, on the surface at least, be attributed to seasonal flu vaccinations. They might also note that one person – and I only saw one – was wearing a face covering. It’s as though we’ve forgotten. It’s rather like the general forgetting of the great flu outbreaks after WW1 unless one ran across a stray reference in a novel from the 1920s or followed up an a death certificate when searching a family tree.
It hasn’t gone, of course. Poke at memories and they are all there, but the signifiers of it have either disappeared or are disappearing – unlike the virus. Vaccination was and is a wonderful thing.
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As well as writing, I’ve taken the opportunity to put in place some Amazon ads for my books in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Experience has taught me that they are more of a cost than a benefit, but it’s worth the effort I suppose. I’ll disable the ads in early January when people have spent their Christmas money.
Amazon puts books into genre categories, partly by design of the author and partly by its own inscrutable operations. My creation of the ads largely involved looking at the categories my books are in, checking the current charts in the UK and US for those categories, and then attempting to ensure that someone searching for those books will see an ad for mine. This is a competitive process so one also has to decide how much one is willing to bid for each time someone clicks on a link to my book.
Two things struck me looking at the charts. Firstly, a lot of the covers were clearly AI generated – I mean a lot. Since the books are obviously selling or being read, it follows that an AI generated cover is not in itself something that will turn readers off in a mass market. The second was that most books appeared to have been self-published. Of course the likes of Stephen King and others had a strong presence, but the big publishers do not have it all their own way. I think this is a good thing.
I have had some contacts with the professional publishing world and, to quote Shania Twain, it don’t impress me much. I tend not to write anything specific on the subject in public forums because that is a form of shooting oneself in the foot, but I have views. Consolidation and conglomeration of the big publishers means that most of the interesting action in the professional publishing world is coming from small presses. A major shakeout is necessary, I think, and will come when the big publishers hit the limits to their growth, if they have not already done so.
On a separate tack, I thought the following article in the Guardian was interesting.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/27/the-big-idea-should-we-abolish-literary-genres
It struck home with me because I find myself getting frustrated when trying to describe my own writing by reference to genre, as received wisdom deems de rigueur. I don’t think in genre terms when I write and I find shoehorning things into genre categories to be restrictive, reductive and false. And yet all the advice given to writers these days is to choose your genre and stay in your lane. While I can see a point to this if writing purely commercial fiction for a specific market (the modern equivalent of the old pulps), it tends towards a ‘writing by numbers’ approach that produces stuff that I don’t especially want to read. And if I don’t want to read it, why would I write it?
May 5, 2023 | Covid-19 Diary, Dead Water
I put the news on this evening to catch up on local election results in England and Wales. Fifteen minutes in, and they’re still talking sycophantic shite about the coronation, teasing out breathless intelligence from assorted nobodies like the Hon. Cecil Trust-Fund Arselicker and his toothy fiancée Lucy.
Sycophancy around the royals is nothing new, of course, and you’d think that broadcasters and the press would show some public awareness of what they know privately. It does strike me, though, how tone deaf this stuff is. I wrote about this last September soon after the death of the queen (https://www.cosmicsurfer.co.uk/2022/09/18/apres-moi-le-deluge) and want to return to it because I was chatting about it earlier this week with an elderly member of the family.
In my earlier post I wrote,
This is not the country that it was when Elizabeth became the monarch; nonetheless, like the ship of Theseus, there is a sense of deep continuity that she herself represented, and I suspect that lies at the heart of a lot of the reaction to her death. With her passing, something has finally been lost symbolically as well as in reality. The institutions of the United Kingdom have long been in decline, and implicit respect for those institutions has attenuated proportionately to the lack of reciprocal respect shown by those same institutions to us. In truth, the country of which Elizabeth became queen was finally extinguished when Johnson and his cabal of chancers and bullshitters lied to her with impunity to hammer through their pet programme of national suicide.
That is why the narrative being pumped onto the beaches and into our fresh water systems stinks: it is the wrong story with the wrong emotional arcs and touchpoints; it jibes because the narrative of national mourning is being superimposed onto a much more nuanced society that is resistant to being emotionally manipulated for the benefit of a hereditary elite before whom we are expected to tug our forelocks.
We are a month short of seventy years since the coronation of Elizabeth on 2 June 1953. It is trite to say that the world and our country have changed since 1953, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Our understanding of who we are (literally – DNA was first described as a double helix in 1953) and our place in the world have been transformed. Even in our current economic circumstances, we are not the shattered industrial country trying to recover from a world war that had only ended eight years previously. Neither had we seen Bill Anders’s 1968 photo of the earth rising above the moon.
Our society has also been transformed (and enriched) by immigration and by freedoms rooted in the changes of the 1960s and 70s. Edinburgh is nothing like 1977 when I first moved here, when the Church of Scotland still dominated civic life and nary a pavement café was to be found (or countenanced.) Membership of the EU and cheap and easy international travel have changed our expectations and assumptions of society and what we can aim for.
The flouncing flummeries that we are being force fed fall flat because they fail to face the facts of change. The narrative around the coronation is more dissonant than Schoenberg and Webern simultaneously playing different compositions on out-of-tune pianos. You want culture wars? There’s one festering right there.
Oh, btw, the WHO says Covid-19 is no longer a global emergency.
Apr 10, 2022 | Covid-19 Diary, Dead Water, Sugar, Ah Honey Honey, Ukraine
For those interested in that sort of thing, I posted a quick diabetes update a couple of days ago. Since that update, my rate of weight loss looks to have picked up again as the natural result of me watching my calorie intake and keeping it lower that calories expended, while still paying attention to nutrition.
Looking at the big picture, I’ve lost 24kg (53lb) since mid-October, and am now stuck with the question of what to do with a wardrobe full of clothes that are too big for me. T-shirts I don’t mind, but a lot of my other shirts are beginning to look ridiculous if I try to wear them. See also all my work suits that I no longer wear anyway. My thoughts are turning towards a mass wardrobe clear out as the beginning of a general downsizing (no pun intended).
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I was happy to get 1000 words written yesterday – a scene for the new story that’s been in my mind for a long time. It requires a lot of work to get it up to scratch, but those 1000 words give me something to work with. Progress!
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I’ve written a couple of times here about Ukraine and the broader consequences of the Russian invasion. Here in the UK, faced with 30 mile tailbacks on the A20 leading to the channel ports and empty shelves in our local Tesco, it’s difficult to figure out what can be ascribed to supply chain shortages globally, Brexit-induced problems and Covid-induced problems, although our government and the BBC carefully decline even to use the ‘B’ word. Be that as it may, issues arising from the war look to be being felt most directly in African countries and also, although this is reading between the lines, in China.
Why China? Because of the confluence of Covid and supply chain issues. This Twitter thread points towards those issues and sheds light on reports of unrest in Shanghai in recent days:
What is unsaid in that thread is that problems in supply and distribution have real-world consequences on a much shorter timescale than here, and this is an issue for authoritarian governments.
In the context of Ukraine, we have to remember that Covid has not gone away, and there are good reasons to think that we are still in the first phase of Covid, not the endgame. Things will only get worse with the progressive destruction of the global climate and ecosystem.
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A couple of days ago I mentioned this tweet and said I’d write more on the subject.
I didn’t write the follow up post, but that comment continues to resonate with me. It might just be a thing on social media since that is where most of the hot takes are expressed. It is true that most people don’t use Twitter – though a lot more do use Facebook – and thus it might well pass people by unnoticed (Helen Lewis had a good piece on this on her substack a couple of weeks ago.) Nevertheless, as I see and hear people all over the place – including the usual suspects in the US Congress – effectively repeating Kremlin-inspired talking points, the resonance is much wider than social media, I feel.
I continue to reassess a number of my own assumptions. I haven’t drawn any particular conclusions yet, but I dare say I’ll write about them here when I do.
Dec 21, 2021 | Covid-19 Diary, Sugar, Ah Honey Honey, Writing
I’ve been toying with the idea – and bear with me here – of buying a typewriter. Why would I want to do such a crazy thing? Partly because I like analogue machinery, I admit, but more because I want to make my writing process somewhat more effective. What’s in my mind is to create drafts on a typewriter, which is, by its nature, a machine that doesn’t allow simple correction as a word processor does. Yes, you can use correction fluid for typos, but the general result is a first draft that comes straight out of the subconscious with little opportunity for revision as you type. The physical pages of a chapter (or short story) can then immediately be revised and corrected, before a more polished version goes into the laptop.
Of course, I’d go via eBay and look for value for money before committing to a better machine, but the idea appeals. I sort of wish I still had the wee typewriter I had at university in the late seventies/early eighties, but it has long-gone. It was nothing special, but it got well used and never let me down.
Of course, if any of my UK readers has a decent typewriter, in reasonable condition, sitting unwanted in a cupboard or an attic, by all means let me know.
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I added a new diabetes update to the site earlier. Nothing major, just steady progress.
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We are in a strange Covid backwater. The news today, in Europe at least, has all been about tough restrictions coming back in in the Netherlands and parts of Scandinavia, and no doubt other places by the time this post goes live. Here in the UK, the government is reluctant to ‘cancel Christmas’ but I think we all know that fresh restrictions are coming soon as cases rise. I see signs of people being sensible and assuming – as I do – that restrictions are in place already. It means, I think, another year that we won’t get through to see my family in the west over the Christmas/New Year period, and I regret that, but there we are.
Dec 15, 2021 | Covid-19 Diary, Legs!
A quiet sort of day today, getting on with some revision and a quick walk to the supermarket and back. I picked up another pack of LF tests from the pharmacy while I was out, and expect to get some when if I can. I’m pretty wary of this Omicron variant and the ease and speed of spread. I’m double-vaxed and boosted, but I’m not going out of my way to take risks. I’m wary mostly because I read the news, but also because the government (UK and devolved, but particularly UK) are starting to looked panicked.
Why are the government panicked? I think because, by basic mathematics, the transmissibility of Omicron means it is likely to overwhelm the NHS by a combination of new patients all arriving at the same time and staff illness/isolating, all on top of the existing shortage of health and social care staff. The fear is that services will collapse completely – and I’ve seen plausible arguments from within the NHS that it has already collapsed as a functioning health service. And we have no idea, yet, of the consequences of Omicron in terms of long-Covid
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I was musing earlier on things to do next year when, I hope, I’ll be a lot lighter and fitter. I’ve already said that I want to take up running again, but I am also toying with some long-distance walks. The obvious one is the West Highland Way, which I’ve meant to do for a while, but I’m also thinking about coastal walks – I’ve meant to walk the Northumberland Coast for a long time – but there are plenty in Scotland. Obviously I’m not getting any younger, and I have a Wild Country Zephyros 1 tent sitting in the garage doing nothing. Thoughts are being thunk.
Dec 10, 2021 | Covid-19 Diary, Dead Water
When I drew a halt to my Covid diary, nearly six months ago, I didn’t think that the pandemic was at an end, but I did think that, with vaccinations, there was light at the end of the tunnel, even allowing for the huge proportion of the world’s population that is not vaccinated.
Watching the Waitress’s Legs
I was wrong. The omicron variant is spreading rapidly and fresh measures are being drafted or implemented, pending a full analysis of the variant’s behaviour. It is the rapid spread that is the principal driver of concern currently, even if the impact of infection is ‘mild’ (where ‘mild is a multivalent term), because of the potential impact on the unvaccinated and the vulnerable. The health service is already at breaking point, and a further wave/tsunami (pick your own metaphor) would be very unwelcome.
I’ve just seen suggestions that the public, being more sensible than the government for the most part, is already adjusting its behaviour, and I hope that’s true. Reducing it to the personal, I had planned to take a walk to the supermarket, but had second thoughts – was the journey really necessary? No: so why make it? I’ll went for my walk, but avoided people in confined spaces, and went to see if those bullfinches and redwings were on the rowan tree today as they were yesterday. They weren’t, they were sticking to high branches to avoid dogwalkers, but there were lots of squirrels and a pair of long-tailed tits for company.
A lot of the comment I see is focused on Christmas, and, like last year, there seems to be an unspoken assumption on the part of some commentators that the virus will kick back and relax for a couple of weeks and enjoy cake and sherry (in the way that it isn’t expected to do for non-Christian holidays). After last year, we should – and, for the most part do, I think – know better.
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