“Brexit means Brexit” led us into fevered speculation as to what Brexit meant. Now we’re all totally flummoxed by “Stay Alert”.

No, I’ve no idea either. There are Five Tests I apply to government slogans, and this one fails all of them.

But hey, who knows what they’re on about? Latest news is that anybody above the age of five who has the disease and is displaying symptoms of the disease can be tested for the disease.

Oh, and they’ve recruited lots of minions (no offence; I like those little guys) to run their contact-tracing service. I know one of them. She’s going to be given lists of numbers to call, she tells me.

“Hello? You’ve been in contact with somebody who has the disease. Have you got it, and are you displaying symptoms? No? In that case, wait a few days, and if you do come down with the disease, we’ll arrange to test you for the disease.”

Got to be showing symptoms, though.

“Actually, this is my home number. Go to gov.uk and that’ll give you a code to get you on the waiting list for a test. If you’ve got the disease and are showing symptoms, of course.”

Way back at the end of New Labour – “Not near you, no, but you can choose whether you want to drive to a test centre in England, Scotland or Wales” – back at the end of New Labour, the government spent a lot of money and time developing an unworkable identity-card scheme that nobody wanted*. Now we have this contact-tracing apparatus. Worked well in China, apparently.

“My partner’s a martial-arts enthusiast with serious anger-management issues. And he works from home. Now stop calling me!” [Update as of Wednesday morning: the home email addresses of 300-ish contact-tracers have been accidentally released into the public domain. I thought I was making this up.]

After “Stay Alert”, I’ve discovered, the second part of the new slogan is “Control the Virus”, which has that fuzzy-comfortable implication that you can actually control the virus. Along with the slightly less comfortable implication that the government is delegating control of the virus to you.

Good luck. Teach it to sit, and maybe to retrieve tennis balls when you shout “Fetch!”

And don’t blame the government for the second wave, because it’s down to you now. Remember that marketing slogan whereby products and services were always Putting You In Control? Exactly. Click here if you accept the terms and conditions. Paragraph 1, line 1: Don’t blame us.

Sooner or later, it’s going to occur to somebody in government that (a) they need people to be alive to book air tickets, pay taxes and revive The Economy, and (b) that their contact-tracing thing will only work if we’re Put In Control of being legally obliged to carry our smartphones at all times.

Remember that scene in the movie where they find the tracking bug and fix it to somebody else’s bumper? Can’t do that with an identity ca– sorry, smartphone.

I want a simple app that makes a noise whenever the distance between my phone and another phone falls below two metres. Something like a personal alarm, so simple that I can control it for myself without needing to be Put In Control.

Something that yells at passing joggers for me. Alexa? Make yourself useful for once?

Something that any passing millennial could design in her sleep without the need to recruit – how many? – contact tracers and the bureaucracy to manage them.

24,000 covid-tracers already recruited, going on 25,000, who will administer 10,000 tests per hour, rising to 100,000 tests per hour before PMQs next week, and twice the population tested by next bank-holiday weekend at the latest. We’ve got this virus licked!

The government’s panicking, isn’t it?

What they can’t say is: nothing’s changed. This is the same monster that we brought you inside to avoid. Now we need you to go outside again and make money for us. No, the monster’s still there. Stay alert! Control it!

[Aside: what they can say, deplorably, is that children are also vulnerable at home so might be better going back to school. Oh, very convenient and not what you were saying a few weeks ago. I have a quote lined up but I won’t use it because it enrages me.]

We’re responsible, right? If there’s a second wave, it’ll be our fault because we weren’t alert enough and failed to control it.

The tragedy is that although the government’s changed the underlying message from “We’ll take the credit!” to “It’s not our fault!” – it hasn’t relinquished control.

You don’t, though, do you, if you’re a government that’s panicking?

You double down: more big numbers in the daily briefings, more test kits posted and counted as done, more contact-tracers recruited; more scientists, more slide shows, more explanations of the R-number (there are two R-numbers, did you know?); all to back up your projections of how successful you’re about to be.

So: no quick, noisy, millennial-designed apps. Instead, a contact-tracing bureaucracy. Outsourced. Our contact-tracers’ personal data is very important to us. Lessons have been learned. 24,000, 25,000, 10,000 per day, nought to sixty; In the future, everybody will be tested for fifteen minutes.

This is another aspect of the apocalypse that fiction didn’t foresee.

The first one was (I just love this), It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (ITEOTWAWKI), and yet we can still order takeaway pizza. Got that. Loving it (with the G).

But here’s the second one: ITEOTWAWKI, and we have a government casting around for solutions that above all fit the established bureaucratic method. Holy challenging but realistic targets, Batman!

Part Three of the new slogan is “Save Lives”.

Gosh, you are going to be busy.

*The Identity Cards Act 2006 was repealed in 2010.

My question for today is: who does this algorithm think I am?

Not in a pompous way – not “Do You Know Who I Am?” spoken in that tone of voice. I just thought – yeah. I wonder.

I’m curious. We talk about Artificial Intelligence, and if we take that seriously (or imaginatively), then we’re talking about some kind of mind. With, let’s assume, thought processes and opinions.

Follow the logic of all the current blether about the exciting prospect of AI, blah blah, and even if that isn’t true today, it will be true soon. So there. You’ve hyped yourself into taking me seriously, professor. At least you got the funding.

No, I’m not going to try to make this funny. My laptop thinks I’m in Dorking and I wrote a piece once about the online provider that had analysed my data and worked out that I’m a Spanish woman.

Been there, done that. Today, I’m just looking at another intelligence across the divide, and wondering. There is a tentative meeting of minds going on here.

Amazon sent me an email yesterday. Books I might like to read on my Kindle “based on recent purchases”.

Actually, let’s do this as a competition. No need to enter. But, you know, think about it if you’ve run out of other distractions.

The competition question is to identify my recent purchases based on Amazon’s recommendations.

Here goes. That wise old algorithm at Amazon suggests that I might like to read:

All The Devils Are Here by Louise Penny
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Cold is the Grave by Peter Robinson
Heir to the Empire: Star Wars Legends (The Thrawn Trilogy) by Timothy Zahn
House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones (I’m giving these in the order Amazon lists them)
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck and [with an introduction by] Susan Shillinglaw
Speaker for the Dead: Book Two of The Ender Saga (The Ender Quartet Series) by Orson Scott Card
Aberystwyth Mon Amour (Aberystwyth Noir Series Book 1) by Malcolm Price.

I want to meet myself!

More to the point – here’s the competition – what have I been buying?

Bonus question. What other aspects of my personal history did the wise old algorithm take into account when compiling its list of recommendations? What did it discount?

I will tell you – I’ve read a book by one of those authors, but not the one suggested and not on my Kindle.

If anybody actually asks, I might even reveal my recent purchases next week. I’ll try to keep the “These are just on my Kindle: I read impressively intellectual books in hardback, y’know” paragraph down to a minimum.

There’s a mind out there that sees me as a reader who would go from [insert one author from the list] to [another] followed by [another].

I should know better, but – I’m kind of flattered.

Footnote: I've always had a sneaking fondness for Amazon, ever since they were a plucky little dot-com fighting to survive the dot-com boom/bust. I know that isn't a fashionable opinion, but never mind. It's fair to add that there's always a "find out why we recommended this" button on Amazon's emails. If I'd already written a below-the-picture piece for this week, I would have just gone to the "we recommended this because you bought that" page and forgotten the whole thing. But I like to think of that algorithm, edging itself towards self-awareness. I wonder if it knows Skynet.

If Covid-19 wasn’t driving a deadly global pandemic, it would make an excellent McGuffin*.

There was a burst of Politics-19 last week. Boris went on the box to tell us – sorry. The Prime Minister gave an address to the nation about progress in the war against the Naz– sorry.

Where we were with the lockdown. He talked about that. Changes. You were there. Covid-19 and how he was changing the rules of the lockdown and introducing a swingometer-thing to tell us how bad it all was.

There was a new slogan. He might have mentioned that a few times.

We’ve dropped the Five Tests. But we do have a swingometer.

The Prime Minister’s Address To The Nation followed a week of media reportage about the changes he was likely to make to the lockdown – to the extent that there were discussion programmes about the changes before they were even made. Just like old times.

But the real treat for nostalgia buffs was the immediate response to the PM’s speech.

“Naah, naah, not listening, can’t hear you, naaah, don’t understand, not clear at all, stay at home, don’t stay at home, completely incomprehensible, naah, don’t understand a word of it,” would roughly summarise Facebook’s response as it came to me.

Then, when we’d all pulled our fingers out of our ears and agreed that we hadn’t understood a word of it, came the sharing.

Three times into my newsfeed on Monday came the same lengthy itemisation of all Boris’s failures over the course of the pandemic. Shared independently by three people, I mean. All familiar names from the 2019 political season.

These long diatribes always have some merit, and no, I don’t think The Johnson is the best prime minister since, um, since … have to think about that one. The Covid-19 outbreak could have been handled better. We could have anticipated the virus’s every move, and – yeah, right.

Anybody scoring political points based on hindsight should be invited to tell us what to do next – and held to account.

That shared list. Yes, he made mistakes. Yes, there were precautions he could have taken earlier, and that week when we were told not to go out but everywhere was still open … confusing.

But the impact of the list was blunted by the overstretched and wilful inaccuracies.

For example, the words “Boris Johnson misses COBRA meeting” – heard this one before – don’t take into account that it was the Health Secretary who was holding a meeting in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, not the Prime Minister. [It’s a room, people.]

Oh, and the words “Boris Johnson retreats to his country manor” is an odd way of saying that the Prime Minister went to the Prime Minister’s official residence outside London – Chequers – to recover after his time in intensive care.

The man doesn’t have to be a full-time pantomime villain to be vulnerable to criticism.

My issue with the speech was the number of times Johnson addressed the British public as “you”, as in “You” have been very good about staying at home.

A trifle de haut en bas, doncha know?

I don’t think “You will fight on the beaches … you will never surrender” would have been quite so effective for Churchill in 1940. Just saying.

As to the new slogan – here we are discussing the slogan, not the policy behind it; good thing we've got a swingometer for the in-depth analysis – I found the old one problematic enough. “Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives” seemed an odd ordering of priorities, until I grasped that staying at home would protect the NHS so that it could save lives. Ah, got it.

The new slogan – actually, I’ve forgotten the new slogan. “Stay alert,” something, something.

The policy. We reduced the R-number by staying indoors. Now we’re going outside again. Nothing else has changed. Hmmm.

This week, all the media coverage has been about the second wave that hasn’t happened yet. This is either world-class expectation management by the government, or obvious even to the media, or both.

This relaxation of the lockdown is not the end. It is not the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.

Now it gets serious.

*Oh, come on, you do. Alfred Hitchcock’s term for the thing that drives the action in a movie. The Maltese falcon in The Maltese Falcon (1941), for example. The stone in Romancing the Stone (1984). Or I suppose you could say, the ring in Lord of the Rings (2001 and onwards for the films directed by Peter Jackson).

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. We should have used it to defeat the virus.

My only other thought, as I grumble my way through this, is that the various presenters and interviewers in my radio should be put in charge of the crisis.

They know, unfailingly, what the ministers did wrong, and they’re able to spot errors of policy where nobody else was even looking. With their accusative self-importance, they should take over.

One of the media’s people was touring the studios yesterday with a line that he rather liked: there are workers who are unemployed and they don’t even know it yet.

Because their employers won’t be coming back from the brink.

Boyo, there are whole industries that are dead and don’t know it yet.

But we have to go through this stage of trying to revive the dead donkey.

Just as the petty adversarial politics of the past keeps trying to reassert itself, so do the industries of the past keep trying to stand up again.

The Economy is in a recession, apparently. A line can be drawn on a graph. Okay, it points sharply downwards, but it connects to the line of the past. No disconnect there.

Stage-coach manufacturers forecast that it will be two years before they get back to normal after the invention of the automobile.

I’m sorry. I’ll read that again. Airlines forecast that it’ll be two years…

If we assume that cramming people back into buses and tube trains turns out not to be as effective as the lockdown in quelling the virus, we can forecast a future in which it is accepted – at last – that the old ways are no longer tenable.

The population density of cities is no longer attractive. Global supply chains still operate, but the quarantine restrictions… People still go out shopping, but less often, and they grow/make/recycle more of their own…

The cinema’s a drive-in now. That lovely little Italian place still has the same number of tables but the intimate atmosphere has gone since it moved to a football stadium at a knock-down rent. At least the tables are so far apart that we get elbow room now.

There’s a difference between planning for the future and trying to maintain the immediate past.

I saw a news item, somewhere online, about three households – neighbours – who had self-isolated together. Their children play together, home-school together, they’re in and out of each other’s houses, but they’re closed to the outside world. Locked down.

Then I thought about that African proverb – it takes a village to raise a child. And those early news pics of villagers in Wuhan province manning roadblocks to keep strangers out. It takes a village to self-isolate and still be economically viable.

And I thought – somewhere in all that is the future.

Curious thing about death.

As I've said before, I’ve been following the updates. The virus targets men. Older men. Men who are differently thin. Men with pre-existing health conditions.

Just last week, there was a report that people living in holiday areas are more vulnerable.

If a skeleton walks up to you wearing a black cloak and carrying a scythe – and shows you an Identikit picture that is an exact likeness of me – you haven’t seen me, okay?

Thank you. Also tell him his whole look needs a makeover. I suggest hi-vis jacket and hedge trimmer – but that’s another blog post.

I know it’s supposed to happen – eventually – but until this virus turned up, I don’t think I took the prospect of death seriously. Never took it seriously but didn’t realise that I wasn’t taking it seriously.

Damien Hirst once pickled a tiger shark and displayed the result over the title The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. That title comes back to me now, although I had to check online whether it attached to the pickled shark or to the cow Hirst cut in half a few years later (and calf).

As the virus gets closer – at this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a report that it targets men wearing spectacles who publish blog posts on Fridays – I’ve started to update my contingency planning.

I’m keeping up to date with the laundry, and I’ve plugged in the Hoover. I made a new will the other day (downloaded the form) and the neighbours witnessed my signature (from a social distance). I’ve been pruning the roses – yes, I know, but you haven’t seen my roses.

The washing-up’s done and my neighbour has a copy of the front-door key.

And all of that has made me feel really alive.

There’s sunshine on the water, brightest on the far side of the Carrick Roads, and the wind is just enough to make the trees seem to shiver.

The house is full of books.

I’m alive. I’m engaged. I walk on Gyllyngvase Beach every day (most days) and make a weekly run to the supermarket for supplies. I’m cooking-ish, getting the garden straight, reading, writing, and using my don’t-know-what-it’s-called to compress shredded paper into ‘logs’ for the wood-burner.

I haven’t gone back to being a hunter-gatherer. It just feels that way sometimes.

I’m not exactly “being realistic” either, about this deadly global pandemic with a special taste for older men whose first name begins with W. I suppose I’m just reporting that the brightness seems to have been turned up on life.

I do have one outstanding planning issue.

The people closest to me though the lockdown have been strangers – runners coming up behind me on my walk and passing ridiculously close, for example. That – I now realise – is how I want it. They’ll never know.

If I am going to be hauled off to meet my ancestors, I’d rather it didn’t happen after I emerged from lockdown, hugged all my nearest and dearest, and then started coughing.

I’m not sure whether this is considerate or egotistical, but I’d rather not be tucking into a steak’n’chips in Valhalla (I’ll have the cheese to follow), chatting to my great-great-great-grandfather across the table, while knowing that back down here, my loved ones are wondering whether they gave me the virus that killed me.

So that oaf yesterday was doing me a favour, really, huffing past in his Lycra, bumping my shoulder. And that student-age guy two days ago, music plugged into his ears. And that weird-looking guy in the hi-vis jacket, and all of them.

This is life. Bring it on!

Some day, I’m going to write a history of political evasion-speak.

And cultural. Socio-economic. It’s not exactly a hobby of mine – more of a niggle – but I notice it.

For example. These days, you won’t hear a UK government minister or a “science officer” or the spokesperson for any vast bureaucracy telling you that he is going to do something. He or she will tell you that she’s going to make sure it’s done.

No, I don’t need to go out and get a life, thank you. Doing that is probably illegal these days, anyway.

Listen to a daily briefing. Count the times. “Make sure”. You’ll hear it more than once.

If I tell you that I’m going to write this post, you can blame me for how well – badly – it turns out.

But if I tell you that I’m going to make sure this post gets written, well, clearly I’m the big, tough authority figure who’s leading the battle to get this post written.

If it turns out badly, well, you know, I’ve been as disappointed as you are by the result.

“Now is not the time to apportion blame,” said David Cameron, standing knee-deep in Somerset flood water a decade-ish ago, after a whole range of government-underfunded flood defences had failed.

“Now is not the time to apportion blame,” said one of Boris’s stand-ins last week, when somebody pointed out that we’re ahead on just the one forecast – number of deaths. [I know I’m misquoting, but that was the sense of it.] This is one you'll hear again.

There’s also a form of evasion-speak that directly heads off awkward questions. The Cameron government’s main contribution to this genre was “…and I think that is the right decision,” which would be asserted forcefully at the end of any announcement in any interview.

“I’ve decided to do something, and I think that is the right decision.” Optional extra: “…at the right time.”

“I’ve decided to do something, and I think that is the right decision at the right time.”

Gordon Brown, in his glory days as Chancellor, gave us the “Five Tests” that were then applied to European Monetary Union. Lately, they’ve been used against the ending of the lockdown.

“I relaxed the lockdown and thousands died in the second wave, but that was the Five Tests’ fault. They told me to do it.”

Tony Blair’s ministers never apologised, do you remember? “I make no apology for…” introducing whatever piece of unexceptional policy-lite was the initiative of the day.

“I make no apology for deciding to do something.” Minister, are you trying to imply that you’re being brave making that obvious, safe decision? 

“I make no apology for trying to sound decisive.” Yeah, right.

Enough!

In these incredibly challenging times, ministers are working day and night (no wonder they look so tired) and incredibly hard (‘incredibly’ means not believably, surely?) to deliver incredibly ambitious targets and claim to have met those targets – so now is not the time to apportion ridicule.

Here's Maya Stein's 10-Line Tuesday poem for 5th May 2020.

You sign up. You get a poem. Once a week. Look here.

lotus

The cranberry supplements won’t save you, or that prebiotic lotion poised on the tile edge
of your shower, or a loaf of bread from Mary’s recipe pixelated with dried dill and pink
Himalayan salt. You may stock your fridge with lemons, hold your breath at gas stations,
remove your shoes outside the front door, make a mixed drink with the good bourbon, reconsider the
alkaline diet that made headlines a few years ago, take two walks daily
and genuflect, mentally, toward anything that’s currently, or on the verge of, blossoming.
Nevertheless, a worry will tag along at every outing, carve shadows from the proceedings.
A curdle of concern will wrinkle the skin of your life. There is no cream to iron you out,
no number to count to, no potion to keep the poison away, no lotus pretzel-ly enough
to ward it off. You are alive and somebody loves you. You are safe as you’ve ever been.

[I share Maya Stein's poems occasionally, having asked permission a while back. They lighten up the week.]

We’re not in lockdown because the government told us to stay at home.
 
We’re in lockdown because we don’t want to catch Covid-19.
 
Despite all the committees ranged against it, the Cobra meetings and the government scientific advisers, the daily briefings, the slide shows and the statistics, the whole not-travelling circus, the inconvenient truth is that Covid-19 isn’t losing this fight.
 
Not yet, anyway.
 
In the news last weekend, there was a story about Georgia (USA). The governor relaxed lockdown restrictions on small businesses. But some (most) of those businesses decided to stay locked down.
 
That makes sense.
 
When the lockdown ends, I won’t be hugging strangers in the streets.
 
Sorry – “when the lockdown ends”. Silly me. When the government announces that it is relaxing restrictions.
 
Or to be exact, when the government announces that it is relaxing restrictions in a way that it hopes won’t give the media grounds for attacking it if the relaxation is followed by a second wave...
 
…because there may be people silly enough to believe that the virus has gone just because the government says they can come out now. But there’s only so long you – I can go on extending a sentence.
 
This is getting a bit gnarly. The truth is, we’re going to be infectious to each other for a while yet. But we need to get back to work.
 
That, I think, qualifies as a new normal.
 
Maybe it’s just me, but I get the sense that all the high-level talk and Q&A about the pandemic, the lockdown, all the rest of it, is about the old normal.
 
Is the economy in a V-shaped recession? Will British Airways return to 2019 customer numbers in two years or three?
 
So very much not the questions to be asking right now.

Oh, not another daily briefing.
 
Ah, that’s what the R-number is. Thanks for explaining it again.
 
Five tests, eh? Do you remember Gordon Brown’s Five Tests for whether or not we join the Euro? No, I suppose you wouldn’t, at your age, minister.
 
[When I hear them talking about their five tests, I feel like Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada. Remember? The “Blue-Sweater Scene”, as it turns out to be called on YouTube?]
 
What has to happen, before we get real about this?
 
How do we devise a society – not an economy, a society – in which we can obtain what we need by co-operating (perhaps not even working) with people whose very presence may be dangerous to us?
 
By squabbling over whether or not the government should advise us to wear facemasks or not?
 
I don’t think so.

PS: My title question. Some years back, I interviewed Professor Jem Bendell for a piece I was writing ahead of a big, serious-minded banking conference (Sibos, if you’re interested). His subject was (and remains) deep adaptation in the face of economic/environmental collapse. Find him on YouTube. Seriously – do.
 
What comes back to me now, from my days interviewing speakers ahead of conferences, was the term “black-swan event”. This has quite a history, but it was first given its current meaning by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2001 book Fooled by Randomness.
 
I’m tempted to say that it has been misused ever since, to describe unexpected events. The characteristics of a black-swan event, as defined by Taleb, are: that it is unexpected; that it has a major impact; that it is rationalised afterwards. My non-italics.
 
Taleb himself has suggested that the current pandemic is actually a white-swan event, in that (my words) it was inevitable, or at least highly likely to happen, eventually. Big impact, but not unexpected.
 
And I’m not quite sure where I stand on post-pandemic rationalisation, although we’re all doing it. “Meant”, anybody? Serves us right, anybody? Obvious consequence of globalisation, anybody?
 
For me, the recurring multicoloured-swan event is that daily briefing. Turning up on a daily basis to say nothing new isn’t a useful contribution. Didn’t expect that, although now I come to think about it … sigh. These are the leaders on whom we rely to get us out of this mess. Don’t.
 
My other multicoloured-swan aspect of the current crisis is…
 
…the world is collapsing around us; the Global Economy has vanished overnight; the centre is continuing to deny that it cannot hold; everything is falling apart...
 
…and yet – it’s still possible to order a takeaway pizza.
 
Nobody would believe it. I don’t believe it. But that’s what happens in a real-life apocalypse. Priorities change.

Today, I’m stupid.

I slept hardly at all last night, not sure why not, and this morning my mind feels more sepia-toned than clear.

That’s not a bad image, I suppose, but I’ve run through shadowed, riddled with dry rot, soft, sagging, made of cheese (blue cheese?), mildewed and damp, and I still haven’t pinpointed it. Sepia-toned. It’ll have to do.

I’m not very intelligent today. It’s raining outside, my lower back aches, I shouldn’t have had that second cup of tea first thing, and I can just tell I’m going to be niggling for hours over whether that comma looks right after the opening ‘Today’.

But this is my consciousness we’re talking about; the continuous ‘me’ that looks out at the world. How can the depth, breadth, quality, whatever, of my perception be different from day to day? Am I less ‘me’ today? What am I missing today that I would have picked up yesterday?

There’s a seagull just outside the window, standing on the stone wall. It’s looking at me (he? she?) and I’m looking at it. And there’s something to say about that seagull, but in the moment of picking up my coffee mug and putting it down again, I’ve forgotten what it is.

What is the difference between the ‘me’ of yesterday, who woke up from a deep sleep to realise that it was after nine, who could have been relied upon to say something – something – about a seagull looking in, and the ‘me’ of today, who embarked upon this interminable but predictable sentence after a night of no sleep, after making apparent eye contact with a seagull but failing to draw any significance, blah, blah, I’m bored with this sentence?

It was a question, wasn’t it? So: question mark.

Once, many years ago, I picked up a prawn sandwich from the tray that should have been removed rather than the tray that had just been brought and two hours later the world swerved away from me and I hit the floor without ever quite realising that I’d fallen out of my chair. The world went sideways and I lost my hold on up, down, sideways, what had mattered a moment before, where I was.

Where was the ‘me’ then, the ‘I’ that we’re supposed to speak from?

I’m not quite up to drawing a conclusion just at the moment, but it seems to, er, me that there’s more to ‘me’ than the conscious part. Or less. ‘Me’ swims along, sometimes under water. Or goes somewhere else entirely

Or ‘me’ is just a succession of conscious moments divided by sleep, prawn sandwiches and, er, can’t think of anything else right now. I woke up this morning – let’s say yesterday morning – full of the delusion that I’d gone to sleep the night before, checked out for a trip to wherever dreams happen, and then returned in the morning with my mind full of fragments of where I'd been.

Not to get religious about this, but I like the thought experiment that we’re created fresh every morning. Not to get militantly atheistic either, but am I really the same person who was delighted to be given an Action Man for his tenth(?) birthday? Who remembers the stone dog on the landing and the pebble windows?

I shall think on this. If I can just eat a prawn sandwich (or, last night, just go to bed) and not be here at all for a few hours, then who’s to say where I was before I was born?

Defeating the Russian and Austrian armies at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805? Oh, why not?

No, I don’t think Covid-19 is “meant”. I do think it fits, though.

Follow the logic of Covid-19, and you end up with a smaller, younger, fitter population of mostly women.

The virus threatens everybody, but it seems to have a preference for older, overweight men with “pre-existing health conditions”.  There’s also, apparently, an ethnic component, but I’ll leave that out as it may be socio-economic and is almost certainly more complex than it seems.

I can’t forget a conversation I had before all this started (see also A virus too ordinary, 2nd April 2020) in which we agreed that all the problems of the world – from global warming down to finding a parking space – would be solved if the global population was cut by half.

No, we weren’t being serious, and yes, we were referencing a recent Avengers movie.

But I was also droning on about the collective unconscious, Gaia, blah blah, and wondering whether we’re better at imagining problems (insert your favourite scene from Contagion here) than consciously addressing them (and a clip from the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference here) – and also wondering whether all that imagining is actually the thought process before the collective unconscious … does something.

I don’t want to say “finds a solution”, but just as a precaution, I’d like to apologise if we’re all living in a Matrix-style simulation and I’ve dreamed up Covid-19 as a plot twist. My bad, but don’t you agree we needed something to confound the mulish certainties on both sides of Brexit?

Like I say, Covid-19 fits.

The virus does its thing, as above, and our response has been to turn off everything we do to harm the planet. Imagine – collectively, if you will – that this is a chance to re-run the history of the second half of the twentieth century, but without the toxic fluorocarbons, CFCs, the pesticides, all the science-improves-on-nature, and with videoconferencing and 3D printing.

I won’t mention Artificial Intelligence (which manifests as Artificial Stupidity, surely?) because nobody’s imagined a happy ending for that either.

I wonder sometimes whether that sense of “meant” represents an awareness of ourselves that goes beyond our day-to-day notion that we’re individuals with some measure of control over our surroundings – but that thought passes out of my mind quickly. I’m not Neo.

Anyway, you’ll have to excuse me.

If there’s a new normal coming, and it’s anything like the new normal described above, I think maybe I should put some laundry on. And find somebody to give me a haircut.

After the Berlin Wall fell, and with it the rest of the Iron Curtain, the files of the Stasi were opened.

They revealed that many East Germans had been acting as informers for the state intelligence service. There was outrage. Many East Germans had some explaining to do.

I remember being vaguely outraged myself. I remember asking myself: would I have been an informer? Or some kind of heroic resistance person, holding out against the pressure through the hopeless years, then vindicated at last when the regime collapsed in 1990.

You can probably guess my answer.

But there’s an affecting clip of Christabel Bielenberg, an English woman married to a German, who spent World War II in Germany, talking through her own mea culpa. She was asked for help by a fugitive Jewish family … and thought of her own family’s safety … and said … no.

Watch the clip. In that situation, I don’t know what I would have done. [The World At War, episode 16; Bielenberg was an active member of the German resistance and, I would say, heroic most of the time. Just that one moment.]

Then yesterday I turned on the radio. They seemed to be talking about the Stasi.

In the old East Germany, the radio told me, people were arrested. They were threatened. But then they were offered a way out. They’d be released if they informed on somebody else, who could then be arrested, and threatened, and offered a way out …

The Stasi kept its performance numbers up. It recruited lots and lots of informers, who informed on lots and lots of – and so on.

Efficiency, right? But the regime collapsed.

I remembered a friend telling me once that there was only full employment in the Soviet Union because you had to accept the job you were offered. The numbers stayed impressive – full employment, yay! – but the entire edifice collapsed.

I think it’s very easy to judge. More importantly, I think moral hazard creeps up on us.

I think every society contains all the personality types necessary to turn it into … anything. I think they bob to the surface according to the circumstances.

The lockdown makes sense, but I wonder if some of the most zealous police officers at the moment are the ones who are, let's put it this way, okay with the idea of keeping us locked up.

In Cornwall, local authorities are inviting the public to inform them of any holiday-cottage owners breaking the lockdown by letting out their properties (to, for example, “escaping” Londoners). Can’t argue against that. Probably wouldn't try.

But no. Thank you. I won't.

In my imaginary novelisation of the current crisis, the lights come up on a journalist watching one of the mid-period ministerial briefings on a big smart TV in an apartment out of a lifestyle ad.

The briefing is the one in which the health secretary answers a question about his recent week off with “mild symptoms”.

He’s feeling great, he says, but yes, he’s still social-distancing. He’s had it, but that doesn’t mean he can’t catch it again and he doesn’t know whether he’s still infectious.

“Expletive deleted,” says the journalist, leaning forward on the sofa they bought in the pre-crisis sale. She’s actually quite foul-mouthed, but I’m a prude so we’re going to have to fix the dialogue in the edit. “I knew it!”

“Huh?” says her partner, who’s sitting on the sofa next to her in his pyjamas, growing a beard and playing a first-person shooter on a laptop.

“Secondary infections!” says our protagonist. She grabs the laptop – yes, of course he protests; he hasn’t saved, etc. – and starts frantically tapping at the keys.

Because this is a tense modern urban documentary-style drama, he peels himself up off the sofa and goes over to the kitchen-part of the room to make himself a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich.

“Oh no!” says the journalist, her face eerily lit from below by more light than could possibly be shining from the laptop screen in front of her. “Oh no!”

Out on the balcony, the string quartet launches into a dark'n'doomy variation on the theme tune (I know I said 'novelisation', but this is a global emergency so we're back in the film).

“Whash-sa-fuff?” says her partner, coming forward from the kitchen. Because this is a tense modern urban documentary-style drama – and uncompromisingly authentic with it – everything he says from now on has to be through a mouthful of peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich.

“Here! Look!” She stands up, comes round the sofa and thrusts the laptop into his hands.

“Ghar-fuh!” He manages to sit back down on the sofa, get the laptop onto his knees, and take another bite of the peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich.

“Phlurf?” he says after a moment. “Es jussa phlog wriff...”

“A blog written by a maverick scientist with interesting spectacles and a little beard whom nobody believes. I know that! But look at this! And this!”

She’s pointing to a news story from South Korea about recovered patients getting ill again. And another one from Japan.

He still doesn’t get it and she doesn’t want any more crumbs sprayed onto their new sofa, so she launches into the exposition that gets the plot started. If we can still get the virus after we’ve had the virus –

– because of all the gritty realism going around, she leaves the door open while she visits the bathroom, and doesn’t stop talking –

– then this is even more serious than we’ve realised.

It’s not the easing of the lockdown that’s the issue –

– because she’s a young female protagonist being written by an older male author who hasn't quite decided on his target audience, she tears off all her clothes in front of the full-length mirror and confirms to herself that those are still there, but doesn’t stop talking –

– so much as the likelihood of a second wave of the infection after the government has used up all its credibility on fighting the first wave.

“Not sure that any of it's true, but if it is, what do we do?” she concludes.

“Say indoorsh?” he says.

“Oh, babe.” She watches him cram the last of the sandwich into his mouth, smearing peanut butter and squished banana everywhere. “Wash your hands.”

Oh no, not "economic growth" again.

News just in that although "our economy" has suffered a hit worse than ever, it's expected to "bounce back" and will resume "economic growth" just as soon as we switch it back on again at the mains.

"Economic growth" is what happens when ever-increasing numbers of people buy ever-increasing quantities of things build in sweaty, overcrowded factories by workers not paid enough to buy their own health care.

You get "economic growth" when ever-increasing numbers of people buy ever-increasing numbers of airline tickets to remote places with exotic germs to which they have no resistance. "Economic growth" is what happens when "the business community" heads back to the execuive lounge and the rest of us form orderly queues for the tourist seats.

Economic growth isn't natural, and nor is it sustainable. It's what we get if we wake up and decide the crisis never happened. Assuming there is a vaccine eventually - assuming we have the option of going back to "normal" - a return to the pursuit of "economic growth" would see us well on our way to the next crisis.

While we're sitting at home not chasing "economic growth", the planet is cleaning up its act. Efficient, isn't it? Fast. More effective than we ever were, with our targets and climate-change conferences.

Let's hope we'll be allowed to come back from this.

Is this the beginning of the end, or is it a transition?

Except for the idiots, we’re all self-isolating. Except for one or two annoying young twerps in running gear, we’re all giving each other two metres of space as we pass on our daily one-piece-of-exercise.

According to the BBC News website’s summary of the government’s briefing last night (I’ve stopped watching the thing itself), the death toll is still rising but the hospital-admission numbers are encouraging – or vice-versa; I forget. It’s getting worse but in an encouraging way. Less worse. Something.

The row over testing kits was a good sign. If we’re all squabbling over who ordered what, when, and why they didn’t have the foresight to do it earlier – we’re doing it because there isn’t any worse news to report.

But we’re doing the thing we do, aren’t we? We’re reporting the news we can measure. Hospital admissions. Deaths in hospital. All reportable numbers.

The “dark matter” in all of this is what’s happening in places where there aren’t neat little agencies to put together numbers on the scale of the crisis. I’m also just a little uneasy about the gap between the reported number of cases – no, not cases; hospital admissions – and the number of beds being made available. How many beds?

China’s numbers aren’t reliable, apparently. No deaths reported the other night, but now, isn’t there a remote village in northern China that’s suddenly been cordoned off?

Africa?

I’m happy to go along with the general view that this is the bit where we make ready for the happy ending.

I am slightly ashamed of my own conspiracy-theorist tendency to spot possible signs that all isn’t as well as it clearly is.

This is real. Like everybody else, I want it to end.

But - what better display of human nature could there be than all the “Minister, could you tell us your plan to get everything back to normal?” questions that now dominate the briefing?

File those under: Fate, tempting.

And don’t expect a victory hug from me. Not just yet.

We’re all longing to be watched.

There was a piece the other day, I forget the source, in which it was suggested that (1) governments have hyped up their surveillance during the pandemic, and (2) they won’t dial it down afterwards. We’ve consented our way into a surveillance economy, society, culture, blah blah.

Okay. Brownie points for turning the happy ending into a dystopia. Just what we need right now.

If surveillance is such a problem, we should get off Facebook. I’ve said this before, but the saving grace of the surveillance economy, society, culture is its sheer incompetence. If any of it worked like it’s promoted, all my consumer wishes would be granted. My life would be one long consumer heaven. But.

What really puts you in control, ha ha, is the freedom to make your own decisions on minor infractions. I can argue the need to double-park with a traffic warden, say, but not with a drone.

Technology removes the consent. Technology won’t listen to you, and won’t decide that just this once…

In the early days of the crisis, the recurring pre-news trailer on the BBC was for a tech show about AI’s ability to transform hospital care. That was around the time the lead news story was persistently the NHS’s shortage of nurses and doctors.

If it comes to it, give me a human hand to hold.

In conversation. We came up with this.

The virus is a warning shot from Gaia. The global panic is the collective nervous breakdown we’ve been trying to have since the turn of the century – or before. The Way We Live Now has been driving us mad since The End Of History at the latest.

But.

Covid-19 has provoked more articles about how this isn’t the planet getting its own back, than articles about how this is the planet getting its own back.

We’re so concerned to refute the notion that this is Gaia’s revenge that you’d almost think we’re worried that this might be – but the whole idea is so ridiculous that I can’t finish the sentence.

This is just a naturally occurring virus that’s jumped from (other) animals to humans. Probably bats. I forget. Just ordinary bats, if so. Not vampire bats. Don’t be silly.

These are rational times.

Before too long, the virus will disappear, global capitalism will start up again, the airlines will reinstate scheduled flights to …. Oh, where shall we say? … Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province, among other distant places, and …

… we’ll all buy tickets to fly off to remote hotspots and breathe in the unfamiliar germs – air! I mean, breathe in the unfamiliar air!

And it was all going so well. Sorry about that.

They’re losing it.

The issue with testing has gone on too long. Other countries have tested millions of people; we’ve only tested a handful, et cetera. And the issue with protective clothing. Principal media use of Zoom is to interview nurses and doctors who haven’t been given the right gear.

Nobody can get through to any official body online. Applications for immediate help are going to take time to process. The banks, this morning, are apparently not rising to the government’s invitation to extend loans to businesses about to go under. Surprise.

The government’s daily media briefing now conveys numbers, platitudes and awkward questions. There are more cars on the roads and building work seems to have restarted on a couple of sites locally.

We’re in the middle of a deadly global pandemic and we’re bored with it.

The government(s) had the initiative and now they’ve lost it.

I’ve always slightly taken it for granted that large organisations can’t do anything. Intergovernmental panels on climate change can set targets but they can’t unchanged the climate. Your bank can email you about how helpful it is, but if your business is going under – sorry.

Favourite example: the waitress will check with the manager who will check with head office to find out whether, in future, they will be able to offer vegan mayonnaise to go with my companion’s salad.

So far, the response to the crisis has been most effective at times when the crisis was acute. Back then, there was a reason to tune in to the daily briefing. Back then, there was reason to stay inside.

Now that the crisis is chronic, and nothing much new is happening, we’re in danger of drifting outside for long enough to infect each other.

In a properly organised fictional pandemic, everything progresses in a logical, orderly manner. The virus is lethal; the government gets progressively more totalitarian in its response; people die in their millions; the survivors get together by about Chapter Seven and build an agrarian utopia.

The real thing isn’t dramatic enough. It’s been pointed out that Covid-19 is absolutely the right virus for the way we live now – engineered to take down global travel, densely populated cities, et cetera – but the further aspect of that is – it’s engineered to worm its way past our attention span.

If it’s going to get really, really bad, that’ll be because we lose interest in it.

Wow, this is a cunning virus. It won’t kill us all now, but if it hangs around and enough of us slip outside to get infected and thus keep it going, and then more of us slip outside because nothing dramatic’s happened, and then…

I was thinking about the human capacity to normalise what happens. We’ve been hit by a virus. It’s been there for a while. We’re not supposed to go outside, but expletive deleted, I’ve run out of milk. The shop’s just down the road and I’m sure it won’t matter if…

Every disaster is inconceivable until it happens. Then it’s – you know, the thing that happened.

But – you know – a quick trip to get some milk? That won’t do any harm.

How quickly we've  all got used to this.

I caught a "When this is all over" discussion on the radio the other day. People were talking about "the endgame" as though viruses just stop.

Do we all just come out blinking into the sunlight? Relight the blast furnaces? Head to the airport for the delayed London-to-Sydney non-stop flight?

Get back onto the roads in our fuel-burning cars?

I'm betting on a mindset change. Covid-19 and Covid-20 go dormant, so does Covid-20(ii), but whatever is the current mutation proves vulnerable to the vaccine we've developed. It doesn't like Summer, either.

By then, we know that immunity through surviving it is neither complete nor permanent. Oh, and - as the saying goes - Winter is coming.

We come out. Very tentatively. We still keep our distance from each other - for a while, anyway. Some of us come down with Covid-whatever, but vaccination and possibly also herd immunity do their thing.

Then we get to decide whether or not we re-ignite globalisation.

Talking to a friend the other day, via Facebook, we came up with the idea that this is an opportunity to replay the second half of the twentieth century, but this time with videoconferencing and 3D printing.

And the canals in Venice running clear. And dolphins in the Thames.

Weird times, though. We seem to be past "It's really happening!" But it is.

Reality 1, Fiction 0.

My daily exercise takes me to Gyllingvase Beach, where I can find no plastic in the washed-up seaweed. I don't understand that.

The streets are (almost) empty; there are runners; on the beach there are swimmers. Not many.

It's when we all know somebody who's got it, that the world changes.

Not that this is necessarily the right moment to be looking for a bright side, but Covid-19 is certainly fixing global warming.

No flight, no industry, no travel across borders – no globalisation. And instead of us sitting side by side staring at the cinema screen, or facing forward in a crowded stadium – or marooned at our tables for two, with or without candles and a single red rose – we’re offering each other support.

Sit-down restaurants are offering take-aways and local social networks are offering help with shopping. The Panic-Buying Phase of the emergency felt a bit like the week before Christmas, but with loo rolls instead of tinsel, and just about the only thing that hasn’t stopped – quite the opposite – is a sense of community.

We talk about empty supermarket shelves in the way that we talk about the weather. Ooh, you should have seen Asda. I was in Sainsbury’s and…

The government’s gone mad, but in a final-scenes-of-A-Christmas-Carol kind of way, and everybody’s praising the NHS for fear of something worse. Normal politics hasn’t exactly been suspended, but normal commentary hasn’t quite caught up – the government seems to keep doing today what yesterday’s commentators complained that it hadn’t done…

…almost like normal politics.

I hope the world changes. I hope we don’t go back to the status quo ante. My phone told me earlier on that the canals of Venice are now running clear. A moment ago, a voice on the radio said, “For the first time in a generation, birdsong is audible in Wuhan.”

And yes, the same voice did suggest that the time had come for a Universal Basic Income. Can’t immediately remember how that’s supposed to work, but if the government does succeed in alleviating the impact of Covid-19 for everybody, we’ll be closer to that than to the old wage-slavery.

Maybe we could start to think about building a new world, rather than making good the damage to the old one.

There's a dispensary near here where the staff have been instructed to protect themselves - and they've taken that to mean: admit one or two customers at a time and lock the door - yes, actually lock the door - against the rest.

Long queues of people of all ages queuing outside in all weathers, to pick up their prescriptions. You have to wait to be let out.

No comment. But there are other dispensaries.

Across town there are shops and cafes that have closed and there are shops and cafes that are carrying on as normal. There are also cafes that are inventing home-delivery services, and some stores are using Facebook to send out messages of support to staff and customers.

"It takes all sorts" is an expression I haven't heard for a while, but it's true.

Lately I’ve been posting short stories on Medium.com. Some new, some not-so-new, and some written for children.

Medium.com, as perhaps we all know, self-describes as an “online publishing platform”. It has the endearing characteristic that it pays for popular content – not much, but there are a few dollars waiting for me, if I can only get around to filling in the US tax form – and of more practical value, it has curators.

These are people – I think people, not algorithms – who pick articles (and short stories, etc.) for circulation to Medium.com’s subscribers and users – yes, both; you can pay for unlimited access or you can read a limited amount per month for free.

I’ve had Medium (dot com) in the back of my mind for a while now. I read an interview with its founder, Evan Williams (co-founder of Twitter), and then I read something else, and happened across something else, and finally took the hint and signed up for an account.

An email started arriving, offering me curated content. After a while, I went in and changed my preferences.

Medium’s okay. I read a lot of what I’m sent. Slightly too much on how to live, how to get by in the big city, how to talk to girls, how to get through your twenties without making a fool of yourself, and I’m pretty sure I also imagined the piece on How to be a writer without having to write anything that I’m remembering now, but there are some good people up there.

Umair Haque, for example. Today’s offering is Notes on a Pandemic: what “We’re in it together” really means. And here’s a piece by Lisa Damour revealing that ‘Anxious’ is the new ‘shy’.

In fiction – oh, here we are. Fiction Writing’s Place on Medium by Tom Farr, and 3 Ways to Make Your Fiction Writing Better – Right Now by Shaunta Grimes. Not to mention The Secret to Becoming a Massively Popular Writer by Ayodeji Awosika.

All interesting, in their different ways. There is also actual fiction (try Bridget Webber).

The unit of approval on Medium.com is the ‘clap’ – which is like a ‘like’ except that you can keep on clapping for as long as you, er, like. There’s probably a piece somewhere on how many claps to give, to signal degrees of approval, and no doubt there’s a block on clapping your own pieces.

This isn’t where I get to boast that I’ve received lots of claps, because, you see, I’ve, um, so to speak, not to put too fine a point on it, er – but what I have noticed is, the claps I have received have (almost) all been for the apocalyptic stories.

If the world ends during the story, or civilisation collapses, or rising sea levels drown everybody – you get the picture. For a truly awful disaster – I get applause.

I do have friends who clap my more sensitively creative-writing-type stories, once I’ve explained the clapping system to them, and I’m sure there are hundreds of articles on How to get more claps for your fiction, but that’s not why I’m writing this.

I like that it’s alive; that there are people reading, curating, clapping. I like the natural-selection aspect – the people who get lots of claps tend to be the people who write well about something interesting.

Mainly, I like having somewhere to put short stories that doesn’t also contain socks.

If I understand this thing correctly, the risk is that we all come down with an unpleasant viral infection simultaneously, and the modern economy grinds to a halt.

Nothing gets made; no services are provided.

Italy has pre-emptively ground to a halt already, and today’s (Wednesday morning’s) UK news is that a UK health minister has tested positive for the virus.

If I was writing this on Thursday morning, I’d mention President Trump’s ban on Europe/US flights, but as things stand, I’ll just claim credit as an incredibly accurate forecaster.

Either we can beat viruses, or we can’t. This isn’t the “zombie apocalypse”, or Stephen King’s “Captain Trips” (which kills almost everybody in The Stand), but the next virus might be.

This one is a convenient virus, because it works against the excesses of Western Civilisation (sic) and Globalisation (ha ha), not least by grounding so many globe-warming flights.

So yes, let’s all wash our hands – with soap and water; hand sanitiser is just the lazy alternative – and let’s see how much of the world we can save by staying self-isolated at home.

“What do they know of management, who only management know?”*

In my inbox is a piece from The Guardian**  about the importance of diversity in team-building. Beneath it, a press release from a charity about the appointment of their next CEO.

The next CEO of the charity is the previous CEO of another charity.

To repeat that: they’ve appointed a CEO whose past experience is of being a CEO. Under “relevant experience”, this person would have written “I’ve been a CEO before” rather than, for example, “I have experience of, or even familiarity with, the work of your charity.”

There’s a “CEO community” and this person is a member of it. A “charity CEO community”, in fact.

The Guardian’s piece on diversity makes the point that if you build a team of CEOs, charity CEOs, you’ll only get one mindset. Everybody will come up with roughly the same solutions to problems – sorry, challenges.

Not in those terms, you understand; the subject wasn’t CEOs and nor was it charities. Teams. Diversity.

My post today is partly about team-building – and let’s agree that a CEO is a member of a team – and partly about diversity. My argument is that (1) the most effective teams have diverse people in them, and (2) the departure of a key person is an opportunity to diversify. To cast the net widely. Not to recruit the same person again.

The photograph above The Guardian’s piece shows a team of people – I guess they’re a team because they’re standing and sitting in a sunlit open-plan warehouse-type office reminiscent of Anne Hathaway’s workspace in The Intern (2005) – a team happy in their diversity: more than one gender is represented, as is more than one skin colour.

There’s a person in a wheelchair, and one of the guys might be ten – five? – years older than the rest of the group. No grey hair, nobody above a fashionable age (and no teenage climate-change activists either), but it’s a good effort.

There's an idea of diversity that isn't the real thing. And the issue goes beyond the usual suspects. A team of radical feminists would all think the same way, as would – oh, here we go, can’t keep them out – any group of fifty-something men in grey suits gathered around a boardroom table.

The idea isn’t that the radical feminists should hire a recruitment agency to find them an Oxbridge-educated public-school boy for their next vacancy, but that the recruitment process should be without bias. Beyond relevant experience – the England football team doesn’t need hockey players – anything should be possible.

If I was recruiting for the mission-critical enterprise that gives me my livelihood, in an unpredictably difficult world, I might want to open my mind to the possibility that there might be ideas and insights beyond anything my immediate peer group can offer.

Diversity is a resource. A misunderstood resource and perhaps a misapplied ideal as well. Is there any difference between replacing a fifty-something man in a grey suit with another fifty-something man in a grey suit, and replacing a CEO with a CEO?

Your new CEO might be ten – five? – years younger than your previous CEO, and might not be the same gender, orientation, ethnicity, et cetera – but you’re still replacing like with like. Diversity is more than skin-deep and it depends on more than just the set of reproductive organs that the candidate brings to the interview.

Recruiting people who don’t look like us is a step in the right direction, and with any luck we’ll learn over time that difference can be positive – and full of ideas. But real diversity is about life-experience, personality, imagination, creativity – and a different combination of those in other members of the team.

The case for recruiting somebody different – rather than a new person with the same CV as the old person – is that by doing so, you open up possibility. You widen the horizon.

You’ve got no chance of reaching a new destination if you insist on running the train along the same old tracks. You need somebody with the authority to switch the points. Who actually wants to explore where else you could go. Enough with the train metaphor already.

Maybe we should recruit inspiring people rather than taking our cues from job titles? Subject to certain essentials (“How good are you at football?”), what’s needed is an attitude. You feel strongly about the job; you want to do it; you have some ideas as to how you might do it.

Or maybe we should think about the challenges we face – think about the jobs for which we’re recruiting. If they were really mission-critical, et cetera, we wouldn’t be having these prob– challenges. We’d just do what was necessary to get them done – sharing out tasks according to aptitude.

Teams form naturally in the wild. If you’re a tribe of hunter-gatherers, you build teams around the task of finding lunch. In the interviews, “I provided lunch last week” will be less impressive than “I’m hungry”, especially if last week was Cabbage Surprise (again), and today, you can see the main ingredient for Alligator Creole swimming appetisingly towards you.

And come to think of it – even corporate team-building exercises are built around tasks. You send your middle-managers off to an expensive weekend in the Cairngorms, where an ex-paratrooper will challenge them to get across a river using only a teaspoon, a ball of twine and a cheese-grater – and a team will emerge.

It may not be the team as defined on the business cards, but it’s the real team. Soaking wet, lost the cheese-grater – but working together effectively. Probably laughing their heads off.

Yes. The work is what matters. The task facing the team.

I suppose a CEO might evolve naturally into the role via their work on the team (actually, in the real world, I don’t suppose anything of the sort), and perhaps a CEO’s skills are transferable from caring about waifs to caring about strays (not), but imagine a world in which the work was so worthwhile that we just did it, without managing each other or needing to be managed.

In which work wasn’t boring or pointless or possibly even dehumanising. In which we were all valued for our distinct and individual contributions. And nobody's job was to conduct our performance appraisal.

I mean, come off it.

*”What do they know of England, who only England know?” Question posed by Rudyard Kipling in his 1891 poem The English Flag. If I’d read the poem before I wrote that opening sentence, I think I would have written a different opening sentence. Kipling wasn’t big on diversity.

But there’s an interesting account of George Orwell’s take on the question here – Orwell considered Kipling’s attitudes and views “unforgivable” – and I’m inclined to suggest that if you only know management, you don’t know much about the company you’re managing – the workers, the vision, the day-to-day routines, the relationships with customers and suppliers, the whatever-it-is that makes it a good-enough place to work.
I’ve used Kipling’s question, but my intended meaning is opposite to his.

**Strictly, The Guardian Labs. Content paid for by The Open University. Convincing piece, written by Megan Orpwood-Russell. Sorry about all the asterisks.

Brexit’s turned out predictable, hasn’t it?

The EU want us to be like the EU, so we don’t have a competitive advantage, and our lot want us to be different from the EU, so we do have a competitive advantage. Straightforward negotiation.

Meanwhile, Covid-19 is making it difficult to blame Brexit for whatever’s wrong with the world economy. Something would have turned up, because there are always “events”, but Covid-19 unambiguously sucks the blame away from everything else.

No, we can’t blame Brexit for Germany’s near-recession, nor for the economic slowdown in the UK. Thanks to Covid-19, we now believe that the real weakness in the global economy is supply-chain dependence on a single country beginning with Ch–. Brexit’s not guilty after all.

But never mind all that. We have a prime minister whose principal concern is to ensure that we all wash our hands, and a contagion that threatens to take us all away from our day jobs.

To be struck down with Covid-19 would be a very unpleasant experience, no doubt, but it’s also hitting trade, tourism, finance, international business, Corporate America, the bottom line, profitability, local businesses, cash flow, staff turning up for work … the way we live now.

You wouldn’t want to, but if you did, you couldn’t make this up. In China, the “surveillance economy” has failed to stop Covid-19, and I doubt that 2020 is going to be much of a season for cruise liners or international travel generally. Invest in companies delivering home-office kits and video-conferencing technologies.

We’ve got a new crisis now, but I’d like not to forget how passionately we all* felt about Brexit. Not to go back over it, but we all believed that this was a big-time crisis, et cetera, families split asunder, shouting matches in TV studios, marches, demonstrations, social media, civil war, blah blah endlessly blah. This was the worst thing ever!

Much of that angst was expressed by people who believed that they could see the future. Remember? We were all going to be richer, poorer, deprived of essential supplies, living in a lorry park on the motorway just outside the Dover ferry terminal, signing trade deals all over the world and bringing new meaning to the word “swashbuckling”.

And maybe we are. But none of those forecasts allowed for anything other than Brexit as the event that would cause the future. There was never any mention of – oh, I don’t know, contagious diseases, say. Or indeed anything else.

Bit much to expect a rabid (sorry) Brexiteer/Remainer to foresee Covid-19, but maybe we could learn to dial down the certainty about the future?

To allow for the possibility that we don’t know everything?

Even, to bring a little humility to the self-appointed task of tempting fate?

*”all” in the current sense that in the worst-case scenario, an infection such as Covid-19 or an argument such as Brexit will reach around 80% of the population.

“We’re going paperless!” says the headline on the letter from the utility company that provides me with gas and electricity.

Reader, they’re going paperless. How old-fashioned, you might say. Well, yes.

Strictly, they’re going paperless in their dealings with customers who don’t read the whole of this letter – who miss the bit where they can opt out of paperlessness – but still, that’s jolly paperless, isn’t it? Come on, don’t discourage them. Jolly paperless! Well done! Here, have one of my gold stars!

Even later in the letter than the bit where we can opt out is this. “Download our new App to get account updates and reminders straight to your device.”

Bless! They’ve got a new App!

If I download it, my device will start pinging away with account updates and reminders from the utility company that provides me with gas and electricity. Hooray! Can’t wait.

The letter tells me that my account with the utility company, etc., “is now easier to use than ever”.

Which is quite impressive. “You’re already benefiting from a convenient way to manage your energy online. … you have everything you need in one easily accessible place.”

I thought that easily accessible place was the gas bill. Tear open the envelope. Read what’s inside. Easy access.

But no. It’s something online. And now that they’re going paperless, I’ll be “joining a community of thousands of account users already receiving their communications this way, and we really hope you’re going to prefer the change too.”

Isn’t that nice?

I found an old chequebook the other day. Used it to pay a utility bill. Oddly satisfying experience. I know a young writer (digital native, if you remember that term) who’s taken to using a typewriter for first drafts and letters.

Going paperless isn’t exactly cutting-edge, is it?

But never mind. It’s very clever. Well done!

I think I will opt out, though, because I just don’t want the extra work.

Utility bills would just arrive. Drop through the letterbox. Remember?

“We’ll send you an email notification when you have something new to log-in and view online. If you’ve forgotten your password…” and so on.

Going online to find my bill. Extra work. Not much, but – work that I didn’t have to do before.

Assuming my spam filter lets the email through.

Continuing the theme, a certain credit-card company sent me another letter the other day.

A4. Brown envelope. Little window in it to show my address.

The same offer as comes roughly every month. Credit card. I can do a “balance transfer” from another card at no interest until some distant reckoning that needn’t trouble us at all now, tra-la.

Enclosed was the familiar What we do with your data leaflet.

They’ve been sending me these offers for absolutely ages. Always the same: a balance-transfer offer on a new credit card.

I don’t mind – my paper shredder gets hungry these days – but that leaflet does bother me a little.

By now, my data should include my responses. I’ve blogged and posted about these offers before – and I once asked Facebook, via a post, to make itself useful and tell B– (I usually name them, but I guess they're all the same) that I wasn’t interested. None of it worked. The offers still come.

Yes, I know. Old fool. Ridiculous old fool wasting his time.

But next time you wake up at 3am and lie there worrying about the surveillance economy – and big data, and data analytics, and CCTV cameras, and all the rest of it – think of me.

I’m not proud of the state of my finances, but one thing I can say is: I don’t have a credit card. I haven’t had a credit card since I got fed up with the things back in the nineties.

Therefore – I’ll spell this out, in case you’re as slow as I am at 3am – I don’t have a balance to transfer.

I’m not eligible to take up Barc– oops, that was close! To take up the credit-card company’s offer, and haven’t been since the idea of the balance transfer was invented.

I don’t know what these people do with my data, but I suspect that they don’t read it very closely.

Reader, I have tested the surveillance economy, and it doesn’t work. Relax: nobody’s paying attention.

My friend Patricia Finney advocates the “0th draft” as a starting point for writing fiction.

Fact too, probably, but Patricia writes mainly historical novels, so I don’t know. The 0th draft comes before the first draft, obviously, and what you do is, you write. You don’t faff around waiting for the perfect opening sentence – you start writing. With whatever you’ve got.

You start, and you don’t stop. The acronym that accompanies the 0th draft is BINMAD. The B stands for a six-letter word that I’ve just looked up on Google – because I try not to use certain words here and Google gives me alternatives.

Using the B-word’s second meaning in its verb form, BINMAD stands for Cause Serious Harm Or Trouble To Inspiration, Never Miss A Day. Never mind how bad you’re feeling, or how much more clearly you’d write if you just procrastinated for another day – you write.

You don’t stop, and you don’t look back. Don’t edit. Don’t read it over. Don’t circulate your opening sentence to a Facebook Group for comments.

Your commitment is to complete your 0th draft. From memory – Patricia and I haven’t had this conversation for a while – you then stick the whole thing in a drawer for a week or more (showing my age: I mean, close the file and take it off the desktop) and go do all the things you dreamed of doing while you were writing.

Then you read it. There’ll be a lot that goes straight in the bin, and a lot of what’s left won’t be in the right order, or won’t be right … and there’ll be bits that need to be there that aren’t there, that you need to write, and that character’s going to need more of a back-story, and if the plot went this way … and you’ll start writing your first draft with a much clearer idea of where your story needs to go.

And how it needs to get there. Hate those long sentences.

The 0th draft gets you past the blank sheet of paper (okay! I’m not young!) and it also removes the pressure of having to get it right all the time. If nothing whatsoever rides on whether or not you’ve chosen the exact-best expression of what you want to say, you’re free to create.

You don’t show your 0th draft to anybody.

Obviously.

I’ve just Googled “0th draft” and found other writers talking about it. Good ideas spread. Perhaps that’s the practical application of the annual NaNoWriMo event (National Novel Writing Month – which is November), which seems to celebrate splurging out a lot of words.

Okay, I’ve just put NaNoWriMo into my trusty search engine. It’s free, and the write-up does make the point that the whole exercise can serve as part of your creative process.

I’ve never written a 0th draft, but I did once spend seven hours waiting for treatment in an A&E department with only a copy of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way for company. I’ve written Morning Pages ever since (approximately; I’ve missed weeks at a time and it’s actually a way of keeping a journal).

Morning Pages are distantly related to the 0th draft, except that you don’t have to be writing fiction to use them.

Start the day by writing three pages of whatever comes to mind. “Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page...and then do three more pages tomorrow,” says the write-up at juliacameronlive.com.

Morning Pages are “the bedrock tool of a creative recovery,” apparently, and I won’t argue with that. They’re not a lot of help with physical injuries, but they do clear the mind.

Everything on the internet has to be oriented towards selling something, so I’ll pause for a commercial break here: Patricia Finney also writes as P F Chisholm, and if you put either of those names into a search engine, you’ll find any number of books to buy – er, read.

Okay, that’s enough online marketing for one day. I was talking to a young friend last Tuesday about the near-insuperable challenge of getting started on a creative project, and I suspect that some variant on Morning Pages, or writing a 0th draft, could be the antidote to a lot of procrastination.

Whatever it is, let yourself do it badly as a route to getting it right. Take the risk, don’t feel the pressure. Getting started requires an act of will.

This is turning into a self-help post. Sorry. I was thinking about 0th drafts, so I started writing about 0th drafts, and then I started meandering around Morning Pages and NaNoWriMo, and now all of a sudden I’m remembering my old friend David Phillips again, and his advice on how to end a magazine article.

“If you’ve got to the end,” David used to say, “just stop.”

We think of electric-car charging stations as things like fuel pumps. You drive into a service station and pull up at the pump-thing and then insert a hose/cable into your car.

Shall we innovate? There’s electricity everywhere. It doesn’t explode if you light a match, so it doesn’t have to be kept in secure tanks under designated filling stations with state-of-the-art fire precautions.

Electricity runs along the sides of major roads. Traffic lights, lighting generally, those emergency telephones you see along the verges of motorways.

Pending the arrival of the self-charging battery – in the real-world sense of a battery that never runs out – how about installing sockets everywhere, akin to the hook-ups you find on caravan sites?

Pull in to a parking space and plug into the kerb?

I mean, imagine if you had to pull in to a phone shop every time you wanted to charge your smartphone.

I’m also haunted by the thought that cars don’t have to be cars.

If the internal-combustion engine hadn’t been invented when it was, but instead, a viable electric motor had been invented back then, what would cars look like now?

If we built up from the battery, rather than trying to fit the battery into a pre-existing great heavy hunk of metal and wheels, what would we build?

Would we invent something lighter and intrinsically safer, that goes not much more slowly?

Perhaps glides over the fields?

Without wrecking the world?

Whenever I do anything online, I imagine that there’s a cluster of photogenic young people gathered behind me, watching over my shoulder.

They’re the tech-savvy junior employees of my ISP – and every other company whose website I visit – and they’re living (but imaginary) proof that we live in a surveillance economy. Society. We live in a society, not an economy.

You know all that stuff about Big Data? Internet giants tracking our every move? They’re that. Big Brother – Sister – Big Sibling is watching us.

Sometimes – I guess it depends on what I’m looking at online – they’re hatchet-faced apparatchiks of the Security State, and sometimes – yes, it definitely depends on that – they’re shocked and horrified elderly relatives who are disappointed in me. William, how could you look at – that?

The usual youngsters just nudge each other and snigger.

Returning us now to the real world, the question I’d like to pose is this.

They may not be standing behind me, my online observers, but they’re definitely there. In offices, behind screens, watching. Taking a break. Making coffee. Playing online games. Tweeting. Planning the weekend.

Sniggering. Nudging each other. Look what he’s on about this week. He’s talking about us.

So what do they officially do, these tech people, apart from sending cookies my way and taking down my IP address?

[That’s the right term, isn’t it? IP address? Make yourselves useful, peeps, and correct it if not.]

What they do, I suspect, is reduce me to a statistic. From my perspective, I’ve got people watching me online. From their perspective, they’ve got millions of people to watch online.

So they don’t deal with me personally. Instead, they draw up charts showing that – I don’t know, some percentage. Charts reducing me to a statistic. 30 per cent of Spanish women behave as I do, while 70 per cent don’t.

Sorry, I should explain that. With the help of a tech-enabled friend, I once delved into the data that my Significant [Online] Other held about me.

And found that the company closest to me, the biggest employer of watchers of me, had collated all my data, run a bunch of clever calculations … and concluded that I was a Spanish woman in my forties. I fitted that profile most closely. And no, I have no idea what I’d been buying to give them that impression.

Yes, and there’s something else. Every time I use my laptop to go online, a pop-up appears on the screen to warn me that people know I’m in Aldershot. To hide my location, I could sign up for … you know the rest. Dollar amount per annum for the premium service.

That pop-up is probably the least effective ad I have ever encountered. Total fail.

The Spanish-woman thing is true (there’s talk of the UK government appointing a regulator for online activity, and I’m getting my compliance in early) but the Aldershot pop-up hasn’t appeared for a while. That said – important background information – I’ve never even been to Aldershot, so far as I can remember. I live in Falmouth.

And now back to the blog post.

They reduce us to statistics, the better to up the response rate on their advertising and direct marketing.

If a double-figure percentage of Spanish women in their forties (not) living in Aldershot sign up to have their location concealed; well, that’s the important thing. Much more important than being right about my age, gender, interest in, um.

Here’s what I think. We should celebrate the glorious, saving incompetence of the technology industry.

We’re not under threat from people who watch our every move. We’re under threat from people who – at best (worst) – devise tools to capture (“capture” – they use that word, but in this context, it always makes me giggle) our every keystroke and then strip out the individuality to fit us into some vast database of simplistic demographic categories.

They’re human. Paradoxically. They’ve designed data-analytics processes that don’t think.

We should encourage them in their humanity.

[Hey, you. Yes, you. Take a break. It’s nearly lunchtime. Go early. The rest of this blog post will be here when you get back. Have a great weekend.]

And we should trust their analytics to miss the specifics of our lives.

Nobody and no machine looks at me and thinks: that isn’t what a Spanish woman looks like. Nobody and no machine takes a walk with me across Gyllyngvase Beach and thinks: this isn’t Aldershot.

Like people in ridiculously complicated spy/thriller movies, these are people who trust their technology.

These are machines that do what’s asked of them – they generalise.

They don’t need to get the detail right, did I say that?

If enough people sign up to have their locations concealed – and we’re all pretty tolerant of low-level tech-idiocies now, so never mind that we’re not in Aldershot – that’s what matters.

The other saving grace of technology – I’m not exactly repeating myself here – is that it’s designed and operated by people. Human beings. All that data analysis follows rules set by, I don’t know, Seattle-based twenty-somethings who don’t get out much.

Yes, of course that’s a caricature. But I’ve analysed the “reciprocal data” that all these ads represent, and I don’t think they’re put together by world-weary Old Europeans with part-time jobs training new recruits at the Aldershot Barracks in the proper use of castanets.

No wonder, despite all the Big Data and the Big Talk and the analytics and the surveillance and the online courses in marketing – no wonder my dreams of buying the perfect happiness-inducing gadget never seem to come true.

No wonder, despite the CCTV and the facial-recognition software and the surveillance and the spy movies and the harnessing-the-power-of-technology, there are still criminals who get away with it.

Move along, please. Nothing new here. Nothing new at all.

This matter of rules. Briefly.

There are rules that are necessary. Do not jump in the deep end if you can’t swim. Do not steal my wallet.

And there are any number of rules that shouldn’t be rules. Shouldn’t be guidelines; should barely even be suggestions.

Take an ambition online, and you’ll find any number of guides to doing it. How to write, how to blog, vlog, reach number one, find your inner peace, write a bestseller, write a screenplay, market an online marketing course, make a fortune, get a job, how to get a better job, get a partner, get sex, love, money.

All that.

“If you can’t do it – teach it.” An old saying repurposed for the social-media age. We have the technology to reach the world with our writing, film-making, singing, music-making – and we sublimate our failure to launch by telling other people how to do what we want to do.

Most of those guides, these days, are written as listicles. Remember listicles? Used sparingly, on the covers of print magazines such as Cosmopolitan or Marie Claire, they were effective. Ten ways to do this, five ways to do that. Oh, and three ways to do the other.

I’m not saying that if you can’t write a bestseller, you shouldn’t write a guide to writing a bestseller. Okay. It’s a way to dream. And you can probably see how to do it as clearly as everybody else who can’t do it. If you can come up with a listicle – yeah, okay.

But the problem with using a how-to guide as your entry point to a creative activity is that they only ever describe what’s worked in the past. Yes, everybody looks to the past to work out what works.

But where’s the spontaneity? The creativity? If we’re all following rules, where’s the spark of originality?

Put that guide down. Try again. This time, do it your way.

Is it me, or does the immediacy of media have a distancing effect?

Yes, and last night I dreamed of Manderley again. What a question for the early morning.

If you’ve just joined us – sorry about that.

It’s half five. I’ve lit the fire. I’m sitting at the table thinking about sitting on the sofa. Because I set the alarms for six, I woke up at five. In my life, this always happens.

I have a cup of coffee in front of me, and by the end of this sentence, I will have drunk some of it, so I will be awake enough to start making sense. There.

I’ve never dreamed of Manderley, but I have just looked it up and found the question “What does Manderley represent in Rebecca?” on Google. Manderley, clearly, only represents one thing in Rebecca, and Google will tell us what it is. So much easier than having to think.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier; it’s a “1938 gothic novel,” says my source. And a film, several times over. Manderley turns up in the opening sentence of the book, and it’s a good opening sentence. Pick the book up in a bookshop or look at the 10% sample on Kindle, say, to find out who did dream of Manderley.

But don’t look it up online. Spoiler alert.

Daphne du Maurier also wrote Rule Britannia, and here’s what Wikipedia has to say about that. “The novel is set in a fictional near future in which the UK's recent withdrawal from the EEC has brought the country to the verge of bankruptcy.”

Wow! Rule Britannia was Daphne du Maurier’s last novel, published in 1972. The UK is near-bankrupt and the main event of Rule Britannia’s plot is that the US invades the UK.

Here in what we might as well call the real world, the die-hard Brexit fanatics of my acquaintance are posting dire warnings that the UK will become the 51st state of the Union now that we’ve left the EU.

Spooky, right? All foretold in 1972 by the daughter of the actor Gerald du Maurier.

Except that in Rule Britannia, the UK is, ah, rebranded as USUK. I doubt that Daphne du Maurier intended this, but if you read that aloud in a certain way, it’s an insult. The book ends with a US withdrawal.

Excuse me. I think this may be a two-coffee blog post.

Brexit’s gone out of the headlines, so I guess we’ve got it done. Facebook seems more interested in beach-cleaning this morning, so that’s healthy, and there wasn’t anything in the news about the Australian bush-fires, so maybe they’ve all gone out.

Immediacy, distance. They’re not on my screen any more.

Trump’s been acquitted – those die-hards are predicting a second Trump victory and muttering about the character (and presidential hopeful) Greg Stillson in Stephen King’s The Dead Zone (1979); wow, they so badly want to be proved right about how wrong the world is – and – oh – Kirk Douglas has died.

Back to my original question. I was going to write a lengthy, earnest and rather dull piece about the way everything arrives by screen these days. Whether it’s fact or fiction, it comes to us the same way (and has the same weight: discuss). And we can switch it off in the same way.

Everything’s on the small screen; everything’s contained within a small rectangle. What impact, if any, does that have on our capacity to react?

But I was side-tracked by Manderley. Narrow escape.

And now I’ve remembered that quote again. In 1920, H L Mencken said, “As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Could happen, I guess.

And that reminds me of The Right Honourable Chimpanzee, by David Phillips and Georgi Markov (they shared the pseudonym “David St George”), which was published in 1978. The entertaining story – yes, it is a satire – of what happens to the UK after a chimpanzee becomes prime minister.

I remember David saying to me, “The problem isn’t that the prime minister is a chimpanzee; the problem is that the chimpanzee is prime minister.”

Mind you, I also – suddenly and clearly – remember David turning to me once and saying, “Will you stop banging on about coffee!”

Enough said.

How seriously should we take this coronavirus thing?

The pictures are impressive. Trucks pumping vapour onto the pavements of Chinese cities. Great halls full of hospital beds; swarms of diggers building new hospitals.

People wearing facemasks. Those hand-held things taking temperatures. That quarantined cruise ship.

I ask because I’ve just heard a radio interview with a professor of diseases – I think that was it – at a UK university. The interview could be paraphrased like this.

“It’s really serious, isn’t it? Is it a pandemic? How serious is it? Surely it’s a pandemic? Tell me it’s a pandemic!”

“It’s not serious yet, but its spread suggests that it could become serious.”

Which is the answer to my question. Not seriously – yet.

Take it seriously in anticipation of it getting serious? Perhaps.

People have died and a lot more people are sick, so yes – seriously.

But the news imperative seems always to talk it up. It’s a story. That interview would have gone the same way even if – oh, I don’t know.

I wish the news would include a “no news” option, or a “nothing much happened today” setting. We don’t need to be “sold” the news, do we?

I suppose we do.

But how seriously should we take this coronavirus thing?

Oh, here we go. Finally.

“The Brexiteers” are loading up the Mayflower and the Golden Hind with trinkets and beads to offer the natives of far-flung undiscovered countries in return for trade deals.

Experts and economic forecasters are piling up sandbags around their offices as the UK economy teeters on the brink of a collapse more final and more terrible than anything the world has ever known. On the stroke of 2300 tonight – markets will be open somewhere in the world – Sterling will become worthless and the UK’s stock will plummet.

Or so we’re told.

Over there on the left are the sunlit uplands of the road not travelled – we’re richer over there, because we voted to Remain in the EU. We’re happier, the sun shines, the Ode to Joy plays in the background, and the landscapes have that clean-cut look of architects’ models.

But we’re leaving. It’s too late.

“Now you’ll be sorry,” the editorials tell us.

It’s a good thing Labour won the argument at the General Election last year. If Labour had lost the argument as well as, er, the election itself, we’d be in real trouble. But no – Jeremy did a fine job, say the candidates to replace him, and we had just the right manifesto. We won the argument.

Where’s Brecht when you need him? “Would it not in that case be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?” Brecht wrote, in his 1953 poem Die Lösung (The Solution).

Yes, and it’s a good thing nothing else is going on in the world. Australia is still on fire and that virus out of China sounds more than ever like something out of World War Z (the 2006 book by Max Brooks, not the movie; Brooks’ “zombie plague” originates in remote China), but apart from all that – and the ongoing impeachment of “the leader of the free world,” as the media call him – we’re free to get on with our own little local difficulty.

Kind of appropriate that this is the week in which the government set out to make the trains run on time. Nationalising Northern Rail – I mean, you’d almost think they had Northern voters to consider.

Oh, and did I hear that there’s a plan to reverse some of the Beeching cuts to the rail network? Bet that’ll go faster than HS2. Maybe the Chinese will give us 5G broadband for the many, not the few.

My most memorable experience of the 2019 general election – I wrote about this at the time – was the stream of barely credible mostly fake news pushed onto my screen from the left. Yes, other varieties of invective are available. But. Have the Tories sold the NHS to the Americans yet? What is the political opposite of #torylies?

I’m not a Tory. I’m not anything*. I follow politics as a fascinating human drama, but I struggle to believe that the election to power of one person (party) or another, one philosophy or another, will be any more likely to transform my life than, say, surveillance capitalism.

The saving grace of human nature, whether you’re talking about shopping or political campaigning, is incompetence. No political party, newly in office, successfully does what it promised it would do or what its detractors threatened it would do. Despite all the personal data at its disposal, Big Tech doesn’t seem to have found a way to offer me what I want to buy when I want to buy it.

Here in the non-fake world, in politics as in everything else, all consequences are at least partly unintended. The future seems to take a contrarian delight in defying forecasters’ best efforts.  Tomorrow remains stubbornly unknowable.

What I notice about Brexit is not that it’s right or wrong, good or bad, because we can’t know that yet (or perhaps ever, given that there really isn’t a road not travelled for comparison). What I notice is that Brexit has provoked a sudden outpouring of certainty – certainty so strong that even truth can be sacrificed to it.

In Brexit as in the general election, my side was right and yours was wrong – in black and white, not shades of grey. How is it rational to use lies – fake news – as evidence in support of what we believe to be true? I got lies from the left in the election and lies from Remain since the referendum; no doubt other postcodes got lies from the right/Leave.

How come we’re all so stupid as to believe that (a) we know best and (b) that we can impose our “truth” on others?

We voted to Leave and then to Get Brexit Done. Now we’re doing it.

We’re still friends. There were speeches and they sang Auld Lang Syne.

Let’s move on.

*Green, since you ask, after a Red canvasser explained to me at length that a Green vote would be wasted. That logic has to change.

Says something about the modern world that trade deals require such lengthy negotiation.

The EU/Canada trade deal took seven years to sort out. What did they talk about on, say, the second Tuesday of the third month of Year Five?

I haven’t seen the phrase “Please allow 28 days for delivery” for a while now, but I used to wonder – why did they ask for so long? What did they expect to be doing on the eighth day? The seventeenth?

Can’t take that long to wrap and post a parcel, surely?

Turns out that the EU/Canada trade deal was vetoed at the last moment by the Wallonia region of Belgium, no idea why, and that it was further delayed when the Canadian prime minister’s flight (to the signing in Europe) had to turn back due to engine trouble. Thanks, Google.

Thanks BBC, actually. Went from Google to a BBC story about the signing of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (Ceta to its friends) dated 30th October 2016. Scrolled down, obviously, to read the story, and found links to other stories. Is Ceta a good model for Brexit? Is visiting a strip club anti-feminist?

What? And here are two more. The nursery putting fitness at the heart of learning. Seven things Brexit will change and seven it won’t.

Oh, doncha just lurve a good list? Refusing to be distracted, I just want to say: you can’t just trade any more. You need a trade deal. And that means hiring trade-deal negotiators.

Trade negotiators, I should say. People who will make the job look easy. People who will tell you, “Yeah, no problem. We’ll get that done in no time.”

Because their whole purpose is to make life easy for the rest of us, right?

Not to impress us with how difficult their jobs are. Right?

Had a conversation earlier with somebody who wants to write.

She started by asking what I wanted – a cappuccino. But then Jess, who owns the café, came up behind her and said, “William’s a writer!”

And then to me, “She’s a writer!”

No name, oddly.

But I think there’d been a conversation between them about writing. And I’d arrived just slightly after the right moment.

Anyway, She-Who-Remained-Nameless told me that yes, she did want to write, but that actually, she was a copywriter.

She writes copy for other people’s websites, but wants to write her own blog.

Then we talked about Ayurvedic personality types.

There’s Vata, which is air/ether, and there’s Pitta, which is fire/water. And then there’s Kapha, which is, um, She hesitated, probably what I am. “But you’ve probably got bits of the others as well!” Kapha is slow, grounded, earth/water. Not, you know, thin. Kapha people are more on the, ah, heavy side. Sort of, um, slow.*

My new friend and I got through the Ayurvedic personality-types conversation, and then She gave me a series of reasons why she hadn’t actually quite got around to blogging about them yet.

She just needed to spend some more time planning to do it, and getting ready to do it, and talking about doing it, and checking the alignment of the planets, and finishing the washing up, and Hoovering behind the sofa, and deciding absolutely one hundred percent what exactly she was going to write, and anyway, she was very busy…

I told her to fail.

I told her that it’s easier to succeed from failure, which is all about learning from experience, than it is to succeed from having a lot of perfectly convincing reasons why you haven’t started yet.**

I told her to write something.

She told me she couldn’t because she was going snow-boarding next week.

I went and sat down and she brought me my cappuccino.

I thought about fear – can’t do anything that matters, for fear of failing at it – and I tried to believe that the picture on the cappuccino (it was a tree) was a ski slope (it was a tree), and then I dawdled around the idea of having the ability to draw anything in the foam on a cappuccino. Not much of a story prompt, but good for a moment or two.

Then I went off into a proper daydream about the young writer I’d just met. Inspired by me (this was MY daydream), she’d forget about the possible cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling of the stairwell, abandon plans to buy pencils that she’d have to sharpen before she could possibly start tapping at her laptop, and actually start writing.

Her blog would be an instant, massive success. There’d be books, a TV show, merchandise, a biopic.

I’d be able to say, “I knew her before she was famous.”

Inspired by her example, I decided to go straight home and write something big.

And I will. Everything’s in order. I just need to tidy my desk and deal with that cobweb, and then…

*I should probably look them up, rather than reconstructing the conversation from memory. Mistakes and misunderstandings of Ayurveda – my fault. If only some young person would start a blog on the subject.

**You should have heard me. I was quite convincing, albeit in a self-help-book kind of way.

Went for a walk the other day. “How many steps?” somebody asked.

No idea. But that reminded me.

I went in search of my Fitbit, which I’d taken off in mid-December and forgotten to put back on again.

Found the charging cable. Plugged it in. Opened the Fitbit app in my iPhone. Clicked on Forgot my password.

Got that sorted out. But no, the app couldn’t find the device. Was it charged up? By now, yes.

Was Bluetooth on? Yes. Had I turned Bluetooth off and then back on again? Yes.

Tried Update device. No. Tried removing the device from the app and reinstalling it. Aha!

Agreed to the terms and conditions. Waited while the app updated the device.

Clicked through the introductory blah about how I can use the device to measure stuff about myself.

Spent a while looking at the app’s new dashboard.

Finally found the menu leading to the bit where I could specify that I would be wearing the device on my non-dominant wrist. Put it on that wrist – loosely, as reminded.

Worked out roughly how long all that had taken.

Went upstairs to my sock drawer – which is the one place in the house where there are no socks, given that I always start there when I’m looking for socks – and shuffled aside all the old manuscripts, notebooks, hats, gloves, until I found my old pedometer. Clipped that to my belt.

Went out to buy some birdseed. Success. 4,130 steps later, I have birdseed and I also picked up some birch logs.

My pedometer’s back in the sock drawer. Along with the Fitbit.

Very bright sunshine. Very clear air. Cold, but I prefer that to the rain.

Maybe I’ll go out for another walk later. Argal Lake, perhaps.

If I do, I’ll take one of my devices, just to know how many steps.

No, not that one.