Talk about Christmas. Somebody on television saying they'd break the rules to get their family of seven together for the celebration. Then apologising.

We're still talking about rules.

Yes, I suppose I drive on the left because that's the rule - no, wait. There's another reason. Duh.

I get the idea that lockdowns "buy time" for scientists to work round the clock, etc., to find a vaccine, and I can work out why certain politicians - blah, blah, blah. I really need to snap out of this.

There was rain earlier. Now the sky's got that marbled look that suggests it could go either way. Fewer leaves on the big tree; they're fluttering in the wind. Cold day.

We're used to the virus now. We know what to do.

No, we don't need government inspectors turning up on Christmas Day to count the places laid at the table.

Mind you, New Year.

Dark-haired government inspector turning up just after midnight with a lump of coal in one hand and a bottle of, hmmm, Lagavulin in the other...

Maybe there is a role for government after all.

Maybe the value of social media is that it keeps the Russians and Iranians busy.

I remember back when the DDR fell, the Stasi were revealed to have recruited practically everybody as informers. The way to get out of any arrest-type situation was to agree to be an informer.

So maybe the performance metric applied by Stasi management was: number of informers recruited this week. That would be an easy number to report, and an easy number to approve, especially with the weekend coming up. The words "but none of them have told us anything" were probably never spoken out loud by anybody at any level.

Imagine the head office of a "hostile state actor", I think that's the phrase, come election time in the USA.

So many fake Facebook accounts created; so many fake tweets tweeted. These are impressive numbers! Well done!

Quora sends me so many questions to answer about Brexit (no, I don't bother) that they must have latched on there as well. Most of the questions I get are asked anonymously, although I get quite a few from Oleg [surname redacted]. A question from Oleg that managed to combine Cambridge Analytica, Birthday Honours, Coronavirus and the class system got me thinking about this.

Somewhere out there beyond the Urals, or perhaps in a nondescript building tucked away in the forests around Moscow, a young hacker is being congratulated on how many questions he's managed to feed to me on Quora. Up there in a converted shelter in the mountains around Tehran (good wifi), another youngster is receiving a merit award for Most Facebook Accounts Created In One Week.

Never mind that all those accounts have been closed; never mind that I never answer. Those numbers look great!

Never mind either that social media doesn't win elections. Back in 2019, the UK election, social media spent a lot of its time telling me that Jeremy Corbyn would save the nation. Now, it's on about the all-encompassing badness of [candidate's name redacted; this isn't about that].

But ... the electorate goes its own way. Yes, there's a lot of fuss about clandestine attempts to influence elections. Yes, I'm sure every enemy agent has a go. But we're so focused on the technology that we miss the essential point: everybody does it but it doesn't work.

Yes, I know that [insert surprise result here]. But are you telling me that demographic voted en masse for that candidate on the basis of what social media told it?

Yes, okay, one day it is going to come out that Covid-19 was developed for Chinese Intelligence by the Trilateral Commission working out of a top-secret laboratory north of London funded by the British Aristocracy, and okay, the truth is sometimes What The Government Doesn't Want You To Know (to take a line from the playbook). But - come on. Sinister foreigners? Really?

Got it! The Overton Window. That's the term I was trying to remember.

The Overton Window is "the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time". Thanks, Wikipedia.

We might guess that, say, policies emphasising human rights fall within today's Overton Window, while policies designed to exclude on grounds of discrimination, race, gender, et cetera, fall outside it.

The Overton Window shifts over time. It expands, contracts, moves left, moves right, across a spectrum ranging towards more freedom at one extreme and less freedom at the other. More relaxed at one extreme and more uptight at the other. More intolerant, tolerant. Nice, nasty.

You get the idea.

Why has the UK government just introduced a three-tier restriction system? Because the idea of a national lock-down has moved outside today's Overton Window for anti-Covid policies.

And actually, because none of our political leaders seem able to think of anything else. While the government's pushing a three-tier restriction system, the opposition is calling for a circuit-breaker.

By now, I'd guess, the mainstream population has worked out that lock-downs are just a way of kicking the proverbial can down the road.

So our politicians are arguing about different ways of using foot-power to convey the cylindrical metal container further along the street.

This isn't leadership. Seems to me that leadership would be acknowledging what the mainstream population is beginning to understand - that we're stuck with this virus for the foreseeable future.

Which would mean finding ways to survive, prosper, socialise, support each other, et cetera, with the virus ever-present in the background. Not just finding euphemisms for: "Stay indoors until the clock turns back to 2019."

I suspect that even the government's assertion of control over the situation is moving outside the Overton Window. Nobody wants to hear that we're going to "beat" the virus, or indeed that we're going to fight it on the beaches, et cetera.

Because we're not.

There may be a vaccine, and it may eradicate the virus as effectively as we've eradicated flu or, say, the common cold. There may be enough doses for everybody to get one without argument.

But.

Seems to me we've got to the point where we're crazy to argue about lockdowns being harsh or not-so-harsh. Long-term or just a couple of weeks.

What's killing us is that we live in a world where low-paid workers can't afford time off just because they're infected with a life-threatening virus.

"I know I'm contagious, but I can't afford to self-isolate."

One of the flaws in test'n'trace is that the vulnerable-to-infection, soon-to-be-contagious people can't afford to be found by the test.

They walk among us, selling us things.

Maybe we should care for them?

Would that be a more effective strategy than depriving them of their livelihoods?

Irrelevant footnote. The film Deep Impact (1998) surfaced on Freeview the other night. I know this because I switched on just in time to catch [spoiler] the briefing scene, in which US President Tom Beck (Morgan Freeman) announces, first, that the world is facing an "extinction-level event", an ELE, and secondly, that the world's governments, together, have worked out a way to deal with it.

Fiction, eh?

Test and trace, eh?

You text positive today, and all your contacts are traced tomorrow. They're warned to stay inside. They do that.

So simple. The virus will be eradicated in three tomorrows.

Simple like those architect's drawings and models, all clean and airy and white-spaced with tiny trees and neatly sharp-pencilled-in figures, of public building projects that turn into urban nightmares.

Or those car ads in which the empty roads curve through scenic hills under blue skies, to music that doesn't sound anything like a traffic jam.

Maybe planning "to beat" coronavirus should take into account the human element.

Oh, hey, I get it. A "circuit-breaker" is a slightly clever-sounding, slightly technical-sounding lock-down with a slightly cool name. "Circuit-breaker" - sounds like the tech people are onto something, doesn't it?

There's talk of a "circuit-breaker" being imposed in Scotland and probably south of the border as well.

Key feature of a "circuit-breaker" is the promise that the lock-down will be short. A circuit-breaker is a politician's lock-down - never mind the R-rate, the voters won't stand for another lock-down so let's re-brand it as a "circuit-breaker" and tell them it'll be over by Christmas.

We can talk about a circuit-breaker in the way we can blather on excitedly about Artificial Intelligence. What we get is a lock-down. What we get is an algorithm deciding our A-level grades.

Circuit-breaker = lock-down. We all go back indoors - not for long this time - and when we come out of hiding, the virus will, um, still be there. Nothing will have changed.

I guess we're all waiting for the vaccine that will wipe clean the world - every surface free of Covid-19; all viruses cancelled.

That's absolutely going to work, isn't it?

We go in for a circuit-breaker, come out, get sick, go in for another one, come out, get sick ... and then on some glad confident morning a few months into the future,  a pharmaceutical company announces "We've got the vaccine!"

They'll price it affordably and produce enough doses to fix the entire world population.

There will be no politics in the distribution.

Within a week the virus will be as totally eradicated as polio was, er, twenty-three years after the World Health Organisation declared the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

The future is so very simple, really. We just unplug ourselves for a while, do it again maybe a few times, and then we come out, get an injection, and covid is history.

I was going to suggest a switch in policy away from short-term catch-phrases towards preparing us all to live with covid for a while - you know, build bicycle lanes rather than a third runway at Heathrow; put university lectures online (behind a pay-wall?); pay nurses a living wage - but it hardly seems necessary now.

There's a circuit-breaker coming up! That'll fix it!

[By way of a footnote, I want to mention a weird cognitive dissonance I've been experiencing lately. I think I can call it a weird cognitive dissonance - I've been hearing one thing and it's been reminding me of another.

It's just that lately, when I hear people talking about the end-game with Covid-19, they sound like senior military officers talking about the military end-game in Afghanistan or maybe it was Iraq. There was always some kind of amorphous victory-situation beginning to coalesce in the near future that somehow over-rode the simple truth that they were only talking to the media because something had gone wrong. We could be optimistic because, despite conditions on the ground, some kind of metaphysical victory-condition was beginning to be met.

Is that unfair? I hear a similar weightlessness in all the verbiage about how we're going to beat this virus, et cetera, world-beating, blah, waffle, blah. People are dying. Young people are presented with the possibility that it's their fault if their elders fall sick.

My thought is - if you can't describe victory in clear, simple terms - black-and-white tanks on the streets of Paris, population cheering - you're not winning.]

Mind you, the decision to go home was the only decision he could have made.

Let's see if I can do this one without p*l*t*cs as well, shall we?

If he was wrong to go home - well, okay, game over. Same as if he had stayed in hospital.

If he made the right decision, in the sense that his recovery continues, he gets to look stronger by coming out earlier.

So I guess he's gambling on that.

What makes this so compelling is that it's so visibly character-driven. I would argue - not taking sides - that we're in the middle of something that has (will be seen to have had) all the character-driven inevitability that Shakespeare or Sophocles would have brought to the screenplay.

What's really challenging is to keep in mind that this is real.

We should wish him well.

Partly because we're all human. But also - what happens to us if we don't?

Reader, I watched the Trump/Biden first debate. Let's see if I can write this without intruding into US politics.

I streamed the beginning, and then I couldn't put it down. One of them won it, I think, and one of them didn't. But if p*l*t*cs are as polarised as they seem to be in the US, I guess everybody saw and heard what they wanted to see and hear.

It will be such fun to come back to it in a few months' time and explain - with the benefit of hindsight - what was so obvious at the time. But without a result to give the event its context and meaning, maybe I'll just stick to one hopeful forecast.

There's a film in that. Or perhaps a drama. Five, maybe ten years hence, it'll be given a rating and put out in cinemas, if they still exist, or streaming services.

Failing that, it'll be transcribed and run on Broadway, as UK government inquiries sometimes transfer to the West End (or BBC2/Channel 4 post-Covid).

Such a character study.

I turned on the radio this morning to find Melvyn Bragg and a cast of scholars discussing the Scottish play.

Might look for the whole programme later, on iPlayer, but I heard enough to get me thinking about the role of character in destiny.

Who are "We"?

Quick question. So much of the anguished commentary about climate change declares that "We" must do something about it.

All of us acting in agreement with each other? Like-minded people acting in agreement? Readers of commentary about climate change acting together?

The intended "We" is probably some abstract noun - society should do something about it, maybe - but we so much choose what to read in accordance with what we believe - confirmation bias, etc. - that I guess "We" are the commentary writers and readers.

In which case, the unintended meaning of the "something" we must do about it is: "We" must write and read about it.

We believe something must be done, and what we're actually doing is writing and reading about it.

If we act on our beliefs, then obviously what we mean when we say something must is done is - something must be written and read.

Which may explain why targets are not being met.

Unless ... the word "We" here is being used to mean "They", in the sense of governments, polluters, large companies; "They" must do something.

While we sit at home writing and reading.

Which may also explain why targets are not being met.

But at least it's not "Our" fault.

Watched TV. Interview between a BBC person and a "political strategist" for one of the US presidential candidates.

The BBC person wanted a comment on the averaged-out result of all the polls.

The political strategist wanted to focus on one poll. Had she seen it?

She'd seen all of them.

But she was proposing to ignore this particular one, was she? Aha!

Let me ask you about the result of all the polls...

You're going to ignore this particular poll! I want to talk about it but you're censoring me!

Taking all the polls into account...

This is an outrage! My right to free speech! You're just a propagandist for the other side!

Struck me afterwards that all debate sounds like this nowadays. Never mind the subject matter - we're cross about it.

Either this is who we really are, because constant media interaction has enabled us to drill down to our core selves and their defences - or nothing matters half as much as our fight/flight response makes us think it does.

Oh and a cheerful think-piece was shared onto my timeline the other day, which suggested that the Black Death was a good thing because it enabled civilisation to advance.

That's all right then.

My constructive suggestion, for what it's worth, would be to look at all the claims we've made for today's technology, and work out how many of them could be made real.

We've talked up 3D printing, which is a tool for manufacturing at a distance. We've talked up robotics, which is a tool for getting the burgers flipped without exposing arts graduates to the risk of turning up for work. We've all got madly excited about AI, which is a method of winning chess games without hiring grand-masters.

​So much of today's technology is designed to do things we already do, but without the people. It's perfect for a pandemic. The UK has a prediminantly service-based economy as well, and if that doesn't mean we can inter-act productively via screens, at a distance from each other, well, I don't know what it does mean.

And where's the organised use of the internet for education? If Kier Starmer can stand at a podium and give a party-conference speech to an empty corridor, surely teachers and lecturers can do what internet-marketing gurus do, and record ten-part downloadable modules for their students?

Do we really need the children in classrooms, however distanced? Students in halls of residence? Really?

We can make an economy happen, but as the small print says, past performance is no guide to the future.

Watching the two of them in the Commons at lunchtime yesterday, I thought: Kier is Boris's kryptonite.

Watching the broadcast last night, I thought: the virus will still be there waiting for us when we come out after another six months.

Whether or not we comply with this current set of restrictions - whether the small minority are cowed by the threat of a big, bad fine - I came away thinking: this sounds remarkably like government by kicking the can down the road.

Yes, yes, I know what happens when the R number goes above one. Could you talk to me instead about how easy, or not, it is to develop a vaccine? What is government going to be doing during the next six months? Say something positive about how you'll be innovating, working with scientists, rethinking The Economy for a world in which we live apart.

Won't technology solve all our problems this time? Can't we harness the power of the newly unemployed towards some kind of New Deal investment in finding a cure - or even just testing for infection?

Is Covid-19 here to stay?

If so, we need new thinking on how to live.

These days, the story is told simultaneously. Nurses care for Covid patients, and they're written up as heroes before their shift ends.

Which is fair enough, given that they get clapped rather than paid a New Normal/New Economy wage.

But then some large brain-dead organisation puts the story ahead of the facts. We've got billions of tests happening every hour, the government tells us as we queue at the test centre.

Or click away helplessly, trying to book a test.

The Covid story is that it goes away. We defend ourselves mightily against the threat of a second wave, using all the "world-beating" blah-blah that the prime minister was waving his arms about, and - wait for it - the war will be over by Christmas.

The virus, I mean. Not the war. It's a staple of any war story that everybody thinks it'll be over by Christmas and it never is. But this is different. This is the virus and, er, it'll be over by Christmas.

Which is lucky, if you think about it. Nothing's actually happened to the virus. Nobody's shot it with a tranquilliser dart, or told it "Shoo!" It's the same old virus that was killing us back in March. Mutated a bit, maybe, easier to catch - but recognisably the same.

We're lucky that we can just tell the story of how it will go away by Christmas - and it will go away.

I mean - imagine if we had to do something to make it go away. Imagine that all the targets and the media briefings and the prime-ministerial blathering weren't enough.

What then?

Every time we think we've reached an understanding of how the world works, sooner or later we're proved wrong. And yet every time, we act as though we're right.

Do we learn more easily (if at all) from past experience, or from new information?

Past experience is always: you thought you were right, but you were wrong.

New information is always: this fits the facts as we (think we) know them.

I think we're F-worded. I'd put that more clearly, but as a friend once told me and I remembered, I'm "ridiculously squeamish about odd things".

There's a glacier, apparently, that's melting faster than we were all confidently predicting.

The other evening, I turned on the radio to hear a man's voice say that he had learned never to reject anything out of hand. They were discussing astrology, and he went on to suggest that maybe the movements of the planets and our destinies are both influenced by some third factor as yet unknown.

He wasn't defending astrology, but leaving open a possibility. I like that attitude.

Let me get this straight.

The rate of infections is rising. More people are catching the virus. Lockdowns are coming back.

But the death rate isn't rising.

Either the virus is becoming more survivable, or people with more effective immune systems are catching it.

If younger people are catching it, at universities or illegal raves or demonstrations or wherever, and surviving it because that's what they do, then this second wave will soon be followed by a third wave.

Young people go home for Christmas, don't they? Share cosy present-opening sessions with their elderly relatives. Get hugged a lot. Kissed goodnight, even.

...and a Happy New Year.

Letter from the bank, printed letter, to explain that they would soon be applying an upgrade to their online-banking systems and that therefore their online-banking systems would soon become unavailable.

Temporarily. They did say "temporarily". But an inconvenient line-break made the letter almost perfect. In old-fashioned newspaper language, the word "temporarily" was below the fold.

Regulars here will know that I have been applying an upgrade to my habit of posting every Friday. In the sense that I no longer post every Friday. I've been otherwise engaged - but more of that later.

We see what we want to see, and I saw everything except the word "temporarily" in that letter from the bank. I'm not sure whether the technical term is "confirmation bias", but I got a real buzz from the surreal but realistic (sic) admission in advance that the upgrade would be a disaster.
 
As they so often are, right? I don't think that's exactly what the bank was trying to get across, but I wonder whether I'm the only customer who read the letter and headed straight to the ATM.

Of course the government's scientific advisory group has a cute acronym, and of course there's a "Shadow SAGE" to disagree with it. As far back as that film about Moses starring Burt Lancaster (1975-ish), I remember being irritated that the principal bearded American was followed around by another bearded American whose entire job was to disagree with everything Burt said.

Or maybe it was that earlier film with Charlton Heston. The Ten Commandments, was it? 1956?

Just for once, let's be told to do something that we're not told a week later is pointless. A scientish came on the news this morning - I like "scientish"; mistype, but I'll leave it - to declare that mask-wearing may be ineffective against covid-19.

"May" is another "could" word. Covid-19 "may" get through masks. The virus "could" still get to you through your mask.

Thanks.

Further to my last, see below, technology seems sometimes to confer an immunity to human feeling.

Just heard another interview about A level results. In one school, one child got an E last year. But this year, the estimated grades were all above E.

So the algorithm downgraded them all to make the lowest grade an E.

The interviewed person went on about how wonderful it all was, how "incredibly" hard everybody was working, and how "complex" the challenge was, of taking teachers' estimates of how the pupils they'd been teaching for years would do - and changing them to something else based on a belief (I guess, see below) that teachers can't be trusted.

The interviewed person ended up confirming that if the young woman appealed, she'd be pretty certain to get a grade based on her ability rather than some cheap algorithm's statistical need for somebody to get an E grade.

The young woman, who also spoke, sounded worried. I turned off the radio and thought about the statistics for anxiety and depression among female teenagers, and about how long it takes for an appeal process to work.

Ofqual, pronounced Off-Qual, is The Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation. Off-Kwol, sorry, Offqual, no, Ofqual, regulates qualifications, examinations and assessments in England. Thanks, Google. Hope they don't come down too hard on Spelpron*.

I feel for that young woman.

*Do we need the footnote? Spelling and ... ? For five marks.**

**Downgraded to three. That's categorised as an easy question.

So if I understand this correctly, Scottish teachers estimated their pupils' A level grades. Because the exams couldn't take place, Covid, et cetera.

Then an algorithm belonging to Scotland's education authority, without consulting anybody, downgraded those estimates.

Was it programmed to assume that the teachers would be over-generous?

Or that they wouldn't know their pupils as well as some big clump of central-government AI?

Maybe they weren't to be trusted with doing their jobs - your guess is as good as mine.

Then Scottish parents objected. Then the government caved. Now pupils will be getting the grades their teachers estimated for them.

A story with a happy ending. Moral: when we ask technology to run something, sooner or later, it reveals its stupidity.

Education Scotland is "a Scottish Government executive agency responsible for supporting quality and improvement in Scottish education" (thanks, Google). Reassuring to know they're there.

I saw yesterday that the UK government has adjusted its counting methodology for Covid deaths. There have been 5,000 fewer Covid deaths than we thought. Those 5,000 people remain dead, but not from Covid.

Fair enough. There's a long history of governments adjusting the way they count, and okay. But they somehow always find a way of doing it that reduces the bad total or increases the good one.

Bet they use an algorithm.

There was a point in art at which the work ceased to speak for itself.

Before then - you paint something, case closed. You go back to your studio, and your Mona Lisa is hung above the cot in the del Giocondo's second bedroom.

After then - you declare yourself an artist, prove it with an exhibition,and forever after, journalists want to know what you think about Brexit.

But can you get them to look at the pictures?

I was thinking about that as I sat outside with a mug of tea first thing. The World was (is) still tied up to Queen's Wharf, where it's been since the lockdown started, and red-and-white tugs were towing, very slowly, a big grey naval vessel across the view.

I came inside and turned on the radio. A Senior Arts Administrator, didn't catch his name, was talking about saving Theatre. Not any particular theatre, you understand, but Theatre. Not some travelling band of thespians who'd run out of greasepaint, but - yeah.

Theatre is in trouble, apparently. And this bloke is going to save it - or, from the gloomy way he was talking, fail to save it and blame the government.

I know that there are people out there writing plays. I know that there are people staging plays.

Just as I know that there are people out there painting pictures, writing novels and poetry, drawing and writing graphic novels, making art generally. Making films.

I don't know what any of them think about Brexit, and if I had the chance, I probably wouldn't bother to ask them how they feel about being rescued, or not, by a Senior Arts Administrator.

I'd ask to see their work, though.