Sunshine. Birdsong. Big cruise ship. Today is going to be a warm day.

When I get to my big exercise moment, I might take swimming trunks.

The water glitters in the sunshine. To judge from the trees, there’s hardly any wind.

Flurry of posts yesterday, inviting me to help various friends by signing petitions to demand the sacking of a government adviser. Looked into it further, and found that the BBC had done a timeline of where the man drove and when he drove there.

In-depth investigation is so easy when the news fits into a template. Was it Archibald Cox? No, Howard Baker who said, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” About Nixon. Watergate.

Today, the drive to Barnard’s Castle fits into the slot in the template formerly occupied by the 18.5-minute gap in the White House tape.

My friends raising petitions to demand the sacking, et cetera. Indignant. Outraged. I hesitate to use the term “usual suspects”, but yeah – those friends. They’ve been noisily bothered about everything since the 2016 referendum. Serial petitioners.

Two seagulls have made a nest on my roof. This is not good news – not for the roof – but I can’t quite bring myself to interrupt their honeymoon.

When the family’s grown up and gone – which will be September, I’m told – I shall take steps to prevent their return.

Or not. I don’t know. Let’s see how they react to my presence in their territory once their children are born. Let’s check the roof, come September.

There were people on the beaches at the weekend. We went to a more secluded beach that doesn’t get much tourist traffic. Swimming. Picnic. Social distance. Locals, but not many locals.

Some of my serial-petitioner friends aren’t even British.

If I wanted to get into serial-petitioning, and to do it properly, I would have to take an interest in the government advisers working for foreign leaders – such as, for example, oh, let's say ... yes, the Swedish prime minister.

Who turns out to be Stefan Löfven, leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party – thanks, Google.

Further search – yeah, okay. A name. An adviser. But he left in 2019. And wait a minute – Sweden doesn’t even have a lockdown. Doesn’t matter where he drove and when.

Here’s a photograph of the Swedish government … uh huh, here’s another name … and here’s a headline from something called Business Insider, which sounds familiar but I’m not going to check that it is what I think it is because it gives me the headline I need. Thanks, Business Insider.

Posted four hours ago. "Sweden touts the success of its controversial lockdown-free coronavirus strategy, but the country still has one of the highest mortality rates in the world."

Hm. Define success. Also caught a clip of a non-British chat show yesterday, shared from YouTube, subtitled, I guess European, in which they were laughing about the UK's government-adviser-gate shock-horror-scandal.

Maybe there are British people who demand the sacking of Swedish government advisers on a regular basis. Maybe it's a serial-petitioner thing.

Maybe there are Europeans for whom laughing at British politics in the acceptable face of ethnic humour.

I wonder. Actually, I don't. For me, the way ahead is clear.

Either I draw up a petition demanding that Sweden imposes a lockdown, or I go swimming.

I’ll give you a clue. “Get a life” is my motto for today.

Not that I’m in the mood for grand pronouncements about gender differences, but I was talking to a friend the other day about Relationships. Capital R.

Talking to a woman friend. Of a certain age. Which is roughly my age.

She missed being loved by somebody. She knew how it felt to love somebody, and – that too, but being loved was what she missed.

Not that she was going to do anything about it. Life was good. And men of our age – yeah, okay, stories were told and I came away with the impression that the bar for men of our age is set pretty low.

If I decided that I missed having a Relationship, and decided to do something about it – well, it seems that just turning up on time would beat most of the competition.

Turning up on time for dates that I had arranged with her in mind, not just to suit myself.

Occasional gifts – nothing expensive, mind; it’s the thought – and a reminder set in my phone for her birthday.

Don’t even have to remember the date. Just the reminder would be nice.

Knowing that I’d put it on my phone.

Going away. Romantic destinations. Spontaneity. Laughter.

Somebody to talk to.

Did I realise that if I got a haircut, lost the ponytail, I’d be really quite–

She stopped. We looked at each other.

We both burst out laughing.

What it is to be friends.

“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.]