Not that this changes anything, but I picked up an old copy of the Weekend FT magazine (25/26 April 2020) and found a piece by the author Siri Hustvedt in which she describes the virus as a "biological zombie".

So we are, after all, facing a zombie apocalypse. Not important, makes no difference, I know, but I like the reminder of how persistently The Unexpected makes fools of us.

Don't be ridiculous - of course there's no such thing as a zombie apocalypse.

Except that now, there is.

Such confidence! The world fits within our understanding.

Except that now, it doesn't.

Today, I'm not so much bothered by the prospect of a Second Wave of the pandemic, as I am impressed (but not in a good way) by how clearly, and in what detail, we can describe what's coming.

Just as we've convinced ourself that the present pandemic - the exact problem we face now - was foreseeable all along in just precisely the form it's taken - look up all the measured explanations of the recent past - so we're clear on the form that the Second Wave will take.

Autumn is Coming, and with it the flu/Second Wave season.

No. Don't see it. The predictability, I mean.

The virus has a morality to it - Dr Fauci was just on my radio saying that people should think of others when they refuse to, ah, socially distance - and it seems to challenge every attempt to reduce it to a known quantity. [See also Is Covid-19 meant, and if so, what does it mean? from a few weeks back.]

Once The Second Coming Of Covid-19 has decimated the population - and feel free to look up the correct meaning of the word 'decimate' - perhaps we could also talk about the role of central government.

There was the farce of the 100,000 daily tests, not, and now my radio is telling me that local authorities have been fighting to get infection data out of central government. Boris is jumping up and down shouting "Build, Build, Build" and we're all supposed to get the hint that this is a New Deal, geddit?

I know the people in my Nextdoor group - my neighbours. I know several of the people on my local council. I'm a moderator on a local self-help Facebook group. We sent a woman to Westminster in the General Election, but her voice is one among hundreds. I don't remember her name.

I'm not so much exasperated by central government's incompetence, as exasperated by the whole idea that central government could be competent. Whatever "government" is, it doesn't seem to work at that scale.

I'm unequivocally a local, and as I write that - intending to continue with something vaguely sarcastic about fragmenting national identity - I remember the local feeling about non-locals coming down here during the lockdown. Burdening our one hospital ... all that.

PPE, testing and tracing, that app - I don't want to get sidetracked. My point: incompetence by virtue of scale. My follow-up banging-on-about-it same-point-again: they're too far distant from us to do any better. In a crisis, in practice, England is too fragmented to be a viable administrative unit. Maybe economically, maybe internationally, but not when we're facing a social, cultural, health, existential crisis.

Maybe after all, the New Normal won't evolve in response to people not going out even when they can. Maybe the New Normal will be forced into being by local authorities wresting control from the centre and closing their own borders.

Or maybe we'll just change without realising we're changing. We'll look back one day and say, did we really behave like that?

So many deliveries. So many parcels. My innovation of the day would be re-usable packaging. Not just plastic that mulches down into fertiliser, or whatever it does, but cardboard boxes printed on the inside with puzzles and games. Perhaps also large-item cardboard boxes that can be refolded origami-style into tables and children's castles. Dotted lines and silhouettes of scissors.

Move along! Nothing to say here! Move along!

I’ve spent the week writing/editing/scribbling on a printed-out draft of a long-ish (12,000-ish words) short story titled Wolf (A Journal of the Plague Years). Also reading Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society, which “explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing”.

I agree with Mr Douthat. What he said.

Everything from political sclerosis to long-running film franchises, explained. My occasional extravagance is hardback books, so I can even tell you that I like the paper this one’s printed on. Published recently by Simon & Schuster.

My short story, which I started because I’m one short (in my estimation) for a planned collection, has reached the important stage where the print-out joins the assorted debris on my desk (kitchen table), surfacing occasionally, becoming dog-eared, gathering coffee-mug rings and (when I see it floating past and pick it up) scribbled corrections, notes and shopping lists.

I might post it on Medium, where I found the other day that another short story has earned all of 7 cents since posting – or I may not. I like the format at Medium, and there’s something agreeably game-like about such tiny sums of money*.

I’ll just add it to the collection. Late in the running order, which feels right. Coming shortly, et cetera.

Ahem. I did say last week, didn’t I, that I was going to stop my regular habit of posting here every Friday?

What are you doing here?

What do you mean, what am I doing here?
 
*On Medium, you get paid according to how many people read and “clap” your post. I really should think this through, preferably before revealing that my other story got paid 7 cents.

Maybe I should put this on hold for a while.

I’ve launched into something else, and while the self-imposed obligation to post every Friday does come at a convenient moment this week – need to stick the GW in a drawer for a while – it does feel like an obligation.

GW for Great Work – although just the initials are what I use: lifelong nickname for whatever current piece of writing-in-progress is under discussion at any given moment. Picked it up in an editorial office years ago. My GW of yesterday needs to be put aside so that I can come at it fresh, er, tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow, so I’ve got time to write this.

But the part of me that writes this is the part that’s writing that. See, officer, I’m not drunk. The part of me that’s writing this, that’s writing that, has got stuck into writing that, and writing this – I’m doing it deliberately now – is taking up head-space.

It’s a distraction. Besides, we’re living through such interesting times that all the commentary has become predictable. No, wait. That doesn’t make sense. Yes, somehow it does.

We’re living in bubbles. In my bubble, the government was too slow to impose the lockdown, is now prioritising The Economy over The Virus – and the shops are open again! Yippee! We’re all gonna buy!

Somewhere out there, no more visible than the hypothetical dark matter in space, is the hidden mass of people who (for example) voted Boris into office despite Labour winning The Argument, and who voted The Donald into office as well.

Out here on the surface of the bubble, so far as I can see, we’ve given ourselves a binary choice: stay locked down; go shopping. Out there in the darkness, further out than I can see, I’d have to guess that people are adjusting the way they live to suit the new normal. Shop-owners are working out how to sell more effectively to socially distanced customers, for example, rather than just obediently switching the sign from Closed to Open.

Griping on about the government misses the point that the government is just the government.

Never mind all that. The surface of the pool may be choppy, but these waters run deep.

I have nothing new to say about These Interesting Times, and capital letters won’t hide that. Shopping patterns seem likely to change, and I’d guess the layouts of high-street shops will change too.

The virus is showing us up for who we are, exposing the flaws in the way we live, blah, blah, et cetera.

In the life I’m not living at the moment, my diary tells me, I’m off to Scotland on Saturday for a week’s holiday. That shadow me is packing the kitbag he bought pre-lockdown at Mallett’s in Truro, and I’d guess he’s made a booking to break his journey with an overnight stay at Tebay Services.

My shadow self will enjoy the journey. He’ll take the direct route, M6, and he’ll listen to music, stop regularly, daydream and occasionally scrabble around on the passenger seat for the digital recorder he carries in the belief that the best ideas come at the most inconvenient times.

For the last twenty miles or so, he’ll be sad that the journey’s not just a little bit longer – but then he’ll get there, and everybody will be there, and his holiday will begin.

In the life I am living now, I have a prescription to collect, a new fridge to buy, and a space where I could put a comfortable chair. Facing my comfortable sofa. The fridge and the chair are daydreams of the lockdown that might become real; the prescription’s an opportunity to join Queue A and look forward to joining Queue B.

Making things right. I was irritated by that queuing system, I remember, back in the early days of the lockdown, but I now realise my dispensary was ahead of its time. I take it all back. Sorry. [To the extent that this blog is an ongoing self-portrait, as I think it is sometimes, je delete rien! Embarrassing as some of it might be.]

In the life I’m living now, and considering that this post is my current GW, I should probably say that I’m letting my LP sit in the drawer to cool off for a while. Lockdown Project, although I only started it … a month ago? No idea, actually. Feels recent, but you know how you get into the habit of saying something's new, even after it isn't? That kind of recent.

[I imagine myself in an old people’s home, reading all these posts and thinking: this was me? Wish I’d spent more time at the beach.]

Ha! “Should” probably say. Picking myself up on that. The future is about “could”. I believe that.

“Believe” is the word we use for “hope”.

Half of me thinks that in three weeks’ time, the bubble will be alive with the sound of people complaining that the government released the lockdown too early. The other half thinks the virus will hold off now until Winter – or Autumn, when we can tell each other that Winter is Coming, ha ha, black humour.

By then – whichever “then” I’m talking about – I hope I’ll have my chair and my fridge in place. In most of the fiction I’ve read over the lockdown, there’s a “me” character – not a character that I identify with, necessarily, but one who comes fairly close to sounding a bit kind of me-ish in his habits.

He may be the Dad. He may be the Co-worker. He may be the Detective’s Partner, the Vaguely Bad-Guy Neighbour who complains about the dog, or if we’re talking about Anne Tyler (start with The Accidental Tourist or A Patchwork Planet), he’s often the younger-than-me-but-I-can-overlook-that central character.

Whatever his character flaws, morals, quest for redemption, contribution to the plot, the “me” character almost always owns a chair in which he sits in the evening with the cold bottle of beer he’s just taken from his fridge.

Even if his only role is to deny the existence of the Supernatural Threat until it walks up to him and eats him – he gets at least one chance to sit in his chair and drink his beer. Even if he dies in the end, he gets, et cetera.

The chair is often identified as a La-Z-Boy Recliner, which I’ve imagined and … now look up online and ... Cor!

I’m gonna need a bigger space.

And either a charity shop selling furniture, or a fatter wallet. The “me” character is never a banker.

In Stephen King’s Bill Hodges trilogy, not much of a spoiler, the “me” character not only gets the chair and the fridge and faces up to the threat; he also gets a quirky sidekick.

Huh! Some “me” characters get all the luck.

I have a feeling that any quirky sidekick I could get would point out before long that (a) I need to Hoover the stairs, (b) I can’t leave the washing-up overnight, (c) I need a haircut, and (d) she’s actually now the Central Character and I’m just the Old Guy Who Writes That Blog.

By then, we’ll only be talking because she dropped in to check that I’m eating healthily and taking exercise.

So the issue for me is type-casting. I haven’t even got the chair for it, but I’m still the “me” character around here.

[Memo to self: dump the patched jacket and the avuncular manner, vacate the corner office in the faculty building with its shelves of ancient leather-bound volumes and strange amulets, and stop giving five minutes to every young detective passing through with a mysterious clue daubed on a fragment of parchment.]

I admit the beer-drinking is attractive.

Feel free to stake out this space – “me” characters always return to the scene of the blog post (or to whatever else they do to fix themselves in the reader’s mind). I’ll be coming back here again.

But not quite so regularly for a while. I have an LP to finish.

Yeah, I wasn't going to do a picture this week. Nor a second post below the picture. But I'd just hammered the final full stop into place on the post above, when the phone rang.

Usually, I keep it muted. There are (were) campaigns for real ale, slow food, et cetera, and I'm running a one-man campaign for phones like they were in the nineteen-seventies. I haven't bought one of those rotary phones you can get now, with the proper rotary dial, but I've come close once or twice.

My campaign doesn't involve me in doing much, except feeling free to mute the thing at times when I wouldn't have had a phone next to me in the nineteen-seventies, and then forgetting to unmute it, but the curious, perhaps serendipitous, consequence is that I no longer hear from scammers.

I occasionally receive phonecalls (and more often return calls I've missed) but today clearly is a receiving day.

"Hey, what's up?"

"You're posting this week?"

"Er - yeah. Why?

"You've sounded a bit down over the past couple of weeks, and I just wanted to check."

"I'm okay, thanks for asking. Bit weirded out by it all. But distracted, not down. I've been working on something else, which is probably what you've picked up. It's a [REDACTED] with razor-sharp [REDACTED] and an extra set of [REDACTED], and of course I'll tell you all about it when it's ready. But yeah. Certainly posting."

"Okay, great. Don't tell me what it's about."

"I won't."

I'm pretty sure you are reading this. Thanks for the call.

Just for the record, the 7am news on the BBC World Service this morning told me that the virus is “spreading exponentially” in countries and states where lockdown restrictions have been removed.

There was something yesterday – Radio 4; I was cooking not listening – about the lowest number of something – Deaths? New cases? – since some significant date early in the year, in the UK.

One or other of those is either mistaken, or fake, or evidence of a spectacular change over twenty-four hours. Or maybe there are countries where the virus is just worse and/or people are getting closer to each other. Or it’s our turn next.

Spaghetti Carbonara, since you ask.

I think I’ll just stay at home. The World is still on my doorstep, and I watch it. Occasional activity, occasional puffs of smoke. The maintenance crew chose a Pope the other day – white smoke instead of the usual black.

The world’s largest privately owned yacht is in for a three-month stay. The Captain, or the Customer-Services Manager, or the Landlord, I forget which*, looks forward to welcoming back the owners of the apartments on the vessel, craft, boat, ship, but for now, it’s empty pending the end of the coronavirus crisis.

Empty but for that maintenance crew putting out the smoke signals. In the deep channel upriver, where the cargo ships are laid to rest – laid up, I mean – there’s the quiet hum of enough power to keep the lights on and the berths warm – like the hum of a fridge in a silent house. Comfortable life, if you like maintenance.

I remember one evening, seeing a group of young men jumping onto the quay from an orange plastic life-boat. Going out for the evening rather than arriving home from a shipwreck.

Not that I was going to write about any of this, but I don’t suppose Covid-19 would agree to wait while I write about something else. “Spreading exponentially”. We’ve all been looking the other way lately, so maybe I should bear witness to what I heard rather than assuming that we all hear the same news.

Speaking of which. That statue pulled down in Bristol. It was put up in 1895, 125 ago, and yeah, maybe there are democratic ways of agreeing that a statue should be removed. But 125 years? That’s almost as long as it takes a public inquiry to produce a report exonerating a government.

Black lives matter. Of course they do. It takes a death – another death – to show us that we behave as though they don’t.

We’re not prejudiced. But somehow, judging by what we do, we are prejudiced.

I’m not talking about single police officers.

Different -ism, but I remember being astonished a few years back, when the BBC finally, reluctantly revealed that it paid its prominent women less than its prominent men. They were going to fix that by 2020, I think I remember.

No individual at the BBC would set out to discriminate against women, but somehow they all do. Did.

Back to racism. I wonder if collective racism, “institutional racism”, is what you get when you deny or suppress or don’t even recognise “individual racism”. I wonder if individual racism is such a simple thing anyway. Hardly anybody would use the words “I am a racist”, and most of the people who said the opposite would mean it. But.

Like everybody else, I’m a complex and complicated evolving bundle of upbringing, experience, expectation, nature, nurture, peer-group pressure, education, instinct, being picked last for the team, getting an A for my essay, mustn’t forget Stress, learned attitudes, memory, idiosyncrasy, sheer good looks and remarkable charisma (I made that last bit up). That suggests my attitudes to myself and other people are determined by a head-full of “stuff”. In double inverted commas.

There’s no clean-slate William. My head’s full of what we might as well call -isms. Most of them benign, I hope. But many of them difficult to detect, never mind change.

Okay. Stop for a moment. At no point in human history has a big moral question been solved by an overweight late-middle-aged man sticking his hand up and saying “Here’s the answer!” I’ve even got a (long-ish, grey-ish) beard at the moment, thanks to the lockdown – but even that won’t do it. Even if I write a book about my answer and start an -ism of my own. Racism is too big an issue for me, or even you, to fix.

What we’ve done throughout history is, we’ve built up mythologies and fairy stories, moral tales, around our most difficult issues. The most successful of those have come down to very simple conclusions.

Do unto others. Do all those things that, as instinctive creatures, we find most challenging.

It would be impossible to train a baby out of the startle reflex.

It would probably be impossible to replace Fight or Flight! with Group Hug! But it’s worth a try.

Difference evaporates. We’re all victims; we’re all having a hard time.

There was/is a saying – “less is more”. Difference is similarity.

Watched a TV show the other night, on Freeview. People looking for houses to buy. They had budgets.

In every house they were shown, the pitch wasn’t “This’ll do” but “If you knock down this wall, extend here, punch a window through here, make this room a bathroom, this’ll do."

And watching that statue coming down, I thought: this isn’t our house. This is the house lately vacated by the Victorians. Statues of slavers, streets named after colonial administrators, monuments to centuries-past victories.

We need to knock down some walls.

Let’s move all that Victorian stuff to the attic – sorry, the museum – and live in a stripped-down modernist interior with huge windows to bring the light in and all the communications technology we could possibly need to share our deepest feelings and find our unsuspected prejudices.

Let’s talk. Let’s open up. Let’s trust each other – and be trustworthy.

That’ll do for today.

*There was a report about The World in The Packet, which is Falmouth’s answer to The Washington Post.

PS: Now there’s a group of MPs “calling on the government” to relax the two-metre social-distancing rule because it’s hindering The Recovery. Their “call” is gaining traction in the media. I say: No. Don’t “call on the government” to do it. Take responsibility. Stand very close to each other. Breathe into each other’s air. Take responsibility for your own little corner of The Recovery.

What holds the attention at a time like this?

The wind in the leaves of the big tree. Bird song. The muted roar of the docks.

It is a roar – and it’s got my attention – but it isn’t very loud.

A sudden flight of geese!

But I can’t see them behind the trees.

An argument, just on the edge of hearing. A man shouting, a woman shouting back.

Seagulls. A wood pigeon. More seagulls.

The sun is high enough off the horizon to be properly warm on my face now. There’s a collective noun of small birds in the catkin bush down the slope from me. Hazel? I’m not very good at naming things on the fly.

If I wasn’t sitting out here with my first-thing mug of tea, those birds would be at my Wild Bird Feeding Station, scattering seeds as they get breakfast. I have the makings of a harvest below my bird feeder, my WBFS, heads of corn fully formed but not yet yellow.

I won’t bother grinding the corn between, say, two pebbles from the beach. But I could. A very small loaf of bread. Dough left to rise in a thimble? Fairy story in there somewhere.

It’s Tuesday morning and I’m sitting out here with a mug of tea and yesterday I did the same and everything was so absolutely just right that here I am again.

Wood pigeon.

“Never get used to this,” we said to each other a lifetime ago, sitting in the car in a deserted North Coast car park at night, watching a Winter sea. I think we’d driven there – detoured there – to be there.

For a while after that there was a ferry I needed to catch every morning. It touched the other side of the water at the same time as my long-ago commuter train probably still draws to a halt at Liverpool Street Station in London.

Cari Nazeer wrote a piece on Medium entitled Reclaim your morning commute. “Set aside a commute’s worth of time to do whatever used to keep you busy on your morning journey.” I like that idea. Sit out with a mug of tea listening to birdsong.

I want to say that the muted roar of the docks is over the horizon, but it isn’t. It’s just not foregrounded. “Send to Back,” as Photoshop puts it. I always notice when it isn’t there, so I guess it’s just blended in with the birdsong and the rest of the morning. Behind their layers.

Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold. “But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar…”

Which isn’t exactly the feeling I get when I hear the muted roar of the docks on a Falmouth morning, but still. I like the poem.

I think I read somewhere that Arnold’s roar can be taken to symbolise the withdrawal of all the Victorian certainties in the face of the twentieth century.

Maybe. Convenient if so.

Suddenly, an aeroplane. First I’ve heard (consciously heard) in a long time.

The docks make a comfortable sound, and I wouldn’t like to be without the occasional experience of opening the shutter in the morning to see some vast ship arriving outside my window.

 Often, they’re built for some mysterious deep-sea purpose and festooned with accessories such as helicopter pads and/or (I looked this one up; ships have web pages) heave-compensated gangway solutions.

The sheer ingenuity of the human mind when presented with a practical problem.

Sorry, challenge. Practical challenge. We don’t have problems any more.

I wonder what the noise for our time would be. The melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of that aeroplane?

My friendly neighbourhood conspiracy theorist tells me that They want the second wave to come during the Summer months, when it won’t be as bad.

So that’s okay, then. There is brain activity behind the decision to tell us all to go back to work despite nothing else having changed. Same old workplace, same old virus.

And long sunny afternoons. And a mellowed-out virus that's kinder to us in the sunshine.

Wait – a virus that encourages sunbathing? I feel another twinge in my sense of the unreal.

Sunlight, said my radio the other day, has both anti-bacterial and anti-viral properties. Well, of course it has.

Just about every component of the modern world forcibly ground to a halt – and now the thing wants us to get some sun.

I can take a hint, but isn’t this weird?

Maybe it’s my cognitive bias going a bit wonky, but if They offered us a choice between (a) a media scientist explaining the R number again and (b) a media atheist giving us a Rational Explanation for the weird fit between Covid and everything we’ve been doing wrong since about 1959 – I’d go for the less patient one.

The atheist, I mean. “How can you believe such nonsense?” is always such a great start to a relationship.

Scientists only get out of bed because they know they don’t know everything, but atheists.

Atheists are inside the box with the rest of us, but they absolutely are not going to let anybody find a lid and try to open it.

Sit down! This is all there is! Tiny little wriggly microbes are causing it!

That’s not a lid! Don’t open it!

Scared? Me? Nonsense!

But don’t open it!

Was it G K Chesterton who said, “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything”? [Spoiler: yes, it was.]

There’s so much on Google and Wikipedia about belief, and faith, and spirituality, and Gaia, and Mother Earth, and The Goddess, and affirmations, and chanting, and shamanism, and healing, and astrology, that it’s actually quite difficult to find that quote about God.

But yes, it was G K Chesterton. [Told you.] He meant, I think, that we either hold to our faith in the one Divine Entity that hardly gets a mention these days, or we become credulous fools.

A variant on Hilaire Belloc’s “And always keep a-hold of Nurse For fear of finding something worse,” I suppose.

Let go of Jehovah, and you get Cthulhu.

Nonsense! Don't often say it, but - nonsense!

There’s something better, not worse, about today’s more forgiving Divine Entities.

[No, I don’t know why I keep using capital D and capital E. A primitive part of my brain has taken over, clearly. Nurse! Help!]

Never mind whether they exist or not. Never mind whether you’re a hard-line atheist or ready to accept the geneticist J B S Haldane’s “suspicion” (his word) that, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

Doesn’t matter. We’re facing a deadly global pandemic that’s not only killing people; it’s killing the way we live now.

Whatever form they take, and even if they're just words for a way of treating the world, we need the DEs now.

I caught myself planning a vegetable garden yesterday.

I wonder if the “gift” of this terrible virus has been a greater awareness. [Greater, transformed, different, awakened, woke, perhaps even pagan - feel free to alter that sentence.]

We’ve all confronted our own mortality. We’ve all heard the government say that it’s safe to send our children back to school – and the parents among us have made their own decisions.

We’re all looking for the comforts of Normal, but we’re doing so with our eyes open.

We might believe in Gaia and the angels but we have absolutely no faith in Them.

That's healthy, right? They might think they can instruct us, or nudge us, or even deceive us back to Normal. But that was the Old Normal.

The New Normal isn’t the old normal with added face-masks and social distancing.

The New Normal is us, working together, making our own decisions, growing our own vegetables, watching sunrises, casting aside differences.

Making our own economies.

Not making the same old sacrifices and paying the same old taxes to the old one.

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.]

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.