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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There will be no politics in the distribution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I guess he's gambling on that.

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

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

We should wish him well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such a character study.

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

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

Who are "We"?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which may explain why targets are not being met.

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

While we sit at home writing and reading.

Which may also explain why targets are not being met.

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

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

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

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

She'd seen all of them.

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

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

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

Taking all the polls into account...

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

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

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

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

That's all right then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Covid-19 here to stay?

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

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

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

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

Or click away helplessly, trying to book a test.

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

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

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

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

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

What then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me get this straight.

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

But the death rate isn't rising.

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

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

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

...and a Happy New Year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel for that young woman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bet they use an algorithm.

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

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

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

But can you get them to look at the pictures?

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd ask to see their work, though.

What I really think is, the virus will come back to the UK with a vengeance around September/October.

We'll all learn hard lessons about the (un)wisdom of coming out of lockdown because The Economy needs us.

We won't realise the worst of what's happening until November, when the reporting catches up with the reality. Then there'll be a political bloodbath.

Central  government paid us to go out to lunch, et cetera, urged us back to work, and insisted that we send our children back to school - just in time for the virus to meet them, and their teachers, and their parents, at the school gates. Children don't mean to spread viruses, but in the language we've all learned, they're a vector.

Local lockdowns will shift the balance of power from central to local government. Roads will likely be closed to all but essential traffic. We'll all be told to stay at home, and The Economy will mutate into an inefficient system for distributing limited welfare.

Out of necessity, we'll build a new normal.

In the more extreme version of this scenario, Cornwall (for example) develops its own currency based on a barter system, and closes its coastal waters to fishing vessels from elsewhere. To protect stocks, only licensed Cornish fishing vessels can use their engines while fishing.

Cities empty. The population continues to fall. Farms and smallholdings across the patchwork of local-authority fiefdoms recruit migrant ex-Heads of Structured Finance (EMEA) and Global Risk Management Professionals to help with their seasonal picking.

Banks, food-banks and supermarkets merge. Regional police authorities and other such bodies come under local-government control. Parks and green spaces are dug up and planted with vegetables.

By next Spring, we're all outside, working on our gardens and allotments, toughened by the Winter, browned by the sun, fitter than we've ever been, and immune to everything our immediate local area can throw at us.

We don't travel. There are taboos against travel.

We're sad, because we're all bereaved, but we're also happy.

We're the survivors, and we've found purpose.

What bothers me most about this virus is that it keeps getting things right.

Walked past the "Follywood" sign this morning. Read about it here, for example. Nestled into the side of a medium-sized, mostly residential street in Falmouth, the "Follywood" sign faces the entrance to the Woodlane campus of our local university.

[Universities, I mean. In the same way that Star Wars Episode IV is actually the first film, our local university is actually two universities. But that's too much detail, right?]

In its pursuit of academic excellence, our local university put up the "Follywood" sign at roughly the high point of its drive to increase the number of fee-paying students it could attract. That was early 2016 or thereabouts. [What? Oh - £9,250 per annum now for a UK student, more for an overseas student, but you're not suggesting that a university would increase its student numbers just for money, are you?)

Across Falmouth, property developers responded to the university's pursuit of mass academic excellence by applying for planning permission to build student accommodation - and the planning authorities gave their answer.

To give you an example, when one application near here was opposed by everybody locally, from the local council to the fire brigade, a planning inspector was sent all the way from Bristol to declare that the application had been approved. Silly old us, getting it wrong like that.

Walked past the "Follywood" sign, and later, I'll be walking past that very building site. An open, empty space, flat concrete, gravel, a skip. No builders; the company hasn't come back. Brambles at the edges, first weeds showing, birds, bees.

We can't get in, because there are metal gates. But nature's hard at work, reclaiming the space.

We use the word “mutate” when we mean “evolve”, surely?

The virus wants to be caught. Becoming easier to catch seems an obvious response to whatever we do to stop ourselves catching it.

Hard-to-catch strains die out; the easy variants live long and prosper.

I speak from ignorance, of course. I was reading about the so-called D614G mutation (so-called because that’s what it’s called; as I said, I speak from ignorance) which is all about a change to the “spike protein” whereby the virus, er, impales the cells it wants to infect (see above re: ignorance).

I remember once trying to get a tangle of little green weed-seeds out of a dog’s ears after a country walk. Burrs. I know all about things getting hooked on and not wanting to come off.

Anyway, D614G is the new easy-to-catch version of Covid-19. While we’ve been locked down, the virus has been sharpening its spike proteins.

And now we’ve come out into the open.

Central government is urging us back to work and offering us incentives to go out to lunch.

Oh, and the virus has sharpened its spikes.

But hey – the sun’s shining and the shops are open and that little café has put tables out in the open.

Central government really wants us to get back to work and then take a long lunch-break. So let’s grab a table under the trees and celebrate the end of the lockdown.

Except – Melbourne, Australia locked down again; Leicester, UK, locked down again; various pubs in the UK that opened at the weekend – closed again.

All along, the most striking feature of this virus, for me, has been how well it knows us.

No, not quite that – how well it adapts itself to us. It’s not “meant” exactly, but it fits in spookily well with the way we behave.

We hid. The virus seemed to go away. We came out of hiding and started to talk about how we could go back to making taxable money.

Still no sinister rustling in the undergrowth – we started to use phrases such as “after coronavirus” in our speeches.

But mostly, we just settled in cosily to policing each other’s mask-wearing. Relaxed our social distancing and joined the crowd.

We came out of hiding, and we got accustomed to being out of hiding, and let’s just suppose that we began to ease off on our precautions.

Do we really need these fiddly masks?

The ten-second rule applies to snogging as much as to dropped food, doesn’t it? I mean, mmm, the thirty-second, mm, two-minute rule. Nothing infectious there.

I suspect that the virus is giving us time.

It hasn’t been defeated. It’s waiting for us to get complacent, and while it does that, it's gone South for the Winter.

Stock up on essential supplies while the sun shines.

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.