A theory of evolution

I am not addressing here any consideration of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. 

No, I'm talking here about a mysterious process that occurs when you have lived in a house for a certain length of time. I do not know exactly what that length of time is, but I think there's scope for several doctoral theses on the subject. Something happens, after you have accreted enough stuff in your house, such that new things begin to appear. Things that you have no recollection of begging, borrowing, stealing, buying or being given. And yet there they are, lurking in dark corners, at the backs of cupboards, hiding under the stairs. They are furtive, knowing that once found they may no longer have a welcome home. Have they invaded? Or have they simply evolved from fluff and malice? I suspect the latter.

What other explanation can there be for the fact that I have just found, at the back of the top shelf of a kitchen cupboard, an unopened packet of prunes from a supermarket 200 miles from here with a best before date of 17th December 2011? I have never knowingly wanted a prune. I have never knowingly purchased a prune. And yet, here they are, squatting malevolently in my cupboard.

The only possible explanation is that they have evolved. Perhaps from the thirteen assorted, opened-then-forgotten packets of raisins, sultanas and currants. Or from fluff and malice.

Weight Loss Plan That Really Works!!!

 A few weeks ago, BigBear decided that perhaps he needed to be NotQuiteSoBigBear, and has been cutting back on his food and drink intake. He is doing very well, despite his wife's insistence on sitting next to him eating hot buttered toast and drinking red wine.

I, however, have been stoically refusing to acknowledge that the overhang above my waistband is a new feature, and I have certainly been refusing to stand on the bathroom scales. This morning, that resolve cracked, and I discovered that I now weigh more than I have done at any time other than when pregnant. And I'm not pregnant.

I'll tell you a little something about myself, and I think it's something that will resonate with quite a few people... I comfort eat. I eat when I'm tired. I eat when I'm stressed. I eat when I'm unhappy. All three of those states have featured this year, in abundance. And as we approach Christmas, and I attempt to undertake too much, make too much, prepare too much and be too much, all of those states ramp up to maximum. 

In light of which, and with an astonishing surfeit of self-awareness, I have decided on a new weight loss plan. And I can 100% guarantee that it really, really works. You don't have to count calories, you don't have to feel hungry, you don't have to stop drinking. My plan? My plan is to not give a damn about being slightly heavier than I used to be. Not now. Not yet. Yes, I could do with shedding a bit of weight. No, I don't fit into my glam party clothes. Was I going to any glam parties? I was not. I am just going to carry on as I am, for now. I'm going to accept that I'm not as fit or healthy as I could be, for now. I'm going to accept that this has been an incredibly stressful, tiring, distressing year, and I'm going to celebrate the fact that we, and all our loved ones, are reaching the end of it with our health intact, with roofs over our heads and food on our tables makes us a damn sight luckier than many.

I am going to eat, drink and try to be merry, and maybe in 2021 I'll be able to do less of the first two, and more of the third.

Sciencing my way through the day

Every industry has a "thing", I'm sure of it. One of those pieces of lore passed on from generation unto generation about The Way Things Are Done. Often there's a good reason behind The Way, but equally often, nobody in living memory has ever witnessed that good reason in action. Probably because everyone follows The Way Things Are Done and so doesn't have to re-visit the pain of why doing it a different way is wrong.

In my industry, of ultra-high vacuum engineering, that thing is brass. Brass, for the non-metallurgically wise, is an alloy of copper and zinc, and "everyone" knows that you must never, ever use brass in an ultra-high vacuum system. Weird things happen. Namely, the zinc migrates out of the alloy and evaporates, leaving copper behind, and coating everything inside your vacuum system with a very thin coating of zinc oxide. At this point, I shall simply assure you that a thin coating of zinc oxide is a Very Bad Thing. 

I have worked on ultra-high vacuum systems for twenty-two years, and I have never seen this happen. My colleagues have, between them, some 180-odd years of experience in ultra-high vacuum system. None of them has ever seen this happen. Obviously, we've all been good and avoided putting brass components in our systems.

I have spent the past couple of weeks banging my head against a brick wall of intransigent scientific instrument, at the heart of which is an ultra-high vacuum chamber. Nothing about it made sense, and eventually, in a cascade of exploding electronics, it finally gave up functioning completely last Friday afternoon. So yesterday I pulled it apart, and found a curious grey deposit all over sections of it. Usually when we find Nasty Things, they turn out to be hydrocarbons, and can be dissolved in alcohol or hexane. This stuff didn't want to dissolve that way.

We all stared, poked and prodded the contaminated surfaces. It was like nothing we'd seen before, and it was everywhere. Normally, we consider a faint smudge or spec of dust to be contamination. Things that are not visible to the eye can be bad enough to stop our instruments working properly. We handle everything with surgical gloves. None of us were prepared for this level of crap. My son comes home from school looking cleaner than this thing.

We looked forlornly at each other, at the floor, and at the ceiling, hoping for inspiration. We drank cups of tea. And then I looked more closely. And I noticed something odd about some of the connectors right in the heart of the machine. Little gold-coloured connectors, that were no longer gold-coloured, but a beautiful salmon-pink. Almost as though they were now made of copper.

(With the benefit of hindsight, and my little mention of brass, I'm hoping you can all see where this is going...)

A spot of hunting around, measuring, comparing, and a growing sense of horror, I realised that the connectors had been taken from the wrong packet. They were brass, and supposed only ever to be used in building electronics, and never in a vacuum system. And still my colleagues couldn't quite believe that such a tiny connector could create so much stuff everywhere. Still, there were dissenting voices asserting it must, somehow, be copper oxide, or iron oxide that we were seeing, and not zinc oxide. So out came The Rubber Bible and we were able to determine that there was a simple test - if our gunk dissolved in sodium hydroxide, it was zinc oxide, and if it didn't it was copper oxide or iron oxide.* 

Friends, the oxide dissolved in sodium hydroxide.

We actually managed to do that thing that everyone knows you shouldn't do. We evaporated zinc out of brass to leave pure copper, and coated every internal part of a beautiful mass spectrometer with zine oxide. (A beautiful mass spectrometer that was supposed to be winging its way to its customer at the end of next week, which is a teensy weensy issue now). But the thing is, despite the fact that it's all totally buggered, I'm so much happier than I've been in weeks, because I know why it's buggered. I have found a simple, elegant explanation for every problem this machine has had. I have used a simple, elegant chemical test that demonstrated that my hypothesis was correct. And I got to use The Rubber Bible.

Today, I scienced. And it was good.

* This would get very long and tedious if I went into all the details of why we knew it was an oxide, and why it was limited to those three materials. You're just going to have to believe me.

You don't have to be the best (Part II)

Before anyone panics, I'm (moderately) certain that this is only going to be a two-part series. This episode is about my lovely boy, and my attempts to manage his hopes and expectations so that he doesn't follow the same contorted mental path that I have, and accepts that doing things for fun is OK, being average at things is OK, and enjoying his life is more important than winning. Nothing like setting myself a nice easy goal.

There have been Things Afoot in the life of LittleBear this year that I haven't written about here, partly for fear of jinxing things, and partly for fear of turning into one of those parents who casually drops into conversation how Tarquin passed his grade 8 Euphonium exams when he was seven*.

As assiduous readers will have noticed, LittleBear loves football. He plays football at every opportunity, he watches football at every opportunity, he can remember (in mind-numbingly tedious detail) the events of matches lost in the mists of time to normal mortals. So, in the brief, golden window of less-lockdown during the summer holidays, he attended a football summer club for a week. And at the end of the week, not only did he receive a trophy for being "Player of the Week", we also received an email telling us that he'd been identified as having "strong attributes" and would be invited for a five week trial with the Norwich City FC regional development program.

And thus followed five very cold, very wet, very windy Friday evenings spent in the middle of the fens, watching my gorgeous little boy training with a group of very talented other little boys (including, fantastically, two of his team mates from our team). I loved the experience of being able to just watch him train and play, and not being responsible for eleven little boys' boot laces and bumped heads, and social distancing, not to mention actually trying to keep them focussed on the training exercise in progress. And I loved watching a really, really good coach at work. It was genuinely inspirational to see how he kept the boys attention, kept them working hard, didn't suffer any nonsense, and yet still allowed them enough of a free rein that they were having fun and laughing.

But, enough about me, back to LittleBear. After a nervous wait, during which it turned out Norwich City FC mis-typed my email address and therefore didn't send us the all-important invitation, my little boy has been asked to join their Player Development Centre. I am absolutely over the moon for him, but it has now opened a huge can of worms for us. Because football clubs are ruthless. They have no loyalty, they have only the desire to be the best and coach the best. And year on year, they assess who "the best" are, from their existing children and any others they scout, and they "let go" the ones who don't make the cut. Some day, LittleBear will be "let go". It could be after one year, two years, five years or ten. But it will happen, and we need to prepare him for that, and for the fact that it doesn't matter. Because he isn't Lionel Messi, and he never will be, but that's OK. He doesn't have to be the best, he just needs to be himself, and he can love football and play football and have a brilliant time no matter what level he reaches.

Which is how we generated our Football Hierarchy - people who live, breathe and love football, but have stopped at different steps along the playing scale:

Coach A: plays grassroots football, coaches grassroots football, loves the game passionately but never played anywhere above grassroots.

Coach W: coaches grassroots football and in his younger days played for a non-league side. Genuinely talented, loves the game but never came close to a professional career in it.

Junior Brown: plays for Scunthorpe, has had a successful but not stellar career pootling up and down the lower reaches of the English league system. Outside the clubs he's played for, has anyone heard of him?

PE teacher: former professional footballer for a second-tier club, former football manager, now LittleBear's PE teacher. A man who made a career out of football at a fairly high level, but probably hasn't been heard of by most of the country.

James Tarkowski: a stalwart of the Burnley Premiership team, with two international caps to his name, but still hardly a household name.

Marcus Rashford: Man United superstar, England superstar, champion of children, and man everyone (in the UK) has heard of.

Lionel Messi: there's only one Lionel Messi.

Each one of them reached a point where they knew they were not going to be Lionel Messi (except Lionel Messi, don't be pedantic). But each one of them kept playing, kept enjoying the game. Each one of them will have been "let go" at some point in their playing life, and each one of them will have carried on anyway, playing and training and enjoying the game without being Lionel Messi. The end of one path isn't the end of everything. And for every player who reached even the modest heights of Scunthorpe United, a thousand children didn't. And most of those thousands of children who love football will never rise above the lowest rung in our Football Hierarchy, but they will still play football and love it.

So this is the conversation we've been having with LittleBear, and he has helped craft the Football Hierarchy, in an attempt to make sure he sees and feels and knows the value of playing football just for fun. An attempt to help him see the huge numbers of people who play and love football without it being a career. And while it's brilliant to have been invited to join a big club's youth development scheme, at some point that will end, and it won't be a reflection on him, and it won't change how much we love him or how proud we are of him. And nobody becomes Lionel Messi.

Meanwhile, I'm still super happy for my little Claret and Blue Canary**.

Someone at NCFC will probably be quite cross about this

* Note: LittleBear's name is not Tarquin, and he does not play the Euphonium.

** For those who don't pay eagle-eyed attention to English football, The Bear family's beloved Burnley play in claret and blue, while Norwich City FC are nicknamed the Canaries, with said bird on their crest.

You don't have to be the best (Part I)

About a week ago, while meandering aimlessly through posts on Facebook, I stumbled across a Kurt Vonnegut quote that a friend had posted, and it really hit a chord with me. (I often find myself mildly exasperated by "inspirational" quotes on the internet, and positively filled with rage at some of the utter tripe that's ascribed to Winnie-the-Pooh but which was absolutely not crafted by A A Milne. I'm assuming they're Disney quotes, or just random bollocks that someone on the internet made up, but I find them irksome.)

Anyway, back to Vonnegut. I was so taken with this particular piece that I even spent some time hunting around for references to it, to try and be as certain as possible that it wasn't a Winnie-the-Pooh-ism. And I was pretty satisfied that it was the real thing.  And the thing is, I have been going back to it several times a day, reading and re-reading it. Marvelling at what a radically different world view it presents to me, and wishing, perhaps, that I had had this particular epiphany several decades ago.

“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes. And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.” 

 

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

 

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.”

 - Kurt Vonnegut

Pretty* obvious isn't it? It's great to do things just for fun, because you like them, because they make you smile, just because. You don't have to be the best, you don't have to "win", you just have to do it and you'll be a richer, more rounded, more interesting person. But that's not really me. While I certainly can't lay claim to the level of talent that Mr Vonnegut has, I can definitely relate to the "achievement-oriented environment". I need to be good at everything I do, I need to excel, I need to prove myself. And it's absolutely exhausting. Not to mention the fact that there are lots of things I don't do, because I'm a bit rubbish at them. Or maybe just average. I avoid huge swathes of life's opportunities for fear of failing, or of not being the best at it. 

In a moment of synchronicity, today I found my original diagnosis of anxiety and depression and the accompanying recommendations made by the psychologist to my GP. Illuminating excerpts include:

"PhysicsBear worries that she is not good enough, despite the evidence going against this, and engages in anxious predictions... PhysicsBear has unrelenting standards which are exacerbating her beliefs... she fears that she will get something wrong and as a result of this she oscillates between over-preparing and avoiding..."

And one of the therapy goals that was identified in 2013 was:

"Not to be as concerned that she is failing if she is not perfect."

So really, seven years later, I shouldn't find Kurt Vonnegut's words such a revelation. But here I am anyway, trying to accept that just doing stuff for fun is OK. I don't have to be perfect. I don't have to be better than other people. Me is enough. Doing is enough. 

So if you hear an off-key warble, aimlessly meandering from note to note, not quite holding a tune, it's just me singing. Because I'm crap at it, but it makes me happy. And if it doesn't actually cause anyone physical pain (which may be debatable) then perhaps I should give myself permission just to do one thing really badly, if it makes me happy.

* At this point in my writing, IdiotCat walked across the keyboard and wrote "hjukkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk,55555". Tempting though it was to leave his words for posterity, I felt it detracted from the readability.

Age is just a number

But sometimes it seems like a dauntingly big number.

Take 9 for example.

My little baby is 9 years old today. Half way to being allowed to vote. Potentially half way to moving away from home.

It's a terrifying thought, especially as I look around and see my cousins' children attending university, setting off on gap years, launching themselves into their adult lives when it barely seems moments ago that they too were round-cheeked little moppets, earnestly explaining their imaginary worlds to me.

A month ago we knew what we were doing for LittleBear's birthday - today would have been a football match against the toughest team in his league, and tomorrow would have been a friendly football match arranged amongst players only from our own club as a substitute for a party. Parties were banned in covid-land, but football matches weren't, and since there's nothing a Bear loves more than playing football with his friends, I was making use of one of the only perks of being a football coach and arranging a match for him.

But here we are, back under lockdown, where not only parties are verboten, but so are football matches. Unless you're being paid millions of pounds and then you can still play football, because covid recognises pay cheques.

It was not, therefore, quite the birthday he had dreamed of, or we had planned, but (I hope) it was still a fun one. And what was perhaps most striking was just how many good friends my little boy has. Friends who walked, drove, or cycled round to our house in the pouring rain to deliver cards or presents. Friends who called by video, or sent emails. Even a friend who came out and played football in the park in the rain*. I think, and slightly hope, that LittleBear takes it all in his stride that he has such good friends rather than being surprised by it. But I was genuinely touched by the consideration, kindness and love from his friends and their parents that helped make his birthday a day filled with surprises and happiness.

There are many things in the world that are dark and miserable at the moment, including today's weather. And yet today was filled with all that was good about the people in the small corner of the world we occupy. And cake.

A successful birthday present

* LittleBear and LittleFriend will never let rain come between them and football. And to keep within the covid-rules, they met up on their own as "two individuals from different household exercising together" while I ran and walked round and round the park. In the rain.

Number crunching

£12 billion on a woefully shambolic, utterly ineffective, track and trace system, when the one thing most of the scientific/medical community were agreed upon in March was that Track, Trace and Isolate was going to be key to stopping, or at least slowing, the spread of the virus.

£12 billion.

It's a tricky number to get your head round. Just another huge figure, lost among many other huge figures of government spending. So let's have a go...

£12 billion is more than the entire annual budget for England's GP services.

£12 billion is at least 50% more than the entire annual budget for the Ministry of Justice. 

£12 billion is the combined annual budget of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) (2018-19 figures).

So, it would seem that one could potentially do quite a lot with £12 billion. Which makes it all the more impressive that we* have managed to implement a system that only contacts at best 80% of those who test positive, and only reaches 60% of their contacts.

Just for fun, I wondered what else we could have done with those sums of money.

There are approximately 43 million people of working age (16-64) in this country. 

If we employed 1 in every 1000 people as contact tracers, on a full-time salary of £20,000 per annum, that would still only cost £860 million. But they'd need computers, phone-lines and internet connections, so let's give them a budget for equipment and services of another £3000 each, which would take us almost to a whole billion pounds. Employing 0.1% of the working population, and equipping them, is still less than 10% of the sum the government has spent**. Given our current rates are 23,000 positive tests per day, each of our 43,000 newly-employed contact tracers would average approximately one person with a positive test every two days. They could spend a lot of quality time supporting that covid-infected person, meticulously noting their movements, and following up their contacts.

Let's not forget the development of the "world-beating" Track and Trace App either though. I mean, it must be expensive to develop a new App mustn't it? Let's just pause and consider the most expensive computer games ever made. BioWare spent the equivalent of $227 million developing Star Wars: The Old Republic. Or £175 million. And, married as I am to a Bear in the computer games industry, I can assure you that big computer games are really quite complicated. But even assuming that developing a phone App that hardly works is as difficult as a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, it's still a drop in the £12 billion ocean.

So, even after employing 0.1% of the country as contact-tracers, and developing an App to rival the world's most expensive PC game, we've still got a little less than £11 billion left to spend on more lab technicians, or reagents, or test kits, or courier services, or databases, or statisticians, or doctors, or nurses, or support schemes that allow those isolating to be able to afford to do so. Maybe we could even try feeding some children, or providing enough IT provision that children can receive the level of remote teaching previously reserved only for those who could afford a private education.

But we haven't done any of those things. Makes you wonder where all the money has gone doesn't it?

* It genuinely sticks in my throat to use "we" in that sentence, as though most of that "we" have had anything to do with this obscene waste of taxpayer's money. The Tory government hold all responsibility for this. All of it. 

** Obviously this is a bit of a cheat, as I haven't included employers NI contributions or any of the administrative overheads of employing people, but it gives you an idea of the sums involved.

10-Day Challenge: Day #10

Well, here I am at the end of my 10-day challenge to write short, positive blog posts in an attempt to force myself to see the good in life even in times of stress and distress.

Has it worked?

I wouldn't say I have become entirely upbeat, but I have definitely forced myself to make an effort not to wallow as much as perhaps is normal. There isn't exactly much reading-between-the-lines required for anyone to spot that there have been down days, even in the span of only 10 days. But I have managed to find one bright spot each day, even if that solitary bright spot is cheese. Cheese can be surprisingly therapeutic - as evidenced today by my making a special outing at lunchtime to the only shop within easy range that sells cheese suitable for raclette. By which means I have given myself and LittleBear something to look forward to at the weekend*.

But having molten cheese to look forward to is not my happy thought for the day, it's just a nice coincidence. 

I am not sure whether this technically counts as a happy thought, but it is certainly a moment of self-awareness, and a progression from the foul mood of yesterday. It all starts with a meme that I saw, and (for the second time in the last 5 years) posted on Facebook.

I have the innate ability to imagine situations that haven't even occurred and get fucking furious about them. I basically think myself into a bad mood.

It was true five years ago, and it's true now. I spend far too much time inside my own thoughts, getting myself more and more angry and upset about things that exist only inside my own head. And, aside from the minor impact of every news article I might look at, yesterday was largely down to "thinking myself into a bad mood". With a certain amount of effort; stern internal talking-to; and a clear-eyed look at my lovely husband, son and friends, I managed to talk myself back into a more reasonable frame of mind.

And for me, that's a massive achievement. I feel genuinely proud of myself for getting out of the funk I'd got myself into. And maybe, just maybe, the previous nine days of making an active choice to see the good in life did help.

* It is an enduring mystery to me and LittleBear that BigBear is not a huge fan of raclette. We choose not to question this position too closely, as it simply means more cheese for us.

10-Day Challenge: Day #9

I have been seriously tempted to scrap today's entry. To simply write, "life is shit and I have nothing positive to say." But instead, I'm going to try and be honest about that, and to try and be honest about the struggle to find something, no matter how small, to be happy about. 

I don't want this Challenge to turn into some kind of Pollyanna-ish fa-la-la about life being fully of fluffy kittens and joy, when the very point is that it isn't, but that even when that is the case, it is possible to find something, anything, that might raise a smile, or perhaps provide comfort.

And today, that has been harder than usual. I have been bad-tempered more or less from the moment I awoke until now. I have hated more or less everything. I have had arguments in my head with more or less everyone. I have not been a joyous person, and have almost certainly not provided my LittleBear with a happy half-term Tuesday.

But...

My LittleBear is a dear, sweet, soft bundle of cuddles, and despite my crabbiness, he has been funny, and gentle and entertaining for most* of the day.

And even though life isn't full of fluffy kittens and joy, there is this...

 

And finally, this is the thought I genuinely had as I cooked dinner and wondered what I had to feel upbeat about. I have five types of cheese in the fridge and have eaten three of them today. And, honestly, some days, having plenty of cheese available is the level of positive I can manage.

* He's eight. I may love him dearly, but I'm not so blinkered as to claim that he's been perfect for a whole thirteen hours.

10-Day Challenge: Day #8

Today's moment of good cheer is the extraordinary power of everyday people saying, "enough" in large enough numbers that they make a difference.

You would perhaps have to have been living under a rock not to have noticed there is a certain amount of kerfuffle over the fact that 340 MPs voted against providing free school meals to children living in poverty through this half-term and the Christmas holiday. Apparently, this would be a mere sticking-plaster and therefore unhelpful. I don't know if any of these MPs have ever had a minor, bleeding injury, but there are times when a sticking-plaster is exactly what's needed. In this case, no, it should not be necessary for the government to provide food for children. No, it should not be acceptable that 1.4 million children are in danger of not receiving enough food. No, as a country, we don't want our population to have to need vouchers to provide enough food for their families. And yet. Here we are. Maybe it has something to do with a global pandemic following hot on the heels of 10 years of austerity? 

However, this is supposed to be a positive light shining in the darkness, not a political polemic.

The positive today is just how many cafes, restaurants, charities and individuals have stepped forward to make sure none of the children who need food are going to go without. 

My own village swung rapidly into action, a volunteer group contacted the heads of the three schools (Infant, Junior and Secondary), discovered how much money was required to fund meals for their in-need pupils through half-term, and decided to ask the people of the village to step up. Within 12 hours of bank account details being published, £2,375 of the £3,100 needed had been donated.

Meanwhile, the local bakery is offering no-questions-asked free sandwiches for children's lunches throughout this week. The local branch of the Salvation Army has more food than they can give away and is redirecting it to other areas. They're also running a "Pop-Up Pantry", allowing people who need help to come along and pay only what they can afford, or nothing at all, for essential groceries.

This is not something unique to my village, it is a story being repeated over the length and breadth of the country, as good people refuse to sit back and see others suffer.

These are the people I want to share a country with. These are the people who can stand up and make a difference; who can reshape the future to reflect a kinder, gentler, more humane world than our elected representatives seem to see.

We can make the world a better place.

10-Day Challenge: Day #7

There are advantages to being a football coach. Advantages that go beyond having my car turned into a mobile kit-room, or my spare bedroom housing spare sets of kit for four different age groups, or turning out several times a week in almost inevitable rain through the coldest and most miserable months of the year.

One of those advantages is the occasional day where the sun shines, and we can get ten small boys together for a friendly match, and they can spend a morning running themselves ragged and hoofing the ball at each other without a care in the world.

The joy of children is a wonderful thing. 

The joy of a sweetly struck ball is a wonderful thing. 

LittleBear in action

How could I not find the positive in sunshine, football and small boys?

10-Day Challenge: Day #6

Today is.... <drum-roll>... half term!

That's right, we've made it all the way through a full seven weeks of school. Seven weeks in which no child in LittleBear's school had a positive covid-19 test. Seven weeks in which no class in LittleBear's school had to be sent home to isolate. Seven weeks in which LittleBear was able to receive some actual, genuine teaching, surrounded by his friends.

If that's not something to feel positive about in these times, I don't know what is.

And to celebrate this momentous occasion, what did we do? Absolutely nothing. It was great. 

I say "nothing", but LittleBear and I have started a "Half-Term Tournament" of board games, taking it in turns to chose the next game. Taking a leaf out of the newly-restarted Six Nations tournament, we are awarding 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, a bonus point for a thumping victory and a loser's bonus point for a narrow defeat. LittleBear has cruised to an early lead, to nobody's surprise. 

Meanwhile, since I couldn't really be bothered to cook, and the next grocery delivery isn't until tomorrow, we had takeaway curry for dinner. Which involves ordering on my laptop, paying by Paypal, and then cycling down into the village to pick it up from outside the front of the restaurant. And as I peddled home in the dwindling twilight I realised how incredibly lucky I am to be able to do that. To have the money to casually order a takeaway on a whim, to have a well-organised local restaurant that I trust, to be able to collect my meal by bicycle, to have a loving little family to share it with, to have security, and comfort and safety.

Today was definitely a day to count my blessings.

10-Day Challenge: Day #5

After two days in which it was a genuine struggle to force myself to look for and find the positive in the day, today has been so much easier. I even have more than one positive! And though it is tempting to keep one in reserve for tomorrow, in case I have a bad day, I'm going to blow it all today and make myself find a new positive tomorrow. Which is a bit of a high-risk strategy, but feels like keeping to the spirit of my plan.

So my first positive for the day is the immense power of friendship, and the importance of maintaining connections, of responding, and of reaching out. I took an hour and a half off work and I met some friends for a coffee outside our lovely local cafe. We mostly wore masks, except for the actual coffee-drinking part, and we just had a chance to sit and talk. And it was lovely. I had nearly turned the invitation down, as I struggle to justify taking time off work for anything other than looking after LittleBear during school holidays. But sometimes cementing the bonds of friendship matters more than an over-developed sense of responsibility towards my job. And it was H's birthday, and to be able to be with her and share a drink, even on a damp bench on a chilly-but-sunny October morning was worth it.

Having been reminded how much it lifted me up that my friends had reached out and invited me for coffee, even though they knew I would almost certainly decline, I in turn reached out to other people in my life today, and was rewarded with warmth and friendship in return. And I was reminded that as tired as I am, and as loathe to stick my head out of my nest and make an effort, and as hard as I sometimes find interacting with people, the same is true for a lot of other people too. There is nothing to be gained from walling myself off and then wondering why people aren't reaching out to me. As much as I need people to smile and offer the hand of friendship, others need that too, and sometimes I need to be the smile and the proferred hand.

Meanwhile, I was rescued from my despair over the government's attitude to providing meals for children living in poverty by the response of large swathes of the population. Not only have multiple councils up and down the land pledged to provide meals for children during the school holidays, but cafes, restaurants and charities all over the country are stepping in and offering their services to provide free food through the holidays. There are people who do care. Not because they're trying to score political points, not because they're trying to win re-election, but because they have been moved to act for the good of those less fortunate than themselves.

On which similar note, I've now reminded myself I have a third thing to be positive about. Three things! On one day! I was enormously heartened to read that football fans from a variety of clubs (included the beloved Burnley) had balked at the idea of paying £15 to watch one football match on a pay-per-view basis at the weekend and had decided instead to give that sum to their local foodbanks. There is no greater sacrifice for a football fan than missing a chance to watch their team. That so many fans chose not only to miss a match as a protest at the price being asked, but then didn't keep their money to themselves in a time of hardship, but gave it to those suffering greater hardship is another sign of the number of genuinely good people there still are in the country.

Life is about friendship, about community, about caring, about supporting each other, lifting each other up, helping each other. Our government may be failing us, but there is still hope when each of us little people link together, forge bonds, and make life better one tiny act at a time.

10-Day Challenge: Day #4

And I thought yesterday was hard to find the positives in...

I'm going to start with something that could so easily be a complaint, a way of seeing the irritations of life and the casual way in which it's possible to be taken for granted. But I'm not going to focus on that, I'm going to focus on the fact that I'm awesome, that I can be left in the lurch and still come out smelling of roses.

We're making a rather curious scientific instrument for a rather curious scientific Russian customer. We first made this customer an instrument twelve years ago, and the new one is a complete replacement, with better performance and more interesting features plus a collection of spares and extra bits for the old instrument so it works better. On Friday, our curious Russian customer informed us that he needed all of the spares and extra bits this week. Immediately. Or we wouldn't get paid. Dealing with Russia can be a bit like that. 

Now, for Various Reasons That Escape Me, my colleagues didn't tell me this, and as far as I was aware, these spares and extras were due to be sent to Russia in the middle of November. It was only at 11am that I was told that the spares and extras were in a box, awaiting a collection by DHL, but that they couldn't ship without a manual, so could I please write one? 

And thus it was that in a mere two hours I produced a manual, including annotated photographs of the original instrument showing where to fit the new parts, diagrams, explanations and detailed instructions. Even my colleagues were impressed at what I managed to pull out of the bag with so little warning.

I am bloody good at my job, and some days I need to sit back at the end of the day and remember that.

10-Day Challenge: Day #3

I may have had the foresight not to commit to 100 days of positivity, but I genuinely didn't imagine that it would be hard to get beyond day 2. Today has been distinctly challenging. 

However, there is little point in trying to improve my outlook, if I instantly give in and start cataloguing the negatives of the day. So instead, here's a little bright spark...

Throughout my early childhood, my parents owned a super-8 cine camera, and my father used to film family holidays, outings and occasions. These would be trimmed and editted down to (mostly) only contain those events that had successfully been captured in focus and with the light meter set correctly. Every now and then we would have a "film night" at home, and set up the projector and screen to re-live family highlights. I still remember the flickering click as the tail of the film flew threw the feed reel and spun frenetically until the projector was switched off.

A few years ago* I found a local video editting company who were able to transfer these old cine films to a digital format, and I've had the digital files sitting on my computer ever since. I have finally got round to copying these onto a memory stick to send to BrotherBear. This has necessitated me watching clips of the old films, just to make sure the copying has worked properly, you understand. Which is how I came to watch my own first birthday - opening presents in bed while a black-and-white cat played with the wrapping paper. More or less the same as my forty-sixth birthday in truth, except I didn't chew any of my birthday cards this year.

Aside from the enormous joy and privilege of having a moving record of my own family's life from 1975 onwards, this has given me a moment of pure gold that I feel I should share with you. I am six months old.

My mother has always claimed that I was only reaching for her beer because I had just come out of hospital after surgery for congenital hip dislocation. Sadly, this excuse doesn't stand up to scrutiny, as further clips at ever increasing ages can attest.

* I admit, from looking at the dates on the files, "a few" appears to be "ten".

10-Day Challenge: Day #2

As previously mentioned, it was my birthday at the weekend. And one of the presents I was given was a pair of gloves. This may not, at first, sound like a particularly exciting present. But, oh, these gloves. They are a work of art. They are gloriously, fabulously extravagant gloves. They are velvet, with a bold flower pattern on a dark green background. 

Gloves from heaven

 

These are the kind of gloves that I have spent most of my life marvelling at, but never being brave enough to wear. In retrospect, I have spent a disappointingly large portion of my life hiding myself in shapeless, formless, colourless clothes. Oversized, charcoal-grey, men's jumpers and jeans constituted a large portion of my wardrobe through my teens and early twenties. It is only in the last decade and a half* that I have begun to find the confidence to wear colours and patterns. Now, I am happy to wear a yellow pinafore dress with dinosaurs on, or a tweed cape with a magenta silk lining. I would not describe my dress sense as particularly flamboyant, nor eccentric (aside, perhaps, from the aforementioned cape). But I rarely now fall in love with an item of clothing but think to myself, "I could never get away with that." Yet that was very much the story of my younger years. Now, my taste and my confidence are much more closely aligned, so it is only finances or common-sense** that now come between falling in love with clothing and wearing it

So my positive thought for today is how much better life is now that I can just be me, now I can wear things that I love and not be afraid of judgement, now that I can smile to myself just at the thought of a beautiful pair of gloves.

* See also changes experienced between the ages of 30 and 40

** This is not entirely true. Common-sense was not in evidence when I bought a blue and gold brocade corset in the middle of a global pandemic. Because I have had so many opportunities for glamorous evening wear this year.

10-day Challenge: Day #1

Because I find myself sinking into a funk; because I look at how infrequently I've been blogging this year; because I need a focus; because the world is full of depressing crap...

I'm going to try an experiment.

A few years ago, I undertook a Facebook challenge of posting something positive every day for 100 days. Prior to that, as I emerged from post-natal depression, I had my Happy Book, and I wrote in it every evening before bed, but only allowed myself to write about the good things from the day. I made myself acknowledge, and remember, and enjoy the good moments with my BabyBear, rather than think only of the tears, or the frustrations, or the fatigue.

I'm sure that every self-respecting therapist will be totally unsurprised to discover that both these processes genuinely helped me feel more positive. If you dwell on the negative it feeds into a negative spiral; but if you focus on the positive, you can improve your own state of mind. 

Given my current apathy and propensity for a negative outlook, I don't feel quite up to committing to writing something positive every day for a hundred days. That in itself is quite telling, and possibly a sign that it's time I found a way to focus on the positives. But I really can't face setting myself another goal that I'm going to fail at. At the moment, writing ten, short, positive posts in ten days seems like a big enough challenge.  

So, I shall start with today.

Today I took a morning off work, and I had my hair cut, in a well-organised, well-ventilated, covid-secure salon, by my lovely hairdresser with whom I can have an intelligent, well-informed chat about politics, society, covid, children and all manner of other topics. 

It was only the second "non-essential" commercial outing I've been on (I'm counting having to buy a car when mine died mid-lockdown, and having to replace LittleBear's too-small, disintegrating shoes as "essential", along with the more normal grocery shopping expeditions). It was odd to be out doing something so normal, and yet at the same time so un-normal, with the masks, and sanitiser stations, and scant handful of people in a huge room, and locked door but open windows. It was refreshing to talk to someone from outside my usual social and professional circle, and to find my views, my fears and my hopes are not strange outliers. And she's a fantastic hairdresser.

So now I feel uplifted about humanity and considerably less bedraggled.

 

Getting older

Today I turned forty-six. Though I choose instead to adopt the age one of my football team guessed, and claim a splendidly youthful thirty-two. Thank you L!

This evening, after a meal out for the first time since BigBear's birthday in March, I am putting some effort into focussing on the positives of the day, and of my life. Mostly because this morning I was not doing a good job of doing so...

This morning, everything felt sad and empty and overwhelming. In the past 7 months only two pairs of feet other than those belonging to us Bears have set foot in this house - PigletBoy sat inside the patio doors with LittleBear yesterday afternoon playing with lego, and MrsBuilder inspected the leaking roof two weeks ago. That's it. A ten year old and a builder in seven months. No family, no friends. Life feels empty of laughter and camaraderie. The friends I used to talk to outside school every day are now just a passing wave from behind a mask as we collect our children on a strict rota, each class five minutes apart from the next. The friends who live more than a five-minute cycle ride from my house may as well be in a different continent*. Even my nearest and dearest friend, a mere ten miles away, I have seen only twice(?) in this whole car-crash of a year. The ones who are in Cheshire, Derbyshire, Surrey, Kent, London, Devon? There is only so far that technology can hold us together. Facetime and Zoom and WhatsApp have kept me sane, but they haven't kept me whole.

I'm forty-six and I feel broken. I seem to give and work and strive and run out of time without reaching any of the goals I'm aiming for. I don't manage to be the mother, sister, daughter, wife, friend, physicist, football coach, mentor or volunteer that I want to be. And maybe that's the problem. Maybe there are too many things I'm trying to be, and not enough me to go around. I'm tugged in every direction, and stretched so thin that I snap. I shatter. I splinter into sharp, angry, weeping shards that help no-one.

I'm forty-six and my baby isn't a baby any longer, and every time I look he seems older and more serious. Responsible beyond his years. Aware of a global pandemic and the manner in which our lives are being shaped by that in ways I wish I could protect him from, but I can't. I am not ready to lose the little bundle of warmth that still climbs into my lap for cuddles, not even when some of those cuddles are just an excuse to delay bathtime.

I'm forty-six and my mother is ageing, and becoming weaker and frailer. I've seen her once since February and I miss her. I miss seeing her as we all are now, but I also miss being young and being looked after. I miss knowing that she could drop everything and rush to my aid, no matter what mess I'd got myself into. I don't need her to rescue me, but I miss knowing that she could. 

I'm forty-six and the world I see around me just looks shit. It's filled with selfishness, and racism, and arrogance, and ignorance. People who won't stop to consider anyone except themselves, or their concerns and views. People who have lost all trace of empathy for those with nothing. Meanwhile politics appears to be dominated by fools and charlatans; men (and a few women) who place self-interest, personal advancement, and public adulation ahead of leadership, intelligence, honesty, integrity, decency or even just Doing The Right Thing. I genuinely despair, not simply of how we got here, but of how we claw our way to a better future. I cannot see it with our electoral system, our press or our current crop of politicians.

This morning, all of that was too much for me. All of that meant I struggled to see and feel the good in my life, and the love that surrounds me. This evening (aside from writing about all of that) I have tried to move the good things to the front of my mind, and to remember that even in amongst the storms that rage in my mind and in the world, there is good. There are people who will strive to do what's right, for no reason other than it's right. There are people who offer up their love and their friendship unconditionally. There is light in the world, and for as long as that is true, it is always worth adding my tiny candle flame of light to the world, to keep on keeping on. To keep giving and working and striving for the world I want for my baby-who-isn't-a-baby.

So here's the other view of today...

Today my boys gave me a lie-in, followed by breakfast and presents in bed. 

Today my gorgeous little boy was as full of cuddles, and love, and compassion and helpfulness as he always is. 

Today I had a birthday cake that Piglet made for me, chosen specifically to be a variety the rest of the bear household don't eat (coffee and walnut, since you ask), so that I could have a cake all to myself. 

Today my lovely friend C, and her little boy, cycled round with a card and a jar of home-made jam, also that the rest of the bear household don't eat (blackcurrant, since you ask), so that I could have the whole jar to myself. 

Today my lovely friend H hand delivered a card, and just snuck it through the door, though I'm sure she knows she would have been welcome to ring the doorbell for a chat. 

Today I had messages from friends in Alberta, Victoria, Singapore and Rotherhithe (among other places). 

Today I was able to talk to my mother on a screen, share a crossword, laugh and smile, though miles separate us. 

Today an adorable band of five-year old boys and their parents sang "Happy Birthday" to me at the end of the under-6 football training I'd been helping out at.

Today I went out for dinner with my two bears, and we had a nice, quiet, civilised meal together, filled with smiles, and laughter and silly jokes.

Today, totally out of the blue, a friend offered to lend me her home in London while she's away for a month in case we wanted a covid-safe place to stay away from home.

Today I was reminded of the love and warmth of friendship.

Today I turned forty-six in a home filled with love, and my two favourite people in the world, and a slightly annoying cat.

Today the sun broke through the clouds.

* Some of them are, but that's not the point.

A vision for the future

I was delighted to discover yesterday that the Conservative Party, for once in my life, shares my vision for the future. The Prime Minister gave a speech to the virtual Conservative Party Conference, during which he espoused the view that we could not return to the old status quo after this crisis ends, that we must build a better future. As is his (extremely tedious) wont, he harked back to the second world war, and to how we worked together through the dark times, and rebuilt the country in the immediate post-war years, having defeated the filthy Boche etc etc. This is his vision - that we emulate the leadership and outcomes of the war-time and post-war years.

I'm sure a man with such a solid grasp of history, with the aid of all those splendid statues around the country teaching us our splendid history, will have recalled the salient features of the governance of this country during, and immediately following, the war. But for those of you who perhaps haven't remembered the details of how the country was run during, and restructured after, the last massive crisis to face us, here's a summary.

During the war, we had a government of national unity, not a Conservative government.

In the 1945 General Election, the Labour Party swept to power in a landslide, gaining 237 seats and utterly trouncing the Conservatives under Churchill. Clement Attlee was seen as more competent to lead the country outside wartime, and better suited to avoiding a return to the mass unemployment seen under the Conservatives in the 1930s. 

Under the Labour government, led by Attlee, the National Health Service was formed. 

Under the Labour government, National Insurance was introduced, leading to universal access to pensions, sickness benefit, unemployment benefit, funeral benefit and child benefit. 

Under the Labour government, a  million new homes were built, of which 80% were council houses. 

Under the Labour government, the rights and protections of women and children were extended under the Married Women (Restraint Upon Anticipation) Act of 1949, the Married Women (Maintenance) Act of 1949, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 1950 and the Criminal Justice Act of 1948, among others. 

Under the Labour government, the Fair Wages Resolution of 1946 protected the wages of those engaged in working on public projects, while the Shops Act of 1950 ensured that shop workers couldn't be forced to work more than 6 hours without a break, and that all were entitled to a lunch break. Then there was the Fire Services Act 1947, the Electricity Act of 1947, the Workers' Compensation (Supplementation) Act of 1948, the Merchant Shipping Act of 1948, the Merchant Shipping (Safety Convention) Act of 1949, a Miner's Charter in 1946, a Colliery Workers Supplementary Scheme in 1948 and the creation of an Agricultural Wages Board in 1948, among a whole host of others, all of which were designed to protect the rights, safety, health and pay of ordinary working men and women.

Are you getting the picture yet? 

It was a socialist government that looked after the best interests of the working people of this country. It was a socialist government that gave us the NHS, state pensions, unemployment benefits and workers rights.

It is a Conservative government that has seen the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. It is a Conservative government that has seen money pour out of the exchequer, not into education, or healthcare, or social care, or employment protection, but into the pockets of management consultants trying to handle the shitshow that is a Tory Brexit. Into the pockets of Tory chums who fail to provide a functioning test, track and trace system during a global pandemic. Into the pockets of Conservative party donors who can't make functioning ventilators. Into the pockets of friends of Special Advisors who don't provide the PPE they're contracted to provide. All without public tender, and all without Parliamentary scrutiny.

So, yes please, Mr Johnson, I'll take your vision of the future. I'll take a government of national unity, followed by a socialist landslide in which we return to being led by men and women who want to lift the people up, not those who want only to feather their own nests. If you see yourself as Churchillian, Mr Johnson, I'll take Keir Starmer as Attlee, and let's get going towards 1945.

Let me get this straight...

 I've had a bit of a hiatus here, but honestly, our government of utter cockwombles is forcing me out of my hole again.

We have three important law officers in the UK - the attorney general, solicitor general and advocate general for Scotland – who are required to ensure that ministers act within the law. 

Personally, I think it's a good idea that ministers act within the law, and fortunately I'm not alone in that, because there's such a thing as the Ministerial Code, which defines what ministers should and shouldn't do. This code, astonishingly, was only actually written in 1997. Obviously, up to that point ministers were deemed decent and honourable enough not to need to have these kinds of things written down. The tail end of the Tory administration that ended with Tony Blair's first election in 1997 firmly put paid to that idea. However, back to that code...

In 2010, the wording of the code was that there was an “overarching duty on ministers to comply with the law, including international law and treaty obligations, and to uphold the administration of justice and to protect the integrity of public life”.

Pretty clear, huh?

But, obviously, it's important to maintain wriggle room for ministers to do whatever the hell they want, so under David Cameron's watch, this wording was reduced to an “overarching duty on ministers to comply with the law and to protect the integrity of public life”.

Because we have a variety of people who don't like our government trying to sneak extra powers for themselves, this change was challenged in the courts, on the grounds that it had not been debated in parliament and was illegal. In 2018, the government defeated the case in the court of appeal. But... in that judgment, although finding in the government's favour, the court also found that despite the change in the wording, the “overarching” duty to comply with the law included international law and treaty obligations.

Now, where were we? Oh yes, our three law officers expressing an opinion on what ministers are and aren't allowed to do.

All three officers were unanimous in their view that the UK internal market bill (the one which is aiming to override parts of the Northern Ireland protocol if there is no trade deal with the EU) would amount to a “clear breach” of the withdrawal agreement and international law.

Got that? The three officers whose duty it is to ensure that ministers act within the law are firm that what is proposed is a clear breach of international law.

Only the Scottish advocate general has the balls to say that ministers should be bound by international law and treaties. The advice letter these three noble officers have written states, “It is the opinion of the advocate general for Scotland that the terms of the ministerial code expressly reflect a constitutional convention that ministers shall act in accordance with the rule of law, which in his view includes international law. In his opinion, that includes the obligation under international law to act in good faith with respect to the UK’s treaty obligations."

The craven boot-lickers* representing the English and Welsh arms of the law, however, don't think that the explicit ruling of the court of appeal as to the meaning of "overarching" has any weight. “In contrast, the attorney general and solicitor general are confident that there is a strong legal basis ... which separate the rule of law into its domestic and international spheres. In their view, the reference to ‘law’ in the ministerial code can only be a reference to UK law and UK constitutional principles.”

The court of appeal ruled in 2018 that this was explicitly not the case and that "overarching" includes domestic and international law. And yet here we are.

I have no idea what kind of a stupid game Johnson, Cummings et al are playing with the UK Internal Market Bill, or whether it's just another dead cat, distracting us from their real purpose. But whatever it is they're doing is definitely making us look like utter shit-weasels to the rest of the world. Always a good basis for trying to negotiate new international treaties and trade deals...

* To be fair, I know absolutely nothing about the Solicitor General, but Suella Braverman, Attorney General is a despicable, incompetent, unprofessional, political toady. Think of her as the UK's very own Bill Barr.

Hiding behind a mask

Right back at the start of lockdown, I did my usual thing when faced with an unknown or scary situation - I panic-read. I read all about masks, about the pros and cons of wearing them, and in great detail about how to make various designs of mask. And I rummaged around in my (embarrassingly large) collection of bits of fabric, and I set to work experimenting with different designs. The first mask was a pleated design and was laborious and frustrating to make. It's wearable but a bit scruffily finished. The next three were all variations on a shaped mask, and none of them fitted either BigBear or me. At this point I more or less gave up in disgust at my incompetence. Spending hours of my precious free time (and it took hours to make a single mask at the start) was just a bit too demoralising.

But then I watched another YouTube video on mask-making, and I decided it was absurd to have all the materials for making masks, and to want to have masks and not have another go at making them.

So I knuckled down and made some more.

I knew I could manage the pleated version, and had realised I could do it more efficiently if I made more than one at a time - cutting eight; stitching eight; pressing eight; pleating eight and over-stitching eight took maybe double the length of time that it took me to make the first one. So away I went. And then, buoyed on by my success, I returned to a different pattern of shaped mask with considerably more success. And then I realised that I'd made rather more masks than the three of us needed. So I offered them to a handful of friends. And then more friends asked for some, so I made some more. And then my in-laws wanted some too. And then a friend-of-a-friend. Which is how I've ended up making 30+ masks for friends, relations and hangers-on.

Being the kind of people that they are, my friends all offered to reimburse me for my efforts, but I'd seen Unicef running a "make one, give fifty" campaign, encouraging people who made masks to do so in return for donations to Unicef that could then fund masks for healthcare workers in areas of extreme poverty around the world.  Every £5 donation would buy 50 masks. So, hopefully, not only have I provided masks to those near or dear to me, but I have indirectly done so for those I will never see or know.

I've spent weeks not writing this post, as it feels all a bit smug and "la-la, look at me, aren't I philanthropic?" or, to use LittleBear's phrase, it's a bit showy-offy. But, on the other hand, it's what I've spent a lot of my evenings doing, and I have very little else to write about. Also, wearing masks is looking like a good idea all round, so in the spirit of pour encourager les autres, I can assure you that with the right pattern and right equipment, they're quite easy to make.

"Mass" production

And if you can't make them, and live close enough to me that dropping them round or posting them isn't absurd... I could make some for you, in return for a donation to Unicef.


Footnote: for those who care about such things, the masks are multilayer, with the inner layer being a non-woven synthetic fabric and the outer layers being tightly woven cotton. They have a flexible metal nose bridge to improve fit and elastic loops over the ears. The shaped masks come in three sizes, from one that fits LittleBear all the way up to one that fits BigBear, via a middling one for me.

 

Everything and nothing

Writing has become too much of an effort of late. I have too much happening in my head, and not enough brain-effort to be able to distill it into anything coherent. My mood oscillates between rage, depression, anxiety and apathy, and none of those states of mind are conducive to writing measured and well-balanced blog posts. Instead I've been confining myself to ranting on Facebook and WhatsApp, interspersed with posting pictures of my cat. Everyone know the internet is largely for pictures of cats and pornography. I'm only aiming to supply one of those niches.

Shall we all just take it as read that I feel intense loathing and contempt for our government, and in particular for the fool masquerading as a Prime Minister?

His character is, in many respects, that of a highly obnoxious anti-hero. As well as his gluttony, he is also obtuse, lazy, racist, nosy, deceitful, slothful, self-important and conceited. These defects, however, are not recognised by Bunter. In his own mind, he is an exemplary character: handsome, talented and aristocratic; and he dismisses most of those around him as "beasts".

Technically this is a description of the character of 'Billy Bunter' culled from Wikipedia, but it's too apt not to be stolen.

I'm going to make an effort to write the odd thing here that isn't about politics, because otherwise I'll either write nothing, or launch into epic rants about the insanity and idiocy of the donkeys who lead us.

So, here are today's random musings...

At Christmas I started feeding the birds in the garden. Initially we only saw sparrows and pigeons feeding from the new bird feeders. Then the odd blue tit. And now, though we haven't seen everything necessarily on the bird feeders, we have spotted a wren who appears to be nesting in the fuchsia; we stopped to watch and listen to a goldfinch singing its heart out on top of the house; and the patio is scattered with snail shells from the song thrush who keeps popping in to feast on them - pursued today by a somewhat vexed blackbird.

Just those few little feathered visitors have lifted my mood enormously.

Stir crazy

I am increasingly of the opinion that many people are becoming more than a little stir-crazy, and that this is manifesting in anger and intolerance. Or maybe it's just I'm spending more time on the internet, and people on the internet are angry and intolerant. It's a close call. I'm definitely becoming more angry and intolerant, but this may be from excess exposure to other people's rage; or the state of the world; or the gradual degradation of my mental health after 13 weeks trapped at home while watching one of the most catastrophic governments in living memory mishandle everything. Again, a close call.

A case in point for you.

There are a group of people in our village who are choosing to hold "street discos" once every month or so, placing a professional PA system on their front drive and cranking the volume up to "entertain" the neighbourhood. In itself, marginally anti-social, as they inflict loud music on a wide area, without apparent consideration for whether everyone wants to hear their choice of music. Nor indeed any awareness that once said music has travelled half a mile, to call it music is an affront to Euterpe, as the sounds bounce, diffuse and dissipate their way through and round buildings, trees and roads. But, it's only been about once a month, and it does appear to have been a communal decision for their street and a lot of people seem to have been made happy by it. So, while I was only one person who was unhappy, I didn't feel inclined to complain to anyone beyond my nearest and dearest. 

Saturday night was another such night of "entertainment". It started at about 7pm, with the published intent to end at 11pm. A bit late for my liking, on a hot night when I want the windows open, particularly in LittleBear's room. He was left with the choice of a stifling bedroom or being kept awake with loud music. "A bit late for my liking," veered into, "You have got to be kidding me," as the music continued blaring out beyond 11:30pm. I went and checked the village Facebook page, and sure enough it was supposed to finish at 11pm, but all I could see were pages and pages of comments about how much fun everyone was having, so I simply seethed quietly to myself and tried to sleep.

The following day I discovered that I was not alone in having felt vexed by the antisocial volume and end time, and a couple of my friends recommended I have another look at the village Facebook page to see the conversation one of them had got involved in, in which she politely and calmly suggested that maybe finishing earlier would be considerate. 

Oh dear.

It was one of the worst mistakes I have made during lockdown, because I was exposed to the full depths of idiocy which humanity can plumb. Most people limited themselves to knuckle-headed inanities, such as "We all like different things, so you should just put up with what I like," or "The nay-sayers always get their way, it's not fair", not to mention the classic, "You should just chill out." One particular resident really aggravated me though, when he launched a remarkably aggressive post to defend the organisers of these events, using an impressive array of logical fallacies. The more I think about the things he said, the more angry I become, not only at his attitude, but at the level of support that attitude received.

The essential points he made were:

• while holding this event, donations were collected for the local food bank, and £250 was collected for the local mental health support charity
• not only did lots of people enjoy the event but the man in question has evidence that many people supported his views, as demonstrated by the number of "likes" his post acquired.
• those who were complaining about the volume and duration were challenged to answer what they were doing for charity
• anyone who complained was simply a moaner trying to spoil other people's fun by preventing any music being played ever.
• the next event would be held, come what may, and since we'd all had plenty of warning that was good enough.

The first point is literally Machiavellian in its assertion that the end justifies the means. The fact that some good comes of these events is deemed adequate to excuse any distress, inconvenience or illness that they induce. I doubt very much that £250 to a mental health charity comes anywhere close to counteracting the impact on the mental health of the excess noise and sleep deprivation. I'll take myself as a single example. I have attempted to write about my relationship with sound before, but the essence of it is that I find too much external noise emotionally and mentally painful. I cannot function properly. I can't think. I become stressed and anxious and angry. In the case of the street disco, even once the music had finished, I was in such a heightened state of anger and anxiety, I still couldn't sleep properly. I am one person out of many, many hundreds who were forced to listen to four and a half hours of music that was not of their choosing. How much was my mental health worth compared to £250 and some food? How many other people suffered sleep-deprivation, anxiety, or other mental health issues as a result of not only the anti-social hours, but the aggressive attacks on social media? Do the ends really justify the means?

Next we can move on to the more classical logical fallacies exhibited, and here I can prove to my sceptical friend that there is a use for my Latin GCSE...

We can start with the idea that because lots of people approved of the event, and approved of the subsequent post, they were in the right. This is Argumentum ad Populum  - or an appeal to popular assent. This isn't actually a valid argument at all. The fact that many people like something does not demonstrate that that thing is in itself right and proper. And even if we were to consider the holding of street discos to be a matter for democratic assent, 60 "likes" on a Facebook page can hardly be considered a free and fair election. Nor does the fact that many people like something justify causing distress to a minority. When your fun comes at the expense of other people's wellbeing, your "right" to that fun needs to be questioned. Popular assent is not sufficient in itself to justify all actions.

Then we can move on to the Argumentum Ad Misericordiam - an appeal to pity. These street discos are being held for charity, and therefore to complain is virtually the same as stabbing orphaned children yourself. What kind of a monster are you? I'm not sure I need to point out that this is a ridiculous argument.

There's my own personal favourite of Ignorantio Elenchi - an irrelevant conclusion, in this case via the use of a straw man. No attempt is made to address the reasonable requests to finish earlier, or to play the music at a lower volume - instead a totally different proposition is countered. Our aggressive Facebook warrior contends that a complaint about the event is a de facto attempt to stop the entire event ever occurring, which would be quite obviously unfair, unreasonable and an affront to the personal liberties of those who do enjoy it. The request to modify the event to be less anti-social is thus brushed aside by imputing something that was never said. The actual argument is bypassed by railing against something else entirely.

Naturally, no internet argument would be complete without everyone's favourite, Argumentum Ad Hominem - attacking the person. Unless you give to charity, you can't complain. If you do complain, you're just a moaner trying to ruin the "fun", not to mention virtually stealing from charity yourself. You're joyless. You're oppressing the rights of other members of the community by your selfish desire to sleep, or have some peace in your own home. The issue here is you and your unwillingness to allow anyone else to have any fun. You're a snowflake, and represent everything that's wrong with modern society.

I don't think I'll be visiting the village Facebook page again for a while.

Celebrate the moments

Nearly nine weeks.

Nearly nine weeks of being at home with only these four walls, two bears and one cat for company.

Nearly nine weeks of attempting to create some kind of routine and stability for my LittleBear, and even hoping that occasionally there might be moments of education tucked in there somewhere.

Nearly nine weeks of glumly reading the news and discovering what new idiocy a cabinet minister has blurted out, what new lie has been honed, how many people have died.

Nearly nine weeks of trying, and often failing, to work productively from home. Trying to design scientific instruments when my notes, reference documents, old designs and colleagues are all elsewhere. Some of these can be accessed remotely, but two filing cabinets full of annotated diagrams of a twenty-two year career designing and testing instrumentation isn't really compatible with remote access.

It's easy to be dragged down. It's easy for the days to blur into one and time to drift by, each day's tears and tantrums feeling much like the previous day's. It's easy to find that every day has too many tears and too few triumphs.

So today, for one day only, I shall celebrate the triumphs.

I went to work for the morning and made a stupidly complex instrument work. Everything came together; years of experience, understanding and knowledge flowed through my fingers and into the beast in front of me, as tweak by tweak I tuned it up into doing exactly what we'd designed it to do. One of those days that comes around only once or twice a year. Most instruments are considerably more recalcitrant and throw up considerably more problems.

I came home and after lunch with my bears, then coaxed the smaller one into attempting not one, but two pieces of schoolwork. He expressed extreme reluctance to tackle either but then both he confessed to rather liking by the end, and being proud of the outcome. And to cap it all, LittleBear's brand new cricket bat arrived whilst in the middle of this burst of scholastic achievement*.

Armed with the new bat, we spent the rest of the afternoon at the local Recreation Ground, and LittleBear discovered the great joy of a decent bat, and the ability not simply to hit, but to thwack, hoick, loft, welly, and smack the ball to all corners of the field. His strokes straight down the wicket were frankly terrifying and had the bowler ducking for cover.

And now, having gloried in one of the few genuinely positive days I can think of in the last nine weeks, I have ordered a curry for dinner. And I am taking great joy, not in the eating of the curry as it's not here yet, but in the fact I can buy takeaway curry via PayPal and cycle to collect it in an appropriately socially-distant fashion.

There are still moments of good in life.


* The reason LittleBear needed a brand new cricket bat is a story of its own, but involves tears, rage, and a broken cricket bat.

How many hours in the day?

The world (and when I say world, I mean internet) appears to be full of people who are having to find ways to fill their days while in lockdown. Amusing little memes about how many times a day they're cleaning their kitchen, or whimsical ideas for craft projects. Expressions of boredom.

Frankly, and excuse my language, fuck that shit.

Here's how the hours in my day currently get used....

• A minimum of 1 hour per meal, three times a day, preparing, eating and clearing. And yet sometimes an hour isn't enough for three people to eat toast. How is this? That's at least three hours per day just providing meals. 
• Half an hour in the Joe Wicks torture chamber.
• 4.5 hours working from home*
• 4.5 hours homeschooling*
• 1 hour playing football. Or cricket. Or catching. Or some other sporting permutation in the garden with LittleBear.
• 1 hour playing Minecraft (also with LittleBear I hasten to add).
• At least half an hour cleaning up the kitchen in an attempt to avoid a localised outbreak of listeria. Somehow this is necessary on top of clearing up after a meal. Crumbs and sticky patches simply materialise out of the ether.
• At least half an hour on laundry or cleaning or tidying or finding missing objects.**
• Half an hour bike ride after dinner, because otherwise LittleBear isn't tired enough to fall asleep.
• Half an hour bath-time or bedtime reading or tucking LittleBear up with snuggles, or some combination of the above.
• Two hours per evening staring blankly at the goggle-box, or the goggle-phone, or the goggle-laptop. There is generally also wine involved. Sometimes treacle sponge and custard. 
• Half an hour of my own bedtime reading.

This adds up to a daily total of 19 hours, leaving an impressive 5 hours in which to insert all those improving things that I apparently should be doing. Except I haven't included the things I need to do that aren't daily, but still happen - Facetime calls with my family; Zoom meetings with the neighbourhood volunteer network that I'm part of; WhatsApp chats with fellow Mums about what the hell the schoolwork is about this week; making football training videos for my little football team; doing the grocery shopping (prefixed by planning the grocery shopping, which takes almost as long); responding to random administrative emails (frequently football related); attempting to remain in some form of contact with friends and relations; gardening (though we're cultivating more of a "wild" garden this year...); cuddling my precious LittleBear, playing with him, talking to him, reassuring him, cajoling him into brushing his teeth, laughing with him, listening to him.

Oh, and I still need to sleep.



Footnote: Obviously I exaggerate for comic effect. Yes, BigBear is doing some of the above, and no, I am not superwoman, squeezing eleventy-billion hours into one day, it just feels like it.


* Admittedly, just for giggles, I am attempting to do both these things simultaneously, which actually means being a bit shit at both of them. I guess it means I get 4.5 hours a day back for doing other stuff though, doesn't it? That's definitely the way this works.


** No, half an hour a day is not sufficient to keep a three bedroom house, occupied by three humans and one cat 24-hours a day, 7-days a week clean. The house is not clean. But it's not actually a health-hazard yet. Got to set the bar low enough to meet it.

A controversial opinion

Apparently it's VE Day on Friday. The 75th anniversary of VE Day no less. And this is worthy of moving our May Day bank holiday from its traditional slot on a Monday. Why?

I can recall little in the way of celebration 25 years ago, when we passed the 50th anniversary of VE Day. So why is the 75th anniversary suddenly so special?

I can hazard a guess, and it's not one that I think everyone will like.

We are being governed by a right-wing, jingoistic, nationalistic cabal of man-babies who hanker after nanny and Empire. Men who truly, and terrifyingly, believe in British exceptionalism. Men who wish us to all follow them in believing that we are better than those nasty foreigners. Men who fervently want to lead us out of Europe and into the hallowed uplands of Making Britain Great Again. What better way to remind us how great we are, and how exceptional we are, than to ram our Victory in Europe down the population's throat?

This isn't about remembering the war dead -  we have a calm and contemplative Sunday in November for doing that.

This isn't about cherishing peace, or supporting our veterans, or celebrating the ties that bind us to Europe.

This is about the kind of knuckle-dragging "two World Wars and one World Cup" chanting that makes the rest of Europe loathe us so much. This is fuelling nationalism, triumphalism and a tragically misguided believe that we're better than them.

This is about us and them. It's about how we beat them.

This is about manipulating history, distorting the past, and using it to persuade the people that we're somehow special. It is the grotesque lie of British exceptionalism writ large. We are not exceptional. We are no braver or brighter, no more honourable or honest, no more stoic or stalwart, no more courageous, calm or clever than any of our continental neighbours. We are all just people. We have a rich, varied and fascinating history with an expansive literary and artistic heritage. As do other countries. We need to get over ourselves.

If VE Day should mean anything, it should serve to remind us of the ties that bind, of how hard so many nations fought together to bring a lasting peace to Europe. As the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Europe from Nazism dawns, Britain instead sets herself apart, convinced that she is better than the rest of Europe. She is not. She never was, and she never will be. She is just another country.

At a time when that belief in our own innate superiority has seen us refuse to bulk buy PPE with the rest of the EU; fail to initiate a lockdown in a timely manner; fail to test adequately; fail to track infections; fail to protect our front-line workers; and subsequently witness the worst death rates from the pandemic in Europe, now is hardly the time to be beating a drum for ourselves.

It is nothing short of grotesque to persuade the population to "celebrate" Victory in Europe when we are choosing to sever our ties with Europe. What is the message there? Is it that Britain stands alone, always ready to fight the filthy Hun? Is it to not-so-subtly continue to build the comparison of Johnson to Churchill? It is a disgusting display of arrogance and self-delusion at a time when more people have died from COVID-19 than died in the Blitz. Johnson is no Churchill. He has provided only vacuum and vacuity where leadership was needed.

I have never "celebrated" VE Day in the past, and I have no particular desire to do so now. I continue to mourn the fact that we are choosing to leave the Europe that we helped to form from the ashes of the second World War. I will always honour the war dead on Remembrance Day; I will always make sure that my son knows the evils of war and the need to fight for peace; but I will not participate in manufactured national back-slapping, bolstered to foster support for the petty, bigoted Little-Englanders currently leading this country.

Week Five lesson learnt

I have only learnt one thing this week and, as previously, it is a lesson that in my heart of hearts I already knew.

I do not like ironing.

Even five weeks stuck inside the house is not enough to make me crumble and do any ironing. The iron has been out once in that time, and it was to fuse some Hama beads together. The pile of clothes waiting to be ironed still squats, sullen, on a shelf in the bedroom. It grows a little every week, but only a little, as few of my clothes need ironing, especially the ones I wear around the house. Nobody irons their pyjamas anyway do they*?

I have even started disassembling the dining chairs one by one to re-glue the joints and clamp them back together. I would rather learn furniture repairing than iron my own clothes.

I do not think this lesson casts me in the best of lights, but it is what it is.


* This is a joke. I am actually rigorous about getting dressed every morning as though I were going to work. If I didn't I might never actually do any work.
 

Week Four lessons learnt

So apparently I didn't learn anything during week three of lockdown. But on the other hand, we're all alive and fed, so lessons or not, I consider it a success.

Week four on the other hand, despite it only being Thursday is perhaps the pinnacle of my adult life.

A friend posted an amusing meme about the idea of learning things during this peculiar time. I was amused by it, but thought little more of it. Here it is...

Four, yes four, separate friends then commented on this, genuinely wondering if Teapot Lady was me. A fifth friend, entirely independently, messaged me with a copy of this meme to ask if it was me. Closer inspection did reveal a passing resemblance. But, more importantly, it looked quite fun. And I'm nothing if not willing to entertain my friends by making a complete arse out of myself.

(No, I didn't use a bone china teacup. I didn't have faith in not accidentally knocking it over in my exuberance. I may be prepared to make an arse out of myself, but I'm not prepared to break a teacup for you lot.)