PSA: graphene

I would like to say that the world is full of idiots, except apparently calling people idiots is not a good way of winning an argument. So, instead, I shall assume the world is full of people who are a little bit scared of science. People who've never had reasons to know about or understand nanotechnology. People who aren't necessarily educated in the realms of materials science or chemistry. And that's OK. Nobody is an expert at everything. But... (and it's a BIG but)... if you're not educated in these areas, and you don't understand, and something sounds big and scary and weird... maybe the thing to do is to find a reputable source of information and try and educate yourself?

That in itself appears to be a challenge. Reputable source of information. Reputable source of information. Not someone with a diploma in aromatherapy. Not someone whose grandma felt a bit funny after a flu jab one time. Not someone who wants to explain to you how the moon landings were faked. Not someone who writes a blog you quite like... oh... hang on... Seriously though, I could be anyone. I happen to be a Fellow of the Institute of Physics whose professional area of expertise is in chemical analysis, with a focus on material structure. But I could just be saying that. 

So... you probably shouldn't just believe me... you should probably follow some of my references if you really want to know whether I'm right. And I have deliberately chosen not to reference Wikipedia. 

Today's little piece of science will address one of the more bonkers theories I've read about the covid vaccines. The claim goes something like this: the vaccines contain graphene, and once the graphene is in your bloodstream, it self-assembles into a nano-bot that can form a brain-computer-interface and thus control/intercept your thoughts. 

Graphene eh? Nano-bots? Sounds pretty scary doesn't it? 

Would you like to make some graphene? I bet you can do it(1). Grab yourself a pencil, and some sellotape. Start with one piece of sellotape and press the sticky side against the "lead" of the pencil. Peel it off. You should have a grey smudge on your sellotape. That's graphite. Not quite graphene yet, but you're getting there. Now you need to repeatedly fold the sellotape in on itself and peel it apart again. Ten to twenty times should do it. Apparently Scotch tape works particularly well for this, as the peeling apart stage is easier. Any low-tack tape will do though. I'm not being paid to advertise. 

Each time you stick and peel, the smudge of graphite is pulled apart a little bit more. The graphite becomes thinner and thinner until eventually you'll have fragments of graphene. Because graphene is simply graphite in a single, one-atom-thick or "monatomic", layer. 

But what is graphite? And is a monatomic layer of it scary? 

Graphite is carbon. That's it. Just carbon. Carbon arranged in a nice, neat lattice. Each atom one member of a hexagonal ring, and many rings together forming a stable sheet (2).

So, there we are. We now know what graphene is - one layer of graphite. And we know what graphite is - a hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms. I don't even need to address whether covid vaccines do or don't contain graphene. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Instead we're going to think, just a little bit, about whether little hexagons of carbon atoms are going to find each other, assemble themselves, and create a robot, nano or otherwise. I'm hoping that this thinking isn't going to take us too long. I'm hoping that it will be but a fleeting thought that will allow us to realise that the chances of fragments of carbon assembling themselves into anything is about as likely as your IKEA Billy bookcase assembling itself, or your pencil becoming self-aware and writing down its Christmas wishlist.

So, there we are. Hopefully one stupid covid vaccine myth debunked. There are no self-assembly graphene nano-bots in your blood-stream controlling your thoughts. 

(1) https://physicsworld.com/a/how-to-make-graphene/

(2) Fig 1 in https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2019/cp/c8cp07592a  

What I've learnt in Week 4,792 of lockdown

Encroaching insanity, and provoked by a friend asking, "But what are you doing for you?" I have decided it's time to do more than sit on the sofa drinking wine and rotting my brain with television every evening. To which end, I have dug out some books on sewing that I acquired some time ago, and have decided to make myself a skirt. Being the kind of sucker for punishment that I am, rather than buying a regular paper pattern, all nicely marked up, I am attempting to follow instructions from a book. This is not to say that the book doesn't have a pattern in it, rather that it has too many patterns on not enough pieces of paper. In fact, it has the patterns for 24 different skirts, in something like ten sizes each, spread across a paltry 3 sheets of paper. 

Perhaps some of you will be familiar with the technique that Jane Austen and Charles Darwin both used of rotating the page when they reached the end and writing again at 90 degrees to their original screed. The result was, unsurprisingly, somewhat confusing to the casual reader. Well, I think it would be fair to say that 240 patterns on three sheets of paper is... erm... challenging.

What are all these lines for?

After several evenings I did finally manage to render this mysterious collection of coloured lines into a set of paper pattern pieces. Having conquered the mighty challenge of cutting the paper pattern, I moved onto the slightly easier territory of cutting the fabric, and was momentarily lulled into thinking I knew what I was doing. And then I began to doubt whether, despite my careful and repeated measurements, the finished object was going to comfortably encircle my comfortable girth. So during the cutting phase I actually made the lining pieces one size larger and test fitted them. And then reduced them back to the original measured size, as I was just being paranoid. 

Filled with a warm glow of satisfaction at having a neat pile of fabric all cut and ready to go, I returned to the first set of instructions that actually pertained to sewing anything. And I discovered that I don't know what understitching a seam means. And I don't own an invisible zipper foot. I don't even own a visible zipper foot, let alone an invisible one. I was beginning to regret that in a book of patterns that starts with easiest and works towards hardest I had not opted to start at the beginning but had leapt in half way through. 

Apparently neither of these are zipper feet

. 

I managed the darts in the lining. I managed to join the three sections of lining together. I even managed to join two of the pieces of outer fabric together. And then I reached the dizzying heights of Step 4, sewing the side seams. One sentence in, and I have to take a diversion to page 158, to discover how to insert pocket bags. Half-way through the instructions on inserting pocket bags, I must divert to page 139 to learn what it means to understitch a seam. At which point I have to give in and scour the entire book to try and work out what is meant by the "facing fabric" in a seam. Having pored over these instructions, and indeed made notes to myself, I retreat to the kitchen to press open the scant handful of seams that I have sewn so far. But it is late, and I am tired, and I fail to notice the setting on the iron when I start to press open the darts on the lining. It turns out that polyester lining fabric does not react well to a hot iron.

A disappointing outcome to an evening's work

So my first evening of actual sewing ended in unpicking a seam, cutting a new piece of lining, and pinning and tacking it in place. I decided at this point that I could not be trusted to do anything involving machinery. So I returned to the sofa with a glass of wine and some mind-rotting television. It's a good thing I'm making a summer skirt, as it might take another 6 months to finish.

Still here

Hello there! Remember me? I used to blog here. Sometimes I wrote several times a week. I'm not sure I remember that to be honest. I'm not sure I remember the feeling of having the energy to write that often, or of having enough to say. I barely have enough to say to maintain a conversation with BigBear, let alone write something that might even raise a wry smile with the rest of you. We all know how it goes now, you talk to a friend on Zoom and try as you might, you just end up bleating about boredom, stress, homeschooling, whose spouse does the most/least around the house, government ineptitude, vaccinations or whichever other permutation of lockdown happens to be at the forefront of your mind. It's not as though we've all got lots of interesting films, concerts, holidays or adventures to tell each other about, is it?

So, to save time, here's a Generic Blog Post that you can pop in and read whenever you're wondering what the Bear Family is up to.

BigBear is coding, with the exact location of where he is currently to be found in the house being determined from a complex algorithm based upon the temperature of his feet, the angle of the sun through the windows, the noise from the homeschooling department, and how persistently IdiotCat is pestering him.

LittleBear is squirming in his chair, running the nails of his left hand back and forth across the fabric of the seat to make a rythmic rasping noise as he listens to a message from his class teacher. A rasp that begins to file through the fabric of your mind after approximately five and a quarter seconds. It's History first thing, to get the pain out of the way early in the day, and the entire lesson is punctuated by complaints of "I can't do this, it's too hard." Particularly as it involves drawing a picture. Why? Why must they have to draw so many pictures? LittleBear is not a child who wishes to express himself through the medium of narrative collage. After forty-seven hours on the history picture, it turns out there's another task. By this point, even I'm not sure I can face more History. It involves expressing an opinion. Asking LittleBear his opinion on anything other than football or Minecraft is akin to asking a cactus whether it wants porridge for breakfast. I think the cactus would answer quicker. LittleBear certainly doesn't have, or wish to be asked to express, opinions on the religious beliefs of Vikings and the impact these had on their life choices.

Having completed his History, and had an interstitial penalty shoot-out with Mummy, he moves on to Maths, as a relaxing treat. LittleBear is genuinely very good at Maths. And Maths is LittleBear's favourite subject. Except when his teacher asks him what his favourite work from last week is, and suddenly it's RE. The RE that he has been known to ask why they study. The RE that caused him to sob and wail about the injustices of life, not to mention the iniquities of being asked to draw a picture. (Again, why? Why always the pictures?) The Maths however, will be awesome, and LittleBear is amazing, and brilliant, and Mummy must come and see how brilliant he is. Until he makes a mistake, and then he's an idiot, and the stupidest child in the world, and he's never doing another Maths question ever again, and he's going back to bed. It's a real rollercoaster in Maths lessons round here.

Having recovered from the Maths, and forgotten that the History even happened, and had another penalty shoot-out with Mummy, it's lunch-time. A chance to wonder which permutation of bread and cheese we're having today. Or to quote one of my colleagues, "I'm bored of bread and cheese, I think I'll have pizza today..."

English after lunch. Though only after some more penalties. It's important LittleBear keeps proving his superiority over his mother. LittleBear starts the English lesson video, but the volume on this particular video is strangely loud, and Mummy can't really think straight when someone's yelling about fronted adverbials. And then LittleBear starts bleating because he's going to have to write an entire paragraph. The horror. Mummy goes to assist, but the desk is a bomb-site with pens and paper everywhere after the History-or-is-it-Art lesson. Vexed by noise, Mummy tries to clear up, but the colouring pens fall down the back of the desk. So Mummy yells at the pens. And at the computer, which is shouting back about prepositional clauses, and at LittleBear who is sitting looking bewildered. Then the books that were teetering in a heap, biggest book on top, slump sideways across the desk, knocking the pen pot over and Mummy picks up the biggest book and hurls it on the floor in a rage.

Then LittleBear is crying, and Mummy is crying and someone is still banging on about time connectives and powerful adjectives. Eventually English is paused, and Mummy and LittleBear are cuddling in a chair, and we're all sorry, and we eat chocolate together until we feel better. It's never too early to teach a child that eating chocolate is a useful emotional crutch is it?

Eventually, English is resumed at a lower volume, and LittleBear only requires "someone in your household" to discuss things with three times in an eleven minute video. And then another twenty-five minutes of help planning before he can tackle the forty minutes of writing it takes him to complete the twenty minute task. 

But in that forty minutes, only interrupted twice by complaints of, "my hand is too tired to write," and a few penalties to limber up again, Mummy has a chance to discover that she made a mistake in her own work right back at the start of the History lesson, and that all the subsequent work done today is based on one error and will therefore have to be thrown away. Because Mummy is also working from home, and it's going swimmingly. Just as Mummy begins to get into the zone of sorting out the design monstrosity she's unleashed, the English is finished, the school day is over and it's time to play with LittleBear.

Which I do. Because I love him to the moon and back, and I'm a shit teacher, but I can at least try not to also be a shit mother once school is over for the day. I don't always succeed, but at least I'm trying, which is all any of us can ever really say. 

And even though most of the above is mostly true, it's not always all of that all of the time. In fact, compared to many, LittleBear is an angel, and works hard, and tries his best. And the school have done an outstanding job of providing video lessons and it is infinitely easier to get LittleBear to do the work when he has to submit it to his teacher and there's the tantalising prospect of a star in return, compared to the soul-destroying trudge last year of working and working and the only people who saw the work were his parents. And BigBear takes charge of French and Art, and anything else we decide he'll enjoy, and he sorts out the day's Variation On Bread And Cheese. And he gets his share of penalty shoot-outs as well. So we're doing as well as anyone. But I don't have anything else to write about.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Week Two lessons learnt

I'm a bit late in getting round to summarising last week, because it turns out that this working from home, running a household, keeping a child entertained lark takes up about as much energy as I have available every day, and by the time I've crawled through the day to LittleBear's bedtime, I tend to sink, slack-jawed and blank-eyed, onto the sofa, fit for little more than posting pictures of my cat to Facebook.

Fortunately, lesson one this week has been to discover how enduringly popular pictures of cats are on the internet. IdiotCat is developing his own fan club now that I have adopted a habit of posting pictures of Therapeutic Cat Of The Day to my own Facebook feed. I feel as though he and I are adding our tiny droplet to the sum of human happiness. I may not be able to do much, but at least my cat can cheer people up.

Lesson two has been that I have never been particularly disciplined about completing a weekly grocery shop in the past. I have always bought approximately the right stuff, and winged it, safe in the knowledge that I can always pop to the shop in my lunch hour to collect this'n'that, or cycle down to the shop in the evening for extra something or other. Now that I am attempting to minimise trips to the shops, I am having to expend considerably more brainpower on actual planning than I am accustomed to. This will probably be good for me.

Lesson three is the discovery that received wisdom about exercise is correct - it may hurt for the first few days, but if you keep going it gets easier. Who'd have thought the entire world was right on that one? Now that we're on to the start of our third week of Joe Wicks, I'm no longer suffering crippling quadricep pain and am able to walk up and down stairs without wincing. This will probably be good for me.

Lesson four is a lesson of two parts. Firstly, it turns out that ten minutes kneading bread dough is a pretty hefty workout for the arms, especially when one hasn't yet overcome the initial pain of Joe Wicks. Secondly, there is a huge satisfaction in making bread by hand, made even greater by a small boy who declares that he prefers it to supermarket bread. This may be a double-edged sword as, though making and enjoying home made bread is probably good for me, having extra jobs may not be. Next step - teach LittleBear to make bread on his own.

Lesson five is that LittleBear finds large tasks very daunting, but with the right gentle encouragement and support he can achieve sizeable pieces of work and enjoy them. The need to complete my own work has meant that I wasn't realistically able to accept "I can't" as an answer to the suggestion he start a writing task set by his school. Instead I put aside some time each day to chat about it, and help write a plan until he felt able to put pen to paper. Had I not had to work, I might have taken the easier path of saying it didn't matter, and that staying happy and healthy mattered more than doing a particular piece of work. Instead he, and I, discovered together that he can do more than he believes, and he finished the week proud of what he achieved. This will probably be good for both of us.

Lesson six is that technology is what will keep me sane. On Tuesday I had my first "Zoom" Pilates lesson. I've been going to the same Pilates class since 1998, when internet connections were still dial-up and the Nokia 6110 was the height of mobile telephone sophistication. The ability to have the same lesson, with the instructor and friends who have been with me through marriage, divorce, re-marriage, motherhood, depression and more, but in the comfort of my own home, was a chink of normality in an otherwise upside-down world. This will probably be good for me.

It would be an exaggeration to say that lockdown is fun, but in the circumstances, it's currently going better than I imagined it would. And while my exhaustion levels are ensuring that there is as much chance of me doing something "improving" like learning a language or mastering macramé as there is of me becoming an astronaut, I am learning something. I am learning things about myself, and my LittleBear, that should stand me in good stead as we travel through lockdown, and emerge one day on the other side. I am finding that I can live in the moment, particularly when there is little choice. I am not exactly feeling Pollyanna-ish about all of this, but I am feeling better able to cope than I was a week ago. And I've learnt the importance of cute cat pictures.

Week One lessons learnt

I'm 90% certain that more or less everyone who writes a blog in the UK will be writing something along these lines, having completed their first week of working from home, or children being off school, or both simultaneously. And why should I miss this particular bandwagon? Even if it only occupies thirty people for 3 minutes each, that's another 90 life-minutes occupied out of a potential several months for all 65 million of us. Let's not think about how many life-minutes that is*.

Along with the rest of you, I have now been at home for a week. I haven't been to the shops; I haven't been to the library; I haven't been to work; I haven't run a football training session, or taken my team to a match, or watched a match. I have seen one friend, from the end of her garden path after I deposited groceries outside her house.

So, what are my thoughts at the end of the week?

I must always wear a sports bra when attempting "PE with Joe". This has been the most memorable lesson, and the one that I have learnt from the quickest. This may not be quite so important to other sections of society.

I am immensely fortunate to have a LittleBear who enjoys reading, and who is currently believing wholeheartedly in the continuation of the "school day", even if some of our lessons are watching old David Attenborough programs or completing elements of a 30-day Lego challenge. Having witnessed other people's struggles on social media, the fact that I have got the bulk of a four-and-a-half-hour working day completed every day is nothing short of a miracle.

I am bored of providing three meals a day for three people. I usually get bored with one meal; two is pushing it and three is just deeply tedious.

I wish that the entire family had had radical haircuts before social distancing and isolation kicked in. I already have longer hair than I want, and two somewhat shaggy bears. Soon we will be facing the prospect of Mummy-cuts, which is not something any self-respecting bear needs.

I have rediscovered anxiety. This is probably the least surprising discovery, as I suspect there are a great many people who have little prior experience of anxiety who are now discovering what us regular anxiety-sufferers have been living with for years. The unexpected tears. The panic induced by a total lack of control of one's situtation, creating a life that oscillates between frenzied, yet pointless, activity and paralysing apathy. The obsessive thinking, the sleeplessness, the tightness in the chest that makes you feel you'll never take a deep breath again, the sickness in the pit of the stomach.

In the space of a week I have discovered, and must work to remember, that the highs and lows can come in quick and bewildering succession. On Friday I had a gentle and warm sense that we were OK. We were warm, and fed, and together. We had not simply survived but even managed to enjoy some of our week of working and learning at home. On Sunday I spent much of the day desperately trying not to cry in front of my LittleBear as I looked too far ahead and felt daunted, overwhelmed and frankly terrified at the prospect of this continuing not for days, or weeks, but for months.

I have discovered the enormous blessing that modern technology brings to our lives. I have had video calls with my mother, brother, nephew and in-laws as well as with my colleagues. LittleBear has managed video chats with three of his friends. We have also managed to sit round two dining tables, me and LittleBear here, and Tigger and BoyTigger in The North, playing a board game**. We enjoyed it so much, we played two games, with a pause for a biscuit at half time. It was the simple pleasure of playing a game with friends, with inconsequential chatter, and no health risk. We are an incredibly blessed generation to have that option open to us.

I have decided that routine is important, as it prevents me and my mind spinning wildly out of control. It also provides my anxious and confused LittleBear with some stability and certainty. I have decided to extend this, as much as is reasonable, to the weekend. And we have decided that our new routine weekends will involve making a cake, and having a roast dinner. This second ensures that multiple meals are dealt with in the form of the roast itself, the soup made from the stock and a pie. Because we need pie. The National Flour Shortage may shortly create a Local Pie Crisis however. Ditto a Local Cake Crisis. Before that occurs, we did produce a Battenberg, which is the ultimate Bear Mood Enhancer.

Battenberg makes Happy Bears

And finally laundry. Laundry never ends. Laundry is no respecter of mood. Laundry ignores your anxiety. Laundry does not care about social distance.

* I couldn't help myself. For every month we spend cooped up, assuming we only have to concern ourselves with remaining occupied while we're awake, and assuming we're asleep for eight hours a day and that there are 65 million people in the UK, we have between us 1,934,400,000,000 minutes to occupy. I'm not going to be making much of a dent in it, am I?

** Not technically a board game, as there was no board involved. A card-based strategy game called Dominion. Usually this game dominates our joint summer holidays in the Lake District. It is unusual in having no random feature to it, so unlike Scrabble or cards, we can play the same game simultaneously in two locations.

Old-school engineering

A moment of levity for you.

Unlike many of my friends, I am coming to the sobering realisation that I am not key to anything. I don't work in the probation service, the armed forces, the NHS, a school, the food-supply chain or any element of critical national infrastructure. I'm pretty much useless in fact. Unless you really need to know the composition of gas trapped in the top of a jar of marmalade that's been in the cupboard for seventeen years because it turns out your family don't eat marmalade. Then I might be able to help.

I do, however, work in a small firm occupied largely by men from a previous era of British engineering. An era when going to the pub for a pie and a pint on a Friday was a perfectly normal thing to do. And going back to work after that pint was also perfectly normal.

In a move that is perhaps more representative of my company than anything I have ever seen, the Engineering Manager has brought a vat of chilli to work and the Managing Director has provided bottles of beer*. Nothing will stand between British engineering and its Friday lunchtime "pie" and a pint**.

Keep calm and carry on social-distancing.


* The company handbook states that it is strictly forbidden to bring intoxicating liquor onto the premises without permission of 'The Company'. Fortunately, the Managing Director embodies 'The Company' and is giving permission.

** It is impractical to re-heat any pastry-based object in the work microwave, so we have flexed on the definition of "pie". We take pie seriously here, and prefer no-pie to disappointing-pastry-pie.

Ahead of my time

A little over twenty years ago, BrotherBear gave me a book. Though I've only read it once, it has stayed with me, as has the memory of my own reaction to it. It was called "Into the Forest" and was written by Jean Hegland. It was a post-apocalyptic novel with two sisters attempting to fend for themselves after the total breakdown of society and technology. They lived in a rural area of the US and were accustomed to their family growing their own fruit and vegetables and bottling some at the end of the summer. But then, as food became more and more scarce, and they lacked the seeds or plants to grow everything they needed, they even resorted to making acorn flour to bake bread from.

It was this that tipped me over the edge, and thus it was that I sat sobbing to Piglet that I was going to die because I didn't even know how to turn acorns into flour, and I have no usable survival skills whatsoever. Being a very understanding Piglet, she humoured me in this total meltdown, and we hatched a Cunning Plan.

Our Cunning Plan hinged upon the fact that at that time friend Tigger's parents lived in a rural(ish) area, in a very large house, with very large grounds, and they grew lots of things, and Tigger's mother was one of those immensely competent women who knew how to pickle things, and made her own mayonnaise. So we decided that when the apocalypse came, we'd retreat to Tigger's parents' house and they'd already know how to preserve fruits, and we could work out how to make acorn flour.

And now here we are, more than twenty years later. There's no flour in the shops and I still don't know how to make flour out of acorns. And Tigger's parents have retired, and moved to a smaller and more manageable home. They might not even want me, BigBear, LittleBear, four Piglets, four Tiggers, and their other three children and families to descend upon them. Besides which, that probably wouldn't count as social distancing.

All my deranged plans have fallen apart. Why oh why didn't I learn to make acorn flour in the twenty years I had available to me??

Footnote: this is a joke. I am not worried that I am going to need to make flour out of acorns. Let's be calm and stop buying All The Food.

Everyone can disagree with me

Of course I'm writing a post about Covid-19, you all knew I would didn't you? But this isn't so much about the virus itself, as about that which is swirling around the virus.

It can hardly have escaped your notice that I am not the greatest cheerleader for the Tories, or indeed for the self-interested manoeuverings of most of our elected politicians. I am usually the first to leap to attack incompetence, venality or stupidity. However, and it surprises me to say this, I am becoming increasingly angry with the level of bitching and carping about the government response that I'm seeing on old-fashioned media, and social-media. What purpose does it serve to stoke fear? Whose interests are protected by spreading mis-information? Who are you helping by claiming to know better? There are people who I like and generally respect who I now feel are doing the job of the Daily Mail - spreading fear, distrust and doubt, fanning the flames of panic buying and selfishness.

I am as sick of comment pieces that start, "I am an epidemiologist and I think..." as I am of comment pieces that start, "I am not an epidemiologist, but..." There are as many opinions as there are arseholes in this country at the moment, and very few of them are helpful.

No, our government is not perfect.

No, they don't know what they are doing.

Nobody does.

Not me.

Not you.

This is new, this is scary, but however unpalatable you may find it, the government is trying to do the best that it can. You may or may not believe that its choices are the best, but you do not know any more than I do. The one thing that does seem to be the case is that the government is basing its plans on scientific evidence and modelling. I am heartily in favour of evidence and science.

Is our government making the same decisions as every other government? No, not exactly the same decisions, but the broad thrust remains the same, no matter the strategy used. And there will be no way of knowing which strategy is most effective until a long way down the line. Declaring that it's "nonsense" or "obvious" or "stupid" on social media is just... arrogant, futile, thoughtless and dangerous. There is enough anxiety, enough fear, enough misunderstanding.

To return to my old hobbyhorse of Brexit for a moment... a great many Leave-supporters made a habit of hurling accusations at Remain-voters that we just needed to get behind the plan and it would all be fine, it was our negativity about the outcome that was dragging the plan down. To my mind, that was arrant nonsense - my opinion on Brexit was clearly never going to have an impact on the negotiating stance of the US in trade talks, or the willingness of Nissan to make cars in Sunderland. This situation however, is quite different. Every time you talk down the government; every time you say it's making the wrong decisions; every time you say you know better, you contribute to undermining the possibility that people will follow government instructions. You contribute to fear, to panic-buying, to social unrest. You are society. You make the world around you. No matter what plan the government opts for, it will only work if they can take the people with them. Take you with them. Take the people who listen to you with them.

The modelling that our government is basing its advice on is available from Imperial College and makes genuinely interesting, and sobering, reading.

Among the many, many interesting statistics and forecasts in that model was the fact that it assumes only 70% of people will follow the instructions. Be that 70%. Encourage others to be that 70%. The smaller the percentage uptake of advice to isolate and distance, the more people die.

There is no simple solution.

There is no path through this that does not cause social disruption.

Sadly, there is no path that does not lead to people dying.

But there are paths that don't lead to the breakdown of the fabric of society. And I hope and believe that there are paths that lead to us being able to minimise the number of deaths. And that isn't just deaths from Covid-19. We need the health service to function to serve all those who are ill with everything other than Covid-19. We need businesses to stay afloat so we are not forced into another decade of austerity, because austerity kills - not as fast or as demonstrably as a virus does, but it still kills.

So wash your hands; distance yourself from your fellow citizens; isolate if you are vulnerable; isolate if you develop symptoms; isolate if someone in your household develops symptoms.

But don't insist that you know best about when or whether schools should close. The knock-on effects of closing schools in terms of both viral spread, impact on key-workers and economic-induced hardship further down the line may be worse than the effect of keeping schools open. Or it may not be. Nobody knows. Not me. Not you.

Don't insist that everyone should stop going to work. Those who can work from home should do so, but no companies are being told to close (as of government advice on 18th March) so don't bully or shame your friends into thinking they should stay away from work if the nature of their work isn't compatible with working from home, and they can maintain sensible precautions at work*. A functioning economy is necessary for the health and wellbeing of the people of this country after this outbreak. Insisting that everything must stop only breeds fear, and panic, and risks further social breakdown and hardship.

I am not, as I said, a cheerleader for the government. But I don't believe, however much I loathe them, that the Tories want us to die.

For once in our lives, we are in positions of power. For once, our actions are going to dictate how the situation unfolds. It is within us to help our fellow man. You may get sick; your loved ones may get sick but most of us will weather that with few problems. It is our duty to protect those who can't weather this virus. It is our duty to support every measure put in place to limit the risks to the vulnerable, and if that means supporting the government in word and deed, then that's what we need to do.

I can still think Brexit is a shit idea though.


* I will hold myself up as an example here. We currently have 7 people at work. We have 3 people self-isolating and 2 people working from home. Each of us at work is in a separate office. When we use communal areas, we all wash our hands with soap and water before and after entering the area. We wear single-use gloves when handling the scientific equipment that we make. No, mass-spectrometers probably don't count as critical national infrastructure at the moment, but if the company folds, it would never re-form and that would have surprisingly wide-ranging knock-on effects on R&D in this country, as well as putting twelve people out of work. We are following government advice, and if that advice changes, our actions will change.