Should I?
[…] classical orchestras are just tribute bands for old music
🤯
Today’s experiment: my Canon M-series camera as webcam…
I’d love to say that I’ve got used to the famine/feast aspect of self-employed life.
But it would be a lie.
”Before Ramsbury, I was a nowhere man, living, as my parents did before me, in a multitude of places without really putting down roots in any one. Ramsbury made me a somewhere person.”
— Peter Marren, The Consolation of Nature
This is true of myself and Shoreham Beach.
Why I do beach cleans — in just three photos…
The new “Apple Silicon" MacBooks looks very tempting as a replacement for my elderly MacBook Pro — but perhaps I should hang on until next year.
It might not be all Zoom, all the time, by next summer…
The vaccine news is, at least, promising. It does give us a glimpse of a future where the virus is much, much less of a threat, and that makes me wonder: will we see a struggle between those who want to embrace a new normal, and those who want to force us back into the old ways?
There’s no doubt lockdowns are hard; that unfamiliar feeling of liberties removed, of freedoms curtailed. But last time, it helped bind communities and families.
Will this one do the same?
Just successfully sourced my coffee filters from a local business rather than going reflexively to Amazon.
Shell.
Met this chap on our beach walk today. Seemed nice enough, but not very talkative.
Today’s news about the US presidential election gives me a little hope for the first time since 2016’s Brexit vote that being of fundamentally decent character still might matter.
I’m not willing to inflate the balloon of hope too much just yet. But a little hope is nice.
It’s not exactly puzzling why we chose to live here, is it?
There’s something utterly magical to me about beaches in the off season, when it’s just us die hards out there…
Birthday beach walk with my daughters.
I’ve slipped out of the habit of using my 9.7 iPad Pro, and that means I’d forgotten what a lovely size of device this is for reading and email. It’s probably due an upgrade when the new iPad Pros hit next year.
Maybe I’ll even be using it when travelling again by then.
This is strangely delightful in the twilight world of an uncertain presidential result: Neon Trump comes to Hackney
(It’s guerrilla art)
Hospital visit concluded. My youngest’s head wound cleaned and glued together. And I didn’t have to stoop to bribing her to be brave. She managed that all by herself.
I’m so proud of the courage and self-possession she has as a five year old. Long may it last.
Have to say - I wasn’t expecting to be spending time in A&E on the first day of lockdown.
So, lockdown it is, from tonight. I’m very lucky to be living very near to these places. It’s going to be much easier for us than so many others.
My family continue to astonish me. I’m a lucky man to have these people in difficult times.
Things that have become a routine part of my life since the first lockdown began: moving around Gigabytes of video recordings every week.
Sometimes you have to get something out of your head before you can concentrate on the other things you need to do.
It’s out of my head, so it’s time to get editing training videos.
Thoughts in the face of Lockdown 2.0
On Friday, I drove my mother-in-law home, and passed through many towns on the journey. We were often caught in traffic jams, and sometimes I ended up idling outside pubs. Every time, I saw the same thing: a handful of tables in use, in a largely empty pub. And that’s on a Friday night, one of the key trading days of the week for licensed premises.
And now we’re going back into lockdown. Those pubs will be essentially without income for a month, at the very least.
How many will survive it?
The pub cull
The small town I live in has already lost at least two pubs to the pandemic, with others looking precarious. What will be left by the time we have the pandemic under control? How many of the town’s small retailers will survive another month without income?
When the virus is under control — finally — I want to go out for a drink with my friends. I want to catch a show at the local arts centre. But will that be denied to us, because we only cared about preserving lives, not the quality of them?
It is, it must be, possible to give thought to both.
Trapped in reaction
It feels like we’re trapped, the UK at least, in reactive mode — responding to short-term shifts in viral prevalence, without any long-term vision of how we survive it, and what we want left afterwards. Oh, there’s talk of the “science cavalry” arriving — but both the timelines and the effectiveness of any vaccines or treatments are very much an unknown quantity.
Are we really prepared to emerge from this at some unknown future point with our high streets devastated, our pubs shut and our theatres and community centres gone? There’s two ways that this virus ends lives: by taking lives, and by taking away what makes life worth living.
Our greatest test in this time, is to work as hard as we can to save every life we can, but while still acting to preserve what feels valuable to us in our lives. Right now — in the UK, at least — it feels like we’re failing on both sides.
Viral Polarisation
And that, in turn, feels like another expression of the polarisation in our society. You either have to be pro-lockdown, or anti it. You can’t be somewhat pro-lockdown, but concerned that we’re not paying enough attention to ameliorating its social, economic and (most vitally) health consequences.
That takes a nuance that our politicians seem incapable of, and certainly the loudest voices online have no tolerance for. Join the tribe. Hold the view. Punish the transgressors.
A future of shouting at one another over social media, without any ameliorating social contact in a pub, a theatre or a community space seems bleak to me. But how do we avoid it? How do we use digital tools to help preserve the places that matter, connect to each other in meaningful ways, and both preserve both life and quality of life into the future?
The next steps
This is not going to be all over by Christmas. It’s probably not going to be all over by Christmas 2021. It’s time we accepted that, abandoned a hope of the science miracle that will make the problem go away, and start building for a more realistic future which co-exists with the virus, but isn’t dominated by it.
It’s going to be challenging. But it needs to be done.
How’s the UK Covid app doing? Oh:
“The “world-beating” NHS Covid app, downloaded by 19 million people, has systematically failed to send alerts telling people to self-isolate after they came into contact with infected people.”
🤦🏼♂️