The Wall
Merchiston, Edinburgh, 22 June 2020.
Years and Years
There’s a new detail at Detail: having made an index of galleries by region, I’ve now added one of galleries by date, so that I can see more easily what’s missing, and you can see where I’ve been when. There’s a lot of scanning of 1990s photos still to do, and even some revisiting of photos and old galleries from the 2000s.
The Madness
How the virus conquered America.
Brazil faces the worst-case scenario.
Europe’s post-lockdown rules. Telling detail: the UK has had by far the longest lockdown.
Britain has gone completely mad during lockdown.
More madness: We can’t fight covid and Brexit at the same time. But as of midnight last night, we’ll have to.
The UK government’s coronavirus testing statistics are missing most of the current new cases.
Our kids have turned 9 and 13 during lockdown and have been trying to keep up with schoolwork on Microsoft Teams day after day after day, and this short film about lockdown life by Canadian teenager Liv McNeil felt so true that it reduced me to tears.
Les poules rentrent à la maison pour se percher.
You can’t understand the world without learning about empire.
A letter to a granddaughter about Earth’s history.
Ukulele Batman meets his match. Aw, come on!
1 July 2020 · Comment · Events
Coming Up Roses
It was a pretty miserable weekend, so here are some sunnier pictures from the garden this month, with the roses out and the raspberries ripening. I picked some of the latter for dessert last week; might see if there are enough tomorrow to make jam.
Four (Hundred) Years
Happy Brexiversary. How a project to boost prosperity, democracy and national pride destroyed all three.
Light Relief
Villanelle as muppets. David Tennant as thermos flasks.
Papercraft models of vintage PCs. I’m having a go at making the 128k Mac, the first I ever used.
The Corona Carousel
Fighting COVID isn’t a mystery, the West was just dumb. The strength of shithole countries. Mongolia got it right.
Covid-19 symptoms and illness classification. Every symptom we know. How exactly do you catch Covid-19? Thousands who got it in March are still sick. “I’ve been ill for months, but I still don’t know if it is Covid-19.”
How a small Spanish town became one of Europe’s worst Covid-19 hotspots. The Bolivian orchestra stranded in a German castle.
Eleven days in March. The hard facts demolish the UK government’s “herd immunity” strategy.
Now that it’s impossible, living far apart seems like a mistake.
The performing arts risk making the same mistake newspapers did.
Back to Life
When everything kicked off in March, I wondered if I should set up a dead man’s switch to post an explanation of where I’d gone if I hadn’t blogged here for a month (viz: to the Eternal 404 in the Sky). It felt too paranoid an idea to implement, though, so I figured I’d just keep to a schedule of posting every weekend, until… I couldn’t.
Heating Up
It’s been hard to disentangle my thoughts about the week from the events of the country and the wider world, and even harder to get through the work I’m supposed to be doing instead of writing posts here. Trying to keep on top of a full-time job from home, with two school-age kids and a partner also working full-time and all the other constraints and tensions of lockdown, is like trying to juggle the contents of the computer cable drawer while walking calmly across the room. You’re lucky to get a few feet before stepping on a three-pronged plug.