100

We are told today that it is 100 days since the start of lockdown, when we were told that we should stay at home unless we were shopping for essential supplies, seeking medical assistance, or getting one form of exercise per day. We've moved a long way since then, albeit through some pretty painful times along the way. Gradually lockdown is easing with the opening up of some shops and other services, the ability to go out and to meet people, schools opening on a limited basis. More is to come with pubs and restaurants opening soon, but I think we could well have some more challenges as the changes take effect (look what is happening in the US with either not being socially distant or trying to do too much too soon).

Clean

A something of a post birthday treat, we now have clean, trimmed, and fresh-smelling dogs. How long the fragrance will last remains to be seen (especially as the weather is a bit miserable at the moment), but they certainly look smart, and seem to have enjoyed their trip to the parlour.

13

Thirteen photos (out of many hundreds I could have chosen) of a very special dog to mark a thirteenth birthday.

Comic

Nicky and I went out today, mostly as a need for some normality. After a week of glorious sunny weather, it rained, so we didn't go far, just for a wander along Rochester High Street. By the time we got there the rain had stopped, but I think that the poor weather, maybe along with the fact that actually not all that much was open, meant that it was fairly quiet. We had some takeaway lunch from Nucleus, and a meander and a look in a few shops. Nicky was pleased to see that Capture the Castle was back open, and strangely we ended up going in to a Comic shop down the other end of the High Street. I think we were drawn in by some entertaining backpacks they had in the window, but then we ended up chatting with the owners for ages, who turned out to be kindred spirits (love of the US, Disney, BTTF ...).

Yemen

Lead story on tonight's news.

Latest estimate - 1 million Covid cases in Yemen.

Latest estimate in a country ravaged by war where the infrastructure has been bombed and the people are already on their knees - mortality rate 25%.

(Official death toll as included in statistical reporting - presumably due again to lack of infrastructure - less than 300.)

Liverpool

Champions! And without kicking a ball. Liverpool have crossed the line thanks to Chelsea beating Man City, and they set a new record of securing the title with seven games still to play. Bizarrely, the earliest point in the season at which to win the title, but on the latest ever date - June 25th - the season should have been over weeks ago.

What a wait it's been for one of the biggest clubs in the world - 30 years between titles. Last time they won it, before it was even the Premier League, Kenny Dalglish was the manager, Alan Hansen lifted the trophy, and the squad was packed with legends from my childhood - Grobelaar, Barnes, Molby, Beardsley, Aldridge, Rush.

There's no question that Liverpool are a special club. It's hard to say exactly why, but they just are. Perhaps it's the loyalty of the supporters and the famous Kop. Perhaps it's the desperate sadness and tragedies they've been through as a club, and how they've shown great loyalty to each other trough the dark times. Perhaps it's the tingling feeling you get when you hear several thousand singing 'You'll Never Walk Alone' at the top of their lungs. Then again, maybe it's an age thing. When I was growing up, Liverpool were it. In the period from 1982 to 1990, Liverpool won the First Division six times and were runners up the other three. Now that they've won it again for the first time, and by a huge margin (and somehow, irrespective of club loyalties, I couldn't be happier for them) I wonder what this group can go on and achieve?

Freak

So, having mentioned that Freakonomics was one of the books that I'd read, but 'before records began', and having it as one of the '100 books' poster seemed like an excellent excuse to get it off the shelf and read it again. It's one of those books that once started can't be put down, and combined with one or two breaks from my desk in the sunny garden, I found that it came and went in a day. Great stuff, and still brilliant reading about the reasons for the US crime reduction in the 1990s that no-one realised until they came along.

Sopel

Just finished 'If only they didn't speak English' by Jon Sopel. I have a signed copy, although amusingly mine was picked up second-hand and was dedicated to someone called John ("To John (good name!), Best wishes, Jon"). The book was written in 2017, in the aftermath of the Trump election victory, and so could be thought of as a little out of date, and in danger of getting lost in the sea of books that have come out during the Trump presidency, variously decrying and despairing at the disaster he has been. However, it was an excellent read (chapter on race particularly thought-provoking in light of recent events), and I may have to pick up his next one, A Year at the Circus (either look out for another second-hand hardback, should bookshop browsing ever be a thing again, or wait for the paperback to come out).

Poster

For Father's Day, one of my gifts (along with Tim Harford's new book) was a poster. On it are depicted 100 'bucket list books' for reading. I've read some of them already, but not very many. If I use official records (i.e. Goodreads since 1/1/11) then the official tally is nine, as follows:

• Notes from a Small Island
• Murder on the Orient Express
• The Great Gatsby
• The Old Man and The Sea
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Animal Farm
• Nineteen Eighty Four
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
• The Catcher in the Rye.

I have definitely read some more before then (Hitchhiker, Baskervilles, Freakonomics) but will go with this basis for recording, and start scratching off covers.

Will be interesting to see how I get on.

Fathers

Wingham

Bond3

I have four copies of Monnraker, A Pan paperback from the 1960s, two more recent paperback editions, and a Folio illustrated edition. Sadly what I am missing is a first edition from 1955. A quick look at Harrington's website reveals that this would set me back about £5,000. Or, if I really wanted to go for it, they have a signed association copy (presented to his long-time friend Ivar Bryce) for the bargain price of £55,000.

As for the story itself, I still think that the best part is the business at Blades at the beginning. The second part then takes a while to establish itself, and it's pretty plain what's going on, even if Bond can't see it for himself for a while. Local interest is provided by Bond and Drax driving up and down from London to the Kent coast several times and mentioning a number of landmarks - Charing, Gabriel's Hill, The Tommy Wyatt, etc.

Then, to top things off (what a chauvinist I am - wouldn't happen in a Bond film) he doesn't even get the girl at the end!

Ah well - Diamonds Are Forever next ...

Vera

We'll meet again

Don't know where, don't know when

But I know we'll meet again

Some sunny day.

PL

For the last three months, we have been making do with football by rerun, by discussion, by nostalgia. However, whilst 'Match of Their Day', or Best Ever Goals, or documentaries about Italia '90 or Euro '96 keep you going for so long, you can't beat the real thing.

Having said that, the return of the Premier League was pretty weird. Not quite sure why. Maybe the players are badly out of practice. Maybe we and they really need a crowd in the stadium to get things going, otherwise it just feels like a glorified training game. Maybe we just shouldn't be doing league football in June. Maybe it's just too soon and the world is still too strange and scary a place. Football is wonderfully 'normal' and whilst we're desperate for it to be back, it'll take a while to find its place again. I'm sure it will. Perhaps it'll prove to be a good example for us that getting back to 'normal' is important, it just isn't easy.

Somebody very famous once said that football isn't a matter of life and death - it's more important than that. Maybe just for the moment it isn't. 

Rashford

Fantastic work by Marcus Rashford.

I can't put it any better than Marina Hyde has in the Guardian here.

Reopening

Today's milestone moment was the reopening of 'non essential' shops, and the news was full of reports of queues on the High Streets and happy shoppers were delighted to be back to their favourite pastime. Strangely, lots of them seemed to focus on the length of the queues to get back to Primark, but there you go. Can't say it's a priority here. Mind you, Nicky popped out today, and the big highlight was that she returned with a little bucket of chicken for me and J from the KFC that has just opened at our local retail park!

10,000

It turns out that leaving Nicky's phone permanently 'on' with the Flickr app running makes a huge difference to the speed at which photo uploading takes place. Having discovered this over the weekend, the massive upload task is now complete. The auto upload folder in Flick now has over 10,000 photos in it (for a total of over 25,000 stored in Flick altogether), and so the mammoth task of sorting and tagging can begin in earnest ...

Hair

One of the many casualties of lockdown has been hairdressing salons, and so we've had to make alternative arrangements. Early on, Nicky managed to secure some scissors and clippers, and has discovered a latent talent for cutting hair. We repurpose a kitchen stool, plus a Disney poncho to catch the clippings, and she's away, and does a mighty fine job too. Today was Jake and my third visit during lockdown, and frankly I am proposing that the 'kitchen salon' stays open for business even after restrictions have been lifted.

20%

Pretty grim news about the economy in April, namely that it dropped off a cliff, and shrank by 20%. Beats all known records for a one month movement. Hardly a surprise given that everyone was sent home in March and the country was put into lockdown mode. In some ways it's almost a surprise that the figure wasn't bigger given that there was pretty much no manufacturing, no retail, no travel, etc throughout the month. I guess it must show that the service industry was able to carry on working remotely, and presumably that essential services plus fundamental public services make up a really big chunk of the economy. Although, as with all of these things, I can't help wondering about how the measurement works. Does the fact that the government was paying millions of people's wages count towards economic output or not? Especially given that on the furlough scheme people were being paid to stay at home and do nothing?

The next question is what shape will this downturn be? Everyone is hoping for a V, but will it be a U, or a W, or worst of all, and L. Time will tell.

Auto

I've been a member of Flickr since 2007, and a big fan of having it there as a way to store all of my digital photos. Being able to keep them all in albums, and adding tags to them is great, albeit time-consuming on the way in, as it means that I can track down happy memories so much more easily. I was amazing that this was a free and unlimited service for so long, and I didn't mind when Smugmug took over, and recently started to make a small charge for the service. After all, I have >15,000 photos safely tucked away there.

However, I am hopelessly out of date. For about the last five years, uploading has been pretty patchy and sporadic, and getting back up to date is a daunting task. The point at which I started to fail with uploading roughly corresponds with the major shift (at least for me) in how photography happened. I stopped taking very many photos with an actual camera, and almost everything started to be recorded using the camera on my phone. The problem that then arises is that the phone camera gets used for all sorts of other things as well as 'photography' (i.e. taking photos that are the sorts of things worthy of keeping for posterity). The camera gets used to grab screenshots, to use as a reminder, to show someone something in a message, and all sorts of other rubbish. So sorting the wheat from the chaff is a nightmare, and I seem to have rather abandoned the task.

Well, rather bizarrely the other day whilst on Flickr I noticed that there seemed to be a few photos on there that I had no recollection of uploading. I turned out that Nicky had set her Flickr app to auto upload for a little while. Seemed like an excellent idea, and so we have left it running. There are about 10,000 photos on our joint icloud account, so it will be interesting to see how long they take to transfer into Flickr.

Also, I know that this just solves one problem to create another - namely that Flickr will then be rammed full of photos that are not sorted into albums, not tagged, and likely to have loads of photos that we don't want to save and need to be deleted.

By hey, it's a start!

Finished

And so we get to a milestone moment. The last exam has been finished, scanned, and uploaded. Whilst I didn't count them, there must have been about 100 pages going through the scanner over the last few weeks. The theory is that to compensate for the fact that exams were being sat remotely and without time pressure, both the amount and the nature of the content had been adjusted significantly to take this into consideration.

All I will say is this. I remain, and always will be, a proud parent.

Calendar

On the shelf in my study is a calendar.

The day of the month is shown by finding the correct digits on two cubes.

How is this done?

Each cube has 6 faces, so in total there are 12 digits displayed on them. Obviously, between the two cubes all 10 digits need to be represented (otherwise you'd get stuck somewhere in the first 10 days of a month). This only leaves the opportunity for 2 digits to be repeated between the 2 cubes. Certainly 1 and 2 need to be on both cubes (as each month has an 11th and a 22nd).

However, 0 also needs to be on both cubes (to be the leading digit for the first 9 days of the month, and 1-9 can't all be on the same cube).

So, we have an impossible problem - we need all of the digits 0-9, plus an extra 0, 1 and 2, making a total of 13 digits to fit onto 12 faces, so a calendar cannot be made using two cubes to show all of the necessary digits.

But I'm looking at one.

What's the answer?

Cheat.

Use a number font where the 6 can be turned upsidedown to make the 9 !! 

Mickey

A lockdown project completed just before Jake's birthday.

Made up of, by my estimate, about 15,000 'jewels', all individually placed.

 

Treasure

What fun. Despite it being a lockdown birthday, lots had been organised, with a load of birthday challenges to be completed, including sporting (golf, badminton, basketball, pool, darts), games and challenges (scavenger & treasure hunts), favourite food (waffle brunch, steak with mac 'n' cheese, cheesecake, Mary's choc brownies) and even a surprise visit by the ice cream van.

A day to treasure!

Films

A lazy Saturday of film watching, started off with Yesterday in the afternoon, followed by Life of Pi in the early evening, followed by Casino Royale (well the second half of it) in the late evening.

Ah lockdown!

Games

During this period of lockdown, we've ended up playing considerably more games as a family than for quite some time. It has proved to be a good distraction, and a good way of enjoying time together when we can't go out to have fun.

Variously we've enjoyed:

• badminton
• table tennis
• pool
• cards (last card!)
• backgammon
• monopoly
• table-top curling
• Obama-llama
  

… and I'm sure some others I've forgotten along the way!

(Note - this was the post from June 4th, but I inadvertently put the status back to 'draft' and it ended up showing as 6th - still learning about new blogger tools!)

Protest

Flicked over to the ITV news, and they were interviewing that rather wonderful bishop who gave the sermon at Harry and Meghan's wedding (Michael Curry).

Doesn't that seem like a long time ago!

Anyway, he was talking about the fact that it is fine to march, it is fine to protest, and it is always fine to call for justice. Just make sure that it's not anger that's at the forefront of your mind, but love.

"George Floyd was a child of God, of infinite value and worth. When you march, my brothers and sisters, march so that we will reflect God's image, God's life, God's justice, God's compassion, in our lives, and in this world."

Difference

A good teacher makes a difference in children's lives.

How can teachers be sure that they've made a difference? The children remember them. Not just for a little while, but forever. Even when you're an adult, you still remember the one or two really good ones.

I heard a story about a special teacher yesterday, via someone who must have been taught by them around 15-20 years ago. Despite being moderately famous now (actor, something of a YouTube star etc.) this person still remembers their teacher. They even shared the story that they loved coming to school so much that they were frustrated and disappointed when they had their tonsils out, and couldn't come in every day to spend time with their favourite teacher.

See - I always knew this teacher was brilliant, and a particularly wonderful person.

But I would say that.

I married her.

BLM

Difficult to know exactly what to say about the USA just now. For the first time in a very long while, the first fifteen minutes of the TV news wasn't about coronavirus, but I didn't want it to be this that knocked it off the top of the news agenda. Once again, a black man dies at the hands of a white police officer, and America erupts in flames.

Undoubtedly there are some deep-rooted and long-standing problems here, but two observations. Firstly, they are surely made worse by a pandemic that hurts certain segments of society disproportionately hard, and the welfare system has no idea of how to cope with forty million unemployed. Getting a cheque (delayed so it could have the president's name on it) for $1,000 isn't going to go very far. I can imagine how people who have worked hard for a long time and now find themselves with no job and limited prospects in the near future must be scared, and how that can easily turn to anger. Secondly, the country's leader is a moron. Being governed by someone so out of touch, so uncaring, so deeply at odds with public sentiment that he thinks that sending out police with tear gas to clear peaceful protesters out of the way to provide him with a photo op is a good idea, is truly staggering.

I am so sorry to see what is going on, and I hope that some healing and some ways forward can be found soon. A big step could be made in November by voting out the moron. 

Bond2

As mentioned in yesterday's post, most of the day was spent enjoying the sunshine in the garden, and in fact most of the day was spent enjoying the sunshine in the garden with a book. To be more specific, Live and let die, the second Bond outing. For some reason I think of Fleming's books as summer reads - I have a vague recollection of devouring several of them in a summer holiday as a teenager. Whilst I have been back to them a few times, I am officially 'allowed' to be reading them again on the basis that they haven't made it onto my Goodreads 'read' list yet. Of, course, given that I was reading no.2, this is apart from Casino Royale, which I read during our summer cruise last year.

So, what of Live and Let Die. As I say, Bond's second adventure, published sixty-six years ago, and in some places, showing some alarming signs of age. Maybe best not to dwell too long on Fleming's treatment of black people, and what comes across as a fairly casual and assumed racism, particularly given that the vast majority of the novel is set in America, and particularly in light of what is going on there right now.

It shows its age in so many other ways as well. The technology, the references, and plenty enough has been said elsewhere about Bond's (Fleming's) attitude to women, so no need to go into it here.

And yet, in Fleming's defence, he was a writer of his time. It's not fair to judge him based on attitudes from 2020. It's Bond. What more do you need to know? Having read it, I immediately want to start Moonraker, and get straight in to his exciting card game with Hugo Drax ...