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So long, and thanks for all the fish

The Douglas Adams headline is a thank you to him for making me laugh over the years, and as good a way of saying goodbye to the watching world as I can think of, especially given the fact that no-one is watching at all. I promised myself that I would continue it until the last desperate reader had at last been shaken off by my prose or ideas or both. No-one has read this blog for a week or so, and thus the moment has come to disappear gracefully from the stage. What a relief I don't hear you say. You might like to not know that there were a total of 538 reads of the posts, the vast majority from the UK (421), 63 from Portugal, 23 from Canada, 9 from Germany, 8 from Ireland, 5 from South Korea, 2 from Belgium, 2 from France, 2 from the United States of America, 2 from an unknown region, and 1 from the Netherlands. I only told three people about it, so where they all came from I don't know. The dogged loyalty of the Portuguese reader in particular is quite amazing. To him or her ...
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Until November

12 August 2020 And there you go! Right on the button! Exactly on time! Precisely as predicted! In my last blog entry I speculated that my use of the word 'assassination' triggered an algorythmic search in America. I'd only used it once, and the next day I had my first and only reader in the USA. I felt these events were obviously connected, but I couldn't be sure, so I thought I'd try an experiment. I used the word five time in Monday's piece. Today I checked the analytics for the countries where readers had read my blog, and sure enough, there is the USA. A single reader. One hit. So twice I have had a single reader in the USA, and on both occasions the day after I used the word 'assassination'. And I am betting that because I have used it here, I will have a single solitary reader in the USA tomorrow or Friday. Twice might be a co-incidence. Three times wouldn't be. Well that's that sorted. It's so good to know we are being kept safe for de...
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Assassination central

Monday 10th August 2020 Everything that is written on the internet by anyone is searched by algorithms for keywords. Even blogs like this get searched. It shouldn't be a surprise.  As the publisher of this blog I can look at the usage statistics and see who has looked at the blog, at least by nationality. In this way I can see that my blog has been read very little by very few people in very few places. My friends in Korea had a nibble, my friends in France ditto, my friends in England most regularly nibble and my friends in Canada have a little nibble once in a while.  But several weeks ago I used a word in a blog entry that clearly triggered off readership in an unusual place. I speculated that with world changes putting conservative forces within the Vatican under a lot of pressure, the reactionary Catholic right wing, fearful and desparing as they are, might produce some looney who would try to assassinate the Pope. He, after all, is viewed by that reactionary cadre as the...
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Let's get on board

8th August, 2020 Once again we face a high summer of inflatables, awash to the gunwales with refugees, trying desperately and at the risk of their lives, to get to Britain.  Here, in the country itself, everyone is exhausted by Covid-19. No-one wants to talk about it. It's all been said anyway. And if it hasn't, no-one wants to hear it. Pretty much the same can be said about Brexit, politics generally, the economy, government, and so on. No-one wants to know any more. We are hunkering down inside our castles, pulling up the drawbridge and sitting down in front of our televisions and drinking beer from the bottle. Our bellies increase as our bank accounts decrease. But we can't be bothered to deal with it. It is mercilessly hot. We have all the curtains closed to shut out the appalling heat. We slurp in a sweaty lassitude drinking cold things hoping this will change everything: Covid, the refugee problem, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, China, USA, the murder of the innocent everywher...
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You read it here first

I heard the most extraordinary programme on BBC Radio Four on Saturday evening. The 14-minuter was called Profile: Professor Sarah Gilbert and heralded the professor as "The no-nonsense scientist whose team is developing a coronavirus vaccine at record speed." What was extraordinary about this programme was not that Prof. Gilbert played the oboe very well as a kid, although that is remarkable. It is a very difficult instrument to play at all, let alone well. Neither is it that she later sprung triplets. Again, remarkable, but not, in itself, deserving of a 14-minute slot on Radio Four. That she has done some snappy work in the labs is obviously good news all round, especially for those of us who haven't had Covid-19 and don't particularly want it. No, what was extraordinary about this programme was the clear sense that Professor Sarah Gilbert had cracked it. That the vaccine was going to work. That the thing was done. They'd solved it. That she and her team...
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Thinking straight

Thinking straight and recognising when the thinking is not straight is very important. Take President Trump's declaration that the more testing you do the more cases of Covid you are going to uncover. He says the reason the numbers of cases of Covid are going up is caused by increasing testing. A number of good people, in the absence of an ability to describe the holes in the logic,  have persuaded themselves that this is indeed correct. But isn't there something wrong here? A lot of people think there is, but can't quite nail it down. If two things happen at the same time, even closely related things, it does not mean one causes the other. If I scratch my chin at the exact moment that my pet parrot squaks: "Whose a pretty boy then?",  it doesn't mean either event is caused by the other. Not the itchiness of my chin, not the vocalisations of the parrot. What causes an increase in Covid numbers? Trump's answer to this is: testing.  But he is wro...
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The appearance of dealing with things

Today is an auspicious day. Mark the date carefully on a calendar, especially if you are one of the hundreds of thousands of relatives of people who have died of Covid-19. For today, the prime minister announced that there would be an inquiry into the pandemic. That's it. No further detail. When will this inquiry take place?   "In the future," said the PM. Extraordinarily farsighted that man. Why isn't the inquiry immediate? More than 150,000 people had signed an online petition, organised by Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, calling for an immediate inquiry into the government's handling of the pandemic. The prime minister said now was "not the right moment to devote huge amounts of official time to an inquiry," when the UK was in the middle of the pandemic. What will be the nature of the inquiry? We don't know Who will lead it, a top judge renowned for an independent stance, or will it be an academic or civil servant? We don...
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