Week 218: Quinquennium
Do you ever wonder how it is that there was a massive influenza pandemic in 1918–1920 that killed tens of millions of people and yet there are hardly any explicit mentions in the literature of the period? I don’t really wonder any more. Few people want to relive the period from 2020 to 2022 in any form.
I had gone out to Japan in January 2020 to work on a short project for a few months. The client had put me up in a brand new apartment in the centre of Tokyo with the most amazing automatic bathtub I’ve ever used, before or since.
It wasn’t even the first time I’d been in Asia during a SARS outbreak, so I wasn’t particularly worried, even when they announced a few cases in Japan (and not just on the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship in Yokohama).
But then, my client told us that they were stopping all work in Japan and booking us flights home. I arrived back in London on Monday 9 March, five years ago this past Sunday. Everything was still pretty normal. I went to a gig on the Thursday, and had a good time.
You might not be able to confirm this, but you can tell me if you haven’t heard it: I have it from two different sources close to government that the UK is going to be in French-style total lockdown from Friday.
By 18 March, there were rumours that there was going to be a “lockdown”, so L— and I went to our favourite bar (RIP the Full Nelson) for beers and vegan burgers just in case it was our last chance. It was very quiet that night, with only one other couple and their dogs. As we left, I said, “see you all after the end of the world”.
And it was, in a way. Cafés, pubs, and restaurants were closed from that Friday. The full “stay at home” directive was three days later. Things didn’t return to normal until early 2022, and it was never quite the same as before.
L— has been away all week at a couple of medical conferences, so I had another week on my own. I managed to avoid staying up too late. That’s always a risk when there’s no one to tell me it’s bedtime.
The sun came back to London last week, and we saw the first glimpses of a future beyond the cold damp greyness of winter. I went out without a coat on for the first time on Friday. On Sunday, I took my picnic blanket to the park, read a book, and had a nap in the sun. (It didn’t last, of course.)
I didn’t have any pancakes. Who has the time and energy to be making pancakes on a weekday, unless they’re being pestered by children? And I wouldn’t put eggs or dairy in them anyway, so I could choose not to eat pancakes any time I like, even if I were living in a place and time in which that were a prescribed Lenten fast, which I’m not.
The United States of America continues to stray ever further from anything even approaching normality.
It’s rather awkward that, under late-stage capitalism, my pension is entirely dependent on a global financial system built on scams and wheezes that can be blown up by a handful of guys who spend way too much time online. I am, of course, optimistically assuming that this same system will leave enough habitable planet remaining by then.
If only there were some kind of organisation that had the scale to shield us from the vicissitudes of market weather and provide a decent retirement to everyone. (I can hear a certain group of baby boomers screaming in terror at the Spectre of Communism while enjoying their own final salary pensions in their mortgage-free houses.)
Some links to distract and entertain:
- ‘You can yodel and don’t have to be conservative’: the Swiss feminist choir rewriting traditional songs.
- Alternatives in UK to digital products, platforms and services.
- Lumon Industries WoeMeter. The making of the prop from concept to final artefact.
- Someone Has To Save The Film And TV That Studios Won’t. Studios consistently emerge as poor stewards of their own cultural patrimony.
- Why are QR Codes with capital letters smaller than QR codes with lower-case letters? Spoiler: CAPITALS are more efficiently encoded.
- TOTP Tests. Terence Eden has made a test suite for an underspecified specification. An excellent bit of work for the public good.
- Statistically correct football chants. Millwall: “No one likes us, 46.58% of us care.”
- Chinese government shifts focus from x86 and Arm CPUs, gov’t promoting RISC-V chips heavily China’s move to reduce reliance on proprietary foreign technology should be good news for open source hardware.
- America is Trapped in a Burning Tesla. “Sooner or later, and probably sooner rather than later, important things are going to break.”
- Paddy Power High Court case: Gardener wins £1m payout. Live by the sword (fleecing punters with a buggy random number generator) die by the sword (lose a million pounds due to your punter-fleecing buggy random number generator).