Category: My bad

bathtub dive and Alex pickup

I just found out you can sing into the extra soundhole on this Riversong ukulele and get absolutely wild harmonic effects. Also, yesterday I learned THE ORIGINAL LYRICS to the ‘2 & 20 Blues’ and they completely change the tone of the song. I shall herewith demonstrate: The very first line is “There’s evil men in this DOGGONE town” but the way my ex (and Dr Filk) taught it was ‘GODDAMN’ and that really changes things. First is worldweary, second is angry, and the song is resigned, not angry. The very last line is “You may say that I’m wrong but you know I FEEL all right.” I was taught ‘I’LL BE’. The singer is OKAY IN THE PRESENT, not sometime in the future. But right now! The song’s about grabbing life where and when you can, not hoping you’ll be happy sometime.

Thank you for attending this bathtub dive into 2 & 20 Blues by Linda Morrison, pressed 1981.

Continue reading bathtub dive and Alex pickup

dying inside a little

I’m going to find and start going to a dementia support group. I can’t spend all my spare cycles whining to Jeff and mOm and expect to actually improve in my ability to cope with it. I need strategies and people going through this to provide their experiences. Yesterday was very humbling and I wish I was a better person. I need better strategies on what to say to Paul when he starts talking about driving again.

It was a nice walk. Gut punch that Cobbs Bakery is gone from Market Crossing. I was going to bring croissants home to my excellent housemate and nah girl it’s gone.

I also need to incorporate social activities with Paul in a proper schedule and quit doing the by guess and by god thing; Mondays and Wednesdays look good for various reasons.

I am continuing to make assumptions about our family situation without cause, and getting bit in consequence. I’ve been up for hours stewing.

Twitter told me I exceeded my post limit for the day. Which wasn’t true, but it happened to almost everybody else on twitter yesterday. The outrage this morning is as predictable as it is weary.

Persistent hiccups. 17766 words. Suzanne’s coming today and all I can think about is how I was so interested in following Paul around that I didn’t do all my own errands so now I have to make a quick cash stop this morning. At least I put gas in the Echo yesterday, it was bone dry.

I literally have to pacify myself for a few minutes if I’m leaving the house in the car. If Jeff is driving not so much but Paul’s new behaviour is relentlessly critiquing my driving and strangely getting my own fed back to me is not cheering me up. Because of course in the Before Times I was on Paul all the time about it….

Some dude named Mic Wright in UK @brokenbottleboy on twitter has made a journalism about all the nepo journalists in the UK AND You Would Think He’d Killed his Mam on the basis of the parade of butthurt journos dragging themselves like sentient target practice through his feed. Here’s the link, and it keeps changing. He added a professional magician to the list mostly out of spite, since literally people are texting him and asking to be added while others mock him for doing it and telling him ‘he’ll never work in journalism’ and it’s like YOU FUCKING IDIOT, WHAT DO YOU THINK THAT THIS IS??? LIKE SERIOUSLY are you the stupidest person in the world besides me?

So I’ve been avoiding watching the Supernatural spinoff the Winchesters because that show tore my heart out through my solar plexus and I don’t need more, so I’m laughing this morning about how the writers really messed up by (checks notes) burning a Golem in an oven and let’s just say that throwing a NOTABLY JEWISH supernatural monster INTO AN OVEN was a big whoopsie and the fandom is shuffling its feet and saying ah guys antisemitism but not in a mean way because everyone’s scared of the irrational fuckers who run the network. So I’m just here to say if this is accurately represented yes it’s antisemitism. It was bad yesterday too. I predict it will continue bad, since antisemitism is the first structural member of a modern fascist.

Told a rich white guy on twitter to stick to aviation because as a semioticist he bites burls, so that tells you how particularly ‘squid with spicy salt’ I am this morning. He was fucking bloviating about AI.

ANFSCD: If your children aren’t drug addicts and voluntarily speak to you, please be grateful. You don’t know how good you have it.

things I ponder

Does Andrew Tate (gleefully known as ‘Taint’ among the ruder orchestral instruments of the great twitter symphony) have any clue at this point how much trouble he’s in, or does the fact he gets a full 30 days – at leeeeast – of pre-trial detention in a pokey in Bucharest give him enough time to percolate this through the miasma of misogyny that renders his brain impenetrable to softness and long term thinking? I pity his lawyer, I pity his co-conspirators, and while there was a rumour he was assaulted in prison he actually went to hospital so the authorities could testify what shape he was in when he was incarcerated. As it is he gets an hour a day outside his cell. Your booooogatti won’t save you now you verminous clownbag. You rape and exploit women and then sell your precious ideas about how to treat women as ‘entertainment’ for men who already hate women and want a rich celebrity to tell them that their fantasies can all come true. That women want to be raped and it’s their fault if you give in to your extremely normal masculine urges. You are one of the single most hateful excrescences of the New Misogyny. I hope you lose the ability to communicate.

Who gives a shit about nepo babies? Nepotism is how a social system under capitalism works because WE HAVEN’T INSTITUTED ANY SOCIAL, LEGAL OR CULTURAL TRADITIONS TO PREVENT IT! And one can argue that hereditary and traditional culture carriers in Indigenous nations are nepo babies, but just herding those words into an English sentence made me want to pop a gummy and lie down for a while. Cause it’s a racist thing to say. Yes, there was enough food on the west coast for some of the Indigenous nations to develop (deep breath) a class system (yeah, sorry, as long as you keep slaves YOU GOTTA CLASS SYSTEM and I’ll be interested to hear the opinion of someone closer to the research than I am) because there was surplus sufficient not only for culture in the making of things in the wintertime but surplus sufficient for people to sit around doing nothing but enjoying other people’s output while eating the last of the berries that were supposed to last until spring. AND YOU KNOW WHAT THEY DID? Potlatch. Here’s a cultural issue, here’s the cultural collective response. Also, re class, in most traditions slaves weren’t allowed to either host or guest. They had ten millennia at least to think about it. Capitalism scorns such a levelling. Some houses got together and threw joint potlatches, imagine what that might have been like, hundreds of attendees from up and down the coast….  The Jews got to think about inequality too. What did the Jews do? Debt forgiveness and baked-into-the-calendar manumission of slaves. Things get unequal, ya gotta reset the table, shake out the cloth, and make sure the dice aren’t loaded. In the meantime, generational wealth transfer is a thing, and some of it is …. IP. One has the right to keep family secrets my dears.

I am pondering with happiness the arrival of  series 3 of Miss Scarlet and the Duke. The first episode aired on PBS Masterpiece last Sunday but it’s not showing up in Duckie, the program Jeff uses to keep track of all this stuff. Whilst rooting around on the internet for that tidbit I also learned that there will be a series 2 of Miss Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries coming soon!

I am pondering trying to get back into the CRA website, but I have to enable javascript on Chrome first?? what

I am pondering the chili in the fridge. I consider eating it for lunch or dinner. If I’m not eating it for lunch, what am I eating for lunch?? I’m thinking EGGIES.

I am pondering phone calls and emails.

I pondered what info would be useful and put my eyeglass prescription in my online care sheet.

 

 

 

 

Never fails

The more useful my blog is to me and my family the less interesting it is to other people… down to five people looking at it per day, including someone I live with. I suppose if Buster could read he’d be in there looking for references to his cattly self too.

Wordle in five this morning. I am endeavouring not to cheat and haven’t for about a month now. Hard to believe I’ve been doing it for more than a year, seems like less time.

Keith is going to his G&G for part of the weekend and I’d go with him if I thought I’d be welcome. We are definitely on the mend relationship wise though so I’m gonna stay out of his show. He’s taking his pOp to an important medical appointment today. Last night I dreamed that Paul completely showed insight into his condition including that his vision isn’t great and when I joyfully said, “So you’re okay with not driving then?” he turned from where he was sitting on the floor at his place watching the same aviation themed movie Jeff and I watched last night (“Devotion” recommended for war movie and civil rights fans, directed by JD Dillard and score by Chanda Dancy (I did like the score)), put on the meanest facial expression possible (literally one I’ve never seen on him before because he is not a mean person) and said, “Of course not, I’ll be driving again soon.”

And then I woke up. Given that it was my own brain that dished out this ghastly bit of me attempting to work through my emotions on this (waves arms helplessly in general direction of undesirable events and outcomes) I guess I’m going to look over to my Ontie Mary and her life experience and pray for guidance. I try to do the right thing but I’m lazy and self-involved. He deserves the very best of care, the world knows he gave it to me many times when I needed it. Keith and I left it that I am ready to take Paul at 10:30 just in case for whatever reason Keith can’t and then we’ll swap out cars and I’ll take Paul. If I don’t hear from him by eleven I can assume I’m excused duty. So I’ll back Keith up but I’m going to operate on the assumption that I don’t have to today.

And I’m sitting here crying like a fool. Must get up and walk around today.

Echo goes to the Krankenhaus Thursday which is great because it’ll be out of the driveway for Suzanne. Suzanne FINALLY HAZ CATT His name is Lucky, he looks like Bounce, and he’s a rescue purr factory.

Jeff and I have both been having insomnia and ‘sleeping at weird times’ issues but they seem to be resolving. We were BOTH up at 1:30 the other morning.

Really enjoyed Brisco County Jr but we’ve finished our watch of the first and only season. RIP Julius Carry you were epic as tracker/bounty hunter/bon vivant Lord Bowler and I think I loved your outfit almost as much as I loved you.

Coming up to the end of season 3 Expanse – still an amazing show!

14151 words. We’ll see what I’m up for today, but progress once again seems possible.

Lumosity brain exercises up next. I am never going to achieve the same scores for them as I did in 13/14 but I’m getting close for some of them.

Briefly thought about adding chat to this website. That would be funny.

New burner to replace the one I melted Jeff’s container on has been installed. Oy me. Hey, it only took two weeks.

There was a rat under the sink last night. We may have to call an exterminator, Buster doesn’t seem up for the job.

Confidential to Glenn dangit I ain’t even opened it yet.

quietly productive

I emptied and ran the dishwasher, wiped down the hellhole surfaces in the kitchen closest to the compost buckets and got most of the rain of tomato out of the microwave, trained the cat, made and thoroughly enjoyed a coffee, possibly wrote a song, did my wordle and lumosity training, clipped Buster’s claws, made ‘meat and potatoes’ for lunch, sent a thousand words to mOm, figured out what my next couple of scenes are (although I’m not putting pressure on myself to write) and I generally luxuriated in the life of a retired person. I took my meds at the right time. I stayed hydrated. I put in eyedrops before I went to bed.

That’s what I’m supposed to do, right?

Watched the Netflix film the Pale Blue Eye. Harry Melling as Edgar Allan Poe was wonderful. Harry Melling’s grandad was the second Doctor Who, who knew. Gillian Anderson’s bizarre mom to a bizarre family was …. bizarre and hypercreepy.  Christian Bale as the haunted detective was quite effective. I really enjoyed the script. Unlike many scripts (many, many; hear me whine) set in historical times, it neither gracelessly dropped modern slang like horseshit into a griddle nor overdid the ceremony and style of days of speech in days of yore. I didn’t hear a single anachronism. Do you have any idea how pleasant that is for a writer? I mean there were many constructions that would likely not have happened in the 1830s, but nothing so far from contemporary usage that it was repellent. For that alone, huit sur dix.

Jeff Bezos, may the intertwined Fates of a thousand cultures give him his reward, has, through Amazon, bought an Indian publishing house called Westland Publishing. It is one of the few publishing houses in India that has the wit and courage to publish ANYTHING that challenges Hindutva. (Spoiler alert, I think that all countries are idiotic, but once you have a settled state that calls itself a democracy, you should perhaps not support a political ideology that FIGHTS LIKE HELL AGAINST PLURALISTIC DEMOCRACY BECAUSE HINDUS ARE JUST BETTER, KK? Plus the caste system is groovy, men own women’s bodies, marital rape is super cool, cops can kill women who report rapes after raping them again, and Muslims are arson targets) OKAY maybe I’m being a racist asshole, oh look, I’m not. I really don’t think that China and India holding hands over kicking the shit out of Muslims is a good look for either country; people are dying in riots pogroms and political reeducation camps in both countries. Anyway, Bezos is literally supporting global fascism by doing that and we already knew he was a cruel billionaire, but HONESTLY can’t he just fucking stop.

Anyway, the closure of the publishing house means that hundreds of titles are no longer available. Absolutely no word on how and when they could be available elsewhere. There’s more than one way to be fash. Having the money to buy good things that support democracy and discourse, and destroy them (huLLLLLO Elongated Greaserat) is fascist.

a six year old is in custody for shooting his teacher. The cops didn’t arrest the person responsible for leaving a loaded pistol out. Everything you need to know about gun culture in the US in one story. (from CNN website, 6-year-old in custody after shooting teacher in Virginia, police chief says By Amanda Musa and Jennifer Feldman, CNN
Updated 7:19 AM EST, Sat January 7, 2023)

 

Brief visit

It was lovely to see Tammy, however briefly. I met up with her in the appointed place and time. The shifter in the Echo seemed to be acting up, so no surprise when the check engine light came on and stayed on the instant I started to drive home. My response was to drive home along Kingsway and never exceed 45 kph (ducked out around Metrotown on the way back, twas a monkey howl of a nightmare around there) which angered the never ending supply of black Mercedes SUVs that seemed bent on sliding up my tailpipe the entire way. Sorry fellas, lassies.

Tammy asked me are you sure you’re not depressed? and I …. of course I’m depressed, I’m okay with that. What I’m not okay with is being so physically weak that I can’t walk a kilometre, being winded after climbing stairs, and experiencing crushing fatigue from standing for five minutes. That’s not depression. That sounds like long COVID to me. How I would get a diagnosis I have no idea. I’ll talk to Katie, she had a friend diagnosed, and of course make an appointment with my doc.

Today I’m thinking about moral hazard. There was a post on reddit about someone who works with the homeless in a large Canadian city, and they’re so burned out, underpaid, and subjected to having clients die, over and over again, that the person reports severe mental health issues and nothing available from work to assist.

I cried into Buster’s fur this morning. He knows I sometimes give fairly tight hugs just to feel something alive, and he tucks his claws away so he doesn’t hurt my lap. I miss Jim and can’t think of Jan and Nita and Carly (and Glenn, hi Glenn) without being hurt again by their loss, ever so much more than mine. I was standing in the kitchen and I thought “Captain Blackberry is gone” and waaaah I’m missing Tom. I think of John every time I walk through what used to be his bedroom (It’s the pinball room and Jeff’s workbench now). I should call Peggy. I don’t have the strength. These days I have to marshal myself just to do the absolute bare minimum of anything, and the slightest setback turns me into a wreck. I’m managing, but I want to skip this part. Jeff of course has been the soul of kindness.

Music and writing are impossible. I think about them, but can’t settle to work. I’m scared to call people in case I start making my mood – frangible, changeable, subject to betterment, but not necessarily – a friend’s problem.

I was supposed to go with Paul for a walk today. I may take a cab over there so we can do that… now that his car’s not supposed to be driven. Jeff and I are going to have to figure out what to do if someone didn’t show up in the middle of the night to tow it, as Paul mentioned might happen. I told Katie about it.

Still feel crappy

However I’m working away on fixing it.

Tomorrow I go to the hairdresser and git my head overdid.

Towels are in the laundry.

I have finished the first season of Gentleman Jack.  She has just come from a church with her love Ann Walker after they took communion together, the only way two lesbians could ‘marry’ in those days even if it had no legal standing. Here’s a collection of people talking about what the show meant to them.

Elon Musk got invited on stage by Dave Chappelle and the two minutes of booing I just watched on youtube was balm for my wounded soul.

 

The return of the catfather

Buster was waiting on the back stairs for Jeff upon his return, which made for a pleasant moment. Jeff has recovered from the grab bag of indignities that ferry travel subjects him to. Before his arrival I managed to get all the food containers and compostable trash dealt with so the kitchen wasn’t armpit high in trash.

Continue reading The return of the catfather

tumblr + fanfic

a match made very definitely on earth.

 

dateamonster on tumblr:

vampire dude to his vampire friend: wow.. looks like there’s only one coffin….. what’ll we do

other vampire dude who reads a lot of fanfiction: we could……….. share it

….

dateamonster comments on this above-noted joke later!

four years ago i made this post. currently it stands at about 300k notes. to this day if i google image search my url the screencapped re uploads of this post are some of the first results i see. it is perhaps my most widely reblogged post in the six year history of this blog.

and now, on this day in the year 2022 i see a gifset from the interview with the vampire tv adaptation where two vampires share a single coffin. a single tear rolls down my cheek, knowing that at last my long journey is over. at last, i can rest.

beowulf22121 THEN REMARKS:
You should be able to rest, but alas, your resting place seems to be otherwise occupied.

New poem – the sieve

This is not a suicide note:
I’d bang on my brother’s door and waken him
rather than leave him my corpse ***on purpose***
ew, I mean, ew

my consciousness wrote the suicide note to you
but the smelly part is still here

I know that my procession
through these eroded markers
was foretold
but the weeping was tiresome
and I had no patience with the acidic streams
for – did you know – your tears become more basic
over the course of the day, and it’s 2 am here

I pull a stray hair out of my mouth and continue
in the present tense
<<< fly back and forth
destroyers of narrative >>>
I cry as if I could be cleansed
rather than imprisoned
behind bars of vapour

quit potchkying around and write this damned thing

it is my salute to those I love who live still
and everything they taught me, all of which
I will take with me to my niche
in the columbarium
for everything I’ve learned is nothing
compared to what is coming
it’s the brutal and the lucky
who will live
another sieve for humanity

I passed through one, today
Most days I don’t know
how close I came

but I do today

I believe Anthony Rapp

I always found him more credible than Kevin Spacey the man ””’HEAVILY ALLEGED ””” and now acquitted of sexually assaulting him when he was FOURTEEN.

Cousin Alex, has indicated, in consequence of conversations with other people in show business, that she believes him too.

Kevin Spacey was small time when it happened, but over and over again older white men are privileged over everyone else and we now have a world that reflects that.

A police officer with the RCMP was murdered here in Burnaby the other day and it’s sad for so many reasons. She was specifically trained to work with vulnerable populations and one of them stabbed her. There was a handwritten note on the spot of her death, “I’m sorry you didn’t make it, I hope you heard us coming.”

I’m angry because I’m afraid the RCMP will use this death as a reason to back away from less violent policing. If they don’t that would be a proper memorial for Cst. Shaelyn Yang.

I’m angry because in all likelihood she was a good cop and good cops seem to get pushed out of the profession one way or another.

I’ll be watching the trial of the man arrested for her murder with interest.

Got my flu shot availability notification; picked up my medications.

Dunnett Day is in planning mode; I don’t think I’ll attend this year. Although I may well if we’re on a heated patio.

8215 words Part II

Suzanne was here yesterday and clean floors actually temporarily existed. She finished the Part I of Totally Boned that I printed for her and wants to give it to her sister Fran now, and I approved. Go litul bok.

I bought myself a steak & lobster dinner for delivery last night. I was so emotionally exhausted after I left Katie’s (although it was awesome to see Alex (new favorite Game ‘Doors’ on Roblox, got a brief tour) and Ryker (who made strange at me). I got very self-indulgent. Briefly saw Keith; he was going walking with a friend and he gave me a hug on the way out the door which I was not expecting and much enjoyed.

Why was I emotionally exhausted – because Paul is, despite many conversations at this point, not actually understanding or able to do anything to help slow his dementia (besides exercise), he’s still in denial about it and not understanding why pestering Keith about his efforts to get a cat (they have mice AND they are all cat people) is counterproductive (Keith’s busting ass).

The reason I went over there was to record any family story he liked with the help of family photos so he could remember and he literally could not put more than a sentence together about any of the pictures we were looking at. I asked him about The House on Wortley Road (that’s the way he says it) and he couldn’t give me more than a couple of sentences and was just randomly saying stuff and saying things like “That’s a good picture of us” (from the Pan Pacific Christmas Party… I think that’s the one where Jarmo nearly got thrown out of the hotel for playing 20th Century Schizoid Man really loud in his room or was it War Pig, I was so effing drunk that night).

I have to start approaching him for this stuff first thing in the morning. And you know what, I’m not really in any shape to do this. He’s already a shell of himself (still cheerful and talkative, just not… himself)  and I was crying in the car on the way back but not loud enough for him to notice.

Ryker is run walking falling crawling at ninety miles an hour. There’s no baby gate for the front stairs (he would basically be in traction for a year if he fell down them) and he crawls CLOSE to the stairs but doesn’t seem interested in flinging himself down them, which is a perfectly fine sign of intelligence. What he does love to do is climb things. He was climbing the elliptical machine the folks have and everything turns and I thought he would end up clipping himself and he did… cried for two seconds.

I left before Dax came over. He thinks I hate him. I don’t any more but I was damned if I was going to let my emotional exhaustion trigger some kind of autistic meltdown and really didn’t want to open that door on Katie.

Jessica’s dad’s surgery was CANCELLED. He needs a triple bypass, he’s in heart failure, and he won’t get the operation until Monday at the earliest. It’s brain-punching news and Jessica and Katie are both terrified he’ll die before he can even have the surgery.

The chaos in the UK is unbelievable, and still life persists there. Brittwitter is alternating wails of angry disbelief, extremely funny reaction pictures, and people saying that Liz Truss, in flattening the pound and killing the queen, is the greatest revolutionary of her generation.

I’m going to try to do something productive today; haven’t figured out what. The rain has finally come and it’s such a relief to be able to breathe. Okay done my daily blog, COFFEE GET IN MY TANK GODDAMN YOU

sundry various miscellany potpourri

Jeff very kindly got me a copy of ‘Road Food’, Misha Collins’ show about regional US cuisine. Really enjoyed the first episode. Jeff is no fan of Vietnamese cuisine, but I am; watching the show start with Pho for breakfast (when I used to have it after I got off midnights all the time at the 24 hour place (name keeps changing) on Kingsway) was MOST enjoyable, I could practically smell it through the screen. His former castmates have started a new ‘Winchester property’, it airs for the first time this month.

We watched ‘Catherine called Birdy’ and enjoyed it mightily. The closing credits are absolutely delightful, and everything beforehand was very well done; a perfect star vehicle for the inimitable Bella Ramsey (previously from Game of Thrones and Worst Witch.) I find it amusing that if I’d known Lena Dunham was behind it I probably would have given it a miss, but many of the writing and interpersonal lapses of her past incarnations are not seen here. A woman’s allowed to get smarter. I won’t infest my site with it, but if you care, google Lena Dunham controversy and be prepared to wonder if she has any friends who don’t share their drugs with her. I mean, I could easily say a hundred controversial things before breakfast but she acted like she literally didn’t understand what she was being called on half the time, and dissolved into tears at charges of racism.

Please note that if you’re a settler accused of racism, it’s probably true! Screaming about it doesn’t help. Sit with it and stay off social media until you can represent yourself as a person capable of self-improvement. Not saying I am that person. I have moved my views somewhat but I’m in the post-wallow stage of antiracism (sample of wallow: ah me! hoW CoudL I haveKN OWN … my PAreNTS did their best – there were only two people of colour in my entire grade school, blah blah blah yes I’m 63 and white in Canada, of course I bathed in racism and ableism erryday) in which I feel a brisk disdain for white crybabies and prefer deeds to words on the subject.

There are 50K Beavis and Butthead fanfics on AO3. Jest reviewing my life choices over here.

5278 words on Part II.

For Trotsky Tuesday, please enjoy the famous combination of anarchist ideals like free love and nudity plus scientific excellence embodied in this wikipedia article about ´Élisée Reclus.

I’ve gotten to the stage in the pandemic where I’ve now imagined all my friends and relatives dying of COVID (except Onty Mary because she just WON’T, THAT’S WHY! I DON’T HAVE TO EXPLAIN THAT TO ANYONE) or sequelae and gone to their funerals in my mind. Somehow I get to arrange all those funerals too so I get things how I want them. As you know I enjoy funerals and memorial services and do like a good one. Anyway, if I sound like I’ve been randomly crying throughout the day, here’s what made me cry.

A newborn calf with really bad respiration after a tough birth, dying in its owner’s arms. A Ukrainian woman making a video for her boyfriend on the front and her apartment takes a direct hit while she’s making it. Dozens of Canadian disabled people on twitter begging for food because they have nothing in their house for Thanksgiving. Not being able to do Thanksgiving with the family. Being too lazy to cut olives for pizza. Wondering if this phone call to my mOm will be the last one. Being glad that my daughter trusts me enough to talk to me about important stuff. Being terrified to lose this housing situation. (This place is literally 50% cheaper than any even close to equivalent housing situation in all of the lower Mainland.) Being so tired that I forgot my evening meds. Every time I go to the grocery store now, I cry. I cry about the abundance of food that’s going to disappear into the maw of climate change. I cry every time I put something like coffee or almonds or chocolate in the cart. Not much, I’m not sobbing, but I’m leaking.

The pandemic is dragging us all through a slow motion mass casualty event. We’ve been abandoned by politicians but the wise expect that. What we never expected was neoliberalism is such an indelible feature in our world that it has made the people we thought we could trust – the public health authorities and epidemiologists – into villainous murderers.

During and after the Great Mortality (as the black death was known at the time) people became much more selfish, lonely, profligate, violent and distractable (by contemporary accounts, anyway, as I read in Tuchman’s ‘The Distant Mirror’.)

It’s all happening again now, and I’m in the middle of it with everyone else. These moments of sadness are because it’s easy for me to feel sad. Many beautiful things are dying, but we must rush on regardless and be adults and hide our grief.