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Make do and mend
Last Thursday I finally decided we had enough of a shopping list to venture beyond the village Co-op, so I went to Sainsbury's in Tadley (avoiding the gargantuan one in Calcot). There was only a queue of a few minutes to get in to the store, and it seemed reasonably well managed. I tried out the SmartShop app on my phone, partly out of curiosity and partly to avoid contact. It was quite a frustrating experience. It turns out that scanning a barcode with a hand-held scanner is much less complex than recognising one on the image produced on a smartphone camera, for any product with a less than rigid surface. Still, almost everything on my list was in stock.
On Sunday we decided to venture out for our daily exercise. I've hardly been anywhere except the back garden, and R even less so; despite rounds of house cleaning, there's been a lot of sneezing which is due to being inside continuously with rather a lot of dust. I think we tested the letter of the law, venturing as far as Ashampstead, but as we were walking for much longer than driving, and saw hardly anyone during the walk, we were very much in compliance with the spirit (the same can not be said for a couple of the villages we passed through, with a few quite busy pavements).
The lockdown was extended to no-one's surprise; the media seem to be waking up to the ongoing government shambles that surely everyone could have predicted. To be fair, I think whoever was in charge would have made something of a shambles of it. The call to make ventilators that turn out to be useless makes me think of households sacrificing their garden railings to be turned into Spitfires in World War 2. Politicians like the words cheap, easy, and popular, as they say in Yes, Minister; and it's damned awkward when those chickens come home to roost. Even the Toady programme is giving them a hard time, with Nick Robinson rightly calling out the day's interviewee - who has been given the task of representing the government as a whole - when they claim "that's not my area". It may well have been the right thing to do to send PPE to China in February; it's certainly not the right thing to do now to tell the British public that it's all on its way from Turkey when you haven't even made the arrangements. But people have to make do with what there is: certainly I've had plenty of experience in my career of insufficient investment and bad decision-making leading to poor results, but no-one's going to be at risk of death as a result.
Cameron and May have been keeping their heads down, but both Blair and Brown have been making noises. It's easier to sound as though you know what you're doing when it's not directly your responsibility, but it's also easier to sound as though you know what you're doing if you're a little bit competent. Johnson is rightly recuperating, but he has some awkward questions to face, as the Sunday Times and others keep pointing out, and the shallowness of his appointees has also been rather too much on display of late.
There's been a bit of discussion about the inappropriateness of wartime metaphors in tackling the pandemic - words such as "fighting" being particularly inappropriate for affected patients. A frequent problem in military campaigns is the length and vulnerability of supply lines, and I think whatever else comes of the pandemic, one result will be a shortening of supply chains on items of strategic importance, though I'm doubtful there will be a vast renaissance in quality UK manufacturing.
I'm settling - as much as one can in the current circumstances - a bit more into the new job. It's been quite a steep learning curve to understand reactive programming, but I feel comfortable at least with the basics. I can't in all honesty say I am looking forward to the inevitable work turmoil of any return to normality, for a number of reasons, though that seems as far off as ever for the time being.
On Sunday we decided to venture out for our daily exercise. I've hardly been anywhere except the back garden, and R even less so; despite rounds of house cleaning, there's been a lot of sneezing which is due to being inside continuously with rather a lot of dust. I think we tested the letter of the law, venturing as far as Ashampstead, but as we were walking for much longer than driving, and saw hardly anyone during the walk, we were very much in compliance with the spirit (the same can not be said for a couple of the villages we passed through, with a few quite busy pavements).
The lockdown was extended to no-one's surprise; the media seem to be waking up to the ongoing government shambles that surely everyone could have predicted. To be fair, I think whoever was in charge would have made something of a shambles of it. The call to make ventilators that turn out to be useless makes me think of households sacrificing their garden railings to be turned into Spitfires in World War 2. Politicians like the words cheap, easy, and popular, as they say in Yes, Minister; and it's damned awkward when those chickens come home to roost. Even the Toady programme is giving them a hard time, with Nick Robinson rightly calling out the day's interviewee - who has been given the task of representing the government as a whole - when they claim "that's not my area". It may well have been the right thing to do to send PPE to China in February; it's certainly not the right thing to do now to tell the British public that it's all on its way from Turkey when you haven't even made the arrangements. But people have to make do with what there is: certainly I've had plenty of experience in my career of insufficient investment and bad decision-making leading to poor results, but no-one's going to be at risk of death as a result.
Cameron and May have been keeping their heads down, but both Blair and Brown have been making noises. It's easier to sound as though you know what you're doing when it's not directly your responsibility, but it's also easier to sound as though you know what you're doing if you're a little bit competent. Johnson is rightly recuperating, but he has some awkward questions to face, as the Sunday Times and others keep pointing out, and the shallowness of his appointees has also been rather too much on display of late.
There's been a bit of discussion about the inappropriateness of wartime metaphors in tackling the pandemic - words such as "fighting" being particularly inappropriate for affected patients. A frequent problem in military campaigns is the length and vulnerability of supply lines, and I think whatever else comes of the pandemic, one result will be a shortening of supply chains on items of strategic importance, though I'm doubtful there will be a vast renaissance in quality UK manufacturing.
I'm settling - as much as one can in the current circumstances - a bit more into the new job. It's been quite a steep learning curve to understand reactive programming, but I feel comfortable at least with the basics. I can't in all honesty say I am looking forward to the inevitable work turmoil of any return to normality, for a number of reasons, though that seems as far off as ever for the time being.