Passacaglia and Fugue

And boy, will there be shouting, but it sounds as if it will come to nothing - some legal cases have already been thrown out and no-one seems to give the others much credence. The margins of victory in Pennsylvania and Georgia seem way too big to be overturned by recounts. They'd really have to "find" some extra votes to count there.

It seems typical of the US that declaring the result of a presidential election would be outsourced to the private sector. Officially we have to wait until December before the results will be certified. Typical too, perhaps, that the counting is slow and the infrastructure inadequate, though the pandemic created problems both in increased mail-in voting and, presumably, in social-distancing and other measures within counting centres. You can recount votes relatively quickly, I suspect, but things like opening a sealed envelope and verifying voting paperwork can only be done once.

Less typical, perhaps, that there is an eruption of popular celebration in the streets. That's more like the popular overthrow of some third-world dictatorship.

Biden did enough to win, but it's not exactly reassuring that 70 million US citizens think Trump was the better candidate, and the other results are hardly inspiring for the Democrats. I'm not really persuaded by the AOC wing of the party asserting they would have done better with a more radical prospectus. Frankly, after the last 4 years, "sleepy" Joe sounds like a good deal to me. There's a case to be made for more progressive politics, but it hasn't been made successfully this time. The USA spends far more on health care and doesn't get such good clinical outcomes, for example. But allow Obamacare to be labelled as "socialism" and it won't go down well.

It would be a fitting end to have Trump forcefully escorted out of the White House by security in January. Meanwhile we have to settle for the satisfaction of Giuliani giving a press conference in a parking lot between a crematorium and an adult store.

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.

I wasn't sorry to have left my previous job, but perhaps the timing could have been better. Last Monday I arrived at the new place for the induction and onboarding. As I'm based in a satellite office, and I had to return later in the day to collect a laptop, this turned out to require four trips on the Central Line. I got a seat every time.

Unfortunately, last Monday evening the decision was made to switch to working from home. I have an ID badge that works at HQ, and a temporary pass for the building I'm supposed to be in; there was no time to get my own badge updated on that first day. I've been struggling with the laptop ever since. I assumed the choice between Windows and Mac was genuine; I'm not so sure that was really the case. Having opted for Windows, because it's more familiar and I prefer both the hardware and the software, I discover I was being given Windows 8.1 (already so many years out of date) and that it's locked down. The helpdesk has a ticket to give me local admin privileges, but as I can't install the software to connect to the VPN without those privileges, I'm not sure that's something they will be able to fix remotely.

So, rather unhappily, I backed off to my personal laptop, which installs the VPN client fine and after some confusion on usernames I have access to Git. But then, it turns out that Docker for Windows requires Windows 10 Professional and I have the Home edition.

At the weekend, I go back to the 9-year-old laptop that hasn't quite made it to the tip, and install Ubuntu on it. Of course, as this is Linux I have to edit some weird config file to actually make it boot up without wrecking the display. Docker works fine, but Ubuntu Network Manager won't import the OpenVPN config file I've been given, and I can't make head nor tail of how to apply the equivalent settings in the GUI.

So, back to Windows 10 Home. As the government has nationalised the railways, I decide, after applying for my season ticket refund, to treat myself to the Professional update. This fixes the Docker install, but the builds still fail. I think I spotted one of the dependent containers failing to start, so I will have to look into this tomorrow.

The whole thing has been Kafkaesque. It's nobody's fault, my new colleagues seem friendly and sympathetic, but there's not a lot anyone can do about this at the moment, and possibly not for the foreseeable future either (though, right now, "foreseeable" amounts to at most 24 hours).

At the weekend we went out for a walk in the Hungerford area. Although there were quite a few cars in the car park, there was hardly anyone on the 6-mile walk at all, the few humans we saw kept sensible distance though one dog was rather too keen to make friends.

I followed all the advice about not panic buying, and as a result I am down to my last potato. I'm almost thinking it would be better to plant it than eat it now. We have enough food in, but after a few days the meals may become a bit weird. There are one or two things I would have liked to have had around, but we'll have to wait. Sooner or later we will need more toilet rolls. There are no supermarket delivery slots available here forever, and the apps/websites are regularly going down; the suggestion to use delivery options if available is a bit rich in these conditions. I ventured out late this afternoon to Sainsbury's in Tadley (reckoning it would be less busy than the huge Calcot store; the local Co-op has had a small queue outside it today, and the Tesco Metro is a little ravaged); the Burghfield Common Puddle has returned and traffic is controlled by broken 4-way lights. I think we're going to have some weeks of strange supply problems and it's only going to get worse as delivery drivers end up going off sick or isolating.

Today the garage called to cancel my service and MOT which was due on Wednesday. This could be awkward, as the MOT runs out at the end of the month; I can't renew the tax without an MOT; insurance, etc. Right now DVLA has only waived MOTs for buses and lorries; presumably a wider loosening must be imminent. I'd like to think people have thought this through but to put it mildly I'm doubtful. There was a PC Plus article in 1999 that claimed society was only ever six meals away from apocalypse; that was, of course, in the context of the Y2K bug, but we're putting it to the test now.

We've been lucky in recent months with ballots for BBC radio recordings, having previously gone to watch The News Quiz being recorded on the night of the European elections, and an episode of Dead Ringers a month later. On Thursday evening we were again in the BBC Radio Theatre for a recording of The News Quiz.

It's been another interesting week, but apart from Brexit, proroguing, and the Speaker standing down, there have been other news stories, including a BA strike and a crime-fighting seal. Francis Wheen, Susan Calman, Felicity Ward and Glenn Moore formed the panel, with guest host Patrick Kielty. Somewhere on a BBC cutting room floor, there exists a recording of news reader Susan Rae instructing Kielty to "tell them the scrotum joke".

On Friday I headed to my final Prom of the season. The queuing in the morning was a bit chaotic; as it was the penultimate concert, there were already people queueing for the Last Night, and it took longer than usual to get the queueing ticket. Things had sorted themselves out when I returned in the evening, for a Beethoven Night. I found myself five or six rows back.

The NDR Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Andrew Manze began with Handel, however; the Music for the Royal Fireworks. It struck me that I am so used to hearing this kind of music on period instruments, that this performance of a modern symphony orchestra sounded unusual, and perhaps lacked some of the raw edge I had come to expect. But the next piece, Beethoven's Ah! perfido, sung by Elizabeth Watts, sounded right, even though it also must have been performed originally with a smaller orchestra. The final piece of the first half was a Bach-Elgar orchestration, the Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor BWV537. It seemed to start a little slowly, but built up as it went on.

The second half was an all-Beethoven affair, beginning with the overture to Fidelio and followed by another aria, Abscheulicher! … Komm, Hoffnung, lass den letzten Stern. The programme finished with the Symphony No. 5. Traditionally, the ninth was played at the penultimate concert of the season, but that was set aside some years ago. Of course, the fifth is one of the pieces that everyone recognises and it's difficult to say anything distinctive. Of course, in the context of Brexit, everything must be viewed through the lens of the Second World War, in which the four note opening motif was taken by the Allies as representing the Morse code letter V. It was a good performance; the third movement always triggers a memory of the film of Howards End, where it features in a rainy scene outside Oxford Town Hall; and the transition to the fourth movement, bursting into C Major, surely records what "sunlit uplands" are supposed to look like. There was a Handel encore, but I couldn't tell exactly what it was.