So schools and colleges had one day of life and now Bojo has said they’re unclean, like the rest of the country. So Joe gets to spend the next six weeks, maybe twelve, at home, while algorithms and their creators bicker to be given the right to determine his future. Conviviality and intimacy are things of the past, getting further away all the time.
Four days into 2021 and Bojo the Clown runs out of ideas so puts us all under house arrest again. But I still have to go to work, now and again, along with a few other people here and there.
This post does not plough untouched furrows of excitement, I know, but then again, nor will January 2021 I suspect. Consider it an abstract; the smoothness of the apples contrasted with the sharp edge of the break. If you like.
The allocation of Mondays as designated stay-at-home days seems to have become a set pattern. Tools of my particular trade: the Mac, the backup disk, and we are at the time of year where the 2021 diary needs to come to the fore. It ain’t high adventure I know, but at the moment it’s what there is.
I don’t normally covet material goods. People, places, experiences, sure… but not normally things. Today I made an exception. Although it’s just as well the price of this marvellous item is concealed on this shot.
For the first time since the 6th March, face-to-face contact with actual University of Manchester students. And even then I should apparently not have been doing this. However, I’ve kinda stopped caring. I like this picture because it was just the shot I wanted to take when I pressed the shutter, and I got it on the first attempt. Mug, mask, maze of wires and all.
Saturdays are football days…. still just about. But while we might potentially have been in attendance at Morecambe FC today for their FA Cup tie with Solihull, this is declared ‘unsafe’ by Our Glorious Leaders at this present time, so like the other interested hundreds we had to make do with TV. The local mug and, in the background, Clare’s scarf offered totems of support. But it’s unreal, fake somehow. The trouble is that no one in ‘authority’ really gives a toss.
A turntable has made a reapperance in our house for the first time in twenty years, so we’ve been digging out some of the old records that survived the Great Vinyl Cull of the 1990s (I was a student, I needed the money, I regret it now, sure). And it’s been an excuse to pick up some new material as well, including that of the very fine band seen to top — previous blog stars themselves. I wonder what music will, in the end, emerge from this time of paralysis, or what art of any kind.
Hebden Bridge’s hundred-year-old Picture House has not featured on the blog in 2020. Flooded (again) on Feb. 9th and then forced to close by the New Fascism — until tonight. Tonight, we could return to support this valuable local resource, see a good film (Saint Maud) and have a glass of wine at our seat. Next week, as we are pressured back into whatever the hell ‘Tier 3’ is being defined as by Our Glorious Leaders, we will still be able to see movies, but not have a glass of wine at our seat. This is the kind of difference that gives me a warm, cosy feeling of safety and respect for authority.
We had visitors in the house today, and this will make no more difference to anyone’s life than if we were to do the same thing next week. Unless you ascribe to the views of the moronocracy, who’d rather blame us for their own failings, and screw up local economies just that little bit more. Meanwhile, Ellie & Marcus work on the jigsaw. It’s half-term.
Being 42 