It's time for a while that I thought about things in which I do participate

There is one thing I have begun to realise.

How much of my comments and thoughts are about events in which I do not participate.

For some reason, commenting on things happening elsewhere to other people did not feel strange before. Everyone talks about the news.

Then The Quarantine happened. Governments did things that they have never done before, not even in wars, and some of them assumed powers that no-one should be allowed to keep. For a day. What is happening in America now is unbearable to watch. A once-great nation is breaking up before our eyes.

What is happening in the rest of the world is also incomprehensible, if you try to understand it as the rational reaction of governments to a virus. Understand it as the desperate reaction of exhausted politicians to one more pseudo-crisis being exploited by special interest groups, and hyped up by a media driven by sensation and producing anti-government propaganda, and it makes perfect sense. Now they have to back out of it while maintaining the pretence that it really was serious, without panicking a noisy chunk of the population who believe the hype and without alienating all the voters. That's quite an act.

And here I am, participating in the whole farce and I don't want to comment or think about it. Of course I have, because understanding what happened to cause the Quarantine is the single biggest test of an analyst's abilities. Now I have done it(*), while carrying on with the day job, standing in lines to collect my prescriptions, and trying to run a life, and now I'm done with it.

But right now, I have nowhere to go, and even if I did, I'm a little short on motivation.

We can fix that. There are at least another six weeks before my gym is allowed to open, and large companies will continue to be asked to keep their staff at home for at least another five months. So I have plenty of time to experiment with how I live and work at home.

Which is what I am going to think about now. It's time for a while that I thought about things in which I do participate.



(*) When Boris announced the Quarantine, all the academics and public health advisors said to themselves:

****, he's actually going to do it. He wasn't supposed to do it. Quarantining healthy people is so dumb even the WHO knows it's dumb. He was supposed not to do it, so that if things went bad, we could all say we advised him to do it, but he wouldn't listen, and look what happened, and how superior are we? Just like we always do. Of course he shouldn't have listened to us.

That's what happened. The experts overlooked how hyped-up the media were, and how tired the politicians were after Brexit, and years of appeasing the unappeasable activists. The disaster that has come on our country will not, however, make the media or the experts or the activists one whit more responsible. Repeat after me...

Experts. Huh. Look what happened the last time we listened to the experts! We got locked in to our homes for four months for no reason at all. **** the experts.

Photographs I'm Printing (3)

Chester Canal Basin - 14/6/2010 Sony Eriksson camera phone

What caught me was the smoothness of the water, that bright sunlight in the middle left edge, and the bright reflection at the front of the barge. It just said print me.

How We Will Exit From Lockdown

I’ve stopped having to do with the news. I’ve stopped reading the speculations and the pontifications of grey public health bureaucrats getting their moment in the limelight, and who know as little about the economy as they do about fuel injection. I am fed up with the media behaving like a propaganda machine for a virus, the NHS and their own hysteria.

The pundits are assuming that the Unwind will be sensible and intended to get us back to earning and spending. It will be nothing of the sort.

The #UnwindFarce will be an exercise in face-saving public-health theatrics. None of it will make sense, and it will be incoherent. It will be there to pretend to maintain the falsehoods that got us here in the first place: that SARS-Cov-2 is a deadly virus that could have swamped the NHS and killed the entire population, and that closing cafes and theatres, forbidding public protests and fining people for sitting in parks was a proportionate response. Everyone will know it is nonsense, everyone will pretend it isn’t.

So we will be living with irritating idiocies for at least the rest of the year, and hearing the voices of public health people threatening another lockdown for the 2020/21 flu season. Because morale.

What the Coronachampions won’t give up is Social Distancing. But the rules will be mind-bogglingly silly. Shops will have limits on the number of people who can be inside, but not lifts in office blocks. Small companies and call centres will be able to return to their premises, but large companies will have to wait until autumn. Children will be able to go to school, but their parents will have to stand six feet apart outside the school gates. Doctors won’t see anyone in their surgeries, and visitors to A&E will have to wear masks and gloves. Six-foot separation at sports stadiums; theatres and cinemas must provide an empty seat to one’s left, right, front and behind; hairdressers and barbers will have to wear gloves and masks. You can have a massage, but she will have to wear gloves. However, buses, tubes and trains will be full, because who is going to enforce it and how? Cafes and restaurants will have to have six feet between tables, but not between two people dining at the same table. Pubs and bars can have so many people per square metre (half a person).

You get the idea. Silly. Obstructive. Intruding. Mask-wearing virtue-signalling twerps walking around and scowling at people who get near them on public transport, or asking in loud voices if you will social distance and not sit next to them on the bus. Randomly-enforced and inconsistent fines, and in place for months and months, until we all start ignoring it.

The Government will spend billions propping up businesses that cannot survive under its ridiculous rules, because everyone will know it’s the Government’s fault. But that won’t make the initial decision wrong. We will be inconvenienced and threatened with more #VirusKidnapping for at least another two years.

And everyone who doesn’t Politically Distance themselves from the whole #UnwindFarce by about July will lose their seat at the next election. Just like Brexit.

How I'm Reacting To Being A #CoronaHostage

I’m not missing the commute. I’m not missing my hectic morning schedule that gets me out of the house fed, shaved and dressed in forty minutes. I’m not missing paying £11.40 a day to travel into London. Nor am I missing paying £3 for snacks or coffee. I’m not missing the Central and Piccadilly lines to my gym. I’m not missing the short evenings at home, where I’m just de-stressing so I can get to bed at 21:30 or earlier. I am not missing the office, about which I have complained enough. I am not missing the 8,000 - 11,000 steps a day. It’s too many when combined with everything else. I am not missing the traffic. I am not missing the crowds of people.

I know some people miss the buzz, but for a long time I’ve just found London crowded and all the people a bit pointless, and I don’t miss that.

It’s been a long time since I went to the cinema. I’ve stopped going to restaurants because the food quality has gone down and the prices have gone up.

I am missing the workouts at the gym. I am really missing convenience shopping - especially for Boots-y things. I miss going to Foyles and Fopp. 

My gas and electric bills have gone up from working from home.

Most of all, I like that if anything goes wrong, it’s not my fault, it’s Dominic Raab’s. If I have to stop paying my council tax because I need the money for food, I can tell them to get the money from good ol’ Dominic.

But then, I have a house and a garden and the weather is fine. What it’s like for couples in small flats in Hoxton I have no idea. I’m still employed and my employer has enough money to pay my salary for a couple of months yet.

I am doing some basic bar-bell and body-weight exercises at home. I’ve just taken delivery of a proper gym mat with lots of foam in it. I’m eating better than I do when I’m at work. I wake up about the same time, but I don’t have to rush when I do. I’ve been keeping up with the MUBI’s, which is pleasant. I’ve stopped with the media, which has turned out to be even more pleasant.

So far, to be honest, so good. But then I’m an a-social grumpy old man, and I don’t feel the loss of the kind of socialising I used to do when I was thirty. And it’s been sunny and warm. What’s not to like?

Photographs I'm Printing (2)

Who doesn't like seagulls and swans and geese and a nice clean, freshly-painted girder arch at the top of the frame, its colour contrasting with the grey water and mud, and the white birds?

Richmond Bridge - 31/1/2010 Canon PowerShot A590 IS

Photographs I'm Printing (1)

Watch enough episodes of any photography channel and in one of them, the presenter will extol the virtues of printing your photographs. Large. At least A4. Modern colour printers and inks are pretty darn amazing these days, though the ink is as amazingly expensive as the printer itself is amazingly cheap.

For a while I nodded along, but was reluctant to take the plunge into printing. The cost of that ink though. Or of getting a digital file professionally printed. A couple of months ago, I replaced the dried-up cartridges (yes, yes, okay, the most expensive ink is the stuff you can't use)on my Canon MG7550 and started again. I'm going to post the ones I choose. Starting with...

The Bristol Channel from Exmoor - 29/8/2009 Canon Power Shot A590IS

It's about the horizontal layers of colour rather than a shot of heather and fields. I mean, there's the representational stuff, but what it's really about are the layers of grey in the sea and sky.

Why We Have To Stay At Home (It's Not What You Think)

Want to know why your movements have been restricted, your business closed and your financial future rendered precarious?

25 words or less?

If someone had to design a virus specifically to embarrass the Health Services of developed nations, they would have designed SARS-Cov-2.

Interested in the details?

SARS-Cov-2 transmits, it is held, reasonably easily. It seems to breed in the throat, not the lungs, so it gets out easier. It is said to last on surfaces for up to three days. Carriers are held to be infectious for up to two weeks, compared with three days for a regular flu. The early studies suggest that half the people who get infected won’t notice and most of the rest of the people who get it will have moderate symptoms. SARS-Cov-2 seems to kill people with immune systems compromised by chronic conditions usually associated with older age. Those high death rates in Italy, Iran and Spain are partly telling us about the poor health of the elderly population in those countries. Overall this is a picture of a virus that really wants to spread, but not to kill. This isn’t the Spanish flu.

Now here’s the Big BUT: it’s looking like the small proportion who need hospitalisation will take 18 days (plus or minus) to die and 22 days (plus or minus) to recover to the point they can go home. Compared with three for a regular flu or pandemic virus. To deal with SARS-Cov-2, hospitals will need six times as many beds as they would need if the numbers are the same as any other flu-based pandemic.

No hospital has that many spare beds. Modern hospitals are highly focussed and productive, churning out specific treatments with a minimum of skilled medical staff and equipment. Such organisations are acutely sensitive to any deviation from their standard operating assumptions.

SARS-Cov-2 is just such a deviation. Faced with a virus that might fill their always-nearly-full hospitals in a week, the Health Bureaucrats panicked. Not only would their precious buildings be full, but the staff would get infected and have to go home for a couple of weeks. Good luck running a hospital with ten percent of your staff at home and no agency nurses and doctors available.

That’s why protect the NHS is in the slogan, before save lives. In such slips are the priorities made clear.

The Health Bureaucrats needed a way to keep their hospitals from getting over-crowded. The lockdown is to reduce the traffic accidents, sports injuries, drunken brawls, industrial accidents, and other causes of visits to the A&E. That keeps the beds clear for all those SARS-Cov-2 cases which aren’t going to appear anyway.

Never before in peacetime had the UK been locked down. This time they could make it seem plausible. The UK’s broadband internet network made it possible for the Government to believe that many people could be sent home to work without disrupting the economy. Once the Government had done that, an hysterical media fed shock-horror stories by activist academics would push through the rest of the shutdown. No high-speed broadband, and we would all still be at work, just as we were through the previous pandemics.

And that’s how we got here. Where are we going?

After Easter about a third of the UK’s smaller businesses will start to put more than three-quarters of their staff on furlough. By mid-May half those people will be short a week’s money while those who earn more than the median wage of £2,500 / month will get shorter faster. By the end of June, those businesses will start to go broke, and their ex-employees will go on some kind of unemployment benefit. Nobody can live on that. By July or so, without an announcement about an end date, even the largest companies will look at furloughing their staff. At that point we turn off the lights.

So the question is: how much of our future, will the politicians allow the Health Bureaucrats and media to sacrifice, to keep the hospitals clear and ready for a wave of people who never were going to come through the door?

I have no idea.

The Surprise Hanging Paradox

I read a version of this paradox many years ago, thought it was nonsense, but couldn’t work out why. Recently I read a different version and understood why it was a silly paradox. Here’s the usual formulation:

A judge tells a condemned prisoner that he will be hanged at noon on one weekday in the following week but that the execution will be a surprise to the prisoner. He will not know the day of the hanging until the executioner knocks on his cell door at noon that day.

Having reflected on his sentence, the prisoner draws the conclusion that he will escape from the hanging. His reasoning is in several parts. He begins by concluding that the "surprise hanging" can't be on Friday, as if he hasn't been hanged by Thursday, there is only one day left - and so it won't be a surprise if he's hanged on Friday. Since the judge's sentence stipulated that the hanging would be a surprise to him, he concludes it cannot occur on Friday.

He then reasons that the surprise hanging cannot be on Thursday either, because Friday has already been eliminated and if he hasn't been hanged by Wednesday noon, the hanging must occur on Thursday, making a Thursday hanging not a surprise either. By similar reasoning, he concludes that the hanging can also not occur on Wednesday, Tuesday or Monday. Joyfully he retires to his cell confident that the hanging will not occur at all. The next week, the executioner knocks on the prisoner's door at noon on Wednesday — which, despite all the above, was an utter surprise to him. Everything the judge said came true.

The mistake is to pay any attention to all that pseudo-logic. You’ve been told that one day next week, you’re going to be hung. And that it will be a surprise.

No it won’t.

You know it has to be one of the days next week, and at the moment you hear it you know each day has a 14% chance of being the day. As each day passes, the probability increases. That’s no basis for surprise. You can only be surprised if you think there is a 0% chance of it being the day.

On the day itself, your proper, downright cool reaction should be Wednesday, huh? Well, it had to be some day.

But what about all that nonsense-logic? The Judge’s ruling, is contradictory. Your hanging can't be a surprise if you know it's what awaits you. Real logic tells us that you can prove whatever you like from a contradictory statement. No wonder you can twist a bunch of noodle-logic to prove that you’re not going to be hung. The reason you can’t find anything wrong with the argument is that there isn’t anything wrong with the argument. The flaw is in the premises, and the argument distracts you from that.

Or you could say, it’s what happens when you treat a probabilistic concept like surprise as if it is a two-valued one. You can be a little surprised.

The Long Goodbye / The Fabulous Baker Boys - Dave Grusin

Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye is one of the great films of the 1970’s. For many, many reasons, only one of which is the John Williams (he of Star Wars) soundtrack. It’s one tune played a dozen different ways. The soundtrack album never seemed to be available.

So here’s the best You Tube I’ve found.


That’s Dave Grusin on piano, who also played all Jeff Bridge's piano parts in that other shambling-cool movie, The Fabulous Baker Boys.

OK. If you’ve never seen it, here’s Grusin's tour de force from Baker Boys (it’s Michelle Pfeiffer singing).