Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
It’s hard to believe that a year has gone by since we walked into the Final Say March while in London. We weren’t taking part but we did watch it travel down St James Street. And I photographed the passing action via the reflections in a puddle. Huge numbers of voters took to the streets to demand that the final Brexit decision should be made by the public. It wasn’t to be.
And I all I have to show for it are twenty or thirty photographs of a puddle.
[Read more…] about Animated ProtestWe had coffee and cereal while wanting to watch TV news coverage that isn’t streaming. Our TV service comes streamed via a broadband modem and a set-top box. It’s a frustrating example of technology that’s provided without adequate integration and training of the provider’s workforce. It’s taken a month for an admission that this is a service issue rather than something we’ve done. It’s a very asymmetric relationship between provider and customer. The accounts department will know if a subscriber fails to stream cash on time. The technicians are divided into factional departments who don’t seem to know when the streaming TV service is failing let alone how to fix it.
We read the Irish Times newspaper at the dining table. The so-called Last Supper in Clifden was the dominant news story. Members of a golfing society met and dined in a hotel in celebration of their society’s 50th anniversary. Unfortunately, there were over eighty for dinner at a time when the limit was six. It’s a measure of the confusion of changing pandemic rules that the gathering was attended by people involved in advising, framing and enforcing the rules. It’s becoming a national scandal. A minister and a senator have already resigned and others in key national and international leadership roles are catching a lot of media flack. Perhaps the biggest lesson is not about flaunting pandemic advice or alleged arrogance but national governance. It seems that the society membership includes members of the cabinet, the parliament and the judiciary. This suggests, to the lay observer, that the executive, legislative and judicial functions might not be quite as independent as should be expected in a democratic parliamentary republic.
Picture us on a zoom call. Something you probably do yourself. We have a weekly Friday evening chat with a friend about what’s not being achieved while the plague keeps us incarcerated so that our health isn’t compromised by our underlying conditions. You know, the underlying implication that our own medical conditions are the cause of any public health failures.
One Friday in particular, I learned that Trumpian delusions may be as infectious as anything that’s out there.
We’d been zooming about the books we’re reading, the news and at the point of swapping recommendations on TV programs we might enjoy watching. I recounted seeing coverage of a dreadfully lax Trump rally that sent all the wrong public health messages.
