Seriously, Why Would You Do That?

In Tesco today I bumped into someone from my band, which was nice - good to get a wee catch up, even if only briefly before we both needed to move on. Except that at one point he stuck out a fist expecting to receive a bump.

Gah!

Seriously, why would you do that? Yes, the risk is now very low, and the proposed contact fleeting. But we're still in the midst of a pandemic, and we still need to eliminate those non-essential contacts. And I had my daughter with me, and so have an additional obligation to show a good example. Yet now I have a choice to make.

Actually, it's quite surprising just how quickly attitudes change - eighteen months ago I wouldn't have thought twice about a fist-bump, a high five, or a handshake. Or even, with closer friends, a hug (in a strictly manly way, you understand). And yet suddenly the prospect of even a fleeting contact becomes a huge issue, provoking instant dread and in the longer term a blog post. It's funny.

But hopefully it won't be too long before the vaccine has this thing beaten, and things will go back. This absence of physical contact, while necessary, isn't really a good thing.

#19: "The Poisonwood Bible", by Barbera Kingsolver (a book from The List - fifteen to go)

Torn

After some time thinking about it, I have settled on voting SNP/SNP next month. My gut feeling, based on the polling that has been done, is that the Alba party won't win any seats in my region, which means that a vote for them would probably be wasted (and while a list vote for the SNP will also probably be wasted, it does make that outright SNP majority marginally more likely).

Given some of the candidates that the Alba party are standing, and some of the stuff that has come out from that party, a significant part of me actually doesn't want them to get many, if any seats. There's more than a hint of nastiness in some quarters.

However...

There's also a part of me that absolutely does want the Alba party to win at least a couple of seats and, crucially, to do well enough to have a platform to build from - with a view to establishing themselves as another legitimate party.

The reason for that is very little to do with Alba specifically, and much more about what it says. Our democracy is fairly heavily weighted against the smaller parties, and even moreso against independent candidates. That means that in order to be represented you effectively need to align yourself with one of the existing parties. But the reality is that there are a fair number of people who end up politically homeless - they find that they simply can't align with any of the existing parties for one reason or another or, worse, they find that all the existing parties agree on some topic with which they disagree.

Faced with that reality, it really needs to be possible to either stand as an independent or to start your own party, and have some chance of success - if there are enough like-minded people who agree with you then you can build something over time.

The problem is that we have seen, time and again, a lot of these micro-parties pop up, contest one election, get nowhere, and fold. The system is just weighted so heavily against micro-parties that they're basically done.

So now we have Alex Salmond trying much the same thing - he's set up his own micro-party, which a significant minority (2-3%) agrees with. And so we come to the big test: is it possible for him, with all of his star power and his backers, and with Wings Over Scotland behind him to set up his own party and build something.

Or is this just another micro-party that the system dooms to failure? If he can't make it work, that essentially means that nobody can make it work... and it means that a voter gets to choose from five parties (that are, frankly, pretty close on most issues), or they don't get representation. And that's really not right.

So...

The upshot is that while I won't be voting Alba (as above), and while I don't particularly care for some of what I've heard from them, I do want them to get at least a couple of seats. And, more importantly, I want them to endure to contest the next General Election and beyond.

Still Waiting

Tadpole's due date was last Saturday. The reason I haven't yet posted anything is that there's no news as yet. I'm not terribly surprised by this, but I think we're both now at the point where we'd rather it was done.

I'll update again if and when there is something to say.

#17: "Sharpe's Tiger", by Bernard Cornwell

#18: "The Good Earth", by Pearl S. Buck (a book from The List - sixteen to go)

Day 100: Update on... Stuff

It has been a really difficult few weeks, for a number of reasons. The sooner this lockdown is over and we're able to actually travel and meet people, the better. Oh well.

• Books: By Day 100 I should expect to have completed 16.44 books. With the completion of book 16 this morning, I'm actually back to being a little ahead - I have a Sharpe novel well in progress as well. I've also just passed the halfway point through Shakespeare, and it will be really nice to tick that off the list.
• Weight: No change.
• Blogging: I'm very slightly behind on both blogs, but it's only matter of one post on each. So I'm reasonably happy there.
• Redecorating the Spare Room: The carpet has been replaced, and Funsize has been sleeping in the room for a couple of weeks now. We need a headboard for her bed, after which we'll no longer have to transfer her to a lower bed in the night. We do also have some residual stuff in the wardrobe that will need to go - that's part of the goal for the next week.
• Tadpole #2: The due date is a week today. All the arrangements are in place... we hope!

And that's pretty much the theme for the last month right there, and also for the next few weeks - good times to come, but the waiting isn't so much fun...

#16: "Thomas the Tank Engine: The Complete Collection", by Rev. W. Awdry (a book for Funsize... and for daddy)

Just... why?

So, Prince Philip has died. That is, of course, extremely sad for the Queen - the loss of a husband of so many years must be hard to fathom. I also understand that this is the item that is right at the top of the news agenda - it almost certainly is the most important event in the UK today.

But...

The truth is that Philip was a 99-year-old man who had been in uncertain health recently. So this isn't unexpected news by any stretch of the imagination. It's also true to note that there is almost nothing to say about this story - the Royal Family are unsurprisingly not about to parade their grief before the world, and so the journalists basically have nothing to say.

So the BBC's standard approach to the big news story, of putting together an interminable loop of empty nonsense to fill up a channel, is already overkill. There is just about justification for putting such a thing together and running it on the BBC News channel so that people can dip in, get informed, and move on.

But can someone please explain to me why the BBC have felt the need to run the same, pointless, empty feed of nonsense on all of their mainstream channels? BBC 1, BBC 2, BBC News, BBC Parliament, BBC Alba, and BBC Scotland are currently all showing exactly the same thing... and that same thing is utterly and completely devoid of content.

There is, just maybe, an argument about it being a mark of respect. Except that the mark of respect appropriate for a grieving family is to give them privacy and space, not to put them at the centre of a media circus. If that was the aim, the BBC should properly suspend it's programming - pull the plug on all their channels for the duration.

It seems we really have lost our collective minds.

#15: "The Dwarves", by Markus Hietz

The Admixture

I've just finished watching "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny", which was an intensely frustrating experience - some elements of the film were genuinely great (including, in particular, the final battle), but many just sucked. The resulting mixture of awesome and awful made for a film I really don't know what to make of.

This is, basically, a much-delayed sequel to the original CT:HD, starring the always-great Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yu. It basically takes all the trappings of the first film, but then wraps them in a Hollywood sensibility of how films are supposed to go, which meant that the whole thing was intensely predictable - there is the evil bad guy raising an army, there is a magic sword, there are fueds and vendettas. There is even, somehow, an echo of Rey and Kylo Ren which is quite uncanny. And then, of course, there's the mega-happy ending, quite at odds with the melancholy of the original film.

I really can't recommend this film. And yet, I really enjoyed large parts of it. It's just... odd.

#14: "The Gates of Athens", by Conn Iggulden

Whatever Happened to March?

It's bizarre - we seem to have skipped pretty much from February to April. One minute I was getting stressed out by a big change in direction, and the next I'm one day away from a very long break.

March did have one milestone of note, that I meant to mention at the time but forgot: we saw the one-year anniversary of my working from home. Which would have been rather nicer if we weren't still stuck in an interminable lockdown. Oh well.

Here's to a better April.

#13: "Blood of Elves", by Andrzej Sapkowski