I've slipped yet further back on the reading target, but there is one thing I'm inclined to note in mitigation of that: over the course of March I've read through half of "The Stand", which is by some way the longest book remaining on The List. So although the headline figure looks pretty bad, the underlying trend isn't quite as terrible as it seems.
That said, I did get bogged down in Cornwell's "Crackdown", and am even more bogged down in "The Darkest Road", so it's not all that good, either.
After two attempts, I managed to arrange with BT to get our landline service reconnected. During the course of that call, I specifically asked if our number would remain the same - if we have to tell everyone the number has changed, we might as well just tell them it's disconnected and give up. Anyway, it was confirmed that the number would stay the same.
Naturally, it didn't.
So today saw me make another call to BT, to speak to another person, tell the tale yet again... and this time an order was placed to renumber our line back to the value we had. Apparently, it should happen on Monday. I suppose twelve days isn't bad for a 'seamless' transition of an unrelated problem.
On the plus side, the assistant I spoke to today was quite impressive, so I'm at least hopeful...
I've done something to my back. It's mostly fine during the day, but my sleeping position is obviously not what it should be, as each morning I'm waking in considerable pain. Which, it's fair to say, isn't setting me up for the day in the best possible manner.
Oh well. Hopefully it will pass soon enough.
About a week ago we agreed to take a new broadband contract - a very slight increase in speed for a very slight increase in price, but otherwise no changes... and then no need to worry for two years. In the course of the call I asked, and had it confirmed, that our landline would be unaffected.
Naturally, our landline has now stopped working. And, of course, I'm now getting the runaround - their computer says that I don't have landline services on my account (since they've removed them), and so of course they don't work. Presumably the next step is that they'll offer to add them to our package, all for the low low price of...
The thing that infuriates me about this, other than it being yet another cock up by yet another internet company (are any of them any use at all?), and other than it being yet another thing I really didn't need to be dealing with, is that the landline is almost completely useless to us - about 99% of the time the phone rings it's a nuisance call. Unfortunately, there is still that 1% of calls that are actually important.
Gah!
LC lamented some time ago that she had two to-do lists: the things she wanted to do and the things that she had to do. Sadly, the nature of life is that the "have to do" list keeps getting ever-longer, and so it's almost impossible to get to the "want to do" list.
Unfortunately, while my own situation is similar, it's not the same: I have four lists to deal with:
And, as with LC, I'm extremely lucky if I ever get to the bottom of the first two lists, never mind moving onto the others. (Plus, given that many of the things on the long-term to do list are themselves pretty lengthy, even if I had some time it's unlikely to be enough to tackle one of these jobs.)
Which means that the long-term to do list is essentially the "do never" list, which is really frustrating.
#13: "Crackdown", by Bernard Cornwell
There's a big spoiler below. You know what to do.
This is the first Bond film since the start of the Brosnan era that I haven't seen in the cinema. I would really have liked to go, too, but the pandemic just didn't allow for it. Having now seen the film, I was probably lucky.
The truth is, this film was always almost certain to be Daniel Craig's third-best - it was going to have to go some to beat the stellar "Casino Royale" or "Skyfall", while "SPECTRE" was just dire, and "Quantum of Solace" was ruined by a writer's strike. Still, given the gulf between the really good and the really bad, there was a lot of scope for it to go either way.
And, alas, "No Time to Die" is very much at the lower end of the scale - it's way too long, it's really quite dull, and it's entirely devoid of humour. Basically, it's a slow burn all leading up to, well, nothing much really.
I was rather amused by the tagline, "James Bond will Return", right at the end of the credits, though - Bond pretty definitively dies in this one, which raises the question of how. (Though three answers immediately leap to mind: one is the "Man With the Golden Gun" (novel) approach - he's grabbed by Russians, reconstructed and brainwashed, and sent to kill M; one is that they jump back in time and do a 60's spy film; one is that they just reboot. Or, I suppose, they could completely ignore it and just carry on.)
But a big part of me thinks that this should just be the end. We've now had decades of people desperately trying to cast a female James Bond, a notion that makes no more sense than a male Jane Eyre. What they're really asking is that MGM instead stop making Bond films, and make something else instead. And maybe it really is time for exactly that.
Today marks the two-year anniversary of my switching to working from home. Which probably deserves at least some recognition.
Funnily enough, this anniversary comes at a time when the country is engaging in a fascinating experiment: is it possible for the people of a country to gaslight themselves? The thing is, the pandemic is very clearly not over. And yet we're engaged in a crazy process of getting rid of all the remaining measures that were put in place to protect us. And so, in order to justify the madness, we're collectively pretending to ourselves that it's all over, even as cases, hospital admissions, and fatalities all rise.
Work have been talking about us returning to the office for some time. I'm not sure when that will eventually happen, though I suspect it will be sooner rather than later. (It would be really convenient if it happened some time after July 1st, but I doubt I'll be that lucky.)
The truth is that I have very mixed feelings about a return to the office. It's adding five hours to my work week, and maybe £150 to my monthly fuel bills, which sucks. On the other hand, there is a community aspect to work that has been missing, to an extent. My answer, I suppose, is the same as it has always been: I'll go back when they ask me to, but not until then.
LC was unwell on Sunday, and as the day wore on I found myself coming down with whatever it was. On Monday I woke up feeling pretty terrible.
Now, in times gone past I would probably have taken the view that I was, just about, capable of getting through the work day. It would have been horrible, but it could be done. And since I'm still working from home, the decision should have been even easier.
Except that we're not in the same world as in times past. The pandemic has changed a very many things, and one of those key things that we really need to ditch is the culture of presenteeism - the view that one should attend work right up to the point where you literally keel over... and even if your being there represents a danger of infection to your colleagues (and, therefore, to the wellbeing of the company as a whole).
Of course, all of this is made simpler by company policy, which is that people who are ill should stay home and focus on getting well.
The upshot is that I was off sick on Monday, and had a not at all restful day. In all honesty, it would probably have been better had I gone to work after all. I woke up on Tuesday initially feeling better, but the thermoter said otherwise, so again I didn't go in. And by mid-morning was feeling considerably better.
Today I'm back at work. I'm definitely not 100%, but getting there.
#11: "Protector", by Conn Iggulden
I don't know much about the situation in Ukraine. The truth is that the whole thing is very distressing, and there's basically nothing I can do about it. Plus, the situation has the potential to become outright apocalyptic, and there's not a single thing I can do about that. So there is absolutely no benefit in wallowing in the wall-to-wall coverage of the whole thing, and sink into a mire of horror.
The upshot of all of that is that I'm not qualified to give an opinion on basically any of it, what anyone should be doing as a response, or what I think is going to happen. I'm hoping that either Putin will see sense, or that wiser heads in Russia will act to remove him, and that the consequence is a very rapid de-escalation... but I don't see any reason to think that that will happen.
And that's all I have to say on that one.
#10: "The Outsiders", by S.E. Hinton (a book from The List - five to go)
At the end of January, I had posted here 10 times, and had read four books. I finished the fifth on the 1st of February.
At the end of February, I had posted 19 times here. This represents the 20th post, on the 1st of March. I have finished nine books, but have barely started the tenth.
Unfortunately, this means that I am slowly but surely slipping back from where I had hoped to be.
The good news at this stage is that it's a recoverable slip - the key is to make sure that the required progress is made each day, plus a little bit. The first part is the more crucial of the two, as it means that there won't be any further slippage. (The problem last year was that that was exactly what happened - as I tried to recover in one area, it meant that another slipped, until everything was just irredeemably behind.)
We'll see how it goes. By the end of this month we should have a pretty good idea.
Due to Covid, and the various stresses of life, I have skipped Lent for the previous two years. Now that things seem to be settling a bit, I've decided that this year it is time to give it a go again.
Of course, the notion of Lent is that one should give something up, and that that something should necessarily hurt, at least a little - it is, after all, supposed to be a sacrifice. So a few years ago I concluded that the thing to give up was coffee. As of Wednesday, therefore, that will be cut for a few weeks.
Unless it turns out to be impossible to stick to that. But then, I managed to give up on Irn Bru for a good long time, so it should be okay. I think.
#9: "Sea Lord", by Bernard Cornwell
The situation in Ukraine has caused questions to be raised once again about the funding of the Tory party - they have been in receipt of some millions of pounds that ultimately came from Russia. This donations are, of course, entirely legal, but they have caused at least some raised eyebrows. And, at a time when the UK really needs to take strong action against Russia, we really need to be confident that the party of government is empowered to do so.
So yet another aspect of our politics that needs to be cleaned up is the funding of our political parties.
My suggestion is pretty straightforward, and it is that political parties should have exactly two sources of funding, and it should be illegal for them to raise funds by any other means:
There would be a couple of effects of this. Firstly, it would cut out any suggestion of dodgy money getting into the coffers of political parties. Similarly, it would sharply reduce the influence of unions on parties, most notably the Labour party. It would prevent parties being heavily funded by bequests, which currently mean that dead members are more important to the Tory party than living ones. And it would prevent the raffling off of 'access' - pay some thousands and you too can play tennis with Boris, have lunch with Ruth, or whatever!
But, crucially, the funding by votes clause would have the effect of making every vote in an election matter - even if you live in a rock-solid safe seat, voting for some other party would be worthwhile as it means more funding for your party of choice.
(Additionally, it of course means that parties must then either work to maximise membership or to maximise the number of votes they receive, in order to be funded. Which is really no bad thing.)
Just my suggestion.
#8: "The Power of One", by Bryce Courtenay (a book from The List. Six to go.)
I watched the trailer for the new Amazon "Lord of the Rings" series about a week ago, and I'm afraid I was unimpressed. Basically, it looked like Fantasy Lands of Generica yet again... it was okay, but there wasn't really anything in it that grabbed me and said "you must watch this".
I guess that's inevitable - since they're not adapting any of Tolkien's actual stories, what is essentially left is a set of names and locations of varying levels of familiarity. But Middle Earth is so foundational to the whole of fantasy that without the big stories it is, more or less, Fantasy Lands of Generica.
Oh well. I'll inevitably watch it anyway, so I guess we'll see.
There are two things I would like to mention at this point, though.
Firstly, I have absolutely no issue whatsoever with the greater representation seen in the trailer. Bluntly, I don't much care - there are many people of colour who are fantastic actors, and so giving them a chance can only be a good thing. Middle Earth was soft-of kind-of a mythic history of Britain, but it's so far removed from any sort of real history as to make it nonsensical. Plus, elves and dwarves don't actually exist, so who is to say that the theoretical dwarves of ancient Britain weren't people of colour?
Then there is the issue of the dwarven princess who, shock horror!, doesn't have a beard. Much has been made of the 'fact' that this is at odds with Tolkien's writings on the subject. Just one small problem: last year the Tolkien estate published "The Nature of Middle Earth", a collection of writings by the man himself. That work had a chapter on 'Beards' (yes, really), which specified who did and did not have them, and in which Tolkien specifies that all male dwarves have beards. He doesn't say anything about female dwarves here, but if he specifies all male dwarves rather than all dwarves that must imply that at least some female dwarves don't have beards.
So our beardless female dwarf is, actually, not at all inconsistent with what J.R.R. Tolkien states on the subject. Oops.
(And, incidentally, what are inconsistent is Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn and David Wenham's Faramir - in "The Nature of Middle Earth" Tolkien specifies that those characters don't have beards.)
All that said, there's a larger point here: if you are truly opposed to the beardless female dwarf, or the people of colour playing elves and dwarves, based on some sort of purist's appreciation of the written works, then surely you must reject any and all of the adaptations of Middle Earth completely - all the movies, the play, the musical, the video games, the TTRPGs, Leonard Nimoy's musical genius... all of it. The truth is that none of it is entirely consistent with Tolkien's writings or his vision, so how can it be accepted.
Bottom line: it's an adaptation; things are going to be changed. What matters is whether those changes are trivial or fundamental, and whether the result is good or not.
#7: "The Looking Glass War", by John Le Carré
Today is the 50th day of the year, so it's time for the regular update:
And that's that. I'm reasonably happy with progress to date, but will need to have done more by next time.
In the least-shocking development in ages, Prince Andrew has settled his case in order to avoid court. Which means, legally, he has no stain on his honour, and can just carry on as before.
Yeah, right.
Here's the thing: the Royal Family have very significant wealth and holdings nominally in their own name, and they're also in receipt of very significant sums of money from the public, and have access to many homes and palaces that are nominally owned by the public. The claim is that the settlement, which is significant, is being paid from the former... though whether that money originally came from us via the Civil List is never going to be clear.
Well, fair enough. He's the queen's son, indeed her favourite son, so if she wants to bail him out with 'her' money, that's her prerogative as a mother.
But it's also not enough.
Nor is it enough that Andrew has been stripped of some of his ranks, titles, and honours.
Very simply, the public can no longer be expected to support Andrew in any way, shape, or form. He must now be stripped of all of his remaining ranks, titles, and honours (with the exception of those few minor awards he legitimately earned for his military service in the Falklands War). Additionally, he must lose access to all those properties that the Royal Family are permitted to use but which remain publicly-owned. Let him live the remainder of his life in obscurity, and as a private citizen.
If not, if the Royal Family cannot bear to excise the poison, then the Royal Family itself must also no longer be in receipt of public money, and they themselves must lose access to those public holdings.
If Charles wants to be King, Andrew must cease to be a Prince.
Aberdeen have been having a shockingly poor season, with the result that they have sacked their manager, Stephen Glass. As a consequence of this, there is the usual round of speculation about who will take over, with most of the names in the frame being managers of smaller teams. So it's likely that Aberdeen's sacking their manager will lead to them taking the manager from some other team, who will then poach a manager from a yet smaller team... and so it goes down the table.
The effect is that because Aberdeen's players can't get their act together, half a dozen teams have their seasons disrupted.
Similarly, a few years ago the then Celtic manager, Brendan Rodgers, accepted the offer of a job from Leicester City while the season was still in the balance. As it happened, it was Celtic's good fortune that Neil Lennon was currently out of work, or that could potentially have had a title-altering effect on that season.
And, of course, this season Steven Gerrard has moved from Rangers to Aston Villa. And, again, it is Rangers' very good fortune that Giovanni van Bronckhorst was out of work... though it remains to be seen what the effect on the title may be, if any.
What I'm coming to is this: a club's manager is massively important. Indeed, in all but the most extreme cases, the manager is a more important figure at the club than any single player (with perhaps half a dozen exceptions - Ronaldo, Messi, etc). Yet while we have a transfer window for players, limiting the ability of the big boys to disrupt an opponent's season by poaching talent, we have no such equivalent for managers.
I think it's needed - both to prevent the sort of cascading disruption we're about to see, but also to give managers a bit more job security.
Funerals are unlikely to be happy affairs. (Or, at least, any funerals I'm likely ever to attend.) At best, they are a matter of saying farewell to a loved one at the end of a long life well lived - and if the person involved had been suffering prior to death, even that can be a blessing.
But a good funeral will generally give a sense of catharsis - it puts the seal on that life well lived, lets those present say their last goodbyes, and then you move forward.
My grandmother's funeral was not such an event. Indeed, it stood in massive contrast to my grandfather's funeral - both were fairly simple affairs, both had detailed plans that were followed to the letter... indeed, both had much the same detailed plan. But that served to make the differences so stark.
Unfortunately, it was an event marred by bitterness. The rifts in the extended family have now become irretrievable, and whereas before there was a need not to let grandma or grandad see the issues at work, that is no longer the case.
Such a shame that the very last gathering of the extended family should be of that character.
There are controversies and then there are CONTROVERSIES!, and today I'm going to be addressing one of the biggest. Forget Messi vs Ronaldo (Ronaldo), forget Federer vs Nadal (Fed), forget even Kirk vs Picard (Sisko). Today, we'll be addressing the burning topic of all topics: Hey Duggee or Bluey?
In all seriousness, CBeebies is twenty years old, and the Guardian have commissioned an article looking at some of the best programmes from the history of that channel. For anyone who is familiar with them, the top two are no surprise at all - the only real question was which would come on top of the heap.
For the uninitiated, Bluey is an Australian animation about a family of dogs - Bandit, Chilli, Bingo, and the titular Bluey. On the face of it, it's the usual anarchic "here's a situation, hijinks ensue" show we've seen a million times before... but what sets Bluey apart is the writing, which is just stellar. It's a children's show that I could happily watch myself.
On the other hand, Hey Duggee is an British animation about a dog (Duggee) who runs a day care facility for five children. Each episode the squirrels go on some adventure to collect a badge. And, again, it's set apart by the writing of the piece, and again it's something I could watch by myself. Indeed, until Bluey came along, my go-to opinion for just about any piece of entertainment was, "well, it's no Duggee... but then, what is?"
One thing to note is that part of the greatness of both of these shows is that they don't talk down to kids, as a great deal of children's entertainment does. Children obviously don't have the skills and experience of adults, and they haven't yet been inflicted with the decades of relentless cynicism that we've developed. But there's a big difference between that and being stupid, and a great deal of children's TV forgets this. Bluey and Duggee do not, and that is a real strength.
Honestly, my view with these things is that the need to pick an absolute winner is somewhat silly - in all the cases, there's no reason you can't acknowledge the excellence of both sides, and indeed be grateful that we live in a world with both - indeed, in most of the cases, each side has made the other better. So it doesn't really matter which is better - they're both good.
But... if I simply had to choose, Duggee wins it for me.
A couple of yeas ago, Tesco decided to do away with as much plastic packaging in their stores as they could. Amongst other things, this meant getting rid of packs of four tins of beans and/or soup, and instead running a permanent "four for..." offer. Which was a good step.
I've noticed that they've now brought back the packs of four, but now wrapped in cardboard, and at a cheaper price point than the "four for..." offer.
Which is a shame on two counts.
Firstly, while cardboard wrapping is better than plastic, it's still an extra bit of wrapping that gets used, and then recycled. That's considerably worse than nothing - it would just be better to leave these things unwrapped.
The other problem concerns the nature of the "four for..." deal in the first place, which ties into issues with poverty, and the Vimes "Boots" Theory of Economic Unfairness - people on the very poorest end of the scale can't afford to pay £2.50 for four tins of soup, and must instead pay 80p for a single tin each week. Over the course of four weeks, then, they pay £3.20 on the same soup - the (slightly) richer person ends up paying less. (And, yes, it's 'only' a matter of 17.5p per week. But multiply that by 52 weeks in the year, and however many different offers the richer person can use but the poorer cannot, not to mention the potential to "stock up" as and when very good deals happen to crop up, and it turns into a not insubstantial chunk of money.)
The upshot: Tesco, could you please get rid of these cardboard packages again? And could you also review whether these "four for..." deals are really appropriate - can you not instead reduce the unit price across the board?
My gran died on Saturday. This was a shock, of course, but not really a surprise... except that it was, a bit. The thing is, she'd been in ill health for quite some time, so it was never going to be too surprising. And yet, we'd been told that she wasn't considered end-of-life, and then she was gone.
Emotionally, that makes things a bit of a mix. She had had a pretty miserable last couple of years, and she was clearly suffering, so her passing is something of a relief. At the same time, it would have been nice to have been able to visit some time in the last couple of years, and it most certainly would have been nice had her four children been able to visit in hospital. Alas, Covid made those both impossible.
One additional sadness is that the funeral, which is likely to be in the next few weeks, is also likely to be the final gathering of the extended family. Indeed, the circumstances are such that I may well already have said a final goodbye to several of my cousins without even knowing it. And that's a shame.
But that's for the future. For now, I'm going to remember my gran, who so often seemed to be in the background allowing granddad to do the talking... but she was always there, supporting everything.