Fruits of our labors

Now we’re well into summer, the back yard looks a lot different. All those empty veg beds are now overflowing with green!

The small beds in the foreground are our herb garden. Several varieties of mint trying to escape the first one, then what we call the “poultry bed” - sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano amongst others. Parsley, green and red onions, and chives, and several varieties of lettuce spread out among them all.

The long bed next to them holds raspberry canes – no fruit this year but hopefully next summer – and strawberries. Then we have 8’ high archways of wire mesh across the last two beds supporting a variety of beans. Runners, French beans, and a purple variety, along with snap peas, broad beans, and several tomato plants, and a monster zucchini taking over one corner.

It’s been marvelous in the last month popping out to pull a lettuce for salad, or handfuls of herbs to liven up a meal. One thing we’ve sorely missed since moving out here is our fresh beans. French beans are available but usually not very good, and we love fresh tender runners, which I’ve not seen here at all.

 

 

A lot going on

2024 is shaping up to be the year of big projects.

For starters, once winter eased off it was time to finish off the raised vegetable beds I started making last summer. Now they’re filled with soil and irrigation drip lines attached, all we have to do is erect supports for beans and raspberries and start planting.

Of course, getting all the herbs and veggies started needed somewhere under cover, so Easter weekend was spent assembling the greenhouse we ordered from Amazon.

This was all work we’d planned to do, but a cluster of things around the house needed urgent attention all at the same time. Our water heater started playing up in January, and we already knew the ancient furnace was long overdue for replacement, so we bit the bullet and hastily arranged for a heat pump and new water heater.

The carport roof had been leaking and slowly collapsing for a couple of years. The builder friend we’d spoken to back then finally had a gap in his schedule at short notice, so a major replacement took place at the same time.

On top of all this, we’d finally resumed work on landscaping at the front of the house and realized how badly the front steps were crumbling, so these are in the process of being replaced.

Yes, it’s all go! But at least this year, after several years of various medical issues, we’ve now got the energy to put some TLC back into the property. I just hope nothing else unexpected crops up.

And alongside all this, I’ve just finished the first draft of The Videshi Dilemma and am getting stuck into edits.

 

The dog ate my shed

A phone call at work in the middle of the afternoon. “Dad, did you do some work on the shed recently? Like, taking off some of the siding?”

No, I haven’t. Why would I do that? Puzzled, and wondering exactly what had happened at home while we were all out at work and college.

This is what I found.

Planks ripped off, and some excavation either side of the door. The dogs must have been after something, probably a raccoon. Though why anyone would mistake this scene for intentional DIY handiwork beats me. Seems someone has a low opinion of my carpentry skills!

Thankfully it was a dry afternoon today and I still had some offcuts of cedar siding from building the tree fort many years ago. All patched up again ... until the next time!

Lazy Crazy Hazy days of summer?

We’re nearly at the end of August, just waiting for the autumn cool to kick in. Summer is usually a time for lazy days on the deck, reading and writing, beer and barbecues. Yes, there’s been all that this year, but also a lot of stuff leaving me feeling like I still need a vacation! Nothing dramatically disastrous, but a lot of small to medium stressors piling on all at once – family, health, mechanical issues, and the ever-present smoke in the air from angry Nature.

On the plus side, we’ve not been directly threatened by wildfires (though there have been a few small ones nearby, quickly handled) and we’re getting through the other hurdles in reasonable shape.

One of the stresses I’ve had to handle is setting up a new website.

I’ve used Webs since I first set up an author site in 2014. They got taken over by Vistaprint, and announced that they would be merging offerings. That announcement was way back in 2020. Since then there have been a couple of “coming soon” type messages, but little talk and even less action. Then, mid July, seven weeks ago, they announced the move was finally here. My site would drop dead at the end of August, and – no – there was no help or tools available to help with the migration. Just, “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

Not much time to figure out what to do, especially as we were about to set off visiting family overseas for two weeks followed by more travel for medical reasons. Strike three weeks from the time available to figure my shit out!

Yep. A bit of a perfect storm.

Anyhow, long story short, I opted to give Wordpress a try and have been doing battle with their labyrinthine website editor this month. My biggest worries were to maintain a presence (which I have) and keep hold of my custom domain name (which I’ve done), so I'm still at:

https://iansbott.com

The new site is still very much under construction as I manually recreate content that I scavenged from the old site. But it’s there! And I was relieved to see that when I updated my domain name details to point to the new site, existing links (such as my browser shortcuts and the links in this blog header) still worked.

That was a major headache sorted out. Now I just need to finish populating the site.

May Day

Today is May Day. It’s a public holiday in Britain, not so here in Canada but I’m not complaining because we still enjoy more holidays during the course of the year than we used to back there.

May Day is also our wedding anniversary – our 30^th this year, so it’s a big milestone.

We don’t do much by way of celebrations these days ... birthdays, anniversaries are all low key ... but it’s still a special day all the same.

Big bouquet of flowers in the living room. A special steak dinner this evening. But meanwhile Ali and Matthew are outside making the most of the sunshine today. They cleaned down the deck this morning and are busy assembling the barbecue she bought last weekend as our anniversary present.

Later on this month we’ll get a weekend away, just the two of us. That’s about as extreme as it gets :)

Happy May Day.

Hello 2021

Okay, half the year has passed, and I’ve been largely absent from blogging. It’s been a tough spell. 

Nothing singly too bad, not even all bad in fact, but a lot going on that gets overwhelming at times. We’ve all had brushes with varying levels of health irregularities at times, and we’ve had to support each other through various workplace dramas. 

I largely try to ignore, or at least not get too distressed by, world events. Politics south of the border is still a shitshow, and the pandemic is under control in some countries but still wreaking havoc in others. Closer to home we are reeling from the unmarked graves coming to light at old residential schools. Nobody with a shred of human compassion can fail to be moved by the horrors inflicted on thousands of children over the course of many decades. 

All this has left me disinclined to engage with the world at large this year. 

On the upside, there are rays of sunshine at home and at work, and things are largely stable and happy in our little circle. We’ve all had our first vaccine jab and will soon have our second. Restrictions are relaxing and we might get to go out for a meal in the near future. 

On the writing front, I managed to get the paperback of The Long Dark published back in January, and since then I’ve been wrestling with the first draft of Wrath of Empire. But more of that (hopefully) in future posts.

Goodbye 2020

I’m not usually one for New Year year-in-review posts, but 2020 has seen so much turmoil that I have to say “good riddance”.

In many ways, as a family we’ve been lucky. Home life has been relatively unchanged, other than not having friends around for meals. Everyone we know has escaped so far, though it’s been harder on some than on others. The biggest loss for us was having to abandon a trip to visit family in the UK this summer.

We are all still earning, with all of us in essential services of some sort (groceries, education, provincial government). Again, we’ve been lucky. Many businesses are struggling, although many have also adapted in various ways as our knowledge of the spread evolved: closing doors, partial reopening, new safety procedures, new ways of operating ...

The biggest stresses that I can see emerging are connected: weariness at the constant vigilance and observing of distancing rules, and the lack of social contact.

People tout social media and online meetings. Zoom and Teams work fine for business meetings, but they are no substitute for gathering around a table for a meal or a drink. People keep promoting virtual coffees, virtual dinner parties, virtual water cooler chats, and I’m getting weary of that too because for me they just don’t cut it. Worse, to me they actively emphasize what we can’t do.

Sometimes you just need human closeness. Sometimes you just need a hug. That is the ultimate cruelty of this pandemic – that it’s robbed us of the most fundamental support mechanisms we know.

But my hope for 2021 is that we can learn and adapt in more long-lasting ways. We’ve learned that we don’t need to all gather together in an office in order to work and collaborate. The environment (and our wallets) has benefited from less travel. We could be and should be living and working smarter in future, making use of what we’ve learned this year. We should be looking forward to a kinder and more sustainable world, and treasuring togetherness when we’re finally able to again.

Near misses

Last week we had an unexpected snowfall. Snow was forecast for "higher elevations", which doesn't usually mean us, and when I left for work it was damp but not cold. Then I get a call saying "It's snowing here, and the highway is getting dicey." So I headed home while I still could and planned on working the rest of the day from there.

When I got home, we were without power. Power was out the whole day. We spent the day in semi-darkness, watching snow fall, and listening to the crack and crash of falling branches around our neighborhood.

But it could have been a lot worse, with several near misses:

The roads were getting dicey. The highway was slow but at least no accidents. I only just made it up the hill at the end of our road, and only thanks to a couple of patches of bare road where trees overhang, that gave me traction to get up speed for the next stretch.

We have a wood stove for warmth, so the house was livable. And we could boil kettles for drinks, and we cooked a simple supper on it just before the power came back that evening.

We have overhead lines for power and cable running from the road to the house. Half of the cherry tree at the front of the property split away and nearly took out the lines. Just the ends of some branches ended up resting on them, which I was able to reach with long loppers and cut them away.

At the side of the house, a couple of massive branches fell from the arbutus at the edge of the property. One fell onto a gravel path a few feet from the back of the garage. The other fell onto the carport roof. As I was clearing them away yesterday it was obvious how lucky we were that they did no damage. We have a deck above the garage and fencing for privacy along the edge of the carport where it butts up to the deck. Either of those branches could easily have wrecked the fence or the deck railings.

Yes, we had a lot to be thankful for that day.

Is it over yet?

Pause for breath as we near the end of a manic year.

 

As I looked out at grey drizzle this afternoon, the neighborhood feels like it’s been damp and chilly for ages. It’s hard to believe it was only a couple of weeks ago that Ali and I took the dogs out for a drive and a walk to a beach where this photo was taken. Thankfully we have a good stock of firewood ready for the winter.

If anyone thought that November would finally bring an end to four years of relentless US election campaigning they were in for a sad awakening. The election has come and gone with a clear winner but no resolution. And don’t expect the shenanigans to end next month with the Electoral College, or even in January. Trump has been laying the groundwork all year to undermine the foundations of American democracy and will continue to do so long after he’s left the White House. Anything to avoid conceding a loss. It’s been saddening to see how deep the misinformation has taken root.

Closer to home, up to now BC has been touched only lightly by COVID. Most of the outbreaks have been in care homes with relatively little in the community, and we’ve got away with fewer restrictions than many parts of the world. The picture has evolved through the course of the year, but for the most part life has continued. That picture has changed this month, with cases spiking alarmingly and new measures in place in the last few days. Limits on social gatherings, and for the first time a mask mandate in indoor spaces. At work, a directive last month to start bringing people back into the office instead of working from home has been reversed, for now. Whether it will be enough to bring things back under control remains to be seen.

Progress on the writing front, The Long Dark text and cover art is in the hands of the book designer, and I’ve been busy proof-reading the interior layout. Getting very close to publication before Christmas.

As if 2020 isn't crazy enough already ...

On top of all the 2020 craziness, the west coast is ravaged by wildfires.

Obviously I'd seen the reports from California, but hadn't realized how close to home the trouble extended. Until Tuesday morning, when we woke up to smoke-filled air drifting from across the border.

Air quality here has been poor all week. Here is the view from my deck this morning. You can see the haze obscuring nearby trees, and the row in the distance – only half a mile away – is almost invisible. 

 

Fires extend all the way through California, Oregon, and Washington state.

Ironically, it was only a week ago that Ali and I were commenting how lucky BC has been this summer. When we went on vacation, campfires were still allowed at the end of August, something we've never seen in all the years we've been here. After several record-breaking years of wildfires, this summer has been damp and cool, so we haven't had to deal with mass evacuations on top of the pandemic.

Not so down south!

Wherever you are, I hope you're keeping safe this crazy year.

Last gasp of summer

So, we're now into September. Since moving to BC, I've always reckoned on Labour Day marking the end of summer. Yes, we may still get warm spells for a few weeks yet, but as soon as the sun disappears it feels autumnal. Darker mornings and evenings, cooler air.

In the last week, Ali and I took another trip up-Island. We enjoyed our week in a cabin back in July, and decided to do it again to round off the summer. It was just the two of us this time (plus dogs) which made a nice change. The week started off a bit crappy, with a two-hour hold-up on the highway due to a serious accident earlier on in the day, followed by a day of rain, but things improved throughout the week. Overall, we had a good time doing nothing much in particular.

Now it's a long weekend before we all get back to the grindstone.

There is a lot of confusion and anxiety about the upcoming school year.

At Ali's school there is supposed to be distancing and other health measures in place, including some remote learning. But from the information available, it looks like all students will be on site for a large chunk of the time which seems to make a mockery of the need for remote learning. If on-site is good enough for half the day, why not the whole day? And the class sizes are too large to allow effective separation.

Matthew will resume college studies, and it looks like most of the learning will be remote other than essential lab work. Again, questions of practicality rear their heads if an on-campus block is followed by remote work where the students are supposed to be off site.

Maybe things will become clear in the coming week, or maybe it will be a gong show. Who knows?

COVID stress

The pandemic is still with us, obviously. March seems like a long time ago, let alone the blissful ignorance of January when it all sounded like a distant problem being faced by people half-way around the world.

Back then, it felt like the world was being turned on its head by the evolving spread of the disease, and the ever-changing advice as new facts emerged. Precautions appeared at first unthinkable, then laughable, then became incorporated into everyday life.

Now we are settled in for the long haul. Who knows when a vaccine will be available, or how effective it will be? Meanwhile, the world has to keep turning and we continue living our lives as best we can. Masks, distancing, and other changes in how we live and work have become an accepted part of life.

But, underlying all the more obvious disruptions and anxieties, I've noticed a more subtle source of stress. It's not something I've heard people talk about, because most people I know work from home most of the time, and this stress is most noticeable in the office.

Social distancing means deliberately and consciously keeping your distance from other people. That requires constant awareness, and active avoidance behaviors. That is not normal behavior for a social animal. In fact, it goes fundamentally against our very nature.

Intellectually, I understand the reasoning. Heck, I'm doing exactly the same to my co-workers – keeping distance, backing off if I see someone coming the other way in a narrow hallway. But on the receiving end, it feels like being shunned, rejected, cast out from society.

Casting people out is a harsh and cruel punishment practiced by societies since time immemorial. It hurts.

Of course, this isn't punishment, it's precaution. But knowing that there's a good reason, that it's not about you, doesn't lessen the hurt. When intellect conflicts with gut feeling, intellect loses. I don't know what the answer is here, but it doesn't feel like something I can just “deal with” or get used to.

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image. 

 

 

Continuing the opening from The Long Dark. Although it's been drawn out in time by the weekly snippets, the chapter as a whole is quite short. To conclude the chapter, we switch back to Anna's point of view. Anna is driving a massive surface vehicle and is aiming to retrieve a hard-to-reach navigation beacon before winter closes in.

=====

Unhurried, Anna reviewed the crawler’s controls, checking the giant vehicle was safely immobilized. She grabbed her mask from a hook on the back of her seat, and pulled it over her head as she descended a narrow stairway to the cramped equipment bay beneath the drive deck. She paused to settle the mask properly in place and pull a strand of hair out from under the edge seal, then she hauled a pair of two-wheeled dollies and a tool belt from the neatly-stacked storage racks. 

Through the crawler cab’s lower airlock, Anna climbed a ladder to the ground. Hints of over-ripe fruit in the air reminded her that the mask’s filters would need cleaning when she reached home. Her unfastened jacket flapped around her thighs in fitful squalls. She ignored an icy chill working its way around her waist through gaps in her clothing, and lowered the dollies to the ground. 

She knelt and pulled off a glove to test the plant’s surface. Tight-knit matting and whorls of stringy fibers yielded to her touch. They felt dry, scratchy, but still held firm when she tugged on a handful.

=====

And (making use of the new rules) this scene continues ...  

Seasonal changes were coming on fast, but maybe she’d arrived in time in this case. She suppressed a shiver of unease as she peered at the ground between her and the beacon. She had a job to do.

=====

That big heap of firewood you saw last week is almost all gone, but it's been unusually hard work this year. Some years we get lucky, and most of it is the right size for our stove. It just needs to be barrowed around to the carport and stacked neatly ready for the winter. 

This year, probably around 80% of it was in chunks that needed splitting down a bit. To make things harder, this load is mostly maple and is very dense. Some pieces split easily, but some put up a fight. And there's a small-ish pile left that we couldn't touch with the axe, so today we're renting a log splitter for the day to tackle those last bits.

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

Continuing the opening from The Long Dark, on the way down to Elysium with her senior negotiating team, Jennifer receives an unwelcome message. The previous post ended with: “The merest whiff of it beyond this circle, and we all spend the rest of our lives in jail.”

=====

Jennifer pondered while the cabin windows shone with the plasma glow of their hypersonic passage across the sky. A faint tang of burnt flint hung in the air. “Are we to know the nature of this potential discovery?”

“The President chose not to commit that detail in writing.” Galloway sniffed. “Just enough information to convince you of the gravity of this order.”

Jennifer narrowed her eyes at him.

Galloway smirked. “Your job is to make sure the Company will have complete control of this discovery when it finally breaks. The colonists get nothing.”

=====

I've had a new distraction this week – our order of firewood for the winter arrived, which was a weight off our minds because it's been hard this year to track down a supplier. Now this all needs to be split down to more manageable sizes and stacked ready in the carport.

All the same, I have made progress on the cover art, just not quite as much as I'd planned.

Camping

Although I'm not sure we can call it that this time!

With a significant birthday this month, the original plan had been to travel to the UK to be with family. That, of course, all got upended with COVID. And with the ongoing uncertainties around travel or pretty much anything, any plans to get away were decidedly last-minute.

As a result, we chose not to even think about getting the trailer ready for use this summer, but we still wanted to get up-island if possible. As it happens, our favorite campground has a row of cabins up by the river, so we rented one for the week.

I've always been curious to see what they were like. We've walked past them so often in years gone by, and this is the first time we've been into one. From the outside, they look small, and with hardly any windows I'd have expected the inside to be cramped and quite gloomy.

Totally wrong on both counts. I was impressed with the layout, the light and sense of space inside.

There's a generous living & dining area, a compact but adequate kitchen, and two bedrooms down one side to the left of the picture. Outside, there's a deck and secluded picnic area.

We had a good time away, mostly mooching around the campground and swimming in the river. Plus I started outlining and drafting a couple of tentative scenes for a new novel, which I hope to get into full swing once The Long Dark is published.

Upgrades

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm now working on a new laptop. My old MacBook was at least 10 years old, and was reaching the point where I wouldn't be able to keep up with software updates.

With a birthday coming up, and many previous years of not wanting anything in the way of gifts, it was an opportunity to splash out.

So I'm now getting to grips with the move.

I've generally found Mac upgrades to be fairly painless. Unlike Microsoft, which treats every Windows upgrade as an opportunity to show off how cool and geeky the Microsoft propellorheads are, and force millions of poor users in the real world to completely re-learn everything from the ground up, Apple doesn't mess much with the user interface. There may be new or updated features, but you can pretty much rely on finding things tomorrow in the same place they were yesterday.

The single most significant change this time was entirely self-inflicted – a switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. This switch is a bit of a learning curve. In many ways, OpenOffice Writer and Calc look a lot like MS Word and Excel. Much of the look and feel is similar, but the overall sense of familiarity hides a wealth of smaller differences, which I'm still learning. Sometimes it takes a bit of online research to find out how to do things, but I have to say that – so far – I haven't found anything I used to do in MS Office that I can't do in OpenOffice.

And one huge sigh of relief – OpenOffice is blisteringly fast.

When I write a novel, I break out the manuscript into anywhere between 9 and 12 separate documents. These typically run to 10k or 15k words. I've always found that Word takes quite a while to open a document this size, and it's got worse over the years with various “improvements”. The most frustrating behavior that cropped up at the last big upgrade was that it would only seem to load the first few pages and then stop until I tried to scroll down, then it would realize there was more to follow and load some more. I would drag the scroll bar down only to find I was only a few pages in, and the scroll bar would jerk and shrink as more got tagged on to the end. For documents the size I deal in, I had to force the scroll bar all the way down again and again until I was sure I had the full text. This could take a minute or so on a really large document, like when I pack the whole manuscript into one file for publication.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I went into OpenOffice and opened the full text of The Long Dark – over 100k words, 200 pages. It was all there in under 2 seconds. No messing around.

So, I'm now up and running, and learning as I go. It took many long hours last week to copy files over, especially my locally-stored mailboxes because the export/import feature didn't work as advertised. The one thing I still haven't yet solved is how to move my photos library. I've tried several approaches which should in theory have worked, but none of them so far have managed to copy that single 18GB file. So, that is still a work in progress.

P.S. Just discovered another benefit – I can copy/paste from my document straight into Blogger's text window without accidentally including a load of MS Word hidden crap, and it carried over italics as well!

Get a grip!

This is a hard post to write. I keep coming back to it, wanting to say something, to vent some feelings, but then hesitating because it feels too self-indulgent. This blog is usually focused on externalities, not so much on inner feelings, but these are not normal times.

Simple truth is, I’ve not been doing too good these past few days.

The realization came during the week when one of my team leads talked about their regular team check-in that day. One of the team mentioned having difficulty sleeping. The events in America dragged up memories of personal experience of racial abuse. In talking it through, other members of the team opened up and shared their own stories. It turned out every single one of them, in one way or another, was struggling to process what is going on in the world at the moment, especially in the US.

At the team leads level, we wondered how much more distress was lying hidden beneath the surface among ourselves and our colleagues. In discussing the emotional impact of extraordinary stories, one after another, day after day, I found myself overwhelmed with emotion.

And I realized, I’m not okay.

That feeling of being overwhelmed and helpless persists. It reawakens with every new story of someone somewhere getting hurt or abused. I am fortunate that it’s not affecting my sleep - yet - but I struggle to focus on anything productive during my waking hours, and tears are never far from the surface.

I am struggling with anguish at the scenes of violence, both on the mob and the individual level. I despair at the peaceful protests turning ugly, often through deliberate instigation of people who have no interest in the protestors’ message. And I am brimming over with anger at the attempts by the powerful to bully a population into submission.

The world has gone mad.

Underlying that is a long-held fury at the systemic abuse of power the 1% “haves” wield over the 99% by the open manipulation of levers of power in their favor, whether it’s passing legislation that favors their rich donors, healthcare and other benefits they award themselves while denying others the same, gerrymandering and manipulating election practices to hamper voting by those they don’t want to have a voice, and a host of other dirty tricks.

This is a bubble that has been waiting to burst.

There is no excuse for the many acts we’ve seen the police commit over the past week.

Equally, there is no excuse for rioting and looting.

Then again, there is no excuse for the deeply-entrenched attitude that the color of a person’s skin entitles one person to set themselves above another. That is the real pandemic that bedevils the world.

Support our workers

All around our neighborhood, hearts have been appearing over the last month. Someone has been making plywood cut-out hearts on posts to stick in your lawn. Some have appeared on hydro poles and in windows. Someone down the road shaped a string of lights into a heart on their fence.

All this is to show support for our armies of essential workers, from healthcare professionals to delivery drivers, to the grocery store workers and many others who are in close proximity to the public all day long.

We combined this heart theme with another suggestion to brighten up Victoria with Christmas lights, and clipped a string of lights to our hedge facing the road.

To give a sense of scale, the hedge is taller than our camping trailer (parked behind, out of sight) and twice as tall as me. The heart is about 9’ tall. Standing on tip-toe I can barely reach the red light at the bottom of the “V” across the top.

Of course with the light evenings this heart isn’t visible until some time after 8pm, but I like to think it brings some cheer to people driving past of an evening.

Wedding anniversary

Twenty-eight years ago yesterday, Ali and I got married at home in our living room, with a registrar and about thirty close family and friends. We had lunch in a marquee outside (it just about fit on our back lawn ... just) with a buffet that we prepared ourselves. The day finished with a noisy, raucous knees-up for 150 people at a venue in town. No question of social distancing then!

Being our twenty-eighth anniversary, it was on the same day of the week (Friday) as our actual wedding day. A small discussion ensued about the twenty-eight-year cycle. There have been three other times when our anniversary fell on a Friday, but this is the first time it’s also been a leap year. With leap years in between, anniversaries on the same day fall at erratic intervals of five, six, or eleven years but they always come around again at year twenty-eight (except when the next turn of the century messes things up, but that’s another matter).

Of course, our celebration yesterday was of necessity a very small family affair. There’s a nearby Thai restaurant we like that’s still open for take-out. I checked the menu online and phoned through an order. I figured I should do that early and my hunch proved correct, it was a hour wait, but that was OK.

Looking for silver linings to all this, it was a quiet drive, parking available right outside. They were geared up to serve customers efficiently and I was straight in and out again, even though they were clearly busy with a row of bags lined up on the counter ready to be picked up.

And dinner was delicious. Thank you Sabhai Thai!

Grim statistics

Over the last month I’ve developed a grim fascination with figures. Trying not to let it become a compulsion - but what the heck! - Ali watches news briefings, I watch graphs. In these trying times I think a little short term madness is essential for long term sanity.

I discovered the Worldometers site which captures a whole raft of world statistics, including tracking the daily progress of the pandemic.

At the start of April, experts were suggesting the US might see between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths. At that time, when the tally was still only a few thousand, such figures were laughed at and quickly downplayed by politicians. A week or so later, the expected toll was revised down to between 60,000 and 80,000.

Now, the US is heading for a million cases by Monday and should exceed 60,000 deaths by Tuesday. On current trends I fully expect that original estimate to be realistic - if not optimistic.

I know it’s not really scientific to compare one country with another, when each has different demographics, different healthcare systems, and different approaches to handling the pandemic. But those are the only pointers we have to go on. So looking at countries that are further ahead in the outbreak, places like Italy and Spain reached a plateau in the graphs of daily new cases and daily deaths, followed by a slow decline. The US and Canada are still on the early part of that plateau. In fact, they haven’t really leveled off in a significant way. This tells me that today’s figures will likely at least double or triple over the next month.

While I’m making dire predictions, looking elsewhere in the world I am keeping a worried eye on both Brazil and Russia. With all the attention on China, then Europe and Iran, followed by the USA, they haven’t really been prominent yet. But just looking at the recent rates I can see them both joining the “100,000 club” by the end of the month and mingling with the hard-hit European nations soon after.

Finally, it sickens me to see the protests flaring up in some countries. These figures are bad enough, and they’ve only been kept at this level (I was about to say “this low” but there is nothing low about them) by the measures being taken. Healthcare systems have been stretched, but not completely broken. That will all change drastically if we let down our guards too soon.