And closedown, and good night.
WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.
According to a story in the local paper, an independent data company has established that, post Bank Holiday and everyone coming to town to go to the beach, the Southend R number is 1.6, as opposed to the official number of 0.6 for the East of England. (I think our local R was still around 3 in April.)
My travel Kindle (yes, I have two Kindles, one for the bedroom and one for my shoulder bag) lives in the office now. I’m buying more books on Kindle today. As I’ve said before, the joys of the Kindle are 1) that I don’t fill my already overstuffed little house with more books 2) I can carry a library in my hand. Having two Kindle Paperwhites is a terrible indulgence, but it’s not like I fly around on private jets or anything.
So I’m buying books. And the Amazon recommendations system – and yes, Amazon ecology, bad for things, I know, but see above about small house and also listen I’m paying real money that I know reaches writers in some form in the end because I are one — seems to think I’m extremely interested in grief. To the extent that it feels like Amazon’s version of that Facebook experiment to see if it can make people clinically depressed. Oh, you like books from Fitzcarraldo? Here are just the ones that specifically use the word “grief” in their descriptions. You’ve bought Booker Prize winners? Here are recent Booker-nominated works that mention the word “grief” in the top paragraph. You like science fiction books? These are our suggestions for you, please note that they are all about grief.
Excellent timing.
Dunno about you, but I’m definitely up for some big howling electric drones today.
I finally had a breakthrough on something last night, after giving up on the thing I needed to do and taking a look at the thing I needed to do next. Sometimes that’s just how it goes. It’s a PROJECT GENEVA module, and I’m on GENEVA all week, so I’m going to spend all day today trying to push that Thing I Needed To Do Next to a conclusion, get it off the desk, and pick up the thing I actually needed to do first tomorrow. So long as I have all the modules done by end of play Friday, I’m good.
Everything hurts, my jaw is stiff, apparently I’ve been shouting in my sleep, and it’s just another (asks Echo what day it is) Tuesday here in Eternal Plague March. But I have a stack of new CDs to listen to, the coffee seems to be working slowly, and the sky is kind of marvellous today. Good morning, reader. Inbox 7 and at the desk.
Three months in. I’ve gained about eighty pounds and aged a hundred more years. As I noted in the newsletter yesterday, I’m trying to check out of the news scroll as much as I can. The news from America is obviously particularly awful right now. (And, correct, “the UK is not innocent.”) As an old white guy from five thousand miles away, any comment I share is, frankly, probably in bad taste and a lot less useful than quietly donating and carefully checking in with people. My distant voice, unfairly charged as it is with privilege and advantage and reach, is not the voice that needs to be heard right now.
The death figures here will go up tomorrow, because Monday’s number is always under-reported. Lockdown has eased just a tiny bit — not enough to make any difference to me — and with the R number still hovering under 1, will probably not stay in that position for long. I walked out to pick up something from the corner shop earlier, and the streets around here seem to be returning to normal. The only other masked people I saw were a young Indian couple, walking down the street with their masked little boy in a pushchair. I smiled, and then remembered to nod and lift my shades too, because smiles tend not to transmit through masks unless you’re looking for it and have eyes to read.
My brain, at this point, is pretty much useless, and everything is ten times harder than it used to be. But, over the last few days, I’ve been hearing local stories of people getting sectioned, suicide attempts and the like. So I’m going to quit whining and log out of everything on the internet and get on with my shit.
Probably another six weeks of this to go. Time to open the last bottle of wine.
“The arrivals hall could not even be called uncomfortable. It was monstrous, a design catastrophe that would make a dusty bus station miles from anywhere seem lively and convivial by comparison. There was a hot-dog stand that served an inedible, nutrition-free parody of food, a newsstand with a display of condoms and smutty magazines, some empty conveyor belts for luggage, and a number of chairs that might have been designed during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition.”