April 21st - Easter, travel, and a birthday

Supply and demand are fascinating creatures, aren't they?  People love to get indignant about "gouging" in a scarcity, or show off about the amazing discount they got on some random overstocked item in a failing local shop, but even at my grand old age a confluence of unusual circumstances can surprise you with a logically consistent outcome that on the surface of it makes no sense.  This week, thanks to the voodoo that is the fuel futures market, the price of crude went below zero as optimistic supply drowned an abject lack of demand in a flammable tsunami of greenhouse gas that might just stay, if not in the ground, then in the pumps, for a time at least.

A little closer to home, last week I was the first person on my team at work to take any holiday since the lockdown began.  That most precious of employee commodities is now something that one only uses if absolutely forced by circumstance. Around twenty days were booked off across the ten of us between April and May and it was all cancelled pretty much immediately a month ago.  I confess I am among those guilty.  Working, to be honest, is the only thing making hanging around the same four walls bearable.  What's the point of taking holiday if it's worse than work?  Easter stretched before me last Thursday like a long desert road with no service stations, a monotonous trial to be weathered without descending into complete madness if at all possible.  As it turned out it wasn't nearly that bad of course, due partly to the fantastic treat of driving 200 odd miles to swap Tiny with her Dad.  I knew, objectively, that people were driving less but seeing the notorious M3 and A303 quite so empty, emptier arguably than they would be at 1am on a Tuesday, except at 3pm on a bank holiday Friday, was redolent of the opening scenes of 28 Days Later.  (No virus-related parallel intended.  Nobody's chewing anyone's face off just yet, except perhaps one's own, from boredom)

In a funny way, seeing even those few other people just going about their day was a calming experience.  The temptation, after weeks of housebound lockdown, is to slip into a paranoid state where the outside world seems to surround the house on all sides with vague threat, where outside is a foreign place from which other people are to be avoided, pervaded by a terrifying pathogen cloud of potential doom and in which every gate latch and stile post harbours an invisible film of certain death.  When you've worked yourself up into that kind of state, seeing other people tooling down the M3 while texting is reassuringly familiar.

We managed to do an egg hunt.  Due to unpredictable shortages in the children's confectionary supply chain we were stuck with unpackaged mini eggs and had to stay up late wrapping them individually with tiny squares of tin foil so they wouldn't directly touch any dog shit in the garden.  I snuck out before breakfast and distributed them onto every horizontal surface I could find before returning to the house.  "Are both the dogs inside," I asked the youngest housemate.  "Because I just saw something brown and furry escaping under the garden gate."

"It was probably next door's cat," she said very calmly.  "When do you think the Easter Bunny will come?"  I'm wasted on this audience sometimes.

Two four-day weeks back to back obviously not being enough, I had the following Thursday booked off.  The consequences of missing Tiny's seventh birthday being too terrible to countenance it was the one day of leave that went un-cancelled among my entire team.  "You will have to follow Carl's lead," intoned the Director in our daily stand-up.  So now my colleagues think I'm a suck-up.  At least I'm not in a position of authority that might be compromised by being seen to try too hard.  Well, except that I'm also in charge of approving holiday for everyone.  What a balls-up.

So after two (count them) days at work after a four day weekend I found myself once again silencing my 8:15 alarm, only this time instead of hopefully trying to go back to sleep I was swept along by a miniature tornado of birthday excitement.  Gifts!  Cards!  New toys!  Chocolate for breakfast!  It's a wonderful thing to be seven, it turns out, in fact demonstrably the only thing that's actually better than being "six for ever and ever".

I was hugely pleased by how excited she was by the Big Trak I bought; I figured she was too young for it last year but she grasped the basic concept quite quickly.  I'd forgotten that you define the turns in minutes (any integer up to 60 for a complete turn) which is a little fine compared to the chunky 'lengths' unit of forward travel.  This means that random button pushing, a state that we slumped into with disappointing speed, gives disappointing results.  "Forward 9, left 6, backward 10" means two room-traversing distances punctuated by a mere 36 degree change in direction.  And the problem with that is that "room traversing" serves only to describe the distance rather than the actual result, which without careful planning involves simply pushing with futility against the walls or dining table legs.  I'm sure the 2020 edition is more resilient than its 1979 original but all the same, two D cells straining a pair of locked electric toy motors doesn't exactly put this amateur engineer's teeth off edge.  Still, that's nothing compared to the auditory misery with which I was afflicted when Tiny figured out that "Photon Cannon x 99" would generate a full minute and a half of electronic pow-pow-pow racket with no further effort on her part.

In between fantasising that I've single handedly unlocked a STEM future for her that involves spatial awareness and programming, the main pleasure for me was the speed with which she replied to the assorted video-calling relatives' question, "what did you get for your birthday" with "this amazing tank called Big Trak".  However this was somewhat tempered by her subsequent demonstrations, all of which involved between three and none movements followed by, you guessed it, Photon Cannon x99.  Did I mention she's seven?  She's seven.

We had a big Zoom party booked with her mates.  Tiny's favourite topic of conversation for approximately 363 days of the year is "what kind of birthday should I have" (Christmas Day and her actual birthday are the only days when this topic does not, for some reason, occur to her).  The frequency of discussion might suggest to one less cynical than I that she cares deeply about the requests she makes regarding Lego cakes, unicorn riding classes, dressing up like the Gruffalo and so on but her inconstancy regarding the obvious choice for a birthday theme is frankly breathtaking.  Harry Potter has been the most recurrent option this year, albeit punctuated by Goonies, PlayMobil and others, but by early March we seemed to have settled on a Hogwartsian afternoon of magic and mystery.  I was carefully measuring out lengths of bamboo from which kids could make passable wands, and had reasearched eco friendly smoke machines with which I intended to decorate the garage into a kind of wizard's grotto - until lockdown turned up and kicked over the goblet of shite.  Luckily, a mere day into the house arrest we watched The Addams Family and Tiny announced, wide eyed and tremulously, that only a fool would ever have suspected her of wanting anything other than an Wednesday Addams party.  So no more wands.  I was smug that I'd left ordering the more specific wizard-related crap from Amazon until the last minute, although I suppose the cobwebs and bubbling cauldrons for the grotto would still have been relevant.

With a few days to go, and my Dad's premium Zoom account details secured so we could do more than 40 minutes without getting booted off, Tiny breezily announced that her favourite thing would be a "broomstick drawing competition".

"Does Wednesday ride a broomstick," I asked absently, in between mouthsful of Shreddies.

"Don't be silly," said Tiny.  "Hermione Grainger does."  Of course.

I slunk off to dial in separately from my work laptop.  In an attempt to look on-brand but also fun, I slapped on my amazing fluffly owl hat and donned a spotty bow tie before assuming the nom de plume (ha) "Pegwig".  I angled the laptop so that the background, normally very obviously my office shelves, was more the Venetian blinds and the angled roof eaves, which I hoped looked a bit like an owl loft.  "Hello everyone," I said as the kids joined, wondering how many of them would get on board with my fabulous characterisation.

"Why are you called Pegwig, Carl?"  Bastards.

My worry that they wouldn't engage with merely drawing a picture as an activity evaporated almost instantly as they all got busily to work, tongues out of mouths and everything.  Adorable questions like "should we draw an animal" and "is it okay if I don't use so much brown, only red is better" were the only interruption.  One kid, evidently his own worst critic, seemed to give up after only a minute or two and simply laid his head on the desk, with his hands over his face, and stayed there for literally the rest of the party until his parents logged him out halfway through the bingo.

The pictures were pretty great; I can't show you because even though I asked them specifically they just couldn't organise to hold them all up at the same time and, well, I can't show you the screen grab with half their faces in because of safeguarding and that.  I started getting them to describe each others, but sensed I was losing the room so I launched into a bit of an experiment.  Cub scouts love a game called "Salute the captain" where you get them to run to the North, South, East or West of the hall and penalise those who hesitate or get it wrong.  I figured the same fun would apply to a game of "everyone point at a time on the clock" and would, as a side bonus, look brilliant in grid view with everyone pointing in the same direction.  I wasn't wrong exactly, but I was a bit disappointed that so many of the kids seemed to be struggling with pointing to the correct time on the clock I'd printed out specially.  Having noticed that video conference images are mirrored (because it's more natural when you watch yourself) I had reversed a stock image of a clock and was so busy earnestly holding it up next to my self-congratulating face that I didn't notice the text message from one of the Mums: "your clock is backwards..."  Yeah, only your own face is mirrored.  The image you see of others, and hence the way you appear to them, is the correct way around.  Sigh.

Bingo went well... ish.  Tiny, annoyingly, was one of the last to get a line but, as I'd only fed in 25 names for a set of 5x5 boards, they all completed their boards simultaneously as planned which was perfect.  I then made my apologies, whipped off my tie and the stiflingly hot owl hat, and made a reappearance on the laptop downstairs as Carl once more, looming threateningly over Tiny's shoulder with a flaming sponge cake while her friends joined in a cacophonous, audio-delayed nightmare vaguely reminiscent of "Happy Birthday To You" if sung by a particularly tone-deaf collection of characters from a Heironymous Bosch painting.  As soon as the candles were out, I suddenly realised we now had 15 kids on a video line, none of whom were about to get any cake.  It was time to end that shit before it became a total car crash and we excitedly said goodbye.  Given how cynical I had been about managing to fill more than the 40 minute free time limit, I was amazed to see we'd blown through just shy of an hour.  Good old Dad and his premium account eh.

Honestly, for all the worrying that her mother and I did about her crappy lockdown birthday I was pleasantly surprised by what a fun day we had.  After staying up late to watch Stardust on the projector Tiny announced it had been her "best day ever" and, after a brief discussion about whether to take chocolate or Big Trak to bed (we settled on neither, because I am an expert negotiator, rates on my website) she turned in for a blissful pandemic snooze while her mother and I passed out on the sofa.

Maybe it's not all bad.

April 6th - We're gong down, and we're taking the natural world with us!

America is hurting particularly badly at the moment.  As recently as ten days ago their president was somewhat bullish about how slight the threat was but, by the weekend, of the million plus peope infected globally a full 25% were in the USA.  Friends in CO are not charitable about how seriously the authorities are taking the threat.

Today, something that has the air of a small event that turns out to be hugely significant to the plot.  It is reported that a tiger in the Bronx zoo has tested positive for Covid-19.  Apparently some pets have tested positive before, but this is the first symptomatic non-human.  In contrast to the charming anthropomorphism of a giant killer cat with "a dry cough", some sinister questions occur.  I am assuming the "asymptomatic keeper" who is thought to have infected the tiger wasn't hugging or sharing a meal with his victim; in fact I'd be surprised if he had got within the magic 2 metre zone upon which we are all relying to keep us safe.  Is this evidence of an increase in virulence?  And what are we expected to do to get animals to stick to social distancing?  If this is a legitimate concern, off-leash dog walking, at the very least, is finished for the foreseeable.  And what about cats?  Or wildlife in general?  Is this how we go?  Blasting away at anything that moves with air rifles in between coughs?

At dinner we trialled running Zoom through the projector to put the rest of the family at the end of the table.  It worked brilliantly.  I did have to smother the skylight with a blanket in order to see anything but it was a lot of fun.  My sister told us a story of a poor family whose mother was due to complete on her house on the very day when lockdown went into force.  Already in homeless limbo, she found herself waiting for the funds to transfer in a ludicrously high stakes parody of an already stressful situation.  Unsure exactly what to do to keep to Government rules, but without a home to go to just yet, the friend and her mother attempted to self-isolate at either end of a six-seater car on Brighton seafront while they waited for word from the bank.  "Imagine," our storyteller mused, "if the money hadn't come through and my friend had had to take her Mum back to hers for .. who knows how long?  No marriage could survive that."  Apparently the BBC have been asking for scripts for a lockdown-themed sitcom; I think we have episode 1 in the bag.

Tiny's fever has been absent for three days now, so off she goes tomorrow to her Dad's for a few nights.  My miles per day graph is going to have a hell of a spike, after literally zero in the past three weeks followed by over 200 tomorrow afternoon.

In other news, the big plot reveal in today's real life drama wasn't the tiger.  Boris Johnson became, I think, the first sitting Prime Minister to go into intensive care.  A mendacious bell-end though Boz may be, he deserves better than clinging on to life while his pregnant girlfriend panicks at home alone.  What is going on out there?

April 4th

Some cheerful predictions from my brother and me this morning.

The rat bastard pigeons have managed to harness the power of a side wind to carry their crap at an angle onto the car. I am adjusting the position and will keep you informed.

I had occasion to chat briefly with the neighbour from two doors down and he confirmed my fears, that this style of parking makes it look like we're some kind of locked-down plague house.  Well, that we're more of a locked-down potential plague house than any other at the moment.  I reassured him that, as far as we know, we aren't quite that contagious but inwardly marvelled at these crazy times when degrees of viral isolation hysteria are worth defining and, at a moment when the entire globe (except Sweden, natch) is confined to their homes by fear of a pandemic, I still managed to look like the weird paranoid one.

The beautiful weather has returned for the weekend and the papers were full of warnings about not giving in to temptation.  Gove was quoted on the BBC today saying people "appeared" to be sticking to the rules, which is something of a relief.  Lord knows what that tricksy general public is really up to, but as long as they're fooling Micky we are probably close enough to being safe.

Mrs to be has heard rumours that the Government are weighing up the economic damage against the lives of all the doomed oldies.  She thinks it's too heavy a blow to the next generation who are just coming up, and I would agree except, well, what about the people who graduated into the teeth of the '08 crash?  We haven't done anything for them.  The thought occurs that all the ire against second-home-owning 'boomers might come to a head if things get too dire.  They had grants, cheap houses and crazy equity gains - and now we stifle the entire economy to save them from missing their last decade in a nursing home?  It's a grim thought either way.

Would've been an easy decision for the Nazis.

April 2nd

The cars are getting absolutely cocooned in bird crap.

At first I thought it was just that I hadn't been paying attention.  Mrs to be's car is always on the side of the drive overhung by next door's tree so it does catch more than mine in the normal run of things but, despite my washing them about a week ago, both were quite unpleasantly bespattered by the weekend so Tiny and I had a grand old time re-washing them.  The weird part is, they were absolutely covered again two days later.

My first thought was that it must be because the cars are here 24 hours a day when normally both would be out for five mornings (or whole days) each week.  But they're both there all day every weekend and it's never this bad.  We've been here nearly a year so if it's seasonal then I feel I would have noticed last year, unless it's a very specific "last week in March" thing.  In any case, I have observed that not being under the tree makes very little difference since the birds are using the telephone wires to shit from.  These handy crap-platforms divide the driveway into four triangular sections of varying sizes, none of which contains a rectangle larger than the footprint of my car.  See diagram:

The lower right looks promising but is woefully too short for the estate car and, while Mrs to be's will juuust about fit, you have to be so snug up to the bushes that one fears for the paintwork (and, of course, any hope of access on that side of the car) and so close to the house that we can't get the bins out for collection.  I briefly considered covering the cars with something, or stringing litte cack-catching strips under the wires, but eventually my solution was to park the bigger car round the back of the house and, well, this farcical nonsense:

I know it looks ridiculous but there is a satisfying lack of excrement on the car this morning so I feel very smug.  My neighbours must think I have some pathological fear of people using my driveway during lockdown.  I'm just worried I would have run out of Demon Shine.

In other news, my standing desk arrived yesterday, which hopefully will go some way to alleviating my back pain from sitting on a crappy rigid chair all day.  It was rather fun putting it together and Tiny was hugely impressed when it was done.  "I want to use it" she says, despite the platform of the desk being an inch above her head.  Ah, the ambition of youth.

Her fever, which made a brief appearance on Tuesday evening before abating without trace yesterday, is back higher than ever.  I've read that Covid is like this, so on the assumption that all three of us already have it, and it's only a matter of time before we're all incapacitated, Mrs to be is currently in the kitchen cooking up as many microwaveable meals as she can.  Here's hoping it's not that bad, but no sense in being unprepared.

March 23rd

Subway and McDonald's, the two biggest fast food chains in the country, and Nandos, the cheekiest fast food chain in the country, closed "until further notice" at close of business today.  To be honest it feels a bit odd to think they were still open.  Just last night I saw a McDonald's ad that, while slick, smacked of opportunism as it advertised their new delivery service (through Uber Eats).  Evidently they were keen to surf the wave of stay-at-home diners.  The papers today are full of disapproval at the "record numbers" of people pouring into the countryside for a nice walk over the sunny weekend.  It's hilarious - we get asked to stay home and immediately get the car out.  Clowns, all.

This video popped up on the BBC and makes for surreal, almost Black Mirror viewing, like it's trying too hard to act like it's got nothing to do with an authoritarian regime keeping everyone home as it labours the point: NHS heroes want YOU to stay home.  I suppose it is more subtle than a giant Edward Argar jabbing a finger at me.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-northern-ireland-51999437/stay-at-home-doctors-and-nurses-appeal-to-uk

Another video showed off a 20-way conference call between three-year-olds and a cockney Princess Elsa, a birthday party concept that would have given Charlie Brooker nightmares were it not for the wider context, not of laziness and social isolation due to technology but, you know, a rampant virus stalking the outdoors.

I walked the dogs after work.  They chased a fox in the woods, which is concerning.  The Great Park has been all but closed recently so we only have two walks.  One is the Racecourse, which might be closed at any time, and the other is through a field adjacent to woods which harbour, it turns out, quite an athletic fox.  It's the third time now and I am worried I am going to be arrested not for breaking curfew but for running the only illegal fox hunt with dogs in Berkshire.  I came back via the shop to post a Boden return of Harriet's.  A mundane reason to risk my life butk, well, it's only cluttering up the place otherwise.  I took the opportunity to pick up a few bits - naan bread, a bar of chocolate, some crisps.  There was no pre-sliced bread at all, but plenty of fresh fruit out front.  I wonder how long this relative normalcy will last.  Contactless worked; it's really come into its own this past fortnight.  The guy behind the counter had those blue sterile gloves on.  It's the little differences.

At home I washed my hands immediately but didn't think to wash all the packets before they went into the cupboard.  Ah well.  I stashed the chocolate in the cupboard behind the mirror in the downstairs loo.  With any luck I'll forget it until the rationing gets really bad.

This evening, an announcement: the PM will address the nation at half eight.  I went out to top up the car with diesel, just in case.  Sign on the pump saying everyone MUST wear the gloves.  Automatic door, contactless payment.. this is actually workable, you know.  While there I went next door and picked up some fresh fruit at Harry's panicked request, forgetting entirely the stuff outside the Londis I'd seen mere hours earlier.  Sainsburys was pretty raided; the only fresh veg were some iceberg lettuces and a whole load of celery.  Poor celery, always the unwanted stepchild.  I got two, and some Taramasalata because, well, nom.  I grabbed a bag from the normal checkouts, which of course was desperate not to let go of its bretheren or to open without serious fiddling.  I resisted an instinct to lick my fingers.  I opted for self-checkout as the staff were not in gloves, but only after inelegantly sliding my items one by one into the newly prised open bag did I realise I couldn't avoid touching the screen.  Then I had to touch my phone with my tainted finger to pay.  Everything is contaminated now.  Might as well just curl up in the gutter and wait for the plague to take me.

Back home bang on eight thirty and Boris announced what he should have done a week ago: full lockdown, only leave the house for essentials.  Wonder if the twats flooding to their second homes will realise their catastrophic error when the local NHS urgent care clinic is double overwhelmed compared to the nice big hospital near their primary residence.  Game of Scrabble seemed the only thing to do.  Harry ended it early due to my insufferable winningness.

Sorry, must be the nerves.  Quite possible that there are people in my family I've already seen for the last time.  Christ, if the Covid takes me before the lockdown ends I might have had my last Big Mac already.  There's a thought.

March 20th

Clemmie was off school with a bit of a cough from Wednesday 4th, right through the Stag weekend and into this week.  On Tuesday we sent her in.. and they closed the school.  So she's had a half day of school in two weeks. Prior to the school closing Harriet was quite happy for Clemmie to lounge about alternating between Lego, reading to the dog and various screens, but the moment all the kids have been sent home an imagined educational imperative has gripped her like a giant, sweaty fist of guilt.  All I heard from upstairs yesterday was repeated instructions to write or add or draw which slowly degenerated into wails of frustration, mainly from Harriet.  Eventually Clemmie ended up in front of NetFlix so Mummy could actually answer a single email.  I think we're going to have to adjust our expectations.

I walked the dogs, taking care to step nimbly around the six foot exclusion zone surrounding everyone I passed.  It was only after I opened the gate to the racecourse, and closed it with my other hand, that I realised I had just effectively shaken hands with everyone who's walked a dog in the past 48 hours.  Oops.  Aaand now the leads are contaminated.  And my hat, so probably my face..

Harriet and I are still managing to be friendly.  Clemmie trying both of our patience.  It's going to be odd having no safety valve or time apart.  At dinner last night she was talking about her amazing Harry Potter birthday party that's coming up in three weeks.  Harriet and I are not sure exactly how to let her down gently about this, so for now we're sticking with vague chat about how it might be delayed a bit.  I ordered her a Big Trak from Amazon as a birthday present and I just hope that it arrives before non-essential deliveries are cut off.  Come on Prime, don't fail me now.

Dogs are fine.  Weather is actually sunny today.  Just a shame I have so much work to do.