440 days of plague

I was in the office again today, entirely on my own, which gave me the freedom to play loud music and yell at the top of my voice; but that gets old fairly quickly as it turns out. Who knew?

Both the Belgian numbers and the weather have been improving, which greatly lifts the spirits. As I predicted lsat time, the number of COVID patients in hospital is now well below where it had since before the October lockdown, and the number of new infections seems likely to drop below that benchmark in the next week or ten days (and the number of ICU patients, currently the slowest moving indicator, will not be far behind). We actually got out to our favourite restaurant for dinner last night, for the first time since last summer.

I walked back with U, who had firm views about the route that we needed to take, deviating twice from my preferred shortcuts (in orange).

Already noted both our guests of the previous weekend and my museum trip on Monday last week. We also profited from the good weather yesterday to walk at the nearby Doode Bemde nature reserve.


Not sure how soon it will happen, but I do feel that we’re nearer the end than the start of all this.

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My tweets

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Whoniversaries 31 May

i) births and deaths

31 May 1940: birth of Peter Mayock who played Ibrahim Namin in Pyramids of Mars (Fourth Doctor, 1975) and Solis in The Deadly Assassin (Fourth Doctor, 1976)

31 May 1948: birth of Lynda Bellingham, who played the Inquisitor in the Sixth Doctor's Season 23 (1986), and returned to the role for some excellent Big Finish plays.

31 May 1983: birth of Reggie Yates who played Martha's brother Leo in the 2007 series of Doctor Who.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

31 May 1969: broadcast of seventh episode of The War Games. The Doctor and friends start a rebellion, capturing the 1917 chateau from General Smythe.

31 May 2008: broadcast of Silence in the Library

31 May 2010: broadcast of Robot Gladiators, twenty-first episode of the Australian K9 series. K9 and the crew take on and shut down an illegal, underground robot fight club.

One more month to go in this project. It's been interesting to come back to this ten years on – there's actually been much less Who since 2011 than there was in the 2005-10 period, when you also had Torchwood and Sarah Jane in the mix, so the updates have generally not needed to be substantial.