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Thirty days of lockdown

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For the first time, it is beginning to feel like we are nearer the end of this than the beginning. Although Belgium yesterday extended the current lockdown to 3 May, there's a strong sense that this may be the last or second-last such announcement. People are starting to talk about exit strategies, including particularly in neighbouring countries. (But things will not move as quickly in the US or the UK.)

From our direct perspective, the government announced yesterday that residents of residential care centres and institutions for people with a handicap will be now able to receive visits from one person (not clear if that was one person at a time or one designated visitor per resident). This announcement caused an immediate kerfuffle with the care homes, who had not been forewarned or consulted, and are not ready. B and U's home called to tell us that they won't be ready for visitors before May. It's probably just as well; B will make do without us, and U would find it too confusing for either Anne or me to come and see her without bringing her back home – meanwhile, we are continuing regular Skypes with her.

It's clear now that the absolute numbers here in Belgium are pretty awful. We have had far more deaths than any other country of our size – more than 4,000 so far, to 1,200 for Sweden and 600 for Portugal, more than Germany or China, level with Iran. Per capita we are at the very top of the table, only just behind Spain and Italy (oh yeah, and Andorra and San Marino). It seems to have been a combination of bad luck, with several early centres of infection, and also a broader definition of the numbers being reported – where other countries are counting only certified deaths in hospitals, Belgium is (now) counting deaths in care homes too, even if they are not formally certified as being due to COVID-19. In any case, it's dreadful.

The dynamic, however, is a different matter. The number of daily deaths has remained agonisingly stable for the last ten days, but it's the last indicator to move (and stability here is anyway relatively good news). The daily number of new hospital cases peaked as long ago as 28 March; the total number of hospital cases has been steady in the mid to low 5000s since 1 April; the number in intensive care has been dropping slowly for over a week. So one gets the sense that we started from an unexpectedly bad position, but that once the situation became clear, the various governments have handled it reasonably effectively, and more importantly the population has generally complied.

I must say I've been wondering again about the stomach bug that hit me a couple of weeks ago. The historian Fern Riddell has written on Twitter of her experience of gastric-only coronavirus, and some parts of her description rang bells for me, in particular her account of it coming back every few days – I had it badly on 26/27 March, even worse on 1-3 April, and felt I was still shaking it off last week. But I'm fine now, and was never as bad as people who have had the Real Thing seem to have been (also, crucially, the rest of the household remained uninfected). Though in some ways I almost hope I have had it, as it would probably make me immune.

I'm certainly in a better frame of mind. The launch of this year's Hugo final ballot went particularly well, and I'm glad I had a hand in that. The Doctor Who rewatches organised by Emily Cook on Twitter have been a good bonding experience. I joined the Eastercon virtual room party on Saturday, making up for not being in Birmingham. My workplace organised an online pub quiz last night (my team won). Apart from that, I've been fairly successful in keeping the day job to the spare room (it has been keping me busy roughly 8.30-6 every day). In news from abroad, Martti Ahtisaari and his wife have apparently recovered from the virus.

Physical exercise makes a very big difference too. The long Easter weekend was sunny and I got out cycling several times. Anne, F and I have been getting out for walks almost every day, whether separately or together. I've been continuing to do my series of videos about the village. (Though the experience has reinforced my admiration for those who work in video and film production for a living.) Here we are in the garden on Easter Sunday, enjoying our eggs. I hope you are well too. Stay in touch.

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Thursday reading

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Current
Oathbringer, by Brandon Sanderson
Monstress, Volume 4: The Chosen, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
Wiske, by Willy Vandersteen

Last books finished
(lots of short books over a long weekend)
Muddy Lane, by Andrew Cheffings
Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsin Muir
A Woman in Space, by Sara Cavanagh
Catfishing on Catnet, by Naomi Kritzer
The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, by Mallory O'Meara
Mooncakes, by Wendy Xu and Suzanne Walker
The European Parliament, by Francis Jacobs, Richard Corbett and Michael Shackleton
The Deep, by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes

Next books
The First Men in the Moon, by H. G. Wells
Long Song, by Andrea Levy

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The Moomins and the Great Flood, by Tove Jansson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Så vandrade de vidare, längre och längre in i tystnaden och mörkret. Småningom kände sig mumintrollet ängsligt och frågade viskande sin mamma om hon trodde det fanns några farliga djur därinne. “Knappast”, sa hon, “fast det är kanske bäst att vi går lite fortare i alla fall. Men jag hoppas att vi är så små att vi inte märks ifall det skulle komma något farligt.” So they walked on, further and further into the silence and the darkness. Little by little, Moomintroll began to feel anxious, and he asked his mother in a whisper if she thought there were any dangerous creatures in there. “I shouldn’t think so,” she said, “though perhaps we’d better go a little faster anyway. But I hope we’re so small that we won’t be noticed if something dangerous should come along.”

This is the very first of the Moomin books, published in 1945. The Moomins had not yet evolved to be the rambling nuclear family that we are used to; instead Moominmamma and Moomintroll cross an eerie landscape looking for Moominpappa, encountering strange but generally friendly creatures en route, and eventaully settling down in Moominvalley. Several of the plot elements were recycled (and done better) in later books. I think this is really for Moomin completists only; I wouldn't recommend it as a starting point – better for new readers to begin with Comet in Moominland. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2017. Next on that pile (after a recalculation) is Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens.

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  • Tue, 21:13: RT @bbcdoctorwho: Marking the Twelfth Doctor Peter Capaldi’s birthday with one of his finest moments #HellofaBird #DoctorWho https://t.co…
  • Tue, 21:14: He was pretty upset when she left him too, though. https://t.co/8MiUYO8z09
  • Tue, 21:14: RT @tardis_monkey: Knowing The Doctors safe place is the TARDIS really hits at the moment. Your home is your TARDIS while we get through th…
  • Tue, 21:16: RT @StevenWMoffat: The Doctor’s red cuff button. Signature touch from Ray Holman, who also stitched red into Sherlock’s lapel button hole.…
  • Tue, 21:19: It’s a killer puzzle box, designed to scare me to death, and I’m trapped inside it. Must be Christmas! #HellOfABird
  • Tue, 21:20: RT @LookingForTelos: Nice visual detail I hadn’t noticed: the shape of the garden is mimicking the one of the castle at large, with a circl…
  • Tue, 21:20: RT @rtalalay: Peter did a rehearsal of all the scene in the garden in Tom Baker’s voice. Obviously I wish i had that on film. #HellOfABird
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  • Tue, 21:26: RT @anghelides: Peter Capaldi is fabulous. So much of what he’s doing is reacting – we learn what’s going on as much from how he looks as f…

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A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

For all those years before she married Dan Needham, my mother never had a real job, or pursued a higher education; and although she never lacked money—because my grandmother was generous to her—she was clever at keeping her personal expenses to a minimum. She would bring home some of the loveliest clothes, from Boston, but she would never buy them; she dressed up her dressmaker's dummy in them, and she copied them. Then she'd return the originals to the various Boston stores; she said she always told them the same thing, and they never got angry at her—instead, they felt sorry for her, and took the clothes back without an argument.

A slow and intricate novel of life in the 1950s and 1960s in a small New Hampshire town, where the narrator's mother is accidentally killed by his best friend in a sporting accident and the whole story is told as a flashback from Canada in 1987. There are two brilliant comic set pieces, first where Owen Meaney takes command of the town's Christmas Nativity play, and then later where he inspires the removal of a hated teacher's car from the schoolyard to the stage of the assembly hall. It has a grim and not totally plausible ending; it goes on maybe a bit too long; but it's a nice chunky read about friendship, growing up and family secrets. I had read it years ago but had forgotten enough to enjoy it again. You can get it here.

This was the top book on my shelves that I had not already reviewed online. Next up is The Master and Margerita, by Mikhail Bulgakov.

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Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor Adventures Volume 03

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I got hold of this Big Finish box set to acompany my cycling through the forest in recent days, and realised only when I started writing this up that although I had already listened to Volume One of this series a couple of years ago, I had actually missed Volume Two. Oh well, more pleasures in store I guess.

All three stories here bring David Tennant back together with Catherine Tate as Donna Noble. The first one, No Place by James Goss, also brings back Jacqueline King as Donna's mother Sylvia and Bernard Cribbins as her grandfather Wilf. They are posing as a nuclear-ish family (ie the Doctor and Donna are pretending to be married) investigating a haunted house in collaboration with a TV show called Haunted Makeovers. As my regular reader knows, I rate Goss very highly as perhaps the best regular current Who writer who has never written for TV. I'm afraid this didn't quite work for me; I guess I am not familiar enough with the subgenres of makeover TV or ghost movies to really get the joke, and the plot didn't make a lot of sense in its own terms. The actors all seemed to be having fun, which is important I guess. You can get it here.

One Mile Down, by Jenny T. Colgan, worked a lot better – an underwater city, where humans and fish people are attempting to find an uneasy modus vivendi, is disrupted, possibly fatally, by Judoon on a mission. There is lots of high and low politics going on, and I found the plot intricate but consistent and compelling. Also very welcome to hear the voice of Rakie Ayola, who played the tragically unnamed hostess in Midnight, one of my favourite Tenth Doctor TV stories. You can get it here.

The Creeping Death, by Roy Gill, is set in the Great London Smog of 1952You can get it here. I had only come across one other piece by Roy Gill, the first Class audio, which was also very good. I'll look out for more by him.

The box set as a whole includes the usual amusing behind-the-scenes banter, but also another disc celebrating David Tennant's association with Big Finish, which goes back to 2001you can do that here.

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Raiders of the Lost Ark

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I've jumped ahead in my sequence of Hugo and Oscar-winning films because Raiders of the Lost Ark was on TV the other day, and I thought, why not?

Raiders won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation for 1982, beating Dragonslayer, Excalibur, Outland and Time Bandits. I think the only other one I've seen is Time Bandits. IMDB users rank it the top film of 1981 both here and here, with that year's Oscar winner, Chariots of Fire, some way down – I find that a little odd, I thought Chariots was a very good film; but I'll discuss that when I get to it in my Oscars sequence. Raiders did get a nomination for best Picture, and won four Oscars, for Best Sound, Best Art Direction, Best Film Editing and Best Visual Effects. Steven Spielberg was also nominated for Best Director.

It's a tremendous bit of escapism. The stunts are spectacular, the staging is breathtaking, and the music incredibly earwormy. Just in case you have no idea what it's about, here's a trailer:

The film is set in 1936, where mild-mannered archaeology professor Indiana Jones, played by Harrison Ford, takes a break from stealing relics from indigenous peoples to attempt to prevent a Nazi expedition from digging up the Ark of the Covenant in Egypt. This requires him to retrieve his late mentor's daughter, who he has a previous toxic relationship with, from Nepal and then fight off well-organised bad guys. The Nazi group defeats him after many twists and turns, capture the Ark and are destroyed by divine forces emanating from the Ark when they open it. There's a particularly memorable chase sequence in the streets of Cairo (actually in Tunisia), at the end of which a planned lengthy fight sequence was cut short during filming because Ford's digestive system had collapsed and he could not go through with it as scripted, giving us one of the most iconic scenes of the movie.
There are many ridiculous things about the story, but the most ridiculous is that the ancient Egyptians happen to have left instructions for finding the Ark in just exactly the right places for Jones (and nobody else) to put the pieces together, and then left the actual hidey-hole well stocked with snakes which have survived three thousand years without any visible food souirce. The Nazis veer more towards comedic than genocidal. Many of the actors playing Arabs (and Asians) are browned up, most notably John Rhys-Davies, who barely attempts to conceal his Welsh accent as Sallah. The fact that the Nazis might have issues with Jews is mentioned precisely once. It does not even pass step one of the Bechdel test (there is only one named woman character, played by Karen Allan, Marion, a peril monkey, whose one remarkable characteristic is that she has a good head for liquor). But it is tremendous fun all the same.

As usual, I'm going to note actors who appeared in Doctor Who as well as here. (I haven't spotted any crossovers yet between Raiders and other Oscar-winning or Hugo-winning films that I have already reached in this sequence. There are of course plenty such to come.) They are all fairly minor characters, mostly playing races other than their own. The most visible, because he has two roles in Raiders, is Vic Tablian, who plays both the dubious guide in Peru and the man with the monkey in Cairo; a couple of years earlier, he was Ahmed in Pyramids of Mars.

Sonny Caldinez appeared four times in Doctor Who, once unmasked as Kemel in The Evil of the Daleks (1967) and three times as an Ice Warrior; in Raiders he is the Mean Mongolian in the Nepal bar scene.


Tutte Lemkow appeared in three William Hartnell stories, one of which is completely lost, but his roles as Kuijiu in Marco Polo (1964) and Ibrahim in The Crusade (1965) survive. In Raiders he plays the Imam who tells Jones how to reduce the height of the staff (advice that is clearly ignored, to no great disadvantage).


Kiran Shah plays Abu in Raiders, and has twice been in New Who, but obscured by costume, as the Unknown Figure in Listen (2014) and an emojibot in Smile (2017). He was already in his twenties when playing a child in Raiders.

And finally, John Rees plays a German sergeant here and also played space crewman Hardy in Frontier in Space (1973)

Back to normal order now, I think – next in sequence is actually The French Connection which won the Oscar in 1971.

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The Blake’s 7 Annuals

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Back in the day there were three Blake's 7 annuals, for the years 1979, 1980 and 1981. By 1982, of course, the show had ended with everyone being killed, so there wouldn't have been much point in another annual. The first two of them are pretty easy to get hold of; the third is rarer but accessible for the determined. No writing or art credits are given for any of the three, which is a big shame because the writing is OK and the art in places rather good. They were published by World Distributors, who also did the Doctor Who annuals for 1979, 1980 and 1981, so it's likely that the same team was involved – we know that Paul Crompton was the main artist for the 1979 and 1980 Doctor Who Annuals, and Glenn Rix for 1981, but I don't think we have any information about who wrote the stories. Surprisingly, there is no mention of the annuals on the Blake's 7 Wiki.

1979 Annual (original price £1.50) – second paragraph of third story ("The Body Stealers"):

Blake peered over the edge of the tower at the dark shapes swarming through the stormy Vemos night below. Cally clipped the bracelet shut on the thin wrist of the semi-conscious figure propped up in front of her against the tower wall. A flash of lightning lit up Rask's cruel features. Thin lips, hollow cheeks, a long sharp nose and two glazed oval eyes, staring with hatred at Cally from under a mass of lank hair whipped forward by the wind.

Fiction accounts for 49 pages out of 63. The stories are OK for what they are, nicely illustrated with two of them featuring alien race who have been inspired by Meso-American culture. The rest is mostly mathematical puzzles, with two pages introducing the Liberator crew, and four pages of rather imaginative detail for the Blake's 7 expanded universe (click to embiggen):


1980 Annual (original price £1.75) – second paragraph of third story ("Sabotage"):

Blake shivered as he watched Vola's gloved fingers working deftly on the lock. He'd expected it to be cold, but not this cold.

Maybe the least good value of the three, here we have only 39 pages of fiction out of 62, and the rest is entirely filled with astronomy and space facts, some of which were already out of date by 1980. The illustrations are good, though most seem reminiscent of publicity pictures.

1981 Annual (original price £1.95) – second paragraph of third story ("The Island"):

“Power banks 4 and 5 down to 20%,” called Cally, reading of her instrumental panel. “We can't take much more of this.”

We're back up to 50 pages of story out of 63 now, which is better. This is the most continuity-heavy of the three annuals (not difficult), set during the third series in that the crew includes Dayna and Cally, with Zen and the Liberator, and references to the recent destruction of Star One. Again, decent interior art. By the time the annual was in the shops for Christmas shopping, however, Zen and the Liberator had been destroyed on screen at the end of March, so it was several months out of date. However, I appreciate the fan service. The art is decent, and the non-fiction part of the annual is filled out with more space and astronomy facts.

If you want, you can get the 1979 annual here, the 1980 annual here and the 1981 annual here.



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Excession, by Iain M. Banks

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Amorphia wandered amongst the dead and dying of Hill 4. The battle had by this time moved on; the few defenders who'd survived and repelled the initial rush had been ordered to pull back just as the next wave of opposing troops had appeared out of the cannon smoke and fallen upon them; they had been slaughtered almost to a man and the victors had swept on to the next redoubt across the shallow valley beyond. Shattered palisades, lines of stakes and bunkers had been chewed up by the initial bombardment and later by the hooves of the cavalry. Bodies lay scattered like twisted, shredded leaves amongst the torn-up grassland and the rich brown-red soil. The blood of men and animals saturated the grass in places, making it thick and glossy, and collected in little hollows like pools of dark ink.

I was disappointed with the last Banks noel I revisited, but I very much enjoyed the return journey here. Excession is one of the culture novels in which humans, bloodthirsty aliens, and super-evolved AIs become entangled in a quest to control an artifect which appears to have come from another, far more advanced universe. Somehow I felt that the various plot strands wove together in a very satisfactory way, with the story fundamentally based on sensawunda – the Culture is already massively further evolved than we are; yet it too quakes when confronted with something unimaginably further advanced. The plot appears to move rather slowly, but in fact it's mostly justifiable setup for the dramatic denouement, or else excusable extra colour for the Culture universe. It works rather well for me, and if you don't have it, you can get it here.

Excession won the BSFA Award for 1996, beating that year's Hugo winner, Blue Mars, by Kim Stanley RobinsonHoly Fire, by Bruce Sterling; Interface, by Stephen Bury; The Memory Palace, by Gill Alderman; and The Stone Canal, by Ken MacLeod. I think I have read all except the Alderman, and I think Excession is the most memorable. Apart from Blue Mars, there was no overlap with the Clarke or Tiptree shortlists; those awards were won by The Calcutta Chromosome and The Sparrow/"Mountain Ways" respectively. The Sparrow also won the Clarke and BSFA Awards for the following year, so next up in this series I'll be looking at the joint 1998 Tiptree winners, Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey and “Travels With the Snow Queen” by Kelly Link.

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December 2005 books

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This is the latest post in a series I started five months ago, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days I've been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I've found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in current circumstances when we are all somewhat distracted. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

December 2005 was an unusual month in that I did not travel – a planned day-trip to France was cancelled at the last moment. The overnights meme says I had spent the night in 21 different places away from home during the year; I seem to have missed Berlin from the list. I certainly visited 17 countries in the course of the year (going by today's borders – ie counting Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo separately). I forgot to note that in November we had put out reports on the rigged elections in Azerbaijan, and also on EU visa policy in the BalkansMontenegro's imminent independence referendum. My Armenian intern A left (she later set up her own business) and I head-hunted her Greek replacement K from the internal media team.

At home, we celebrated little U's third birthday (she got an Etch-a-Sketch) and Anne's brother and sister both joined us for Christmas, in time for David Tennant's first full episode of Doctor Who. I seem to have pictures of them and the kids, but none of Anne or me. We had a full house, especially when Anne's parents and my sister and her husband all turned up.


During the Christmas break I did my own little historical project, transcribing my great-grandfather's diary of his 1858 pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

This was the first year that I did a year-end roundup of the books that I had read. I hadn't yet developed consistency in format and counting, so the number I tallied then is different to my new tally below.

December 2005 books:

Non-fiction 3; 2005 total 42
'with all faults', by David Low
Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man, by Ann Wroe
The Georgian Feast: The Vibrant Culture and Savory Food of the Republic of Georgia, by Darra Goldstein

Non-genre fiction 0; 2005 total 9

sf (non-Who) 4; 2005 total 79
Erewhon, by Samuel Butler
Sevenacide, by Robert Shuster
Triplanetary, by E.E. "Doc" Smith
Numbers Don't Lie, by Terry Bisson

Doctor Who 3; 2005 total 5
The Well-Mannered War, by Gareth Roberts
Human Nature, by Paul Cornell
Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt

Comics 1; 2005 total 8
Boulevard of Broken Dreams, by Kim Deitch with Simon Deitch

2,500 pages; 2005 total 46,400 – this number soared once I started commuting by train in 2007
2/11 by women; 2005 total 30/144 (21%) – a standard proportion until I started to make efforts to read more diversely
None by PoC; 2005 total 4/144 (3%) – likewise.

Best books of the month for me were The Georgian Feast, which I'm still cooking from and you can get here, and Paul Cornell's Human Nature, which you can get here in a new edition and of course later became the only original Who novel to be later adapted to television. (Other formats adopted to television: a game book, a comic strip, a couple of short stories, more loosely a couple of Big Finish plays.) Several of these bounced off me, most thoroughly the rather dismal Sevanacide collection, which you can get here.


2005 books roundup

I make that 143 books in total in 2005, a bit less than the 149 I tallied for 2004 (and lower than any year since).

SF 79 (55% – highest percentage I have recorded for any year, though perhaps not if you count Doctor Who books as well)

The one you haven't heard of: Cultural Breaks, by Brian W. Aldiss

Non-fiction 42 (29% – higher than some recent years)
Best of 2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto, Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, by Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary, The Orientalist: solving the mystery of a strange and a dangerous life, by Tom Reiss
The one you haven't heard of: Bradt Travel Guide to (North) Macedonia, by Thammy Evans
Worst of 2005: The Truth About The Armed Conflict In Slovenia, by Col. Nikola Popović, Col. Ivan Matović, and Lt-Col. Stanoje Jovanović

Non-genre 9 (6% – very low; this was when I decided to start reading a bit more classic fiction)
Best of 2005: The Days of the Consuls/Bosnian Chronicle/Travnik Chronicle, by Ivo Andrić, Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiassen
Worst of 2005: The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown

Comics 8 (6% – on a par with the lower end of recent years)
Best of 2005: Bone, by Jeff Smith, Nu We Toch Hier Zijn, by Barbara Stok
Worst of 2005: Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron, by Daniel Clowes

Doctor Who 5 (3% – I was only just getting started)
Best of 2005: Human Nature, by Paul Cornell, The Dying Days, by Lance Parkin
Worst of 2005: Genocide, by Paul Leonard

Book of the year 2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto, a brilliant history of Nieuw Amsterdam, the Dutch colonial town that became New York. You can (and should) get it here.

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An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith

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Second paragraph of third chapter (brace yourselves, it’s a long one):

There are some sorts of industry, even of the lowest kind, which can be carried on nowhere but in a great town. A porter, for example, can find employment and subsistence in no other place. A village is by much too narrow a sphere for him; even an ordinary market-town is scarce large enough to afford him constant occupation. In the lone houses and very small villages which are scattered about in so desert a country as the highlands of Scotland, every farmer must be butcher, baker, and brewer, for his own family. In such situations we can scarce expect to find even a smith, a carpenter, or a mason, within less than twenty miles of another of the same trade. The scattered families that live at eight or ten miles distance from the nearest of them, must learn to perform themselves a great number of little pieces of work, for which, in more populous countries, they would call in the assistance of those workmen. Country workmen are almost everywhere obliged to apply themselves to all the different branches of industry that have so much affinity to one another as to be employed about the same sort of materials. A country carpenter deals in every sort of work that is made of wood; a country smith in every sort of work that is made of iron. The former is not only a carpenter, but a joiner, a cabinet-maker, and even a carver in wood, as well as a wheel-wright, a plough-wright, a cart and waggon-maker. The employments of the latter are still more various. It is impossible there should be such a trade as even that of a nailer in the remote and inland parts of the highlands of Scotland. Such a workman at the rate of a thousand nails a-day, and three hundred working days in the year, will make three hundred thousand nails in the year. But in such a situation it would be impossible to dispose of one thousand, that is, of one day’s work in the year. As by means of water-carriage, a more extensive market is opened to every sort of industry than what land-carriage alone can afford it, so it is upon the sea-coast, and along the banks of navigable rivers, that industry of every kind naturally begins to subdivide and improve itself, and it is frequently not till a long time after that those improvements extend themselves to the inland parts of the country. A broad-wheeled waggon, attended by two men, and drawn by eight horses, in about six weeks time, carries and brings back between London and Edinburgh near four ton weight of goods. In about the same time a ship navigated by six or eight men, and sailing between the ports of London and Leith, frequently carries and brings back two hundred ton weight of goods. Six or eight men, therefore, by the help of water-carriage, can carry and bring back, in the same time, the same quantity of goods between London and Edinburgh as fifty broad-wheeled waggons, attended by a hundred men, and drawn by four hundred horses. Upon two hundred tons of goods, therefore, carried by the cheapest land-carriage from London to Edinburgh, there must be charged the maintenance of a hundred men for three weeks, and both the maintenance and what is nearly equal to maintenance the wear and tear of four hundred horses, as well as of fifty great waggons. Whereas, upon the same quantity of goods carried by water, there is to be charged only the maintenance of six or eight men, and the wear and tear of a ship of two hundred tons burthen, together with the value of the superior risk, or the difference of the insurance between land and water-carriage. Were there no other communication between those two places, therefore, but by land-carriage, as no goods could be transported from the one to the other, except such whose price was very considerable in proportion to their weight, they could carry on but a small part of that commerce which at present subsists between them, and consequently could give but a small part of that encouragement which they at present mutually afford to each other’s industry. There could be little or no commerce of any kind between the distant parts of the world. What goods could bear the expense of land-carriage between London and Calcutta? Or if there were any so precious as to be able to support this expense, with what safety could they be transported through the territories of so many barbarous nations? Those two cities, however, at present carry on a very considerable commerce with each other, and by mutually affording a market, give a good deal of encouragement to each other’s industry.

I am not especially well versed in economics, so I had been looking forward to reading this classic text. I’m afraid I lasted only about a hundred pages. The content is all good and well argued, but Smith is not Gibbon (coincidentally, I had a distant cousin whose maiden name was Smyth and married a man whose name was Gibbon) and without the delights of Gibbon’s style, the detailed prose was a bit wearing, especially given my general state of mind, driven by the current situation; I am looking for comfort reading, not education at the moment. Some day I shall invest in a nice readable Economics 101 text book and educate myself properly in the dismal science, which I guess may also have moved on a bit since the eighteenth century. If you want, you can get this here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is The European Parliament, by Richard Corbett, Francis Jacobs and Michael Shackleton.

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Red Notice, by Bill Browder

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Based on countless viewings of the movie Animal House, I decided that if I was going to go to a party school, I might as well do it right and join a fraternity. I pledged the Delta Upsilon fraternity and, after the requisite hazing, was accepted as a member. Everyone had a nickname there—Sparky, Whiff, Doorstop, Slim—and mine, on account of my curly, black hair, was Brillo.

This is an impressive first-person account of one businessman who was ruthlessly targeted by the Kremlin for trying to operate freely in Russia. Browder managed to make a lot of money in Eastern Europe in the wild days immediately after the fall of Communism, but ran foul of the Russian authorities, who used the full force of bad law to strip his assets (of which he had a lot) and, much worse, arrested Browder's legal adviser Sergei Magnitsky, who then died as a result of his mistreatment in jail. Browder's is not the only such story, but it is very well told, and he has vindicated Magnitsky's memory by getting legislation passed in various jurisdictions allowing direct sanctions against those who have abused human rights. One or two people who I know personally show up in the narrative (in a good way!) which is always interesting too. Recommended. You can get it here.

This was my top unread non-fiction book. Next on that list is The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, by Stephen Fry.

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Thursday reading

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Current
Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsin Muir
Oathbringer, by Brandon Sanderson
The European Parliament, by Francis Jacobs, Richard Corbett and Michael Shackleton

Last books finished
The Moomins and the Great Flood, by Tove Jansson
A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving

Next books
The First Men in the Moon, by H. G. Wells
Wiske, by Willy Vandersteen

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Hugo final ballot Goodreads/Librarything statistics

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I have not tracked systematically how good a guide this is to the likely winner of the awards, but it's a useful yardstick for how far finalists have managed to penetrate the general market. In each table I have ranked the books by geometric average of their number of owners on Goodreads and LibraryThing, and bolded the highest average ranking in each category.

Best Novel

Goodreads LibraryThing
owners av rating owners av rating
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow 139037 4.11 647 4.14
Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir 73792 4.25 546 4.19
Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire 70258 4.08 328 4.18
A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine 43577 4.18 437 4.14
The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders 38557 3.58 404 3.76
The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley 16359 3.99 196 3.8

Seanan McGuire scoring notably better on Goodreads than LibraryThing. Gideon the Ninth getting the best average rating on both.

Best Novella

Goodreads LibraryThing
owners av rating owners av rating
"Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom", by Ted Chiang (Exhalation) 93782 4.3 656 4.19
This Is How You Lose The Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone 87078 4.01 534 3.82
In an Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire 32887 4.2 331 4.26
The Deep, by Rivers Solomon 46868 3.77 214 3.86
To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers 30503 4.23 285 4.14
The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P. Djèlí Clark 7639 4.08 164 4.14

For Ted Chiang's story, I am giving the numbers of Exhalation, the collection it was published in. This Is How You Lose The Time War has more Goodreads owners than all but one of the Best Novel finalists, and more LibraryThing owners than all but two of them.

Best Related Work

Goodreads LibraryThing
owners av rating owners av rating
The Lady from the Black Lagoon, by Mallory O'Meara 18450 4.05 171 3.92
Becoming Superman, by J. Michael Straczynski 4842 4.65 84 4.58
The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein, by Farah Mendlesohn 165 4.02 34 4.2
Joanna Russ, by Gwyneth Jones 75 4.2 11 3.83
Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, by Arwen Curry
John W. Campbell Award Acceptance Speech, by Jeannette Ng

One of these is a documentary film and another was a speech, so no numbers can be given. The ratings for Becoming Superman are very high indeed.

Best Graphic Story or Comic

Goodreads LibraryThing
owners av rating owners av rating
Mooncakes, by Wendy Xu & Suzanne Walker 29842 3.9 108 3.56
Monstress, Vol. 4: The Chosen, by Marjorie Liu (writer), Sana Takeda (artist) 8218 4.24 136 4.13
Paper Girls, Vol 6, by Brian Vaughan (writer), Cliff Chiang & Matt Wilson (artists) 7513 4.19 93 4.03
Die, Vol. 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker, by Kieron Gillen (writer), Stephanie Hans (artist) 5223 4.1 89 3.98
The Wicked + The Divine, Vol. 9: Okay, by Kieron Gillen (writer), Jamie McKelvie, & Matt Wilson (artists) 4524 4.26 69 4.18
LaGuardia, by Nnedi Okorafor (writer), Tana Ford (artist) , James Devlin (colours) 1526 4.08 38 3.88

Mooncakes has clearly tickled the Goodreads community much more than the LibraryThing community; and yet also has the lowest average ranking on both systems. The final installment of The Wicked + The Divine has the highest rating on both.

Lodestar

Goodreads LibraryThing
owners av rating owners av rating
The Wicked King, by Holly Black 211351 4.44 663 4.34
Dragon Pearl, by Yoon Ha Lee 25020 3.82 271 3.79
Deeplight, by Frances Hardinge 9436 4.24 52 4.13
Minor Mage, by T. Kingfisher 5489 4.18 61 4.02
Catfishing on CatNet, by Naomi Kritzer 2220 4.13 83 4.63
Riverland, by Fran Wilde 1324 4.03 33 4.13

Massive lead for The Wicked King on all metrics. One other indicator though is the ratio of the more fannish LibraryThing readers to the more general Goodreads users, where Naomi Kritzer is well in front.

Retro Best Novel

Goodreads LibraryThing
owners av rating owners av rating
Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord, by Olaf Stapledon 3096 3.9 419 3.91
The Golden Fleece, by Robert Graves 2185 4.04 510 3.74
The Wind on the Moon, by Eric Linklater 2255 3.95 301 3.8
Land of Terror, by Edgar Rice Burroughs 1178 3.72 295 3.47
The Winged Man, by A. E. Van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull 256 3.44 187 2.87
Shadow Over Mars/The Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett 150 3.28 75 3.45

Sirius has the most GR readers and the highest ranking from LT users; The Golden Fleece has the most LT readers and the highest ranking from GR users. For Leigh Brackett I amalgamted the GR readings for both titles of the book, which is catalogued separately there – it still has the lowest GR rating of any book here. (And The Winged Man has the lowest LT ranking.)

Strange times, and not quite four months to go.

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My BSFA votes (big long post)

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Other things being equal, I wold have been looking forward to Eastercon at the end of this week – a welcome return to the Birmingham Hilton where I have had various good times over the years. The last few times I attended Eastercon I got (not very reluctantly) roped into counting the votes for the BSFA Awards; the voting deadline this year has now been extended to the 24th, with an online ceremony promised in early May. But I had been expecting to make my mind up this week, and I have decided my votes in all four categories, as follows.

Best Art

Well, precisely one of my nominations made it to the final five. These are all nice pieces, but I found them quite easy to rank. (In each case, click to embiggen.)

5) Charlotte Stroomer – Cover for The Rosewater Redemption by Tade Thompson (Orbit)

Interesting geometry which however doesn’t say much to me.
4) Chris Baker (Fangorn) – Cover for Wourism and Other Stories by Ian Whates (Luna Press)

Interesting future city, possibly dystopian, or do we only think that because of the dark buildings and the weather?
3) Julia Lloyd – Cover for Fleet of Knives by Gareth L Powell (Titan Books)

Was one of the ones I almost nominated but I am bumping it down a bit on reflection. I love that the ships in the fleet do look a bit like knives.
2) Richard Wagner – Cover for Interzone #284 (Interzone)

This grew on me, looking at it again – there is clearly an interesting story in the picture. (Not sure that it relates to any of the actual stories in the magazine though.)
1) Aitch & Rachel Vale – Cover for Deeplight by Frances Hardinge (UK edition) (Macmillan Children’s Books)

Very interesting, and really made me want to read the book – what is with the porous heart, in the middle of various marine objects? All intriguingly drawn, not crowded, very suggestive. Got one of my nominations, and gets my vote.

Best Non-Fiction

Five finalists here, but I have only read four; I am not going to invest in Sideways in Time: Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction as it costs more than all the rest of the shortlist combined (in all categories). Sorry. If you want to, you can get it here.

4) Away Day: Star Trek and the Utopia of Merit, by Jo Lindsay Walton. Second paragraph of third section, with footnote:

When Saadia describes what work is like in the Federation, he also implies that the resources that pour from the Federation cornucopia are allocated by some system of reciprocity.11 Just by itself, this claim doesn’t tell us much – there are so many different kinds of reciprocity! But Saadia narrows it down by (quite reasonably) emphasizing the more informal, forgiving, and egalitarian forms of reciprocity. That is, he emphasizes mutual aid, where what is paramount is the care and respect for one’s neighbours (or for those who might one day become one’s neighbours). Gift‑giving is focused on greatest need, and over time the accumulating networks of storied obligations fulfil an emergent function, gradually cultivating a discerning, generous, and fiercely cohesive community. Mutual aid has associations with anarchism – for instance, in Ursula Le Guin’s classic critical utopia The Dispossessed (1974) – but Saadia doesn’t go that far; the Federation does have laws and regulations!
11 Or to put it another way, drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s suggestive terminology, the Federation operates through the communicative rationality of a shared lifeworld, rather than formal systems of bureaucratic and market power. Just by itself, this claim doesn’t tell us much – there are so many different possible states for our shared lifeworld to be in!

A blog essay on the economics of the Star Trek universe which I am afraid did not interest me much, leaning on the work of authors who I have not read. You can read it here for free.

3) About Writing, by Gareth L. Powell. Second paragraph of third chapter:

The truth though, as you’ve probably already realised, is a lot more complicated.

This is a nicely done short account of the experience of being a writer, with recommendations to colleagues and aspiring writers. Quite a lot of it is self-care in one way or another, and that’s advice we all probably need, especially in these days when many of us are unexpectedly working on our own rather than in a communcal environment. It’s a good book, and in fact was the only thing I nominated that made it to the final ballot, but the other two (which I did not read until after the second round deadline had passed) are fundamental contributions to our understanding of the genre. You can get it here.

2) H.G. Wells: A Literary Life, by Adam Roberts. Second paragraph of third chapter:

The Time Machine is, of course, the more famous of Wells’s first two novels, and for good reason. It is, quite simply, a masterpiece. Henley paid £100 to serialise it [in] The New Review over Christmas and New Year 1894–95; and a strange sort of Christmas story it must have made. William Heinemann advanced Wells £50 for book publication rights, and Wells’s first book-length fiction emerged into the world in May 1895. Despite being only 152 pages long (some scenes from the serialised version were cut for the one-volume edition), Heinemann nonetheless had enough confidence in the book commit to an initial print-run of 10,000 and a 15% royalty—generous, given that Wells at this time was a relatively unknown writer. Just how unknown is reinforced by the American first edition of The Time Machine, which was published by Holt & Co in New York as by ‘H.S. Wells’.

This seems to be a synthesis and revision of the blog posts by Roberts which were collectively nominated in this category two years ago. It is a straightforward sequencing of Wells’ novels, looked at through the lens of what was going on in his life at the time. Wells wrote a lot of novels and lived a long life, so it’s quite a long book, though for the sf fan the interest goes off the boil after the first few chapters. I definitely felt I learned more from this than from David Lodge’s A Man of Parts. One technical point – rather more proof-reading errors than I would have expected from a professional publisher – note eg missing preposition in the third sentence of my extract above. You can get it here.

1) The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, by Farah Mendlesohn. Second paragraph of third chapter:

The sections of this chapter and the next do not represent an even or ordered mapping. Heinlein’s work followed a spiral path, and elements that I wish to identify turn up, are discarded, and then returned to again in later work. But there are three clear divisions in terms of the rhetorical techniques Heinlein uses: the cinematic, the didactic and the picaresque.

I was a huge fan of Heinlein's writing in my teenage years, but the last awful novels came out just around that time and somewhat tainted the memory of the pleasure I'd had a few years earlier. I have gone back to his work a couple of times in recent years, but bounced off it as often as not.

But here Farah Mendlesohn approaches Heinlein with a redemptive eye. It is an interesting comparison with Roberts' Wells book – it is shorter, because Heinlein didn't write as much despite living a bit longer; it is more consciously fannish; but it's a much deeper analysis of what Heinlein thought he was doing with his writing, grouped more thematically than by time line. Heinlein's politics, for good or ill, had much more influence on later science fiction than Wells'. Possibly Heinlein actually had more to say than Wells, even if Wells said more of it.

I learned a lot from this, including in particular what Heinlein thought he was doing with Farnham's Freehold and how it went so badly wrong. It gets my vote. You can get it here.

Best Short Fiction

6) "For Your Own Good" (Wourism and Other Stories), by Ian Whates. Second paragraph of third section:

To my left the land sloped abruptly downwards. I gazed at the waxy-leafed crowns of orange trees and, beyond them, the white walls of a villa. Without consciously deciding to leave the track, my feet carried me down between the trees, almost slipping on the dry loose surface, my fingers reaching out instinctively in passing to drag along the rough grey-brown bark, as they had so often during those long ago days of boyhood.

A story of man vs machine consciousness. Failed to grab me.

5) This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Other pilgrims wander here, in saffron robes or homespun brown. Sandals shuffle over rocks, and high winds whistle around cave corners. Ask the pilgrims how the labyrinth came to be, and they offer answers varied as their sins. Giants made it, this one claims, before the gods slew the giants, then abandoned Earth to its fate at mortal hands. (Yes, this is Earth—long before the ice age and the mammoth, long before academics many centuries downthread will think it possible for the planet to have spawned pilgrims, or labyrinths. Earth.) The first snake built the labyrinth, says another, screwing down through rock to hide from the judgment of the sun. Erosion made it, says a third, and the grand dumb motion of tectonic plates, forces too big for we cockroaches to conceive, too slow for mayfly us to observe.

Also failed to grab me, though everyone else seems to love it. A bit like Good Omens, the story of two adversaries who find that they have bonded. Obviously that theme appeals to a great many people; I'm just not one of them.

4) The Survival of Molly Southbourne, by Tade Thompson. Second paragraph of third chapter:

It has been quiet, the kind of quiet that makes you think the danger has passed, the kind that makes you go soft, less vigilant.

I very much enjoyed the first of this series, The Murders of Molly Southbourne, which was on the BSFA shortlist two years ago. The sequel felt a bit less surefooted to me, with the rules of the world not being as coherent and the means and motivation of the protagonist less clear. Still, I liked the crackling prose.

3) Ragged Alice, by Gareth Powell. Second paragraph of third chapter:

The headland to the north had a steep path leading up from the end of the concourse to a small chapel overlooking the town. Holly and Scott were met at the top of the path by a uniformed constable in his midthirties.

I liked this a lot – police procedural meets horror, as with a lot of popular UK-based writing at the moment, but this time in Wales rather than London (Cornell/Aaronovitch). Some bits didn't quite make sense, in terms of policce procedure – how come the protagonist gertscalled in so quickly? How come nobody in her chain of command spots the resonaces with her own personal history? – but it was a compelling if chilling read.

2) To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Looking in the mirror, I wasn’t sure I liked what that equated to. I was almost eleven years older than when I'd left Earth. That’s not so much time, but the changes of ageing had largely escaped my notice, distracted as I was by the more dramatic differences of somaforming. I didn’t mind the lines in my face, but I also didn’t remember their development. My hair hadn’t grown too much in the five years spent in torpor, but the frequent shaving meant I never saw it much longer than maybe a centimetre. Now, I saw frequent threads of wintry grey among the black tufts. My body was average, healthy, nothing out of the ordinary. That was the problem. Without the glitter, I felt dull; without the brawn, puny. To my eyes, I looked ill, and the sight made me sink.

What I love about Chambers is that she digs deep into good old sensawunda, and comes out with a new 21st century sensibility. Here a human crew adapts themselves to the environments they are exploring, far from a home planet that has gone awfully silent on them; and they have to move and grow in a newly strange universe. Somewhat downbeat ending which I see other reviewers compaining about, but it worked for me.

1) "Jolene", by Fiona Moore (Interzone #283). Second paragraph of third section:

I shook my head. “Sorry to disappoint you,” I said, “but she wouldn’t talk with me either.”

Somehow this just ticked my boxes – the shortest of the stories on the list, a noir tale involving a near-future London woman detective and a rogue intelligent car; it achieves just what it has to do in the space it has to do it in. Gets my vote.

There are six short pieces to choose from here, which is high but not unprecedented; there were seven in this category last year, and eight novels five years ago.

Best Novel

5) Atlas Alone, by Emma Newman. Second paragraph of third section:

It’s so broad a request I suspect this is actually just a test of my ability. I wouldn’t put it past her to seed some rogue data in there just to see how I respond to it. She says I can take a couple of days if I need to. I decide I’ll get it to her in half the time.

Rather failed to convince me, I'm afraid. The protagonist is at the centre of a vast multi-planet political conspiracy, and spends her time playing immersive computer games. The intelligent AI which turns out to be Behind It All is just powerful enough to keep the plot going and not powerful enough to resolve everything. Didn't work for me.

4) Fleet of Knives, by Gareth L Powell. Second paragraph of third section:

My crew.

I liked all the rest of the shortlisted novels. Fleet of Knives is the sequel to last year's winner, Embers of War, which I really enjoyed. There is a nice theme of the double identity of one of the protagonists, whose two roles are war criminal and dissident poet. In the end, though, MilSF isn't quite my thing and the book slipped down my ballot accordingly.

3) The Green Man’s Foe, by Juliet E McKenna. Second paragraph of third section:

Just after eleven, by the Land Rover’s dashboard clock, I saw a left-hand fork signposted to Bourton, Aylworth and Ashgrove. That last village was where Ben had told me Brightwell’s new owner, Edmund Franklin, lived. As I hit the indicator and followed the road down into the valley, I soon found Bourton under Ashes.

Now it gets very difficult to choose. I found The Green Man's Foe very helpful and hopeful comfort reading. It's the sequel to a book I haven't read, a contemporary fantasy about an English chap with magical relatives, dealing with dark forces and teenagers going off the rails. I am marking it down a bit because the villain was pretty one-dimensional, or at least the protagonist's perception was, which weakend the investment I was ready to make in the characters.

2) Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Second paragraph of third section:

He had downplayed the possible biochemistry aspect in his reports to Baltiel, while simultaneously knowing that the man would not be fooled. It created a convenient fiction between them that they could show to later auditors. Baltiel was sharper than Senkovi had initially thought. After his big presentation about 834g, Senkovi had asked the man, ‘How did you get through all that fast enough to make the decision?’ and Baltiel had just said, ‘I’ve seen your appraisals and tolerances. You wouldn’t stake your career on a bad bet. All I needed to see was that you were staying the hell off my planet.’ And he had smiled blandly, and Senkovi had learned a lot about his boss from that expression. An inclination to play God was part and parcel of wanting to go out and terraform other worlds, but good practice was to at least play nicely with the rest of the pantheon. Senkovi had met Avrana Kern once – it had been hard to avoid her – and there was a woman who was her own Zeus, Odin and Yahweh all in one. Baltiel’s role had only ever been intended as a subordinate Vulcan, but now he had found a new lease of divinity, a project Kern could not reach across the abyss to dictate.

I hugely enjoyed Children of Time when I finally got around to reading it recently, and this was a really good sequel, with some very vivid non-human aliens and great action between planets. I think this one wins the sensawunda contest among the novels.

1) The Rosewater Insurrection, by Tade Thompson. Second paragraph of third section:

He looks up, and sees the filtering of sunlight through the dome. The light has a blue tinge today. In his mind he queries the xenoforms for conditions outside the dome, in Rosewater and beyond. Nothing unusual. The humans are walking and driving back and forth. Buying food, selling food, fighting, fucking, living, dying. No military build-up, no imminent attack. The religious factions seem calm. The weather is stable, no elevated seismic activity.

Also a sequel to one of last year's finalists, Rosewater, which I ranked top last year and I am ranking this one top again this year. Near-future Nigeria (like other parts of the world) has been subject to an alien intrusion; this plays out on the ground in micropolitics, including sexual politics, for an interesting and intelligent exploration of what it actually means to be human in an unforgiving and rapidly changing world. I think of all the books it's the one that speaks to today's situation most clearly, and it gets my vote.

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  • Mon, 21:23: RT @sturdyAlex: Today is exactly 14 days since Greece went into a lockdown much stricter than UK. Many rebuked it as premature, illiberal,…
  • Mon, 21:27: RT @jburnmurdoch: NEW: Mon 6 April update of coronavirus trajectories Daily new deaths: • US has averaged 1,000 deaths per day over the la…
  • Mon, 22:32: RT @RozKaveney: The thing about social media is…you don’t actually have to press the button. You can type the thing, look at it for a bi…
  • Tue, 10:45: Best Practices for Filming with a Mobile Device https://t.co/xGPF2mIIk1 Obvious, but worth repeating, from @APCOWorldwide colleagues.
  • Tue, 11:40: RT @neilhimself: I am so proud of @CoNZealand. Making a WorldCon happen is hard enough. Making a WorldCon happen that you are then going t…

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Twenty days of lockdown

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Ten days since my previous update, a briefer set of notes on what has been happening.

First off, I had a bad bug last week – I had actually had an upset stomach a few days previously, and thought I had recovered, but then started a course of antibiotics on Monday evening and perhaps that over-triggered the body defences; at any rate, I slept very badly on Tuesday night and woke on Wednesday knowing I was not getting out of bed that day. On Thursday I felt even worse and of course worried that I was coming down with the Big Rona; but I called our GP who pointed out to me that I had no trouble breathing and no temperature, and more importantly neither Anne nor F was showing any symptoms at all, so it was just one of those things. I stayed in bed on Friday as well and was better at the weekend. Read quite a lot on Wednesday and Friday, didn't have the energy for it on Thursday but watched a classic film in bed, in stages. Back at work today with a mountain of backlog, of course.

More positively, we've been able to Skype with little U every couple of days, and she now understands what is going on – at first she obviously thought that she was seeing a passive video, but she eventually realised that it was "real". (We get regular updates on B, who is fine, but there is no point in tryingto Skype with her.) When we talk to U, it's with my iPad held at arm's length, so it can get a bit crowded at our end of the call. You will see that we have been joined by Upsy Daisy and Igglepiggle.

I am glad to say that the Big Rona has yet to hit my own immediate circle. The former prime minister of Somalia, who I met a few years ago, sadly succumbed to it; we have also lost the great Mhamed Khadad, but as far as I know it wasn't Coronavirus that got him. I have been fortunate; I know from Facebook and Twitter that a number of my friends have had sadder experiences. I have had no update on ex-president Ahtisaari, but another friend in his 70s who had been hospitalised in Sweden has been released and is still recovering at home.

Belgium appears to be at or even slightly past the peak, at least of this round. Today the number of COVID-19 patients in intensive care decreased for the first time since the crisis started, and the expectation is that the death rate (which sadly reached another maximum today) should start to fall in a week. Whether this means we can start going back to business on 19 April is another matter. I think it's more likely that we will be asked to tough it out until 3 May, or perhaps have a partial relaxation in the last ten days of this month.

The situation in the USA continues to horrify me. I know, I know, states' rights and all that; it simply means that there are 50+ different outbreaks which are simply not being co-ordinated, with no national leadership and the highest daily death rate of anywhere as of current writing. But the crazy thinig is that the objective evidence of Trump's failure to deal with the issue appears to have no effect on the internal narrative – in fact, his approval rating seems to be higher than at any time since January 2017. Cause for despair.

Meanwhile, when I have not been ill I have found it easy enough to disappear into the spare room to do Werk and then emerge at the end of the day. Next weekend will be a long one again – remember Easter? My plan to do more videos about the neighbourhood was hit by illness last week, but I hope to revive it. We are fortunate enough to live near the woods, and get out often enough.

Stay well, everyone!

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