This will probably be the second last of my ten-day bulletins on COVID. Today, almost all restrictions were lifted in Belgium. Masks are compulsory only on public transport and in hospitals. The passenger locator forms for entering the country and the COVID-Safe pass for entering restaurants have been scrapped. We’re in a very different world.

So, I am in the USA, for the first time since the pandemic started, having been to Gallifrey One last weekend and now staying in Seattle with one of my oldest friends after a couple of extra days in DTLA (downtown Los Angeles, as the locals abbreviate it).

Getting into the USA was surprisingly smooth. You need a vaccination certificate, of course, and unless you had a COVID diagnosis in the last 90 days, you need a negative test from the day before or day of travel. (Annoyingly, my COVID diagnosis in November was 91 days before I left, so I had to get the test.) You also have to print out and sign a seven page attestation, which immigration officials will briefly glance at and then discard. KLM allows you to upload your vaccine certificate and test result, but I carried paper copies anyway, and the vaccine cert has come in handy in restaurants or bars.

All that having been done in advance, I must say I thought the immigration process wss the smoothest I have had since 9/11. The queue at LAX seemed shorter than in 2013 or 2020, but maybe I was just in a better mood. The border officials have now been trained to ask questions to see if your story holds together, but it comes across as polite chit-chat even though we all knoww what it’s for.

For the subsequent domestic flight from LA to Seattle, there was no check of vaccination status at all, as far as I remember, though all passengers were required to wear masks.

However, that is not the whole story. Originally I had planned to land in Seattle on Wednesday, rent a car and drive up to Vancouver for 24 hours, to see various old friends and long-lost relatives. As I started making the final preparations at the weekend, I got very strong feedback from my Canadian friends that it was simply not worth the risk.

Canadian entry requirements include the provision that you may get pulled aside for random testing, and then required to isolate until the result comes through, which apparently can take up to 24 hours. I can’t really blame them – if most of my country’s international visitors came from the USA, I think I would want to be very cautious and distrustful of travellers from the south of the border in pandemic times.

I was also a little worried about the truckers’ protests, though they were mainly much further east and anyway that seems to be over now. I was not worried by any increased chance of infection – I am triple-jabbed and have also had the damn bug, so I hope I am unlikely to catch it again. But the thought of my planned 24 hours in Vancouver turning into a bored wait in a border motel was pretty discouraging, so, with considerable disappointment, I cancelled everything except the rental car and had an extra day here in Washington State.

I haven’t done the massive picspam posts from Gallifrey One that I did on the two previous occasions I was there because with people wearing masks, the photos are just not quite as good. It’s a price we have to pay, of course. There was a very strong rule that attendees must wear masks unless eating or drinking or doing convention panels or photos, and I did not witness anyone breaking it. The ethos was very much one of shared responsibility.

At the closing ceremony of the convention, Shaun Lyon spoke emotionally about the torrent of abuse that he and the organisers had faced from COVID-sceptics and vaccine deniers every time they made any announcement about their COVID policies, and thanked attendees for the support we had collectively shown. It’s really awful that the trolls reacted in that way, but I guess it is not surprising. I doubt that any of the trolls ever seriously contemplated coming to the convention in the first place, and I am glad that the convention team stood their ground. I felt safe as a result, and I think most other people did too.

When I get back next week, it will be to a Belgium where the COVID numbers are all now dropping fast and teleworking remains recommended but is no longer required. My employer is allowing staff to choose how much they want to be in the office, and I plan to go as much as I can, so the WFH era is coming to an end. But I’ll do at least one more in this series of posts.

On a different topic entirely, I am watching the news from Ukraine with great anxiety. The unprovoked Russian attack, rooted in a belief that Ukraine should not exist as an independent country, does not seem to have been as successful as intended so far. But Russia has a massive advantage in terms of numbers, and the outlook is bleak.

The end may be in sight. Other countries have moved a bit quicker than Belgium; I don’t really begrudge the authorities here their caution, but I’m very glad that restrictions are going to be drastically reduced from Friday.

I won’t be here for it. I’m going to the USA on Thursday for a week and a half, first to Gallifrey One in Los Angeles, reprising my last big trip before everything went wrong in 2020; then I hope a day in Vancouver, and a weekend in Seattle with an old friend, before getting home on the 28th. So I’ve been rather frantically trying to close off various work files this week, not helped of course by major developments for two of our more sensitive clients over the weekend.

I’ve also been following the Ottawa protests, with mounting disbelief. Gareth Evans, my former boss, used to joke that Canada is such a polite country that people say “thank you” to the ATMs when getting their money from the bank. We haven’t seen as much of that in recent days, as an externally funded group of unrepresentative activists has disrupted the life of the capital city. Here’s Amal El-Mohtar, expressing herself eloquently (as usual):

I’m just going to reiterate what I’ve been saying in private to family abroad thinking they’re supporting “freedom”: Centretown is under aggressive, belligerent, illegal occupation by white supremacists, & if you support them you are hurting me personally & I am ashamed of you.

— Amal El-Mohtar is on Hiatus until Feb 15 (@tithenai) February 6, 2022

These “protesters” want to decide government health policy by mob intimidation and are calling for the overthrow of a democratically elected government. I think it says a lot for Canadian tolerance that they have been allowed to endure this long. But as with 6 January 2021 in Washington, it’s a direct challenge to the rule of law, and it’s not clear that the rule of law has won.

The other direct challenge to the rule of law of course is the continuing awfulness of Boris Johnson, unapologetic for his repeated breaches of his own rules, or for his appalling slur on the Leader of the Opposition and the subsequent inflamed mob. Part of me hopes that the Conservatives dump this charlatan quickly, for the sake of the UK as a whole. Part of me hopes that he is allowed to linger on for months, with steadily dwindling authority, and that his successor is unable to rally a damaged and divided Conservative party in time to prevent a Labour victory. Keir Starmer has disappointed me on occasion, but at least he is not an instinctive, habitual liar and cheat.

Health-wise, the last of my follow-ups from my hospital visit in November revealed the rather surprising news that I have a granuloma on my larynx. It’s one of those psychological things where I went into the consultation convinced that there was nothing at all wrong, and came out of it convinced that I could clearly feel a lump in my throat. Apparently it is probably caused by acid reflux, can be treated with drugs and should go away without surgery. (It also turns out that I have extra arteries feeding my kidneys, but apparently this is found in 25% to 40% of cases, so it’s not quite as unusual as the extra bronchus in my trachea.)

As regards other people’s health, I was very sorry to see the news about Paul Byrne, who was only 44. He was probably a teenager when I last saw him, when his sister and my brother were an item, so it’s very sad news. (Also sad but less of a shock: former Slovak foreign minister and MEP Eduard Kukan, aged 82.)

I love Belgium in general. But I have been very frustrated by the post-Brexit customs charges on imports from the UK. Last week I finally received a keyboard for my iPad which physically arrived in Belgium in September. It was a replacement for faulty goods, so should not have been subject to VAT or import costs. I made many phone calls and sent many emails over the months, asking what had happened to my purchase; what struck me was the complete refusal of anyone I contacted to take responsibility for the delivery of my goods. A couple of times I got the answer that the package had been handed over to the customs service for a technical check; my problem with this response is that it clearly wasn’t true the first few times it was given, and in any case the responsibility for timely delivery still rests with the post office even if a different government department is involved. To a certain extent, Belgium is a country created by bureaucrats for bureaucrats; one is not reminded of this too often, I suppose. There would of course have been no need for an import procedure without Brexit, but there was no need for the import procedure to take 21 weeks.

Here we still are, twenty-three months in. But I think (and I know I’ve said this before) the end is in sight. The peak for infections in Belgium seems to have been passed about the time of my last ten-day update; hopitalisations, ICU numbers and deaths are still rising, but I think the first two at least are likely to peak next week. Even the most Eeyore-ish of Belgian health experts thinkswe’ll be able to relax the restrictions soon.

Apparently our 80% teleworking mandate is stronger than anywhere else in Europe art the moment – no more than one day a week in the office, and the office should not have more than 20% of personnel present – and I must admit it’s really getting to me. There’s nothing to beat in-person contact with colleagues and friends; when you try and get someone’s attention on Zoom, you’ve already lost the spontaneity of popping down the corridor or spotting someone at the coffee machine. And in general I’ve been a passive supporter of lockdown measures, but I did wonder if the latest tranche has actually made much difference.

Myself, I noted in the last ten-day entry that I’d had a persistent sore throat; it lingered with me for more than a week, and I needed a full day and two afternoons in bed to really get rid of it. Woke yesterday feeling much more like myself, which is a relief. I do wonder if the “Long COVID” effects made it more difficult for me to shake the bug. I kept neurotically taking home COVID tests every couple of days, and they kept consistently coming up negative.

In other health news, I had a full specialist check-up of my heart on the Friday before last. When I went to hospital in November, the doctors thought they might have spotted something in the EKG, and given that my father and both my grandfathers died of sudden heart attacks in their sixties, and I turn 55 this year, my instinct is to be cautious. The final phase of this was to wear a heart monitor for 24 hours, hooked up to my torso by half a dozen taped-on sensors that made me feel like the Emperor Dalek.

That was jolly uncomfortable and I found it almost impossible to sleep with it on. When the moment came at 5pm on the Saturday that I could take it off, I was actually driving home from Antwerp with Anne, but I pulled over, stripped to the waist, pulled off all the sensors and had a damn good scratch, no doubt to the consternation of passers-by. Anyway the verdict is that apart from mild hypertension there’s nothing wrong with my heart, which is a relief, but I’ll get in the habit of annual check-ups given my family history.

I’m going to keep up these posts at least until we reach the end of restrictions in Belgium, which I suspect means I’ll do another three or four. See you next time.

A bit gloomier today than I had hoped to be. The numbers in Belgium continue to soar – more than 3% of the country’s population had a positive diagnosis last week – and there is no immediate prospect of further relaxations of the restrictions. I had been considering a work trip to the UK next week, but I’ve decided to postpone that for the time being. (Three weeks from tomorrow I’ll be heading off to the USA. I hope.)

I’ve also had a nagging sore throat since the weekend. Not bad enough to stop me working, but irritating all the same, and I worked from home today instead of from the office in Brussels as I had planned. My home COVID tests keep coming up negative, which is something at least.

And yesterday came the sad news that Erlend Watson had left us. Most people outside the Liberal Democrats will never have heard of him, but he was a well-known personality in the party, always proud of his Orkney origins and a bit larger than life. It’s years since we had met in person, but as with so many acquaintances of times past, we had re-engaged more recently on Facebook. He did not recover properly from a double lung transplant last year, and announced on December 26 that he probably had between three and six months left; in fact he did not even get a full month. We will remember him. This was his last tweet:

Is this the worst British government since Caligula? Difficult to go much further on record. The one who lost the Dogger Bank or the one during the Permian extinction? @mrjamesob

— Erlend Watson ️ (@erlendwatson) December 21, 2021

And speaking of lungs… After my visit to hospital when I had COVID in November, the Belgian medical system stored all of the tests and reports for me to look at when I felt like it. It took a while for me to feel like it, but I did have a look last week, and was a bit puzzled by a reference to “pig bronchus”, which I had never heard of. It turns out that I have not one but two connections from my windpipe to my right lung, the extra one being an offshoot from the windpipe a couple of cm above the point where it divides between left and right. This is a mutation found in, as sources rather imprecisely put it, between 0.1% and 5% of people. It’s not in any way dangerous; I got through 54 years of life without it being an issue, and most people would never know if they have it. I would post the actual scan of my torso here, but the extra bronchus is only barely visible on it, even if you know what you are looking for.

Tomorrow it will be 20,000 days since I was born. No party planned, but if I make it to six weeks past my 82nd birthday, you’re all welcome on 14 June 2049 to celebrate 30,000 days of me.

So, as I expected, infection rates in Belgium have continued to soar, now almost 50% higher than the previous record; but the other numbers remain fairly stable, hospitalisations drifting slowly upwards at 10% ish a week, ICU numbers slowly decreasing, deaths likewise – the death rate reported for 14 January was the lowest since 30 October. And even the rise in infections seems to be decelerating. So I am fairly confident in expecting a significant relaxation of the restrictions in the next couple of weeks.

Myself, I was not feeling well for most of last week, which I put down to a slow reaction to the booster shot; I had to retreat to bed on Tuesday afternoon and again for most of the day on Friday. Fortunately it was a slower week than expected at work – one particular client crisis, something we had been anxiously anticipating for months, turned out to be a damp squib on Thursday, much to everyone’s relief. I have been feeling better this weekend, and got out yesterday to an exhibition at the M Museum in Leuven on therelationship between humanity and the universe, featuring a couple of really interesting loaned exhibits.

These are the Hamangian thinkers. They were made about 5000 BC, so they are 7000 years old. They were found in a grave in Dobruja, Romania, in 1956, and are normally in Bucharest at the National Museum of History. Most prehistoric art relates to fertility or hunting. These two are just a man and a woman, sitting there and thinking. They have had a lot to think about in seven millennia.

The other thing occupying my time has been preparing the vote for this year’s Hugo award nominations, which went live a few minutes ago. Apart from the usual hassle of adapting existing templates to 2022’s needs, we had to integrate a couple of late rule changes (DisCon III, last year’s Worldcon, was only a month ago). This is now my fifth time on this particular gig, and while we now have established software solutions (the front end designed for CoNZealand in 2020, the back end designed for Worldcon 75 in Helsinki in 2017) there’s always something new to implement. Not being a programmer, my role is partly shouting encouragement from the sidelines but more importantly making sure that the software delivers what we need.

Speaking of time, back in September 1994 in Belfast we had a party to mark my being 10,000 days old. (27 years and 4 ½ months.) I’ve worked out that I will hit the 20,000 day mark on the 27th of this month. (54 ¾ years.) It’s bad timing for holding a celebration – Anne and F both have exams, and Wednesdays rather than Thursdays are my current days in Brussels. Still I’ll mark the date, and maybe hope for a more party-friendly situation when my actual birthday comes round in April.

No ill effects yet, though I am braced for an uncomfortable night and morning.

The omicron variant is zooming here, as elsewhere, with a massive 82% increase in infections reported today; I would not be surprised if we burst through the delta variant peak in the next few days. (Today: 11778. Record, reported 2 December: 17917.)

But hospital numbers have not been rising as rapidly as in previous waves. Yes, they are up a bit but really not a lot, all things considered. And ICU numbers are actually sill decreasing. We’ll need another couple of days o be sure, but I think the theoty that omicron may be more infectious but less serious is looking fairly credible.

With all of that, the government solemnly met today and decided not to change anything. There were rumours that they had been advised to shift back to 100% teleworking, but in the end they decided to wait and see. So for now I’ll be going into the office on Wednesdays. (If anyone in Brussels wants to meet for lunch, or a pint after work, on a Wednesday, do give me a shout.)

I’m going to divert a bit and talk about career development in pandemic times. I had lunch yesterday with a friend a couple of years older than me who was recently let go from the non-profit job he had had for two decades. Under Belgian law, he still gets paid a month for every year he worked there, so he’s not under economic pressure until late 2023, but of course he is looking around. I mentioned a few possibilities that seemed obvious to me from his CV, and then at the end of the conversation he started talking about one of his hobbies; and his eyes lit up with an enthusiasm that had been absent when we were talking about political work. For heaven’s sake, I said, build yourself a small business working in that hobby (a niche area with lots of fans and certain high-value items and consequently immense transaction fees). I hope he does that. The current situation makes us all more reliant on existing channels of communication, and deters people (well, deters me at least) from setting up new links in the casual way that was possible in the olden times.

This morning I had two separate conversations with two different 21-year-old women who both graduated with their first degrees last summer, one from Northern Ireland, one from Luxembourg (both daughters of old friends). They have had very different university experiences from anyone older than them. Both were really clear about the policy areas that they were really interested in, which of course is really helpful in terms of thinking about where they could look for future employment, so I think I was able to make some concrete suggestions in both cases. But I thought afterwards, in olden times, I could have recommended conferences for them to attend and meet other people with their specific interests, and so that they could make a good impression as potential future hires. It’s much more difficult now, and it’s going to stay difficult for a while.

Stay well, everyone, and get boosted as soon as you can.

So. Enjoying a much quieter Christmas than usual; though still a bit more convivial than last year; for Christmas dinner, we invited our old Cambridge friend P, who normally goes to his family in England but couldn’t this year. I’m happily blogging away (most of my book blog posts are written at least a week in advance). We took B out for a walk today despite the rain (which she doesn’t mind) and did not quite succeed in getting everyone to look at the camera at the same time.

The girls have now had their booster shots, Anne and I have appointments for next week and F has his for later in January. Anecdotally, my sense is that a lot more people are feeling knocked out by the booster than by the first jabs, but it’s still better than the alternative. Next time I write one of these posts, I’ll have had mine.

Despite the rise in Omicron cases, the Belgian numbers in general were improving rapidly before the holiday weekend, with infections falling by 36% weekly. We’ll see what happen tomorrow when (presumably) we’ll get new numbers. One thing that already strike me is that in the current peak ICU cases, rather than deaths, are now the lagging indicator, peaking last and falling more slowly; which possibly points to cases being in general less severe now than in previous waves. (Of course maybe most of the really vulnerable are already dead…

One consequence of the tangibly less severe situation is that in Belgium at least, the social contract of respecting decrees on social distancing is starting to break down; today’s front page headline in De Standaard is that theatres and cinemas are refusing to close as ordered. Being De Standaard, it also says that this is more of a Francophone probem. For now.) We’ll see how that develops.

Otherwise I am reasonably hopeful of getting back to the office more than one day a week some time in January. Stay well, everyone!

I’ve continued to feel more and more like my normal self. My blood oxidation is back up to a healthy 97%-98%, and I also seem to have lost a couple of kilos (down to 78 from 80, from 176 pounds/12 stone 8, to 172 pounds/12 stone 4). Most excitingly, the booster jabs are being rolled out in our area earlier next year and I immediately signed up for 6 January (which is 20 days from now, so will be in the next-but-one COVID update).

I went into the office both yesterday and a week ago. Last week I was still too tired to stay at the office Christmas dinner to the very end, but yesterday was fine (apart from very heavy traffic caused by the EU summit). I also went in on Wednesday this week, not to the office but to a couple of external meetings, one of them a guided tour of this exhibition, which I recommend.

I am glad to say that the Belgian numbers are all now moving in the right direction. Yesterday was the first day since June that all four metrics that I follow – new cases, hospital occupancy, ICU occupancy and deaths – had posted both day-on-day and week-on-week decreases. (Seven out of eight down today; deaths, which are generally a trailing indicator, blipped slightly upwards from yesterday’s number.)

However disruption still continues. Anne’s parents had planned to visit us in the week after Christmas, but their Eurostar has been cancelled so they will now come later in January. More worryingly, the omicron variant has not yet hit Belgium very hard, and that will probably push the numbers back up again in the next few weeks.

I sometimes use these posts to comment on British politics, and I can’t ignore last night’s spectacular by-election result in North Shropshire; the shape of things to come, hopefully. The only bigger swing from Conservatives to Liberal Democrats in history was the Christchurch by-election of 1993, which is also the only parliamentary election in Great Britain that I’ve ever campaigned in, putting in two days and a night for the Lib Dems. Ironically, in recent years I have become very friendly with the Conservative candidate who lost Christchurch in 1993, bonding over a shared interest in psephology.

Anyway, I’m still working next week until Thursday, and I’ll go straight back in January; plenty to do, and all great fun too.

As previously noted, I had hoped to be able to stop this series of posts if there was no big surge in COVID numbers, and declare the pandemic over as a constant concern. But that’s not where we are. The government have just annouced that we’re going back to mandatory teleworking four days a week in Belgium. I am in a special situation where I am arguably working for two different employers, so I’ll see if I can get away with two days a week in Brussels, but I am not very hopeful.

I’m just back from five days in England, where for once I managed to do the Day 2 test (the last couple of times that I went to London, I left so early on Day 2 that the test arrived after my departure). It was gloriously negative.

Still waiting very anxiously as of this writing for the results of my return-to-Belgium test taken this morning. I feel about as grotty as I usually do after a series of late nights with friends, capped by Eurostar yesterday evening.

Belgian cases, hospitalisations and ICU beds are all showing a steady increase of around 27% at the moment; two more weeks of that and the caseload will exceed the record of November last year, so I can see why the government felt that something had to be done. Today’s numbers are:

10283 cases (weekly average from 3-9 days ago), comparable with 8 Nov and 23 Oct last year, when hospital numbers were 6893 and 3649, ICU numbers 1464 and 573, and deaths 173 (!) and 35. Likely to pass November 2020 peak of 15967. (Spring 2020 figures are unreliable.)

2693 in hospital, not yet above the April peak of 3215 but likely to surpass it in the next few days. Nowhere near November 2020 peak of 7461. (April 2020 peak was 5759.)

557 in ICU, way below the April peak of 947, never mind the November 2020 peak of 1470. (Which was higher than the April 2020 peak of 1286.)

25.6 fatalities (weekly average from 3-9 days ago), some way below April peak (42) let alone November 2020 (202) or April 2020 (282).

So, you know, it’s not as bad as a year ago, let along in Spring 2020, but it’s still bad.

And everyone needs to get vaccinated and continue being careful.

Well, I had said that I thought I might stop this series of ten-day updates once we hit the 600-day mark (counting from the first day of full lockdown last year). But we are really not out of the woods yet, so I think I’ll continue for a bit longer.

The worrying increase in the COVID numbers in Belgium has slowed, but not stopped. (There was a welcome day-on-day decline in the reported weekly average number of new infections between Thursday and Friday last week, but I tend to feel that was because of disruptions to the reporting cycle caused by the 1 November public holiday, as it was back up again on Saturday. Next Thursday, 11 November, is another public holiday, and a lot of people (including me) are taking the Friday off as well, so it may be a couple of weeks before the Sciensano updates get back in sync.

It’s not great. The weekly infections rate for 25-31 October was 7758, which means 54,306 in total, which is about 0.5% of all Belgians. The peak last year was 15967, just over twice as high; at that point hospitalisations were 3.3 times higher than now, ICU occupancy 3x higher and deaths 5x higher. So the vaccinations have made a difference. I expect that the current wave’s peak will not reach 10,000.

Meanwhile I wonder if targeted advertising has medical news for me that I did not expect.

In case you missed it, here’s my post about the amazing stucco ceilings of Jean-Christian Hansch at the Château de Modave, way off the other side of Huy, which we visited on the Toussaint/Allerheiligen holiday on Monday:

Planning another visit to the UK at the end of next week; so the next update in this sequence should be after I get back.

Holding.

Edited to add: Well, that’s embarrassing. I had carefully planned out my day so that I would do an astute update here to go live later in the evening, but in fact my “holding” entry went live when I was still in the office.

It was a very annoying day, coming at the end of a lovely visit from my sister C and her daughter S. We totally failed to take any pictures with C in them, which is a shame as it was her birthday on Monday and we went out for dinner on Sunday.

Further edit: F did get a picture of the birthday girl.

We also went to visit B.

And took U for a walk in the woods.

This morning I had decided to work from home as C was leaving for the Glasgow climate conference and Anne was also heading off to England for two nights for a funeral; but at 9.30, in the middle of a vital call with a colleague, the internet disappeared from our house and refused to come back. So I went into the office mid-morning, having basically lost two hours of the working day which I am still striving to make up this evening.

(On top of that, someone decided to pick a fight with me on Facebook about Handel’s Naturalisation Act of 1727. We live in a strange world.)

Anyway. The surge in the Belgian COVID numbers that I noted last time has broken out into a full-blown fourth wave of COVID infections. But in Belgium at least, more than half of the new cases are among school-age children who have not been vaccinated, so the impact on those of us whose work does not involve school-age children has been much lower. For comparison:

Today’s reported daily average infection rate is 5691, 75% up from a week ago. This is higher than the third wave (April 2021) peak of 4827. In November 2020 I missed the numbers on the 15th, but the reported weekly infection rate on 14 November was 6213 and on 16 November 5246, so 15 November must have been about equivalent to today.

On 16 November the numbers in hospital were 6504. Now it’s 1379.
Also on 16 November the ICU occupancy was 1423. Now it’s 255.
Also on 16 November the weekly reported death rate was 202, the peak of the second wave. Now it’s 15.

Yes, you may say, but that’s while the second wave peak was declining. What about on the way up?

Well, I have those numbers too, from a year and twelve days ago.

On 16 October 2020, the reported daily average infection rate was 5976, a new record and 96% up on the previous week.
The hospital numbers then were 1949, 41% more than now.
The ICU numbers were 327, 28% more than now.
The death rate was 23, 50% more than now.

There was still some time to go before the second wave peaked – 15967 daily infections, reported 1 November (so more than 1% of Belgium’s population had tested positive for COVID in that reporting period); 7485 in hospital, reported 4 November; 1474 in ICU’s, reported 10 November; and 202 fatalities, reported 16 November as noted above. For what it’s worth, I think the fourth wave will peak way below the second, though it has already beaten the first and third, and that the hospitalisation, ICU and fatality numbers will be correspondingly lower.

It’s still not good, but we seem to be adapting to a new normal.

Talk to you again soon.

I have been wondering how much longer I would keep doing these ten-day updates. I had hoped to round them off with the abolition of all restrictions a la Denmark and Sweden, but the Belgian numbers are surging a bit at the moment so it seems unlikely. (And we have lost Colin Powell to COVID now.)

But we’re a lot closer to normal than before. Masks in some circumstances, but shops and bars are all open again, and we have bought a new sofa; I had work lunches every day last week and today (though nothing in the calendar for tomorrow or Wednesday); and the USA is finally opening up to Europeans, so I should be OK for Gallifrey One in February.

Brexit has continued to be a complete shitshow. I did not mention it in my last post, but I was invited earlier that day to a briefing by British officials on the next steps to be taken, in effect soft-sounding me and some more important people from the Brussels bubble four days in advance of Lord Frost’s speech last Tuesday to see how we would react to the likely lines he would take. It’s safe to say that we were none of us convinced by the diplomats’ line that the UK was trying really hard to reach a deal but was being blocked by the pesky Europeans. In the event, the speech was even worse than I had anticipated from the briefings, and I amplified my statements in an interview with Al-Jazeera on Wednesday:

On a more positive note, here in Dutch is a presentation of the place where our daughters live – in fact featuring both of their living units, though neither seems to have been caught by the camera (they can move fast when they want to). It’s actually a recruitment video – I hope it works.

In science fiction news, the faltering bid to host the 2023 Worldcon in Memphis officially folded this morning. This means that it will be either in Canada (Winnipeg) or China (Chengdu). My money is on Winnipeg; I don’t think this is China’s year.

That’s it for now. I think I’ll do two more of these, taking me up to 600 days (though there was a big gap last year), and then call it a day, unless things get bad again.

So, young F has endured ten days in quarantine since I last wrote, and has displayed no symptoms of COVID whatsoever. So we have had a lucky escape. He is free as of tomorrow and I also get a test tomorrow morning (actually my 7-day test from his positive notification, but three days late because I have been travelling and recovering from travelling), and hopefully that will be the end of the story.

In fact I got pinged as having been close to some confirmed cases of COVID at the weekend, while in The Hague, presumably from others in the testing queue on Tuesday last week, but I’d meanwhile had another test on Friday so I was cleared.

I’d had the Friday test for my trip to the U.K. from Monday to Wednesday, only to discover on Monday morning that the British requirement for a recent negative test has been dropped if you are double-vaxxed (as I have been since June). So there you go.

Meanwhile I had a pleasant time in London, with a couple of days of work and also an afternoon visiting C in Eltham, including the medieval palace hall where Henry VIII was brought up.

Eltham Palace is quite extraordinary – reconstructed as an Art Deco home in the 1930s by Sir Stephen and Lady Virginia Courtauld, who only actually lived there for eight years. It has been well restored.

It’s also close to an anonymously crucial spot in Irish history.

Anyway, back to the usual routine. Belgium’s current rate of positive cases is the lowest in Western Europe, and the U.K.’s is the highest (not counting the Isle of Man or Channel Islands); and our death rate is about half the U.K.’s. So I hope I have not brought any nasty souvenirs back with me, but tomorrow’s test will make that clear.

Edited the following day: As I hoped and expected, my test on Saturday morning was negative.

Well, major drama today. F got pinged yesterday as having had a high risk contact last week, went for a test and was told today that he had tested positive for COVID. So I immediately went and got myself tested at the hospital in Ixelles, finished off the undelegatable stuff at work and came home. He has no symptoms, Anne and I have no symptoms, but you have to do what the rules say.

What exactly the rules say is not completely clear – the chap who I spoke to on the national tracing line said that since I am double-Pfizered, I could leave quarantine if I get a negative test result; Anne didn’t get the same information, but did not ask the same question. But what is clear is that we have to maintain household quarantine for the time being.

It’s actually a little surprising that it has taken this long to strike so close to home. Also a bit surprising that it was F rather than me that provided the first positive test in the household, given that I see such a wide variety of people (but maybe students are not as careful as my professional contacts).

Anyway, it is what it is. Even being asymptomatically COVID-positive would be a real pain in the neck; we had a fun-packed wedding anniversary trip planned for the weekend, and then I have a planned work trip next week and a major work event on Thursday 7th. I would bet that the fact that we’re all double-vaxxed means that F is less infectious and we are less susceptible. But I’ll know for sure tomorrow. (Or sooner if I start to go down with the symptoms, but I think that would have happened by now.)

When I was planning this post this morning, I was intending to cheerily speculate that I’ll finish this series when all restrictions are lifted in Belgium, which should be some time in October from what I read in the papers. But today has reminded me that it may be a long time before all of this is over.

I’m friends-locking this for the moment, so if you happen to see it please don’t make public comment until I have made it public again. Thank you!

Edited to add: My negative test came through this evening. Whew!

So, the good news is that the Belgian numbers are pretty stable, with today showing hospitalisations, ICU cases and reported infections down since yesterday, and infections also down from last week. Of course, kids have gone back to school in the last few days, which will cause an uptick; but it feels like it’s all under control.

The Brussels rentrée is under way, with the Liberals hosting a reception a week ago at the Grand Central – you can see me talking to a Bulgarian MEP at a couple of points in this video.

And there’s another reception this evening, hosted by POLITICO; setting this entry to post just before I arrive at it.

Also very glad to say that last weekend our village held its annual zomerfeest, cancelled last year, but arranged at short notice last week. All the traditional elements were there, the nature walk on Saturday:

With some wildlife as well:

And on Sunday there was an exhibition of local artists, including in the church:

While in the beer garden behind the parochial hall, a trio sang Yves Montand’s La Bicyclette and other chansons:

We’re not back to normal yet, but the trajectory is clear, and the weekend celebrations of the turn of the seasons in our village helped to reinforce that feeling.

We made it back from Norn Iron OK on Sunday, flying home from Belfast via Amsterdam, which is the cheapest and quickest route these days. A good break.

I diligently went for my return-to-Belgium COVID test on Monday, and was offered three for the (already modest) price of one as they were doing tests for a new procedure. In for a cent, in for a euro, and they gave me €35 of shopping vouchers as a reward (which meant I almost came out ahead on the deal). I was actually a bit worried. I had had a very sore throat and a bit of a cough all weekend in Northern Ireland, and it was so bad on Sunday and Monday nights that I slept very poorly. However the test cleared me within five hours, so it was just a “normal” cold.

Also on Monday, work asked me to go to London again for a meeting on Thursday, so I booked the Wednesday afternoon and Friday morning Eurostars. It turned out that my Monday back-to-Belgium test was also valid for another entry to the UK, so it was even better value than I had realised. I still needed to pay for a Day 2 test in the UK which I was never going to use, as I left my hotel before the post arrived on Friday morning, but the rules only say you have to pay for a test before you arrive in the UK, they don’t say you have to actually take it. Returning to Belgium on Friday, I did not need to test again as I had been out of the country for less than 48 hours, and as we all know the virus waits until the 49th hour to strike, or at least that’s the approach the regulations seem to take.

I commented to a couple of people that actually in the olden days, international travel was much more hassle than it is now, with the need to get travellers’ cheques and printed tickets etc, and also passports even for internal European trips. One of the people I pointed this out to responded that none of those inconveniences required anything to be put up your nose, which I must admit is a fair point.

Checking in for the outward Eurostar on Wednesday, the UK border chap reminded me that I’ll need my passport to travel to the UK after 1 October; my ID card will no longer do. Global Britain, open for business, eh?

I worked from home on Monday, waiting for my test result, and again on Tuesday because I had slept badly and couldn’t face the train. But I went to the office Wednesday morning – still pretty empty – and again on Friday afternoon – even emptier. (And of course worked from the London office in Bloomsbury on Thursday, including the meeting I had come over for and numerous others.) Like most places, I suspect, the rule is that you wear a mask unless sitting at your desk, and that in an open-plan office nobody sits directly opposite anyone else. But restaurants and pubs are open again as usual; I had two fine dinners in London, one in a gentlemen’s club courtesy of a knight of the realm, the other with a cousin at the Elgin gastropub in Maida Vale.

One welcome sign of normality: the Thai food truck which used to appear regularly on Fridays in the Square de Meeûs, around the corner from the office, has returned, so I can feed my Pad Thai addiction.

There has been a bit of a rise in the COVID numbers in Belgium over the last few weeks, though signs are that it is now tailing off. Presumably it will get another boost again when schools restart next week. The number of people in hospital and in intensive care, while higher than in June, is still lower than at any time between then and last October. So basically the modest rise in the number of cases has been only weakly mirrored in terms of impact on the health system; the vaccination campaign has worked.

But I think I will keep up this series of posts for now. It is a good mental discipline, and we are still quite a long way from being back to normal.

So, here I am in Norn Iron, recovering from a weekend of family party. I must say that it has been amazing to be back. Normally we would spend three weeks here in the summer; obviously last year that did not happen at all, and this year Anne was here just for the weekend, F and myself staying an extra week. We wear masks in enclosed public spaces, of course, and everyone has a battle story to tell; and it’s not over yet. But to have a family reunion was fantastic.

My brother and sister and I clubbed together and got Eleanor Wheeler to create a semiotically charged bird bath as an 80th birthday present for our mother, here being ceremonially unveiled.

And inspected by three out of five grandchildren (our girls not being available).

Apart from being struck down by lactose intolerance, I have been making the most of being here and seeing a few more people, including my godson, his mother and grandmother.

F got to meet Bród, one of the most famous dogs in Ireland.

Not everything goes according to plan.

But basically very glad that travel is possible again, despite inconveniences; and of course as I said at the start, this whole thing is not over yet.

So. I have a work meeting in London on Thursday. This would have been not unusual before March 2020, but now it is a new step into the unknown. Booked on the only Eurostar of the day for Wednesday, will stay two nights and then off to family gathering in Northern Ireland.

Of course, despite my doubly vaccinated status, the British still require me to have a negative COVID test before I travel. So I hunted around last night, and I found a testing centre near the office, and booked in for 3pm today.

At about 4.30 this afternoon, I looked up from doing last week’s timesheets, and thought, wasn’t there something I was supposed to do after lunch?

OH SHIT

Frantic googling found that the testing centre near Bruxelles Midi / Brussel Zuid still had vacancies this evening. I booked for the 1745-1800 slot, sweated through my 17h Zoom call, and jumped in an Uber.

That last bit shows just how deranged I had become. Our office is a stone’s throw from the Trône / Troon metro station, from where it is a smooth ride to Midi / Zuid. It’s easy and reliable, and frankly I could have just as easily booked an 1800-1815 slot to give myself some extra leeway. Instead I sweated for what seemed like an hour (but in reality may have been four whole minutes) in the traffic jam on Place du Trône, until the driver was able to nip across the junction.

I was there by 1751, and tested and out by 1801. A colleague who got tested there at the same time of day a few weeks back tells me that he had his results by lunchtime the next day. As long as they come through by the time I reach St Pancras on Wednesday, I’ll be happy.

So how was your day???

Edited to add: my results came through at 8 the next morning, 14 hours after the test. I am clear of COVID.

So, back when I started these ten-day updates in March last year, I had no idea I’d still be at it half a thousand days later. (I did skip the updates between 100 and 220 days in; that was the lull of summer last year.) I will keep at it for now; we’re not exactly back to normal yet.

We’re a lot closer than we were. Today, for the first time in a month, the weekly average of new infections in BElgium was less than the previous reported day – and since that’s a seven-day average of the period from three to nine days ago, that means we are probably over the hump. The number of cases has risen a lot from its dip in June, but is still lower than at any time since mid-September 2020, more than nine months ago. And although hospitalisations and ICU occupancy have risen, they are many times less than the levels last time we had infection rates this high. There were six days in July when no COVID deaths at all were reported in Belgium, for the first time since 10 July last year.

So I’m on the optimistic side at the moment. I’ll be going back to work in the office five days a week, starting next Monday, 2 August. There are not a lot of people around during the holiday season – this week, I was in on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and I don’t think there were more than six others present on any of those days, in an office whose capacity is around 50. I have an actual physical meeting planned in London on 12 August, and I’ve also booked some time off to go to Ireland, now that that is possible again.

Apart from that, we celebrated F’s 22nd birthday with cake last Sunday.

And shopping in Leuven, I came across a band playing “Ciao Bella”, not sure exactly why.

Irish friends will have noted that the retired politician Desmond O’Malley died, aged 82. He famously challenged the church’s role in Irish politics in a speech during a parliamentary debate on legalising contraception in 1985, which ended with the famous phrase, “I stand by the Republic”:blockquote>The politics of this would be very easy. The politics would be, to be one of the lads, the safest way in Ireland. But I do not believe that the interests of this State, or our Constitution and of this Republic, would be served by putting politics before conscience in regard to this. There is a choice of a kind that can only be answered by saying that I stand by the Republic and accordingly I will not oppose this Bill. A friend pinged me to remind me (and I am not sure if I had ever realised it) that O’Malley had actually cited my father at some length earlier in the speech:

I took the opportunity over the last weekend to read some of the chapters in J. H. Whyte’s book on Church and State in Modern Ireland. To read, perhaps in full for the first time myself, the whole mother and child controversy of 1951, as it was called, is unbelievable. It is incredible that Members of this House and of the Government of the day could be as cravan and supine as they were, as we look back on them now. It shows how much the atmosphere has changed. Then one has to ask oneself “Has the atmosphere changed?”. Because when the chips are down is it going to be any different?

It was interesting to read the so-called mother and child scheme. There were ten provisions for women in it relating to ante-natal and post-natal care and care of the children when they were born. One of the provisions was for free dental treatment for pregnant women. The most tremendous objection was taken to that at that time. I recall only a couple of weeks ago, the Minister for Finance reading that out here in the budget speech and there was a howl of laughter all round the House. How could anyone seriously object to something like that? How could anyone seriously object to anything in it, as one looks back on it now? Look at the effect it has had on this island. We have to bear in mind that this is 1985, and whatever excuses one could make for people in 1951, those excuses are not valid today for us.

We are 36 years on from 1985, which was 34 years on from 1951, and Ireland has come a lot further in the last 36 years than in the previous 34.

My last update was a bit pessimistic, as COVID case numbers started to surge again in Belgium. But actually it now looks not too bad. Cases today are at 1330 (well, that’s the daily average for 10-16 July), compared to 697 ten days ago and 328 twenty days ago. But hospital numbers are only at 265, up a bit from 240 ten days ago and down rather more from 329 twenty days ago. So it looks rather like the extensive vaccination campaign (68% of the entire population has had one jab, 49% have had both) means that those who are getting the bug are not getting it as badly. It’s still far from over, of course, but this is the first time we’ve seen a surge in cases that wasn’t immediately followed by a surge in hospital numbers, ICU cases and ultimately deaths. We are in new territory. I see unconfirmed reports today that the UK is no longer screening arrivals from green or amber countries; I do hope that’s true and also that it’s sustainable.

A different disaster: on Thursday last week we were woken early in the morning by extraordinarily heavy rain. The flooding was very bad in parts of Belgium and worse in Germany, and a number of kind people contacted us to ask if we were OK. Fortunately we’re elevated well above the river basin. We had some roads closed, and some houses in the next village had to be evacuated and had their cellars flooded. Other places had it much worse. But the most dramatic thing in our locality was a confused beaver seen navigating a street which is normally not under water.

Also in more or less local news, this morning I went to Landen to attend a ceremonial visit by Patrick Butler, Lord Mayor of Limerick, to inspect the battlefield on which Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan, lost his life in 1693. The Mayor of Landen, Gino Debreux, presented him with a rare contemporary print of the battlefield.

We then went to the Chapel of the Holy Cross, which you may remember is a favourite place of mine anyway, where Wim explained the course of the battle to us.

The two mayors (both wearing sunglasses) inspected a contemporary 1693 rifle. (Later on the Mayor of Landen got a fantastic photo of the Mayor of Limerick firing a similar weapon, which I hope he will publish).

I’ve had a nice relaxed few days in Paris, which I’ll write up at the weekend, and tomorrow is a public holiday here. Back to work after that. But it’s been really good to have a five-day break, my first since the start of the year.

I’m a bit less cheerful today than I have been in some of my recent updates. Belgium managed briefly to qualify for the ECDC green zone last week, but infections have started to surge again in the last few days, today’s case rate being a massive 82% ahead of a week ago. Hospitalisations and deaths have not yet started to rise in sympathy, which either means that a lot of people who are getting diagnosed are not in fact all that ill, or that the other numbers are delayed. And it’s currently raining cats and dogs outside, on a Saturday when I have been grumpily stuck doing Day Job stuff since this morning. It’s been great to be back in the office three days a week, less great when it extends to the weekend. And the ongoing tedious wrangling over Brexit, with the UK pretending they did not know what they negotiated or signed last year.

I did manage one completely fascinating bit of cultural tourism, in our own neighbourhood: the amazing baroque stucco ceilings of Park Abbey.

I had one of those bizarre media appearances on Egyptian TV last weekend, with long pauses for simultaneous translation, on the future of NATO. It sounded to me like I made sense, but I have no idea what the translation said.

Also an Albanian TV interview which I did in June was actually broadcast at the start of the month, this time interviewed in English but dubbed into Albanian.

One welcome bit of nostalgia was a friend posting photographs from a couple of student parties in Cambridge days. I had bad luck with the reflection off my glasses in the first one, and am looking the wrong way in the second. Amused that in the second I happened to be sitting in front of my future wife, two years before we started dating. Weird also to think that young F is now older than either of his parents were in these pictures taken in 1988.

Not going to jinx it, but I’m planning to get away from Belgium for a couple of days next weekend. I’ll report on that after the fact.

But for now, I think I’m likely to be keeping up these ten-day updates for a while yet.

First and most crucially, I got my second vaccination last Friday, and am therefore clear to travel in the EU from Friday week.

Many people had warned me that the second Pfizer dose can really knock you out the second day after you have had it. I am glad to say that I did not notice anything. I had a big work task over the weekend and was able to complete it comfortably by Sunday afternoon.

I note that in my previous post in this series I referred to “Worldcon hassles”. As those who care about these things will already be aware, the entire 2021 Hugo Awards team, including me, resigned on Tuesday 22nd, rapidly followed by the resignation of the 2021 Worldcon Chair on Friday 25th. I’m not going to say much more about it here, except that I very much appreciated a message from one of the Vice-Presidents of BWAWA, the organisation that “owns” this year’s Worldcon, apologizing for the stress that we had experienced. That does make a difference.

But the big news is that the office is now open all week, and I will be in Brussels on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays for the time being. Two days ago was the first day of the new regime, and I bought a celebratory Vietnamese lunch for the half dozen colleagues who had showed up.

The Belgian numbers keep going in the right direction. I think that in the next week we will have a day with no recorded COVID deaths, for the first time since September. For other countries – notably the UK – it’s not quite as good, and for parts of the developing world it is disastrous. I’ll cling to what I have.

I am pondering how long I’ll keep up these posts. Last year my benchmark was that the numbers should be below those of 15 March 2020, when there were 266 COVID cases in hospital, of which 54 in intensive care, and 6 deaths. The fatality rate is comfortably below 6 per day at the moment, and the hospital numbers, currently 329, should be below 266 by this time next week. The number in ICU is comparatively much higher – 147 – but also falling rapidly. So I reckon I’ll be doing a 480 days of plague entry, but maybe not 490.

A gradual feeling of return to normality. The Belgian COVID numbers are really tumbling at the moment – ICU beds down 29% from a week ago, hospital beds 36%, deaths 37% and infections a whopping 45%. More than haf the population has been vaccinated with at least one dose, more than two thirds of those over 18. The government further reduced restrictions on Friday. We are heading towards the ECDC’s Green Zone – we won’t hit the criteria by next Tuesday, but I think it’s quite likely that we will by the Tuesday after.

On Thursday we had another work party, this time at Place Rouppe; when I arrived, Belgium were already 1-0 down to Denmark, but they managed to pull ahead by the end, no doubt due to the encouragement sent from afar by me and one of my other Belgian colleagues, who had come suitably equipped.

As well as a nice family outing to our local thousand-year-old churches last weekend, we celebrated B’s birthday yesterday. Last year it was the first time we had seen her since the first lockdown. This year she was in an odd mood – came happily for a drive in the car, got very upset when we brought her to what is usually a favourite place, the ruined Paterskerk in Tienen, but calmed down when we brought her back to her home and started feeding her strawberries. F managed to take one good picture of her sitting with me and Anne, which got a gratifying response on social media.

B’s birthday is not actually an easy day for us; it is another reminder of milestones not reached.

But the weather is good, and despite Worldcon hassles and Northern Ireland being in disarray, I bought bacon from the British shop on Friday and have been doing fried breakfasts this weekend. Very cheering.

A significant day today, as I returned to the office for the first time on a regular basis – I have already nipped in a few times this year, but I have now been allocated the Thursday shift and will be going in on that day until things loosen up again. I was the most senior person there today, and enjoyed the company of younger colleagues, one of whom had only started earlier this week, while another had not been to the office since March last year.

Gillian Tett, a contemporary of ours at Clare, wrote a piece a week ago (well, the Guardian published an excerpt from her new book) that really captures what we have lost in the last year of virtual interaction. Roll on normality. We went for a drink after work on Place de Londres (I refuse to go to Place Luxembourg on Thursdays) and it was really good to see people enjoying themselves on the terraces on a lovely sunny evening. There was a palpable feeling of decompression. We were a good multinational group – two Romanians, two Italians, a French/Croatian colleague and me, so seven nationalities between the six of us.

The Belgian numbers continue to go the right way. I had hoped in my last update that I might be able to say today that ICU numbers are at their lowest all year; not quite there, but we’ll hit that threshold in the next couple of days. More importantly, perhaps, vaccination rates are ramping up. Anne had her first dose yesterday, and I get my second tomorrow fortnight.

(A few weeks ago I met – in person – with officials from a Central Asian government. “We have all had Sputnik vaccine,” the leader of the delegation told me. “Now we can receive Russian television without antenna!”)

And in the office pool for the European Championships (as I still old-fashionedly call them) I drew Denmark. Which may not seem such good news, but (unlike some of my colleagues who had not been born then) I remember watching the 1992 final in a pub in Maynooth, when Denmark won despite not having actually qualified. I take it as a good omen.

See you soon.