Jim Stewart's Blog

For the second day in a row the infection rates have dropped in Crosby – and that is before the Tier 3 restrictions come in to play.

In the area I live in the levels are much lower – we have around 4 new cases a day in the village. In the village in Spain where I have bought my house they are announcing about 1 new case a day. The villages are about the same size.

Labour have finally come out in favour of a circuit breaker. Interesting idea – but as far as I can tell this is only a pause, not a long term solution. Would people feel able to close down everything for three weeks and stay at home? Oddly enough I am seeing quite a pushback from the older age groups. I guess some have decided they don’t want to spend a significant part of their future life locked away in isolation.

This really is a tough balance. Talking to a friend they came up with a concept of “resetting the clock”. I think that is an interesting concept, and something that maybe we could pay more attention to. When we were in total lockdown I wondered if one of the things we should do is have a “shielders only” gathering at the end.

There are a lot of things we can do that are almost 100% safe. We have a concept of COVID Secure businesses. Maybe before we start locking things down further we should try to develop some ULTRA-SECURE events that would help people reset their clock.

What resets my clock – actually it is just the ability to get out for a walk with nobody around. Unfortunately there are so many more people getting out there these days – at least I have my midnight graveyard to wander around.

I live in a high risk area. So tonight I spent time reading the new restrictions. And the one take away for me is the Coronavirus and alcohol do not mix.

It is interesting how dependant society is on alcohol to enjoy life. You do get the idea that there is a real societal addiction to the stuff. And lets be honest – a lot of the people we see roughing it on the streets, a lot of the violence we see is linked to the stuff.

Is it time to “just say no”? I mean as a society, not as an individual. Should we be looking at how to develop entertainment that is alcohol free?

Let beer be for those who are perishing,
wine for those who are in anguish!
Let them drink and forget their poverty
and remember their misery no more.

Rumour is that the Liverpool area will be the only area to face level 3 lockdown. But the political leaders in the area are saying they have not agreed to that because the government is not offering enough cash.

But the rates are different in different areas. My local area is below 200. However the Waterloo area is around 1000 at the moment (that is about 2 months from herd immunity).

But this is a negotiation? What it says to me is that we are entering the restriction fatigue period. This is the time when people start to choose to take chances, to ignore the restrictions. It was always coming, it was predicted. This is the crucial period.

I remember my first work flight. Somehow I ended up with an ex-RAF person on one side and an ex-Navy person on the other side. Before we took off they had gone through about 6 air disasters they had personally been involved with. My knuckles were white. I have always been uneasy flying. I know the facts, I know the risk of getting killed is low. One of my jobs was reviewing all fatal air crashes in the world, looking at how hard they hit the ground and how many people died. I got to see the Lockerbie Pan Am 747 (they reconstructed it from the pieces). The fear of flying was way higher than the risk of flying demanded. Over time my fear level reduced – to the point that I am now normally asleep before the aircraft leaves the ground.

We know that we are really poor at judging probabilities – the national lottery shows us that, as do all the casinos and online gambling sites.

Even at the current levels if you enter a COVID secure venue for an hour it carried the same risk of death as driving for a year. The risk is low. To start with our fear level was high, but we are getting used to it. Our COVID knuckles are no longer white. We wonder why we are going through the pain of restrictions. We feel happy negotiating about restrictions and economic effects.

Fascinating negotiating idea – we will continue to let people die unless we get more money. The levels in the Liverpool area are averaging out at 600 cases per week per 100,000. The rise is progressing in a fairly consistent manner. At the current rate the Liverpool area will achieve herd immunity before Christmas.

It also means somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 deaths in the Liverpool area alone.

This is the problem with a pandemic – the risk we face from the virus in a month will be much higher than the risk we face today, but it depends on the actions we take today. And to add a complication – the risk we will face next year from societal damage also depends on our actions today.

The level of science behind the actions we need to take is enormous. Sadly there are so many people in the political world that seem to think they can gauge all this in their heads without the backup of 50 teams of experts.

I spotted that the film Star Trek was on TV tonight. Got me wondering about my copy of the Leonard Nimoy book “I am Spock”. I have a signed copy of the first edition. Looking online I see they are selling for upward of £40 depending on condition. Some are even selling for over £100. Strange how people put value on things. I remember he was a really pleasant guy.

I had ordered some face coverings from the USA a week ago. Today I got a card in the post. By ordering direct I need to pay duty on things coming in to the country. This can easily be 20% of the order value (or less depending on which of several thousand categories it belongs to). With a no-deal Brexit this will start to apply to anything delivered from Europe. A complication a lot of people don’t think about. And there are a lot more.

I see similar things with the independence campaigns for Scotland and Wales (not Ireland). Do people realise they will have to change their vehicle licence plates, their driving licence, their passport – and don’t get me started on the pensions issue.

There seems to be a tendency to reduce things to simple political yes/no choices for a lot of things, when the real world is a lot more complex.

Take for example the rule of 6. In Scotland they have added in the “two household” rule. So if you see six people meeting how do you know if they are from more than two households? Well, you would need to check the identity of everybody in any group of more than 2 people. And you could only hope to fine people if you could prove somebody knew there were more than two households meeting. The simple number 6 makes it easy for the police to enforce – the two households rule is virtually impossible to enforce. Sadly it shows a naivety in some of the rule making.

I was listening to music as I worked today and this song came on. There was so much of it that seemed relevant to today, but a couple of lines in particular that stood out to me.

This fear what we feed on is what´s keeping us apart

The song poses the idea that fear results in us being angry amongst other things. It got me thinking about all the anger we see, particularly in the USA. Could this be about fear, maybe. I certainly think there is a lot of fear going round. And the drip drip niggles of some politicians do little to reduce the level of fear – in fact they often make it worse.

There were other lines that spoke to me – about the vanity of looking for a sign and the loneliness caused by our love of stuff. But the effect of fear was the thing that jumped out.

Sometimes when we know we are about to crash and burn it can be important to build hope.

Did you know 9th October was International Beer and Pizza day – I celebrated by ordering a pizza (cheese free) from Papa John.

October 10th is World Porridge Day – so you know what to have for breakfast….

There was an article a few months ago about how terrible it was that we were giving state funds to compensate former slavers. There is a background piece here. It makes it clear that we should be ashamed of the fact that we paid off slave owners but never compensated slaves.

I see things a different way. The objective at the time was to free slaves. At the time there was not universal agreement that it had to take place. The government effectively bought support to do it (much the same as they did to establish the NHS).

According to the web site I just don’t understand slavery. But I believe that is because they are trying to impose our current values on decisions made in a totally different political climate. I believe it was the lesser of two evils. Just like the abolition of the slave trade could not include the freedom of slaves if it stood any chance of success (trading in slaves directly from Africa was made illegal long before the abolition of slavery).

There are often two ways to look at things. I saw a programme tonight about sandwiches which had an issue with carbon emissions for transport.

It struck me that there are two ways to deal with carbon emissions from transport. You can either demand a reduction in transport. Or you could demand that transport becomes less carbon producing. In the month when the first hydrogen powered train took to the rails in the UK I think the second route is looking easier to achieve than the first. Formula 1 have announced they will be using net zero carbon fuels within three years.

The one take away I have from this is the importance of keeping the focus on the goal, whether it is freedom of slaves or zero carbon rather than on the means to get there. Sometimes the road to the goal is not the one we feel fully comfortable with.

I’ve been trying to find a diet that controls my blood sugar. It can be hard, because you get these times when you really want that thing – you know – the thing you have that you shouldn’t eat. I find it hard to balance my carbs. If I reduce my carbs too much I end up snacking with worse carbs. I get this hunger for something.

I still have six of the eight bars of chocolate I brought back from Nicaragua. I can ration sweet stuff with no problem. My failing is with savoury stuff. Particularly hot food (I mean hot as in pepper).

Tonight we see pubs being closed in Scotland and more restrictions being put in place. People are finding it hard, they have been without entertainment and socialising for a long time and it is being pulled away from them.

I read this tonight

God—you’re my God! I can’t get enough of you! I’ve worked up such hunger and thirst for God, traveling across dry and weary deserts.

Got me thinking. What am I hungry for? There are a lot of things I have not had for the past several months – am I hungry for any of them?

If we can understand what hunger people have then we can better understand the deserts we need to avoid. I have said from the start that the old grey men have not paid enough attention to the young single people that want to find partners. Is it any wonder they have been bending the rules?

I doubt Nicola will miss going to the pub. I doubt Boris will miss going to the cinema. That isn’t to say their decisions on the restrictions are wrong. I just think that maybe there are groups of people that we have not thought about in terms of their hunger.

There have been numerous empires in the world, some bigger and longer lasting than others. The Roman Empire is one of the best known. Technically this does not include the Roman Republic, although I would personally ignore that technicality (the idea that a republic cannot be an empire is something I can’t subscribe to).

The biggest empire in history was the British Empire,. It is interesting to think about the commonwealth and whether that will be seen in the future as a continuation of empire.

What is empire? The best definition I have found is a group of countries ruled by another country. In business it simply means a grouping of companies under a single umbrella. I think applying the business definition to countries is quite informative.

I wonder if we are actually living in the Western empire, a sort of amalgam of the influence of a few countries with common beliefs, imposing them on a wide range of countries in the world.

What ends empires? Is it because they overstretch? I don’t think so. I remember being taught that the Roman Empire fell because it became decadent. Not sure I agree with that either. Decadence doesn’t have a direct effect. But what it does is introduce distraction, and I think that is one of the causes for the fall of empires.

No doubt another cause is the realisation of the ruled states that there is an unacceptable imbalance in the benefits.

So are we being distracted? And is there an unacceptable imbalance in benefits of our systems? The Trump influence is to say the systems are too equitable and he is slowly pushing toward a less balanced system in the world. So yes, I think we are priming the pump of the end of the Western Empire through increasing imbalance. But distraction?

I have started to wonder whether the fake news – the anti-science that is become so prevalent is our distraction.

And that has got me wondering what the end of empire would look like. I know a lot of people that thinks this capitalist system needs to be overthrown. But what would replace it? The end of empires tends to be discord.

I think the end of empire may be coming, but I am not sure we will enjoy the replacement.

I remember the Douglas Adams lines about the whale falling and splatting on the ground.

I was going through the TV guide today and I came across a murder film with a warning in the guide saying “contains scenes of whaling that some might find upsetting”. Hang on – this is a murder film. Never mind the whale killing, what about the person killing?

I remember on some of my early trips to the USA I would watch TV in the hotel room. There would be adverts with a string of tiny text at the bottom with a voiceover talking at supersonic speeds with warnings. So far we only have the small text on the screen bottom (often in low contrast which makes it hard to read).

But the TV guide is now filled with warnings, and some of them seem to be stretching things a bit. It seems we need to warn people just in case.

I remember having a session in my bank where a senior adviser tried to tell me I should take out a personal pension. He was training a junior colleague. I explained to him in not so kind terms that he was being less than honest with his advice. I hope the junior learned. Some years later anybody that said yes in this campaign got compensated for mis-selling.

Is this the right way to go? Or should we adopt more of a buyer beware approach?

We have already pulled Gone with the Wind. Will we get to the point of adding a warning to Moby Dick because of whale hunting? We certainly need a warning on the Bible.

I didn’t think the warnings on USA TV meant anything to the people the warnings were being given to – they were impossible to read and you could never take in the voiceover. The warnings were more about protecting companies than caring for the end users.

Okay, on the dinner table you have a gravy boat. So why do we talk about a gravy train. And what is a gravy plane?

We were talking today about the strange weather we have had this year. News reports have been talking about extreme weather in France and Italy.

It struck me that we have been talking about a “new normal” in relation to the pandemic. But actually there is the new climate normal that we have not quite got to terms with in this country. Even if we take drastic action these extreme weather events will be with us for the rest of our lives.

Countries like Nicaragua, where the climate changes have challenged the ability to farm, have started to out changes in place that are sustainable. But here we seem to be still at the sticking plaster stage.

Nothing we do will reverse the changes in our lifetime, so how should we be living differently, how should we be growing in a different way?