- A year ago today I got some bits right and some bits wrong about impending lockdown.
- I thought I would enter a lean period of work – instead I have worked 226 days of the last year, virtually all on good, impactful (although v stressful) covid response services. Yay (argh) yay.
- Someone tried to rob J and I in the street. It was dark, but there were plenty of people around, so it was surprising. They failed, and we called the police, and we were fine. Not fine though, was a woman nearby who observed what happened and froze, too afraid to walk home, in case the perpetrator followed her next. We got talking to her while we waited, and in the end (when the police didn’t come) we asked permission and walked her home ourselves.
- I can’t stop thinking about it. Given everything this week, and my relative privilege, as a gay who only ever gets a fair bit of low-level abuse.
- I am grateful for my pink singers and a long, open and raw post-rehearsal zoom chat that really drove home the fact that well over half our population systematically fears the rest.
- Channelling that energy into working on a proper evidence-based, progressive equal opportunities policy and action plan for the group, working with a diverse cross-section of people from within it.
- Not surprisingly though, feeling quite flat and irritable.
- Near the beginning of the stay-at-home-ness I took out a contract with Three Broadband for their 5G at home offer. It was pretty great to start with, being a continuation of Relish’s service, and I got consistently 150Mb down and about 50Mb up. But then, Three took it over properly and (I believe) turned off the ability for the router to roam networks to get the best signal, and now the service is much less reliable. There is no prospect of fibre anytime soon because of complicated Reasons, and so I continue to be plagued by crap internet. I’m intrigued by Starlink insofar as it might give a commercial incentive to avoid the calamity of space junk, but that is all. I would rather not deal with Technoking.
- I have a chromecast plugged into our tele and my favourite thing about it was the way it could show a photo slideshow of better times sourced from Flickr albums. But Google took away that feature. But, they also do not support showing photos from my google account. So now I look at other people’s photos, which do not spark as much joy because they don’t include all the people I haven’t seen for a year. I want to find that product manager and give them a piece of my lockdown isolation pandemic mind.
- In better service news, I switched business bank account a couple of weeks ago to Starling and it was very uneventful which is what you want from a bank.
- I’m really, really enjoying Small Axe, which is educating me, nourishing me with musical discoveries, moving me with its cinematography and storytelling. Just great.
- I completed 365 consecutive days of Spanish duolingo which means I’m now a bit better at putting a limited number of Spanish words in roughly the right order. Bueno.
- Inspired by Chris I’ve downloaded the Koala app and I’m chasing Elvis around the house because I want to make a banging dance track made of growls. I’ve not been successful yet