Wednesday 6 May 2020

Trouble With Football Books


Heard Hancock yesterday say that the government wanted to get football back on the societal agenda ASAP as a morale booster. Surely a football match is a morale booster for only half the fans as, in the average match, one team has to lose the game, which isn't much of a morale booster for them or their fans. That aside, without precautions it's probably going to kick off another round of deaths, which isn't at all a morale booster.

All these people who are disobeying the lockdown and going to beaches and parks - do they realise how dangerous this is for them? They should at least go equipped with factor 30 sunscreen.

Hay saw these charts yesterday from Professor Neil Ferguson's analysis and forecasts of deaths in the 7 hardest hit regions in Italy if social mobility is increased as little as 20% of pre-lockdown mobility.


We have a long way to go yet and life is going to have to change dramatically. We probably won't get back to normality and will have to accept massive societal changes to enable us to cope with future pandemics, which modern travel methods ensure will happen again at some time. It's not a case of if, but when.

Hay and I were talking about John Wyndham books the other day in reference to her book club (more a wine club, if you ask me). One of the few Wyndham books I've never read is Trouble With Lichen, so I bought a 2nd hand copy on eBay.


Looking forward to a good read.

Still plodding through Wolf Hall - just over half way though. It's hard going. Hilary Mantel has a habit of not saying who is speaking, making it difficult to keep track of conversations. You start a paragraph thinking one person is speaking, only to realise at the end that it's someone completely different. If you don't know the history, it must be very confusing.

She also uses quote marks with the same cavalier approach to the rules of punctuation as Boris has toward truth. She will start someone talking within a set of quotation marks, but the response from the other party lacks any quotation marks whatsoever - you don't know whether they're talking or thinking or whether it's merely descriptive narrative. It seems I'm not the only one who thinks this and it's a common criticism of her style.


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