Moronic

 Moronic is an anagram of omicron.

You might have seen the video of people on the tube, singing, “Wearing a mask is like keeping a fart in your trousers.” It’s like a Stephen Sondheim tribute/Shaun of the Dead mash up.

Moronic variant

This kind of behaviour, however, isn’t a symptom of the Omicron variant, despite being moronic and pointless. However, expect to see more of it. When messages are mixed and confusing you can’t expect people not to be scared and angry. 

The good news is that this new variant only spreads in shops and in public transport and not at school nativity plays or KFCs. 

Seriously, though, the good news seems to be that symptoms of this new variant don’t include a cough or loss of smell and just seem to make people tired. 

The bad news is that we may have to suspend our moronic tendencies for a while until we find out if it gets round the vaccine and kills old people.

Names

 Apparently, names matter.  Boris Johnson is really called Alexander, which is far too serious a handle for the PM. Frances Ethel Gumm wasn’t allowed to sing Over the Rainbow until she changed her name. Amazon only got its name because Cadabara kept being changed on spellcheck to Cadaver. 

This is how we are suddenly at Coronavirus variant Omicron. 

Omicron sounds like an evil robot overlord sent to destroy the Earth. The very name strikes terror into the hearts and minds of anyone who has ever watched an episode of Dr Who.  

As we watched the News the Long Suffering Husband questioned the name.

“Omicron? What happened to all the others? We started with alpha, went to beta, gamma and delta but how can we suddenly be at omicron?”

I thought he had a point but was quick to explain that they have variants of interest (VOI) that they name and only tell us about the variants of concern (VOC), especially now that we are all ‘over it’. When they decided to stop giving us the number and went to the Greek alphabet it made sense. The numbers were confusing anyway. Alpha was B.1.1.7, Beta  B.1.351, Gamma P.1 and Delta B.1.617.2. And with that logic you can see why they chose a simplified classification system for the public, after a brief but disastrous flirtation with naming it after the country it was first discovered. Racism, jingoism and viruses are not a good mix.

As viruses mutate all the time there will be as many mutations as there are cases because every human body has an impact. Every body gives the virus a chance to grow and develop so that it can live in harmony with its hosts. It’s sole aim is to get to a stage where it can not kill or terrify too many. We have never been able to study this process in as much detail before. It’s a fascinating time for science but a confusing one for most people. 

This current VOC B.1.1.529 was first identified in South Africa and Botswana three days ago and has panicked the scientists. It is the fourth VOC and they think it could change the course of the infections as much as the Delta variant. They are also concerned because it is different enough to get around the vaccine. It hasn’t yet spread enough to be a sure fire problem but keeping it in one place will help to stop that happening. Luckily, some learning has taken place.

So, what happened to all the other letters of the Greek alphabet?

Epsilon - B.1.427 & B.1.429 discovered in USA - No longer detected

Zeta - P.2 discovered in Brazil - No longer detected

Eta - B.1.524 discovered in Nigeria - No longer detected

Theta - P.3 discovered in the Philippines - No longer detected

Iota - B.1.526 discovered in the USA - no longer detected

Kappa - B.1.617.1 discovered in India - no longer detected

Lambda - C.37 discovered in Peru - still a VOI but seemed to have a random and not easy pattern of spread

Mu -  B.1.621 - discovered in Columbia - still a VOI but seems to have a random and not easy pattern of spread.

Nu - B.1.1.529 discovered in South Africa.

Wait! Isn’t that the same number as omicron? Yes, of course it is. Names matter. 

You can imagine the conversations.

You can’t call it the Nu variant. That’s too confusing. 

Which new variant? 

The Nu variant. 

I know it’s the new variant but there’s been so many I want to know what it’s called.

 Nu. 

Oh for gods sake!

So, the scientists at WHO scratched their heads and discussed it.

We’ll have to skip the Nu variant as the new variant. 

What’s next?  

Xi! 

How do you say that? 

No one really knows. 

K-igh? 

Zgh-igh? 

Shy? Shee? 

Ghee? 

We can’t have that, it’s too confusing and it sounds too Chinese. 

We will be back to square one. 

What’s next? 

Omicron. 

Perfect. 

Sounds like a scary robot. 

Do you think it will make people wash their hands, wear a mask and restrict their travel? 

BBC headline- Killer Robots are closer than you think: How scared should you be?

Reindeer from the knitting nest

 A small creature appeared from the knitting nest. 

Actually, he’s not that small. It turned out that he was much bigger than I thought he’d be. He is soft and cuddly and like all creatures born from moments of mindful knitting, he has a story to tell.

After just one season in the service of the big man himself he has been put out to pasture. 

It’s not that he wasn’t strong or that he lacked navigation skills. His nose was bright enough to guide the sleigh and even though he had one wonky antler that the other reindeer teased him about, most of the time he got on well with everyone. He was the kind of reindeer you’d want with you on a long difficult night, making it his mission to make sure that everyone else was happy and having fun. He invented the game where the reindeer used two carrots to make fangs and do vampire impressions. None of them had ever seen a vampire but it was jolly good fun.

Sometimes, though, he would get a bit overwhelmed at the responsibility. All those children. All those toys. All those hopes and dreams. There was so much belief in him and he wasn’t quite sure if he could live up to it. 

No one really thought it was a problem that he would dip his carrot in the brandy, Sherry or Baileys that had been left out for Santa, not even when he started to slur his words but when everyone started to get his name wrong because he couldn’t say it after the first 100 million houses Santa suggested that he retire.

He is now hoping to find a new home, although he would still like the occasional dipped carrot. All things in moderation.

Confidence

 Oh to have the confidence of Boris Johnson or Nadine Dorries. Even when their incompetencies are pointed out, extremely publicly and shared endlessly on social media, lampooned by comedians and Ant and Dec, they continue to believe they are brilliant.

Do they lie awake at night worrying about what they might have done wrong?

Do they stop writing, just in case they say something stupid or unforgivable? 

Do they turn down parties and social events for fear of not quite fitting in?

They might do. It might all be a fake smile and an insistence that everything is perfectly fine that causes them to blunder on, waffling on about Peppa Pig or Channel 4 receiving public money. They might be perfectly well aware of how dumb they’ve been and keep their anxiety private. It’s easy to look in from the outside and think they have it all sussed. I suspect that they don’t even know how incompetent they are , which makes it easier to fool themselves.

I also think they are supremely self confident, which isn’t fair. Why should they get it all? Couldn’t they share?

Advice

 It’s ok to write nothing.

MPs are revolting

 I haven’t been able to write for a bit.

But I saw the headline “MPs set to revolt over second jobs!” and decided that if I just wrote the title that popped into my head I might be able to.

However, that’s it. Enough for today.

The lies we tell ourselves

 It’s only a dog

You’ll know when

At least

Went to sleep

Perfectly fine 

The lies we tell ourselves

Life’s a bugger

Repeating patterns

Grief has its own agenda

It takes time

Grief is love

Unavoidable truths

Butters no parsnips

 This is a public service announcement. There has been a ground frost, so you can now eat your parsnips, unless you’re French, in which case you are likely to turn your nose up and wonder why the British get excited about animal fodder. 

Parsnips after the frost, lifted from the ground and eaten quickly have a unique sweetness that you don’t get from shop bought.

Today, I’m missing my allotment for the first time. I’m also looking as several conservative MPs tweets and thinking, ‘Fine words butter no parsnips.’

Never has anything looked more corrupt and sleazy than yesterday’s vote to protect Owen Patterson (and therefore giving corruption a green light to all in the future) and the MPs who are now tweeting that they abstained, as if we should be proud of them for almost doing the right thing are making me twitch. 

It’s pointless too. Like a parsnip in summer. The standards committee had already decided that the MP was guilty of taking money to lobby. He maintained that he was bringing the issue up because he passionately believed in it and was nothing to do with the £100000 they pay him a year on top of his MPs salary. The Conservative party whipped its MPs to vote against the next step which would mean a by-election. This would give the final accountability back to his constituents, making it a government for the people. His constituents probably would believe all his arguments and the majority would vote him back in, so what is the point of taking away this step that makes parliament accountable to us? 

Who else has mouldy parsnips in the bottom of their fridge?

Post Pandemic Craziness

 Last week I spent a day looking through original records of patients at Broadmoor between 1882 and 1910.  From the end of 1889 until about 1891 there were several admissions where their diagnosis was annotated with the word ‘pandemic’. This wasn’t something I knew about but Google tells me that it started in Russia, killed mainly old people, affected more men than women and that modern virological sequencing has suggested that it was a coronavirus. 

Broadmoor 1890

It made me wonder if it’s the type of virus that sends people nuts, rather than the circumstances. 

The world does feel particularly nuts at the moment. 

At the weekend I went into London and a group of about 30 men were being guarded by 8 police officers as they walked through St Pancreas. It didn’t look as though they were under arrest or in trouble in any way. The police officers walked by them, joked and chatted. They looked happier and more relaxed than if they’d been policing a climate change march. The men were singing and wearing a lot of Burberry. 

“That’s unusual,” I said to the Long Suffering Husband, “I wonder why those men are so important.”

A beat later, I realised that they were singing football-type chants and I got angry about the waste of resources. Eight police officers to make thirty men, who should be in jail for their repeated violent acts, feel safe and important. It’s the wrong way round. The world is crazy.

As the day wore on people seemed to be more drunk than usual, devils, ghosts and witches, spilling onto the streets from bars, as early as 5pm.

Then I came home to find another argument raging on feminist Twitter about what being asexual means. A woman had posted a picture of herself dressed in leather dominatrix underwear and captioned it, ‘This is what asexual looks like.” It was funny. I don’t know if she was serious but boy did it wind up the middle aged Twitter feminists. I am now at the stage where I’m fed up of seeing arguments about gender and sexuality and would really like to go back to the days where sex was real and binary, gender was not real and could be freely ignored and sexuality was a private matter that no one talked about. Obviously, that’s my version of how I’d like it to be and I do realise that those who ignored societal norms of gender and sexuality were persecuted when we didn’t talk about it. However, all this talk is just a little crazy.

Then we have the climate. Hundreds of people flew to Scotland to discuss how to save the planet. Boris Johnson fell asleep and the American news channels set up in Edinburgh (rather than 45 miles away in Glasgow, where the conference is actually being held) because the castle is prettier. At the end governments still won’t have done enough but they will have all tried to pass the blame.

As if this wasn’t all crazy enough I then got one of those news push pings on my phone that said,

“HEALTH NEWS: You could be getting too much sleep!”

I told you. Post pandemic craziness.