A piece of good news for once. I now have a new stock of hormone patches sufficient to last me another 3 months. Hopefully by that time the current surge of infections will have died away.

The not so good news is that I had to walk to Boots because, despite having been to Bath and back on Friday, my car would not start today. A battery should not drain from being fine to having zero charge in just 2.5 days. So there’s probably an electrical fault somewhere. The nice man from the garage is going to pick her up on Thursday and take a look.

The COVID data suggests that Lockdown is definitely biting at last. Trowbridge is still well below the national average, but the infection rate is still rising here so I’m in no hurry to go out unless I have to.

Politics is much of the same. I am looking forward to Andrew Lloyd Webber penning Brexit: The Musical, in which all of the cast are British fish suffering under the tyrannical rule of the evil giant squid, Cthul-EU, but are liberated by Brave Sir Boris and his Merry Men. It will, of course, end with a rousing rendition of Rule Britannia. Sadly the production will become embroiled in a massive lawsuit when it is discovered that all of the songs written for Rees-Smug have been filched from the catalogue of the HP Lovecraft Historical Society.

Well this has been a week. As I mentioned on Wednesday, I was expecting to drive to Bristol today to get a new hormone prescription. It turns out that I hadn’t had a blood pressure test in a while, and the doctor wanted to make sure I was OK, even if that meant me risking a long trip in the middle of a pandemic. So yesterday I look the car for a run, so as to give the battery a bit of a boost to make sure it would start this morning. Also I needed fuel. And when I got home the oil and engine service warning lights came on.

Fortunately I have a very good garage. The boys took a look yesterday afternoon and pronouced the car probably OK to drive. I came up with a new plan which was to drive to Bath and get the train from there. That way I would only be 10 minutes each way on a train rather than 45. It worked, and I note that the trains were practically empty. They may be busier in peak hours, but I very nearly had a carriage to myself both ways.

I don’t quite have the hormones yet. Boots didn’t have any in stock, but they put in an order and it went through, so presumably there are supplies in the country.

Meanwhile the FT, which is much more reliable than the government when it comes to COVID data, says that the number of cases in the UK is coming down at last. Where I live is still fairly safe. Our last reported number was 283 cases per 100,000 people, which is a lot less than the national average of 555, but well up from just over 100 at the turn of the year. Many parts of London are over 1,100.

Of course I still have to go out to get the prescription when it arrives, and to drop off the car for a service, but at least I don’t need to go to Tesco again for a couple of weeks at least.

Also in the FT is news that the government plans to rip up all of the UK’s employment protection laws. This, like the move to allow bee-killing pesticides, is definitely in breach of the withdrawl agreement that Bozo signed with the EU just before Christmas. Interesting times, eh?

Rejoice, fellow inmates of Plague Island. We are once again World Leaders! Today we achieved a new record for the daily death count due to COVID-19. We are now running at over one death per minute. Our government is so proud of us.

Yes folks, things here are steadily going from bad to worse. We are in Lockdown, but there are so many exemptions, and so little financial support, that loads of people are having to go to work anyway. Which means that they are having to send their kids to school. So Lockdown is kind of not a thing. But never fear. The government has come up wit a brillant idea. They are going to test people entering the country to make sure that they are COVID-free. I’m sure no one ever thought of that before.

(I remember well arriving in Melbourne when the SARS epidemic was just starting. The immigration process was terrifying. Australia knows how to do biosecurity.)

Just in case you were wondering, the Home Secretary says that this is all the fault of people being badly behaved, and that we all need more Discipline!

The nation’s fishermen are up in arms because it turns out the the great deal that Bozo made such a fuss of negotiating on their behalf is complete crap and they are all going bankrupt.

The nation’s musicians and performing artists are up in arms. Apparently the EU offered us a reciprocal deal whereby our people could go and perform over there without needing a work visa, provided that their people could do the same here. Bozo turned them down. Presumably he was worried about ABBA or Mozart doing a comeback tour or something. Surely crippling the British pop music industry is a small sacrifice to pay in return for keeping foreign musos from our shores.

It was Prime Minister’s Question Time today. Bozo, you will remember, did a spectacular u-turn on the issue of free school meals for kiddies during Lockdown. Poor families were going to get £30 a week. Then some smartarse suggested that if you gave money to poor people they would spend it on drugs and porn, and the kiddies would get nothing. So Bozo arranged for some of his mates to take the money, buy food and distribute it. The resulting food packages appear to contain about £5 worth of food. Everyone is wondering what happened to the other £25.

But not Bozo. No sir, he is concerned about the failings of the Leader of the Opposition. It has been pointed out to Bozo that a young footballer from Manchester United has been making our beloved PM look an idiot. Why can’t Mr Starmer do that, eh? Perhaps the Labour Party would be better off making young Marcus Rashford their leader. Then everyone will know what a fool the PM is.

It is, I think, the first time ever that a Prime Minister has attacked the Leader of the Opposition for failing to make clear what an idiot the Prime Minister is.

Closer to home, I braved Tesco today. I think I have enough food for 3 weeks. I’d like to say that I can now stay at home, but I’m almost out of hormones and for reasons I don’t want to bore you with I have to drive to Bristol on Friday to get a repeat prescription because the surgery is unwilling to do a video consultation. And then when I have the prescription I will have to go to Boots twice: once to leave it with them, and once to collect the medication. So much for Lockdown.

Well, yesterday was quite something.

Of course no one should have been surprised. Dear Leader was egging people on to do it for days in advance. The attempted coup was openly planned on Facebook and other right-wing social media. But despite having a lot of inside help, the supposed revolutionaries were extremely inept.

Part of that, I suspect, is because they were too middle class. My Twitter feed had several mentions of a woman called Eizabeth who had complained bitterly that it wasn’t fair that she’d been tear-gassed when all she was doing was starting a revolution. Many of the perps were going around unmasked, and even streaming on their own social media channels. If there is any will to bringing them to justice, it should be very easy.

Therein, however, lies the problem. I gather than one of them, a lawyer, has lost his job. Another has been identified as a Republican state legislator. These are not working class revolutionaries. They are “nice” wealthy white people who could afford a trip to DC by plane to have their little revolution. Will they be prosecuted? Remember that kid who shot a couple of BLM protestors?

As for Dear Leader, I suspect he’ll get away with it too. The 25th Amendment has to be invoked by Pence and the rest of the Cabinet. They might be very angry about nearly getting lynched, but they won’t want to antagonise the Trumpists any further. That leaves Impeachment, and I don’t think there are sufficient votes to get that through the Senate, given that it requies a two-thirds majority. Pelosi should probably do it anyway to force the Trumpists in the Senate to identify themsleves, but it won’t pass.

All of which is bad, because this is not going to go away. Dear Leader has made it clear that he intends to continue the fight. The next outrage will be better planned, and more bloody. And the next one after that will be worse again. Appeasing Fascists never works, but it sometimes takes a long time for people to learn that lesson.

Meanwhile there was a significant drop in the number of new COVID-19 cases in the UK today. One day does not make a trend, and the 7-day average is continuing to rise, but I hope that’s a sign of Lockdown begining to bite.

Over here we have our own insurrectionists. They are not attacking the government because they have the government they want. Instead they are picketting hospitals and abusing NHS staff, whom they believe to be perpetrating a hoax. Nigel Garbage has founded a new political party with the express intention of opposing all lockdown restrictions. And there’s a new far-right TV news station launching soon. I suspect it won’t be long before NHS staff start getting physically attacked.

Hello, and greetings from Plague Island. 2021, eh? Meet the new year, same as the old year.

Things here have been moving with some rapidity, mostly the number of new COVID-19 cases where the chart is looking steadfastly vertical. But politics, too…

On Sunday morning Bozo went on national television to reassure that nation that he had no doubt that it was safe for our children to go back to school for the new term starting Monday.

Later that day, Nicola Sturgeon announced that she was recalling the Scottish Parliament and having an emergency cabinet meeting about the ongoing pandemic crisis.

By Sunday evening Bozo had achieved the unprecedented result of uniting all of the UK teaching unions against him. Many schools were saying that they were refusing the re-open.

The Scots spent Monday deliberating and planning. In the afternoon Nicola Sturgeon announced new lockdown provisions.

On Monday evening, Bozo went on national television to explain that it was far too dangerous to send children to school and that a new national lockdown was being put in place for at least 6 weeks (i.e. until mid-February).

This morning Wormtongue Gove went on the radio to say that the new lockdown would last at least into March.

Today my Twitter feed has been full of people in England trying to find out what the new lockdown regulations are, who they affect, what government support there will be for affected businesses and so on.

Meanwhile it was leaked that Fake President Loser was planning to flee the US on the 19th and would be hiding out on his golf course in Scotland. Today Nicola Sturgeon announced that he would not be allowed into the country. Perhaps he will go and stay with his friend Bozo instead.

Politics, eh? The only thing anyone is certain of is that we have no idea what Bozo will do next, but whatever he does it is certain to be too late and the implementation will be bungled.

Yesterday I had planned to do a big shop before the virus situation got any worse. But my car wouldn’t start and the jump starter was out of juice so I figured I would go today instead. Then Bozo made his announcement. Tesco is likely to be mad right now, and definitely out of toilet roll. I have enough food to last at least another week, possibly two. So I’m going to hunker down and hope that a bit of sanity returns after a while.

It is a week since Christmas eve, and the effects of the holiday are starting to be felt. For the past two days we have had over 50,000 new cases of COVID-19 per day. Deaths yesterday were just short of 1000. I suspect it will get worse over the next week. Posts from NHS staff in my twitter feed are starting to sound desperate.

So what is the government doing? It is ramming through a bill to approve Bozo’s Bexit deal, which also happens to be stuffed full of various provisions allowing the government to create new laws without reference to Parliament.

Well someome appears to have taken back control, but it is certainly not us. And what they have taken control of is certainly not the response to the pandemic.

Right on cue, Bozo has announced that after decades of failed negotiations, he personally has wrested the Best Deal Ever from the evil foreigners of the EU. Analysis of the deal suggests that it will leave the UK far worse off than we were as members of the EU, but we will have blue passports and we can stop a whole lot of foreigners from coming to these sceptred isles, so it is apparently all worth it.

There are two main reasons why the deal has been announced now. Firstly it is good for Bozo’s ego to be able to do so. It makes it seem like he was working hard right up until the last minute, whereas in fact all he had to do was decide which concessions to make. Of course he knows that his rabidly xenophobic right wingers will be furious at what he has done, but by announcing the deal so late, and over a holiday, he gives them no time to stir up a fuss. This is far more important to him than giving British businesses time to plan for operating under the new regime. As always, Brexit is far more about internal Tory Party feuds than about the good of the country.

The Labour Party has enthusiastically embraced Bozo’s deal. Brexit appears to be one thing on which both their centrists and far left agree on.

Meanwhile, for the last two days, we have had new infection rates in excess of 39,000. We are supposed to not notice that.

There is much excitement here is plague-ridden Brexitland. New cases of the virus are now running at over 30,000 per day, and the rolling 7-day average is up to 29,000. There is much talk of a scary new mutant version of the virus which has allegedly just been discovered. No one knows whether this new threat is a member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, or an independent operative, but I fully expect Bozo to announce that he is seeking advice from Charles Xavier any day now.

The reality of the situation seems to be that there are many mutant strains of the virus, and that this one has been known about for weeks, if not months. The suspicion is that Bozo and his spinmasters are using the idea of a deadly new strain of COVID-19 as an excuse for the government’s manifest failure in ending Lockdown #2 too early in the hope of “saving Christmas”.

However, the idea of a deadly new version of the virus running unchecked in the UK has taken root elsewhere in the world. Other countries have accepted the narrative of the UK as a plague ship that must be kept quarantined. Consequently many countries have now banned travel to and from the UK. This includes closing the Channel Tunnel.

You may think that the Brexiter hordes would be cheering with glee. Huzzah! Britain is finally cut off from the Continent! We are safe from foreigners. But of course the Brexiters are Libertarians. Therefore they firmly believe that they should be free to control their own borders, but that equally no other country should be allowed to close its borders to them. There is much outrage.

All of which is largely irrelevant to your average Briton hoping to enjoy the holiday season. Londoners are already furious at new restrictions being suddenly imposed when they had been promised a free and merry Christmas. Now the entire country is worrying whether there will be enough food to last the holidays if shipments from the Continent cannot get through. Thankfully most people will already have stocked up on huge quantities of food by now, but it does look like we’ll be getting a taste of No Deal Brexit a few days early.

Talking of No Deal, we have now passed the point by which the European Parliament will be able to ratify any trade deal. Therefore No Deal has happened. Negotiations could still continue, if diplomats are able to meet, but there will at least be a short period of No Deal happening.

Given all of this, Her Majesty’s Opposition has swung into action. In order to stand up for the country, Kier Starmer has issued a demand… that under no circumstances should Brexit be delayed. There must be no extension of the transition period.

Hopeless, the lot of them.

Last week I wrote that by Christmas I expected the situation in the UK to be back where it was prior to Lockdown #2, if not worse. Well, it is no fun to be proved right, but…

Yesterday saw over 35,000 new cases, which is a record. Today was only 28,500, which is the third highest daily total since the pandemic began. The rate of deaths is now trended upwards. But Bozo has “saved Christmas” so we are all supposed to be happy.

Thankfully the local situation is still good, and I probably only need to make one more shopping trip this year.

Gosh, it has been a long time since I did one of these.

Anyway, the UK came out of Lockdown #2 on December 2nd. The rate of new cases of COVID-19 had been falling for a while, and the death rate had started to fall as well. Predictably, as soon as Lockdown ended, the rate of new cases started to rise again. We had over 20,000 yesterday. Deaths are still falling as they tend to lag a week or two behind the new cases, but by Christmas I expect things to be back where they were at the last peak, if not higher.

Thankfully the situation locally is very good. There were fewer than 10 new cases in Trowbridge in the past week, and much of the town is currently rated “supressed”. I’m not planning to go anywhere much over the holidays.

The vaccine is now being rolled out, and a few people in Bristol have already got their jabs. I am by no means vulnerable or essential, so I expect it to be many months before my turn comes around.

Meanwhile Bozo has managed to thoroughly piss off the EU leadership and major European heads of state. A “no deal” exit from the EU now seems inevitable, and indeed Bozo has been on the BBC boasting about how good this will be for the country him and his cronies. Indeed, if news reports are to be believed, they have something like £8bn staked on a collapse of the pound.

As I am paid primarily in US dollars, I’m not too worried about collapse of the economy. I am very worried about what the next year will bring for the trans community in the UK. Because of the work I do, I get to see some of what is being done behind the scenes to dismantle trans rights. You don’t need government action to take people’s rights away. Just as the value of the Equality Act has been people knowing that discrimination was illegal, so the government flagging its desire to dismantle that Act leaves people feeling free to ignore it. Or, if it is more convenient, interpreting the EA in such a way as to conclude that trans people are a danger to everyone else and need to be denied services.

Oh well, in 50 years time historians will have a lot to write about.

On Monday 397 people in the UK died due to COVID-19. Yesterday the number was 492. We could easily be in a thousand a day territory by next week. I understand the Bozo spent Prime Minister’s Question Time vehemently denying that he ever said any of the things he said at the same time the week before.

As most of you will probably have heard, there are new Lockdown rules coming into force in the UK this week. At this point the government can’t really be accused of a u-turn, because it is more accurately spinning like a top. At the current rate of policy changes, it is predicted to reach tornado velocity shortly before Christmas and land us all in Oz some time in early 2021. This is not a bad thing. Being anywhere other than in post-Brexit Britain will be an improvement.

Meanwhile the virus stats keep rising fast. We had 397 deaths recorded yesterday. For comparison, that’s more people than have died in Finland in the entire pandemic.

I made my weekly visit to Tesco today. A friend in Bristol had reported stores running out of toilet roll again there yesterday, so I was relieved to see that the shelves were not completely bare. The only thing I expected to be able to find but could not was chocolate organges — the standard variety, that is, I’m trying the new white chocolate ones.

I can, if necessary, survive a couple of weeks without another trip, but hopefully that won’t be necessary. I continue to have plenty of work, some of which is even paid.

I haven’t said much about this of late, partly because I have been busy, and partly because it is terrifying. We are now closing in on 400 deaths per day, and given how sharply new cases and hospitalisations are rising, that is only going to get higher. If things are this bad at the start of winter, it is going to get pretty brutal by December and January.

I wish I could say that there was a chance of the government coming to its senses and trying to do something useless, but sadly I don’t see any chance of that. They are convinced that only poor and useless people are going to die, and they are happy with that.

My congratulations to Melbourne, which has endured a fairly severe lockdown and is now at 0 cases.

The UK is now well into its second wave of infections. New cases have been in the 15k-20k per day range for the past three days, and hospital admissions are rising very steeply. Deaths are still only in the 100-150 per day range, but will doubtless rise as the disease runs its course for the newly infected.

The governement continues to babble incoherently, issuing new emergency plans on a regular basis and changing their minds a few days later. There are only two things consistent about the statements: they always insist that they are doing a magnificent job, and any problems are the fault of other people. It reminds me of satirical send-ups of the likes of Idi Amin.

Thankfully the area where I live continues to be relatively less-badly affected. We are officially at “Medium” risk, which by goverment definition is the lowest level on the scale. I don’t think Cummings is very good at Maths.

One of the reasons why Bozo and his gang of incompetents can get away with this is that they media is still largely on their side. Yesterday one of the idiot “opinion” writers for the Telegraph noted that everyone is going to die eventually, so their is no point in wasting time and money saving people who are dying from the virus. I’m sure it won’t be long before they are claiming that it will be good for the economy if a few more people were to die earlier rather than later, and that the virus is not sufficient to encourage this. Another one of them was claiming that the right to be racist was a free speech issue. I’m sure you can see where this is going.

Another reason that they are getting away with it is that they still have sufficient support in the polls to easily win a General Election. But fear not, dear reader, the Labour Party has a cunning plan to win back the electorate. It is called, “embracing transphobia.” They seem to think that will be a huge vote winner.

I think I’ll just go and read a science fiction book or something.

Well, 200 days in, and still no sign of a competent government response.

The excitement about data errors seems to have died down. We had over 15k new cases yesterday, and over 14k today. But, as I have said before, there are reasons why that isn’t comparable with the same data for the first wave.

Rather more worrying, because the data is much more solid, is that hospital admissions have more than quadrupled since the start of September. There are now over 3000 COVID-19 patients in hospital. This is well short of the first wave peak, which was almost 20,000, but cause for concern.

The government, having decided that jobs in the entertainment industries, are “non-viable”, is trying to encourage actors, musicians, and so on to re-train in what they believe are more useful jobs. I took their test. They suggested that I might try a career as a hotel porter.