love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

Meanwhile BREXIT quietly proceeds

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/20/brexit-gove-confirms-plans-for-checks-on-goods-crossing-irish-sea

I think you mean is being cruelly betrayed!

No surrender, Boris.

my anecdotal observations from occasional shopping forays into hackney = some ppl are wearing them (maybe a third? a quarter?)

on the the whole older ppl (inc me) and more often black or poc ppl than white.

like tracer's mine is a janky self-made one which i have to tie behind my head -- more an awareness signal than a genuine medical device. i do have blue latex gloves tho, i scored a box v early on. streets are generally very empty so the issue of self-distancing doesn't seem to arise much here.

i've fixed my broken mask so i can brave the shops today secure in the knowledge that at least i'm not the one acting the cunt

somebody got knifed at 8pm last night in the park where i play ball with my kids. unless the knife was 2m long that's a naughty disrespect of the rules

anecdotal evidence but my daughter was telling me yesterday that a cohort of her friends seem to have totally given up on the idea of social distancing, notably since last week

https://i.postimg.cc/Y2z4Ht1W/Castle.jpg

^ for reference

Barely anyone is wearing masks here. I suspect it'll be even fewer when it gets too hot to wear scarves, etc.

I already had a decent pre-lockdown stockpile (well two 100 boxes) of xl latex gloves which I use for dangerous cooking activities like chilli/scotch bonnet chopping. I didn't think about getting more before the price gougers moved in.

I've been feeling that ppl are giving up, too. Surprisingly a steady stream of neighbourhood scolds lecturing people hasn't actually made people more likely to follow the guidelines, what a surprise eh.

xpost

Yesterday's twitter fad was a buncha media types trotting out tired "lol Stoke Newington hipsters" material. The fact that this happened at the same time as Hackney having the third highest mortality rate in the UK really struck home to me how BAME and working class communities get treated here - first you get gentrified the fuck out of and then you get erased by clowns performatively expressing their disapproval of other clowns.

tbf you get erased by clowns cosplaying WWII as well

I don’t think masks are ever going to catch on here unfortunately - in retrospect the waffling over their efficacy right at the start was unfortunate (as was the fact that the govt never advised wearing them obv). Now we have people thinking wearing a mask means going into a hospital and stealing one, or that making one is pointless (based on argument that are the equivalent of “there are no studies that prove covering my mouth when I cough stops me from getting coronavirus!”)

Quite simply the government should (have) be(en) supplying masks. But then even with good ones there are probably more or less or even counnter-productive ways to use them. If shops or buses are handing them out that means you're fiddling around your face with unclean hands and more than like it fitting it less than optimally. Then there's the question of how much if at all you should be reusing them if they are collecting particles.

Gloves certainly seem to be a bad idea, at least for shopping.

* more than likely

Gloves certainly seem to be a bad idea, at least for shopping

thank you for yr helpful input

now i'm no amateur virologist but i'm pretty sure that *putting something across your mouth and nose while you're around other people* is productive full stop and pondering whether it's worth bothering is part of the problem

There are loads of videos online showing easy ways to make masks out of socks, old T shirts, handkerchiefs... if you tie them properly they will stay on and you can put a little bit of kitchen roll inside as an extra layer of filtration. Then you wash them when you get inside, as you wash your hands. This makes them reusable. It’s really not that hard

Yesterday's twitter fad was a buncha media types trotting out tired "lol Stoke Newington hipsters" material. The fact that this happened at the same time as Hackney having the third highest mortality rate in the UK really struck home to me how BAME and working class communities get treated here - first you get gentrified the fuck out of and then you get erased by clowns performatively expressing their disapproval of other clowns.

hey Dyson

suck it

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/21/dysons-uk-staff-revolt-against-order-to-return-to-work-coronavirus

“rough” or “stabby” area

UK politics thread description

our local newsagent is selling masks - might pick up a couple before they become (inevitably) mandated. beat the rush

/“rough” or “stabby” area/

UK politics thread description

"Gloves certainly seem to be a bad idea, at least for shopping"

put them on before you go inside the shop/supermarket, chuck them into the nearest bin when you leave, as long as you aren't touching your face with them I think they are good imo

struck home to me how BAME and working class communities get treated here - first you get gentrified the fuck out of and then you get erased by clowns performatively expressing their disapproval of other clowns.

God, is this ever OTM.

btw even the Scottish government of St. Nicola of Sturgeon didn't recommend the wearing of masks.

I think that was a failure all over Europe. Others are trying to catch up tho, which the UK isn't, really.

our local newsagent is selling masks - might pick up a couple before they become (inevitably) mandated. beat the rush

They are widely available. Last week I bought a pack of 10 for £10 in a local chemist. I thought that was a bit expensive and this turned out to be true. I'd forgotten to mention my purchase to my wife and she independently bought a pack from some other shop for £7.50. At the post office they were selling them individually for £1 each. Standing in the queue I watched as the clerk pulled a mask out from a multi-pack with his bare hands (not that wearing gloves would have been any better since he's constantly handling cash and letters/parcels) and handed it over to the customer. Admittedly, he only touched the strings part of it.

setting aside how well or badly difft govts handled it, there was a genuine conundrum here: clear early announcement of the value of masks everywhere leading to a run on purchase of masks by those with superior resources leading to a shortfall (given inadequacy of reserves at that time) for those that needed them most, most quickly

one of the pleasing things abt the homerton mutual aid whatsapp was the announcment in early weeks of switchover by local textiles artists to the manufacture of masks (for free, with their new-found free time) and asking and discussion of where they were then best sent

Apparently the Czechs getting everyone to use masks (plus earlier lockdown etc.) has been one of the pillars of their successful covid response.

Elsewhere be interesting to see where this goes. There clearly aren't enough migrants to exploit this year

There are some great opportunities to pick fruit in Kent and the government's website is now live.https://t.co/Cq2pVYJICC

— Tom Tugendhat (@TomTugendhat) May 20, 2020

A good thread on how isolation has been out of the conversation, as a thing.

A thread on "track and trace" and how the government are still cutting corners in ways that will cost many lives: Amid arguments about what date the UK's contact tracing will begin, and chatter from the government about its new app, the main story has been missed: 1/

— Crystal moth (@Prolapsarian) May 21, 2020

i don't know what the practical necessities of fruit and veg picking genuinely entail but just from what's been talked about on the news this week the terms and conditions are a fucking affront to a civilized world

I went to university with a guy who had incredibly romantic notions about what fruit picking in Kent was like and literally quit university to do it. He was disabused of those notions pretty quickly and was the only British-born worker there, and absolutely the only person who didn't have to be. He quite and ended up in a poultry processing factory chucking dead, plucked and gutted chickens onto a conveyor belt and from I heard that was a step up.

There are horror stories about what happens to affluent British backpackers when they are required to pick fruit in Australia and the collision of the British workforce with what happens here is going to be pretty nasty. There are gonna be a lot of people who were very anti-immigration being forced into doing jobs that previously only immigrants would have done and they're going to realise quite how shit those jobs are.

There's also a gigantic workforce of 18 year olds who had planned on going to university or at the very least would have been working in pubs, cafes or hospitality that otherwise wouldn't exist. It's going to be like the shittest gap year ever.

and this is while the gov is *trying* to put a positive spin on it. i think we know what happens when nobody's looking

my anecdotal observations from occasional shopping forays into hackney = some ppl are wearing them (maybe a third? a quarter?)

on the the whole older ppl (inc me) and more often black or poc ppl than white.

Constantly bemused by reports from other areas of London that bear absolutely no resemblance to my experience. Maybe where I live is just idiot central? I would say that Asian people are far more likely to be wearing face masks. On the other hand, middle aged Afro-Caribbean women, they just don't give a fuck!

I picked raspberries, tomatoes, stick beans during the summer holidays when I was at school/uni. it's hard work and the pay is shit. picking beans paid a bit better for some reason, it was done by weight but so were raspberries, whereas tomatoes was just an hourly rate, but I expect this depends on the farm.

Nice little disclaimer at the bottom of that Pick for Britain site: "Pick for Britain and AHDB have no responsibility and/or liability whatsoever for any third party’s obligations under the Modern Slavery Act 2015."

the worst farming job I did I think was planting potatoes, fuck that killed my back and I only did it for a few days

But of course:

1. No criminal investigation into Arcuri-Johnson relationship - but interesting findings in the official report nonetheless ....

— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) May 21, 2020

Nice little disclaimer at the bottom of that Pick for Britain site

when i saw this Tweeted last night i thought it was some kind of joke that i wasn't quite parsing

So bizarre that there are actually people out there who think Laura K is biased against the government.

i saw that and had to doublecheck he wasn't taking the piss and now i want some people to die

in my Parisian neighborhood, largely African and South Asian, most people are wearing masks. That was true even during the lockdown, when I didn't know where they were getting them! Now they're readily available in pharmacies and, from what I've read, many stores sell them as you enter if you're not already equipped. (I'm still just reporting from what I see outside, as I haven't left yet since the lockdown began.)

I'm probably repeating myself but back in the early 90's there was a minimum wage for agricultural workers of £3.83 ph with some bennies but not much to write home about! It might sound shit but before the '98 minimum wage act there were employers still paying rates like £2.70 -3.20 ph for some absolute shit jobs like packing fucking Trill or cleaning card clothing machinery with oily rags.

Newspaper circulation predictably down:

Newspaper print circulations in April vs in March
Daily Mail: 944,981 (1.13m)
Express: 234,373 (289,393)
Mirror: 363,082 (442,610)
Star: 219,275 (276,453)
i paper: 134,553 (215,640)
Guardian: 106,003 (129,961)
FT: 88,756 (146,373)

(Telegraph, Sun, Times, too scared to publish.)

— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) May 21, 2020

Slightly surprised that they’re not much lower.

14 million daily twitter users in the UK

hm that's monthly i think actually

battle for labour continues apace https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52742562