Roll up, roll up and read some short stories. Oh, and beware of shysters who are everywhere (not that I’m one, I haven’t got the nous). And a few more spoof headlines for good measure

About 15 months ago, I came across a website that I’ve found very useful. I think I was scouring the net for outlets for short stories (which is, or was, something of an irony, but more of that later). Times were when short stories were much in demand and were regularly carried by all manner of magazines, which is how F. Scott Fitzgerald made his packet (then boozed it all way and died of heart failure).

The mention of Scott Fitzgerald’s name is something of a giveaway: this was pretty much 100 years ago. At my age (sadly now 70, and that is not a piece of bullshit thrown in for a cheap laugh and count yourselves privileged that I have been honest) ‘the Twenties’ don’t seem that far away. But let’s be blunt: most of the 30-odd people who will eventually get to read this blog entry over the next few months are probably at least 20 to 30 years younger than me, and for them ‘almost 100 years’ is most certainly ’almost 100 years!’ and a long, long bloody time ago. But for us ‘silver surfers’ (other cliches are available) it is not quite that distant.

For example, when I was five (between November 21, 1954, and November 2o, 1955) ‘100 years ago’ was for a five-year-old an extraordinarily long time ago — I could hardly imagine it. It was not just before World War I/the First World War or even the Boer War, but before the Indian Mutiny (and for American readers, before the Civil War). Those were the dark ages for me, and ‘the Twenties’ were in an odd kind of way comparatively recent (my mother was born in 1920 and my father in 1923).

Not only was there no internet in the Twenties and thus no streaming services, there was no television to keep folk amused, and radio and the cinema were only slowly getting their act together. So people liked to read — novels and short stories. And as there was money to be made by the magazines by printing short stories, there was a huge demand for them from writers of all kinds.

Certainly today, in 2020, some magazines still print short stories, but far, far fewer than in the heyday before television and cinema. Women’s magazines include them (‘She wondered whether she would ever recover from the grief of her darling Peter dying’), as do the downmarket rags such as Take A Break (‘There was something odd about the couple who moved in next door’).

At the snooty end of the market there’s The New Yorker and its ilk who will still print short stories, but try getting your foot in there without being on shagging terms with the editor. So out of curiosity, I was googling who might still be wanting writers to submit short stories and came across Deadlines For Writers. As it turns out: not a great deal of publications.

. . .

There is any number of sites publicising ‘short story competitions’ but invariably — at least the ones I have come across — they are just moolah machines in literary drag: they promise ‘prizes’ for the best stories submitted, but crucially it will cost you a pretty penny to submit in the first place.

For example if you want to win the Elizabeth Jolley short story prize for 2020 — not bad at AU$6,000 for the winner, with AU$4,000 for the runner-up and AU$2,500 for bronze — you will have to cough up an AU$25 entry fee. It does get cheaper if you already pay an annual AU$75 for a print subscription to the Australian Book Review, you will only be charged AU$15. But . . .

Now I tend to be a cynical cunt, and for all I know I am being unkind to the Australian Book Review and the many, many other online short story competition organisers. Perhaps. And perhaps not. All I can say is that if — in 12 months, just 500 people cough up their entry fee, the Australian Book Review prizes are well covered. If twice that number cough up, the ABR is AU$12,500 in the clover. And 1,000 would-be writers worldwide sending in their work in 12 months is really not a lot. That’s just under 85 a month. Realistically, the figure would be 2,000 or 3,000 or even more. And for every 500 bods over and above the initial 500 needed to cover the cost of prizes who chance their luck and their AU$25 ‘entrance fee’, ABR is quids in.

It gets a little more obviously stickier with the number of publishers asking for you submissions online. They are keen for ‘new writers’ and will take a look at everything. Quite possibly they will reject some of it but that is unlikely given the nature of their game. But if you are ‘accepted for publication’, watch your wallet.

In just a few minutes I have come across two such publishers, Austin Macauley Publishers and Pegasus Press but there are many more. Austin Macauley must be big — they don’t just operate in London, but in Cambridge, New


York and Sharjah (wherever that it — I’ll look it up in a minute). Pegasus Press on the other hand operates out of Cambridge, but then as Cambridge is a famous university town — one of the world’s more famous if truth be told — they must be good, respectable and decent. Surely? I mean, surely?

Well, not quite. Pegasus Press will consider all submissions, and the chances are your luck will be in and finally becoming a published author — your dream — will soon be real. That’s if you agree — that’s only if you agree — to coughing up around £2,300 to help with costs. I don’t doubt Mr Macauley of London, Cambridge, New York and

Sharjah (it’s in the United Arab Emirates) will also want his ‘contribution’, but I can’t yet tell you what it is, but I have sent a brief email saying ‘I should like to submit a manuscript. How much will it cost me’?

There’s nothing wrong with vanity publishing, and people pay to have a novel (or a piece of non-fiction) ‘published’ for a variety of reasons. Quite possibly, in the case of non-fiction, the subject matter is too arcane and a bona-fide commercial publisher — who won’t charge you anything at all if he accepts a manuscript — simply doesn’t think it will sell in sufficient numbers to cover its costs.

As for fiction, well in just this past year I have read two commercially published novels, one of which — Time Of The Beast by Geoff Smith — was dire, and the other, The Colour, was — well, so-so.

Yet that second novel, The Colour, is by Rose Tremain, who according to her Wiki page (gasp! she has a Wiki page? She certainly does!) has won a seriously long list of awards. Well, I haven’t read her other work (and for all I know it is very good, but after The Colour I don’t really feel inclined to) but judging by what I made of The Colour that

list says more about ‘awards’ than anything else. (Note to self — if by some odd fluke you are offered a literary award: turn it down!) So even commercially published fiction is not going to ring more bells because some publisher thinks ‘it will sell’.

As for vanity publishing, well Mr Macauley of London, Cambridge, New York and Sharjah and Pegasus Press are still lurking in the darker corners of the literary world, but it was once even worse. Out of interest (in knowing quite how big the rip-off would be) in the mid-1980s — only yesterday it seems to me, but probably way, way before you were born — I was quoted a price of £6,000 to ‘help with costs’. Taking inflation into account that sum would now (in 2020) be just under £14,000. So Pegasus’s £2,300 looks modest by comparison. But it’s still a rip-off.

The good news is that even if you can’t get a commercial publisher interested but still want to see your work ‘in print’, thanks to the internet that’s possible — without the bullshit and losing shedloads of money. You can now get any manuscript printed up in any number you want in good quality and all you pay for is the printing. I had the one novel I have so far written (and plugged here till I’m blue in the face but to no avail) printed up by Amazon’s Createspace.

The same novel under a different title was previously printed up by Lulu.com. I only switched because a friend at work suggested Createspace. But with both of them that’s it: no bullshit ‘we will edit and market your book and get it reviewed by the Press.’ You submit your manuscript in the form you want it to appear as a pdf and it is printed. Basta!

NB A few years ago, being one day in the office of the books’ department of the paper I was working for, I asked how many of the books submitted by bona-fide commercial publishers each week were reviewed. They said about four or five large reviews and several more brief reviews from about 60 sent in every week. The rest were given away to anyone who wanted them. (About three or four times a year, a large pile of these books were piled up on the desk on the editorial floor for anyone to take what they wanted.)

So your Pegasus Press and Austin Macauley can go and disappear where the sun don’t shine with their promises.

. . .

The reason started this entry is because I wanted to tell how 15 months ago I came across Deadlines For Writers and why I found it very useful. How? That’s quite simple: the woman who runs it (out of South Africa) posts a monthly ‘prompt’ for a short story and stipulates a pretty strict word count (the smallest was 750 words, the longest 2,500). And that is it.

For a guy who grew up ‘wanting to be a writer’, I produced little. ‘Comparatively little’ would even be an exaggeration. Now over the past nine months — I submitted my first in January 2019, then not again until August 2019 — I have completed 15 short stories. And as the astute among you will be wondering how come that’s six more than ‘one every month’, I must confess that I created a second identity on the site so I could submit more than one story every month.

And to cut to the chase, you can (if you so wish) read them all, or just one or two, here. The site also offers prompts for poems and I have submitted several of those, too. Oh, and remember those 500 ‘entry fees’ the ABR needs every year to break even. By my count the Deadlines For Writers, looking at the number of submissions for January (prompt ‘Coalition’), 286 stories were submitted.

Extrapolating that figure, that’s just over 34,000 a year. ABR would be very happy to get that number. If each of them paid an AU$25 entry fee, ABR would up to a cool AU$837,500. And if they only pay AU$15 to enter, it’s because they have already coughed up AU$75 for subscribing to the ABR. Not bad for running a website.

Beware of shysters. They are everywhere.

NB If you do check out my novel (link above) please remember the old adage never to judge a book by its cover. Please. I’ve got to get someone interested, for Christ’s sake.

. . .

Life as we see it (through the bottom of glass of a treble gin ’n tonic)

This ’n that — Ruskies, Commies, good guys, bad guys, morons like Trump, the Cold War, Jim Crow, lynching blacks, Howard Zinn, Billie Holiday — it’s strange what occurs to you sometimes of an hour

When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s - ten years old in 1960 - ‘America’, by which we meant the US, was in an odd sort of way a kind of Nirvana. It was, we were led to believe, where everything worked and worked well, everything was efficient, everyone was well off, everyone was attractive, life was glamorous. America was slick, cool, and, for us in Britain at least, but also in post-World War II Europe and especially then West Germany, somewhere to be envied. It is pertinent that, as I say, when we spoke of ‘America’ we meant, and often still do, the United States. Bugger Canada, Mexico, Central America and the several huge nations to the south, ‘America’ was the United States.

At least two things were at play here and coloured my outlook: I was very young and, like all very young folk, very impressionable; and it was the height of the Cold War in which the world, or most of it, acknowledged that there were ‘the Good Guys and the Bad Guys’. For us, ‘the West’ and ‘the Free World’, we were the Good Guys and ‘the ‘Ruskies’ and other ‘Commies’ were the Bad Guys.

Of course, for many it was the other way round: for countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America where ‘the Ruskies’ and the ‘Commies’ were seen as allies in the struggle against nasty dictatorships, they were seen as the Good Guys, and the putative ‘Free World’ which for purely venal reasons all too often bolstered and often put in place many a nasty dictatorship, they were the Bad Guys.

That gullible ten-year-old, 60-odd years down the line, has learned a lot more history and seen a lot more of life, both personally and at a distance. He no longer believes in black and white, but in infinite shades of grey, with the occasional darker and brighter shades, and the, even less occasional, almost jet-black and almost pure-white spots. This gullible ten-year-old 60-odd years (who if truth be told has had quite an easy, comfortable and happy life) somehow manages down the line to be both cynically pessimistic and agreeably optimistic.

He now knows that ‘America’s’ — and in the United States’s — 1950s outbreak of prosperity and the picture of affluence it was able to purvey throughout much of the world was almost wholly the result of the resurgence of its domestic industries because of World War II. It was a war which was, in a sense, a god-send for the United States. Until Japan — it has to be said inexplicably — attacked Pearl Harbor and the US joined the war, the nation was still largely on its uppers.

Given the vast social discrepancies between the haves and have nots, as great in ‘the land of the free’ as anywhere else despite the faux-patriot insistence than in the ‘land of the free’ anyone could make it, some, many even, were doing quite nicely thank you after a few lean years at the beginning of the 1930s. But a great many more were not and were still scrabbling around for steady work and a steady income to feed their families. For much of the 1930s a staggering one in four men was without a job. But World War II changed all that.

Almost overnight the nation’s factories would be put back to work to produce goods needed for the war effort. And folk again had jobs, a steady income and a future. Until then, though, the US was in parts as much like what we until recently — and patronisingly — referred to as ‘Third World’ countries as were those ‘Third World’ countries. The Northern eastern seaboard states were perhaps in reasonable fettle, but, for example, until ‘that socialist’ Huey Long was elected governor of Louisiana, the whole state had less than 400 miles of tarmacked roads. And the dustbowl of the Mid-West was in an appalling state.

Roosevelt’s first New Deal went some way to alleviating the lives of many at the bottom of the pile, but the nation’s economy was still sluggish and he launched a second New Deal a few years later, giving manual workers rights to join trades unions. But congressional opposition slowly grews — none of the politicians were on there uppers — and the bad times dragged on and remained bad until it was kickstarted by the US entering the war. Then it all changed.

She sheen came off the ‘American Dream’ for those in the ‘free West’ who had observed the country so enviously when the Vietnam War was escalated (a war, incidentally, started by the French,  but they rarely get the blame).

Arguably however horrible war is, a case can be made for ‘a just war’. World War II was ‘a just war’. But World War I wasn’t and neither were either the Korean War and the Vietnam War. But it was the latter which really fucked the ‘America’s image’. Timing didn’t help. At the time of the Korean War the West was still in war mode and prepared to die for ‘world peace’. But the late 1960s the WWII survivors were getting on, getting comfortable and getting impatient with their sons and daughters who were as unconvinced by the US’s pious democratic sanctity was we have been ever since.

Those sons and daughters, ironically today’s reactionary generation, refused to play the game, and as more and more of their generation died completely futile deaths in the Far East, they were less and less inclined to help to perpetuate the patriotic myth — as it happened a myth that was less than 30 years old but as a rule folk have short memories — that it was the United States destiny to ‘save the world’. But that’s only one side of the coin.

The other side is a loathsome, offensive, simplistic and widespread knee-jerk anti-Americanism, and it is not restricted to the political left of any country. It is bizarrely quite common. Yet whenever some silly anti-American generalisation is aired there is usually ripply of approval. ‘The Americans are all . . . ‘ What, all of them, all 330 million of them?

On many issues I am the last man to defend many American practices and attitudes. For all its much-touted status as ‘land of the free’, the US as more six times as many of its citizens banged up in jail per head of population than does ‘Red’ China. On the other hand you have a better chance of loudly ranting against the government and staying out of jail or even alive in the US than you do in China. So what does that tell us? Very little, actually, except that the world is a complex place and it is not just stupid but dangerously stupid to try to reduce it to one or two smug certainties. Anyone who thinks she or he understands the world is deluded.

. . .

Several years ago, I read a book which most certainly did not ‘change my life’, but which most certainly did give me a wholly new perspective on the US and, as a result, on the rest of the world. It was Howard Zinn’s admirable A People’s History Of The United States. I have posted about it before and shan’t bother here to repeat myself, but, rather later in life, my eyes were opened to an extent which was long overdue. By that I mean merely that I began fully to understand the complexity of life, humankind and history.

There was much in that book which appalled me as very little had appalled me before. I could and can never again see the United States as a defender of human rights after reading Zinn’s quite sober and unsensational account of the wholesale genocide of what I as a that ten-year-old ‘red indians’ and to whom we now rather more respectfully describe as ‘native Americans’.

Then there are America’s black population. I am at the moment watching Ken Burns’s account of the American Civil War and its purported emancipation of black American slaves, and cannot forget, because of what I read in Zinn’s book, how within just 12 years of the end of the Civil War, blacks were back were they started with the first establishment of the first Jim Crow laws. And from there on — for the next 100 years — it got worse and worse. Take a look to the left. I am no sentimental liberal but since then I cannot hear Billie Holiday’s rendition of the song Strange Fruit without tears coming to my eyes. And I’m as white as chalk. For those who are unfamiliar with it, you can hear it below. And if you didn’t know — but I’m sure you will guess — the ‘strange fruit’ she sings of are  the bodies of lynched blacks hanging from the trees.



Zinn makes a very good point in his book about white working class racism. He believes — he claims, I am obliged to write, but I can only say that he makes a great deal of sense for me from what I know of the world — that whipping up hatred of the white underclass against blacks in order to suppress newly emancipated blacks (‘they’re after your jobs!’) was simply a cynical ploy by the ruling class (I can’t believe I’ve used that phrase, but, well, I have because it is true) to kill two birds with one stone.

. . .

All this came to mind — the assumed efficiency and glamour of 1950s America as much as everything else — over these past few days when I read about the complete pig’s ear Donald Trump is making of his country’s response to the coronavirus, the lies he is telling, the confusion he is sowing, the history he is re-writing. Yet apparently as much as his reputation among many in the US is falling — even if it can fall any further — in other quarters it is rising. Those who cheered along the would-be iconoclast who promised them he would ‘drain the Washington swamp’ are convinced that the growing, ever more appalled antagonism towards Trump and how unbelievably ham-fisted he is proving to be is simply more ‘proof’ that ‘they’ are out to get their man. And that thus their man, Trump, somehow must be right.

From what I know of US history the times are not, in fact, exceptionally extraordinary. But what is different is that the world in 2020 is different (as the spread of coronavirus has shown us) than what is was in 1820 or 1920. We smug Brits are half-convinced that when all is said and done those loud, whooping, classless, tacky Yanks have pretty much got a screw loose and not much else can be expected from them. What, though, all of them? All 330 million of them? My one week (!) in the US, a week’s visit to New York in June 1989, was long enough to teach me that however much we Brits think the US is ‘like us’ because we speak the same language, it just ain’t so. It is as much a foreign country as Russia or Tibet. And I suspect that in some ways there are ‘several countries’ even within the US — just how much to Texans have in common with the folk in Maine, for example?

The main difference the US makes to the world is by virtue of its size and the size of its economy. But that is a hell of a difference. And because of the impact it has the world, and not just the US, really does not need a total idiot like Trump in charge. The sad thing is there’s bugger all we can do about it.

Might I end on a plea: if you feel that despite my pious disclaimer I am also guilty of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, can I urge you to accept that I am not, that the impression is merely conveyed by this piece not being as well written as it might have been?

We have nothing to fear except fear itself (and, of course, running out of loo roll, sugar, milk, shampoo, those tasty little choc things, coffee beans, the Radio Times, a back-up iPhone, porn mags and I really don’t know what else, but not having those scares me shitless!)

I’ve got out of the habit a little of posting here and I don’t know why. It’s not as though I don’t think of things to write about, but what with all the bloody reading of books about Hemingway and knowing that if I should be writing anything, it should be first drafts of the different elements that will go to make up the long blog I’m planning,

I don’t seem to get around to this blog (and I have got quite a bit of the Hemingway words done already, though I must fight the tendency to re-write and hone stuff I’ve already written instead of writing new stuff). There is one question, though, which has brought me back to this blog and it has — so bloody inevitably — to do with the global coronavirus pandemic.

I’ve long thought (as, I’m sure, have many others, although I haven’t yet heard much on TV and the radio or read much in the papers) that the true danger from the pandemic is not to our health, but to various global economies. It will damage them enormously, and after folk have stopped catching the virus and often dying from it, the effects of the pandemic will long be felt.

In short, in order to counter the spread of the virus many countries in the northern hemisphere have simply closed down, insisting everyone isolate themselves at home unless it is absolutely necessary that they go out. Don’t go to work, everyone has been told, and only go out briefly if you have to go shopping or pick up a prescription.

As for thus having no income, there are various government guaranteeing wages (somehow — I’m very unclear as to the details or how the schemes will work). Here in Britain it is even trying to find some way of guaranteeing that the self-employed don’t lose out either, a far trickier task. Businesses, who must also shut up shop, have been told that they, too, will get ‘government help’.

It all sounds fine and dandy, and even this grubby little cynic is impressed who, broadly, everyone is coming together for the sake of everyone else. Yesterday, I went out for the first time in several days — I am now retired and have not had to worry about income as my pension should not be affected — to the St Breward Store and Post Office (at the top of the village by the church and next to the Old Inn if you ever find yourself in this neck of the woods) and was puzzled to find six individuals standing alone in the pub car park, randomly in no particular order. They were, or seemed to be, just standing about. It turned out that only one customer was allowed into the shop at a time, and this was ‘the queue’, though as all were at least eight feet from anyone else it looked bugger all like any queue I have ever seen (and joined).

Quite whether that measure — keeping our distance in a pub car on the very rural North Cornwall Moor — is as useful as not travelling by crowded tube, commuter train or bus in a busy city, is a moot point. But as Tesco say

‘every little helps’, and — well, why not? We might eventually discover that ‘social distancing’ was about as useful as ‘hiding under a table in the event of a nuclear attack’. But until then . . .

It is March 26, 2020, today, and we have been assured that the pandemic will not be over soon and could last until well into June (Wimbledon will decide by next week whether to postpone this year’s tournament). So I have no rational reason for saying this and shan’t pretend I do: but I have a gut feeling the emergency will be over sooner rather than later. I might, of course, look very silly indeed to someone reading this in six months or a year’s time. All I am saying is that is my gut feeling, for better or worse and for what it’s worth. The knock-on effects, though, I suspect will be felt for month and possibly years. But, fingers crossed, there might even be some positive developments.

Ever since, first Wuhan, then Lombardy, now most all European countries have been in lockdown and folk are not going out (and, crucially, not commuting), air pollution has fallen dramatically as have CO2 levels. Now you might be a ‘man-made climate change’ freak or you might be an out-and-out denier, but that fact, the fall in air pollution and CO2 levels cannot be denied and has to be pertinent. The obvious conclusion is for us all to carry on ‘not commuting’. That, though, is not possible. Or might it be? Might this now not be an opportunity, given such dramatic evidence of how we can drastically cut air pollution and CO2 levels, for wholesale reassessment of how our economies are set up? Of course, it is, but it’s easier said than done.

My former employer, the Daily Mail, operates from Northcliffe House in Kensington, West London, and I should imagine that what with all the other departments involved in the operation of producing a newspaper — folk usually think in terms of ‘writer and reporters’ but, in fact, not only are there sub-editors busying themselves on the editorial side, but their work would simply not be possible if it weren’t for a range of other departments: advertising and marketing, promotions, personnel, finance and — not least — the IT department.

IT must get an especial mention: like every other pen-pushing industry in the 21st century, IT keep the show on the road. Any glitch has to be sorted out in minutes. And it always is. But over these past few weeks they have (former colleagues tell me) excelled themselves. Why? Because Northcliffe House is now completely empty and will be for the duration. Everyone is working from home (as I did when I was still placing the puzzles). Logging on remotely to the system is straightforward, but when I was doing it just a few did it regularly, certainly not more than 1,000 bods. So the system had and has to be robust and IT have to be on top of it 24/7. And they were and are.

But the Mail is, in a sense, lucky. Newspapers, in a way, operate on the fringes to mainstream pen-pushing companies. By the nature of their industry and what they do, they are accustomed and usually prepared to adopt and adapt to changing circumstances almost overnight (the paper is largely printed in East London, but they have an identical twin operation ready to take over at a moments notice for the paper to be printed in Didcot, just under 100 miles to the west).

I don’t think other industries are as flexible and, getting back to the bad knock-on effects of the pandemic, smaller companies, of which there are thousands throughout Europe simply can’t afford to shut down for a month or two. Once they shut down and have no cashflow they go bust and thousand, quite possibly millions, of jobs are lost.

I have seen warnings that we might be in for a worldwide recession: a ‘global economy’ smug economists boasted about 20 years ago which would, and has, distribute ever more prosperity to ever more people in ever more countries has a downside: problems travel equally as fast. If — and it can only be an ‘if’ — there is such a recession it will be deeper and last longer than anything since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

There are also claims that because of the social effects of widespread unemployment, it might have been better to let the pandemic take its course. And catastrophic economic conditions invariably play out in politics. Just how keen will Europe’s liberally minded folk be to look on the camps of several thousand migrants to the EU from

North Africa and the Middle East if they are out of a job with little prospect of getting another, falling into debt and are forced to sell their homes for less then they are worth? Rather less than they were last year, and last year they were rather less inclined to brotherly love than they were 15 years ago. In the context of the EU, it is also worth considering just what effect on the euro — the always rather flakey euro which has never quite found its feet — a collapse in the economies of Spain and Italy would have.

Naturally, on that and other questions there can only be opinions. There cannot be ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers. Similarly, the prognostications of various ‘health bodies’ as how the pandemic will pan out are, at the end of the day, less copper-bottomed than they might be (and their supporters claim).

All are based on ‘computer modelling’ — ‘if this, then what?’ — and it depends upon what data you start with, for which read, to put it more brutally, what assumptions you make. So the results will vary, and, for example, just a few days ago ‘Oxford’s Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease group’ suggested (here is one report) that perhaps things weren’t quite as bad as they seemed. It’s ‘model’ suggested that more than half of Britain’s population had been infected by the Covid-19 with no serious effects, in many quite mild effect.

If true, that suggested coronavirus was not half as dangerous or lethal as had so far been feared. This conclusion from one ‘health body’, though, is at odds with previous conclusions from other ‘health bodies’ and has been criticised and downplayed. So who is right? I don’t know, I can’t know, and nor do you or can you. At the end of the day you pays your money and you makes your choice. And that is all a tad pointless.

As for what effects the universal closing down of the economy will have in the coming months and years, who knows. (As I’ve recorded in this blog before: one definition of an economist is someone who can utterly convincingly explain this week why what he had utterly convincingly predicted last week didn’t actually happen.) But as I began this blog entry, I’ll end it: I suspect the future has less to fear from coronavirus medically than it does from the effects socially and economically of measures taken to counter its spread.

. . .

And just for good measure . . .

This one has got bugger all to do with what I am writing about, but I like it. It is just a screenshot I took while watchign a documentary and which I then dicked around with briefly in Photoshop.

Coronavirus latest and other irrelevant shite: headlines you might have missed while you were out stockpiling lavatory paper, rice, hand-sanitiser, pasta, sugar and pornography