Update: Am I Being Unreasonable?

I just wanted to write a very brief update on this.

Yes, six weeks later, I had a response today. I wrote to them again, two weeks ago, to remind them that I had not yet received a response. To be honest, I had expected them to stall – if they had wanted to publish the data, if would be public already – so it was no surprise that they were stringing this out.

The hospital’s response was that they could not publish the data because the data does not exist.

Think about that for a minute – a hospital does not know how many COVID tests it is carrying out. It also means that our government has no way of compiling the numbers that it has been presenting since March.

I have to request that they review the decision, before I can take the request to the next body.

I think I have been fobbed off throughout this adventure, what do you think?

What staggers me most of all is that there are people out there who don’t want me to know the local picture.

Mister Bump

As the UK is coming out of lockdown, so too are we – my wife and I. Only slightly – I want to make sure that all the cards are stacked in my favour before resuming my old life.

With that in mind, we had a garden-guest around last week, a friend of my wife. I can’t remember how we got there but the conversation somehow got to post-lockdown behaviour. I said I’d be far more comfortable coming out of the house if I knew there were no cases in our local hospital.

Okay, if there are no cases it does not necessarily mean we are [i.e. the vicinity is] COVID-free, but if we did have enough COVID cases, I’m sure some of them would end up in the hospital, and counted in the statistics.

It so happens that the husband of this friend works up at the hospital. Ah

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Fandango’s One Word Challenge (11 August 2020)

for Fandango’s One Word Challenge (FOWC), paranormal.

If you listen to the lyrics, you’ll get the link. This reached #1 in the UK at Christmas, 1971.

Why Didn’t I Just Leave It Alone?

It is just gone 5pm here and I have just stopped doing things for the day.
I had the bright idea after lunch of checking the family web site.

I maintain a web site under my real name, just as a “Hello, I’m ….” kind of thing.

It’s got a Welcome page, a short page about work, and a contact form. There’s another page that just converts this form into an email. There are two tiny other pages, success/failure to submit the form. So, all told, not a big site.

After lockdown, one of the ways I got back into work was by looking at this site, and I was quite pleased because part of the “looking” was to bring it up to date, freshen it up etc.

So, this afternoon, I had the bright idea of running my site through one of these “semantic” tools. For example, it told me that certain tags were missing from my images – those tags would help someone who can’t actually see the image. Or it picked up on a few missing tags, which search engines look for.

One other thing it picked up on was that some of the files used by my site were out of date. Not surprising, I last brought the site properly up to date seven or eight years ago.

So, I set about updating things.

Suddenly, the update process reported an error! I tried my site, and the bloody thing would not load.

I spent a while looking for what had broken things, but to no avail.

Now, the saving grace here is that this was just my “test” site. My “live” site is sitting on a web server, happily running away, saying Hello if anybody visits it. So why am I worried? Just because it is a pain not to have it on my computer, so I can tweak it.

After a bit of thought, I decided that it was probably a good idea just to create a brand-new site from scratch and copy my five or six files onto it. At least then I should be all up to date, too.

I’ve copied two of them so far. Four more of the bloody things to go. So that’s the activity for the next few days. Just as well I didn’t have anything special planned! Grrrrr….

Fandango’s One Word Challenge (10 August 2020)

Every once in a while, you let a word or phrase out and you want to catch it and bring it back. You can’t do that. It’s gone, gone forever.

Dan Quayle

for Fandango’s One Word Challenge (FOWC), catch.

By the master.

Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.

I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican.


One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, and that one word is ‘to be prepared.’

When I have been asked during these last weeks who caused the riots and the killing in L.A., my answer has been direct and simple: Who is to blame for the riots? The rioters are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings? The killers are to blame.

Who Won the Week (9 August 2020)

I do like Fandango’s Who Won the Week post, and like to join in with some quirky stories from my own newsfeeds. The idea is that we pick a “thing” (person, organisation, anything) who “won” the week. I often post with a heavy dose of tongue-in-cheek, but not last week or today. Another good news story.

A mega-short post this week.

As anybody who follows me will know I take a strong interest in Irish news. Something I saw earlier caused me to pull my original post and replace it with this.

In the last 24 hours, in the whole of Ireland, there were 68 new confirmed COVID cases, but no new deaths. Actually, this isn’t really news, because there has been a very low death rate since mid-June. Threes or fours, but often zero.

Ireland has still had an estimated 1,772 deaths caused by COVID, but hopefully there is light at the end of the tunnel.

We’ll get there.