Jules Jones's Blog, page 3

At the going down of the sun

... and in the morning, we will remember them.

It was a beautiful, and unseasonally warm, day at the village cenotaph this morning. We remembered those who had fallen, and those who came home but marked by what they had seen or done or had done to them. Some of them came home in body but not in mind; my mother has a tale of a man known to her family who had been tortured and was no longer in contact with reality, nor ever would be.

Those who served in the Great War have all gone now. The ranks of those who served in the Second World War are dwindling fast. Among those who left us this year was someone who trained in the ATS, who later married a naval officer who had served under fire. It was unsettling when the Queen died a few weeks ago, not least because one of the things she represented was being one of the remaining living links with that time. I sang "God save the King" for the first time this morning. It has been "God save the Queen" for all of my life. Now she is gone, as are so many who served both on the front line and on the home front.

So many soldiers of the Commonwealth; so many countries and so many faiths. Lest we forget the sacrifice they made, for their future and our present. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, as we have demonstrated far too often in the decades since.

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Covid booster - Moderna - update

Note: possibly TMI. :-)

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So worse than the Pfizer was, but still not terrible,

And I get to do it all over again next weekend, when I have my annual flu jab...




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5G antenna refurbished

 Had a bivalent Moderna jab this morning for my autumn Covid booster. The jab itself was barely noticeable. They weren't telling people to sit down for observation afterwards, but I did anyway because I'd felt distinctly wobbly during the observation period the first time round and had to have an extended observation period lying down in a dim room - almost certainly migraine aura after nearly an hour under fluorescent lights, but they weren't taking any chances. This time I had a noticeable slight ache after a few minutes, but this is normal for me because the RSI magnifies any muscle ache. Arm's getting a bit sore now, with accompanying ache in the RSI damaged muscles and tendons down that arm, but not at a level that needs a pain killer. I might take some aspirin anyway as a preventative, because my damaged tendons are likely to hurt quite a bit once the inflammation gets going.

Also getting a lot of typos. Not sure how much of that is the RSI kicking in, and how much mild aura, but I'm glad I took today off work.

I stopped in the charity shop across the road when I got out, and have returned home with £19 worth of craft materials, including a folding work basket that had some wool in it, a boxful of bits and pieces for "take the lot for £10", and a rather nice necklace of big beads that I will probably take apart for beads on a twiddlemuff. I don't actually want all the bits and pieces, but as the person behind the till said, craft people usually have craft friends they can pass the unwanted bits to. They often can't sell individual items, but put a batch of them together in a basket and the job lot will go. He was also telling me that they'd been seeing a lot of younger people looking for craft things, mostly witchy things like embroidery with black cats. The other thing the young people are into is making rugs with cartoon characters, such as detailed reproductions of scenes from the Simpsons, some of which they sell. Knitting books and patterns are selling well. Interesting bit of gossip about some of the effects of lockdown.

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But there's no smoke at all coming out of the stack

 For the mill has shut down and it's never coming back.

That's the second time I've seen a former employer fall to the dynamite. It takes time to demolish a mill safely; months, even years. But the destruction started long ago, with investment choices and other choices; some of those choices made by a government hell bent on shovelling as much money to its chums as possible, and if that means bringing down an industry so you can push large government grants for regeneration of a derelict industrial site to your party donors rather than grants to keep the mill afloat through the lean times, well, that's just business, isn't it?

Forgive me if I'm cynical if the promised regeneration ever happens. This is, after all, the government that gave millions to a ferry company with no ferries. There was once a Tory party with a one nation philosophy, an enlightened self-interest that believed that the rich had a duty to the poor, to provide a safety net and make sure nobody fell through it. That too has gone and is never coming back.

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Still failing to post

 Doing one of my spates of cleaning out my inbox by picking a keyword for some newsletter and mass deleting anything from that keyword I don't want to keep, on this occasion CafePress. That often takes me back quite a few years through my inbox, and the keyword picks up more than the newsletter. As usual, I have been reminded of friends and acquaintances from long ago; and have looked up some on the internet to see what has become of them. Some of them have simply moved on to other fandoms or other social media, or in one case being a town councillor in Glasgow. Others haven't posted anywhere I can see for a long time, at least under the name I know them by. Some author websites have gone completely, not even being used as an electronic billboard by some hosting company with the right to the domain name. And I feel a twinge of sadness, because although most of these people were not close friends they were still people I liked, and I will never know what happened to them.

So doing another "hi, still here", so people who only know me on this social media platform know I'm still around and safe.

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22 bees

 I never much liked the #prayfor... hashtag on Twitter. It always struck me as bandwagon-jumping and attention-seeking in the wake of a tragedy for many of those using it. I liked it even less five years ago tonight, when terror came to my adopted city once again. I glanced at my computer before going to bed, and saw something trending. I looked at the news and it was clear something bad was happening. When I got up the next morning, it was clear just how bad. 22 people dead.

Some things you shouldn't repeat on Twitter. On my way to work, my bus was passed by two unmarked black cars with blue lights behind the front grill but no sirens, moving very fast indeed. I said nothing about it online that day, because it was very clear where they were going and why, and you don't give terrorists advance warning if you have any common sense or decency.

My office is close enough to the Manchester Arena that we had press cars parked outside over the next few days. Some of my colleagues were delayed coming to work, because their normal route by train or tram or road was blocked. Victoria Station was a major crime scene. We had a constant reminder for days of what had happened. The entire office stood silent at the windows during the remembrance minute a week later. Yes, it's possible to cry silently. Most of us were.

The scars are healing for those who weren't directly affected, although they'll never heal for those who lost loved ones or were injured, and those who were there that night but got away physically unharmed. But we remember. It's what we can do for those who can't heal.

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Anzac Day, 2022

 At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.

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The website's back, and writing thoughts

 My professional (for certain values of professional) website is back up. I've even updated it with the somewhat belated news that all five in the original batch of reprints are now up, and also available in paperback, no less!

Amazon's recently started offering a hardback option in KDP, and I am very tempted to play with it, but it would need quite a bit of work, given the price I'd be unlikely to actually sell any, and I don't have the time and spoons at the moment for just messing about with it for fun. Given the setup cost v per page cost, I'm considering whether it would be nice to do omnibus volumes of the Lord and Master and Spindrift duologies, or alternatively put the two short stories in with Lord and Master 2, as Alex did me some covers for the shorts that could be used as dividers within the book.

I think for now the priority should be getting covers and then creating the reprint editions of some of my other Loose Id titles. I don't intend to do all of them; not least because I think Nice Tie could do with some heavy editing before being put back on sale. But I'd like to get the Buildup books and Promises to Keep back out there.

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That little unpleasantness

 Gorbachev's still alive. I wonder what he thinks about his long hard work on making the world, and Russia, less horrible frightening places to live in being trampled into dust?

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I'd like to have my website back, please

 My official website is currently returning a database error. Apparently my webhost bought a new server and is having fun bug-hunting. Oh joy. I suppose I could ask him to return it to the old handcoded and handloaded by FTP front page rather than the SQL version, as that still exists behind the Shiny, and indeed still has many pages not yet transferred to the SQL version, which task is how I discovered yesterday that the database version is down. I'm not sure I can be bothered, because it's not as if it gets many hits these days and with any luck it will be fixed sooner than I can remember how to use an FTP client, or indeed where I put my ftp client. One would never think that I used to do this stuff for fun, but that was another country, and besides the wench is dead; or at least not actively writing at the moment.

It's not as if I'm even writing much on my DreamWidth these days. I was going through past entries yesterday, and it's extremely obvious when my brain got fried and I couldn't look at a full size screen anymore. I'm doing a lot better now, but I've got out of the habit of sharing my thoughts in longer form than Twitter, and I don't have any writing related thoughts to share because I'm not currently writing myself and I'm also not keeping up with industry gossip, see "big screens make my brain hurt". But I do have at least one book review written but not yet posted, so I'd better do that next.

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