Yes, I forgot to post yesterday. I was watching Hamilton, which is a very powerful piece of musical theatre about a deeply problematic subject. Daveed Diggs is superb in it, but then you knew that.

Today there was an actual Grand Prix, with a great finish, and the local boy came in 3rd. Go Lando! Motor racing is a bizarre thing for Somerset to be good at, given that our roads are highly unsuited to racing, but we might just have another World Champion in the making.

Also today we had another fun WiFi SciFi event. Thanks as always to Anne for organising it.

If the media are to be believed, most of the UK population spent the weekend in the pub. Thankfully none of them will be coming home here, and if they truly want to gain their freedom (from this mortal coil) who am I to stop them?

The contrast between the strict security and hygiene in place at the Grand Prix, and the “let’s all grab a pint or ten together” attitude of the UK government could not be more stark. Our country would be better off being run by a bunch of petrolheads.

Formula 1 is back! Today has just been practice, and of course there are no fans at the Red Bull Ring circuit, but there are actual cars being driven by actual human beings on track. You may not have missed this, but I have.

Interestingly the sport is going out of its way to be socially responsible. Everyone actually attending races gets tested regularly. Most people are wearing masks. And the Mercedes team has adopted an all-black livery for the year in support of Black Lives Matter. This is not what one might expect from a macho, big-money sport.

There’s an England v West Indies test match due to start on Wednesday.

And Hamilton is now available on Disney+.

So basically I’m very happy staying at home and watching TV, which is just as well because pubs are opening in the UK tomorrow for the first time in months.

Wizard’s Tower accounts done, including another royalty payout for Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion.

Quite a bit of reading done, some of which is paid work.

And now I am going to make a loaf of bread.

Interestingly there is no update of COVID-19 data from the government today. Normally the daily figures are posted around 4:00pm. It is now almost 9:00pm and there’s nothing. That suggests that the news is bad.

The first of the month is usually an admin day for me. I get to spend it doing backups, accounting and so on. I haven’t done the Wizard’s Tower accounts yet because it is Canada Day across the Atlantic and consequently no one is at work at Kobo to run their June accounts reports.

I have put in a request to run a party at Worldcon. I wonder what that might be for?

I have also booked up for Virtual World Fantasy. After all, I can. (It is in Utah this year so I would not have been able to attend physically.)

The big news in the outside world today is of a major piece of dishonesty by the UK government. Their reporting of COVID-19 cases has been divided into two groups, the so-called “pillar 1” and “pillar 2”. Pillar 1 consists of the results of tests performed by government agencies. Pillar 2 consists of the results of tests performed by private contractors. A week or so ago there were very few pillar 2 tests. Now there are a lot, but they are not included in the official government statistics.

The official statistics say that new cases of COVID-19 have been steady at around 1000 per day for a while, and have been dropping slowly. But when you include the pillar 2 tests you see that infections are rising rapidly and the current rate is around 5000 per day.

This is not yet being relfected in the death tallies, but we know that the virus takes a while to incubate and people don’t die immediately. It seems like a spike in deaths is just around the corner.

Interestingly the rise in new cases seems to be quite localised. As you may have heard, Leicester has been very hard hit. So have a few locations in Wales. Mostly this seems to be a result of people being rushed back to work and employers not putting proper precautions in place. I’ve seen reports that at least one employer in Leicester ordered staff into work even though they were sick.

The government will doubtless blame it all on Black Lives Matter protests, even though the locations of the outbreaks are not strongly correlated with major demonstrations.

Right now there doesn’t seem to be any serious rise in cases in the South West, but I will keep my eye on the situation.

What have I done today? Hmmm…

I did a bunch of trans stuff on social media.

I answered a lot of emails, mainly Diversty Trust work. It is good to see that ramping up again.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do online training effectively. My thanks to a bunch of academic friends on Twitter for sharing the learning that is being sent their way.

I finished writing a thing for next year’s LGBTHM, which involved reading a PhD thesis about “sex changes” in 1930s Britain.

I gave a talk on trans history to a trans youth group.

And I finished the June issue of Salon Futura.

There were a few more things as well, but that will do, I think.

Meanwhile in the so-called real world, the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, suggested on Radio 4 that cis women need to be protected from the likes of me. Apparently he has also challenged Bozo to 50 press-ups at the next Prime Minister’s Question Time. I think I can join every other woman in Britain in echoing Nicola Sturgeon’s, “Oh for goodness sake…”. There is not enough facepalm in the world. Who let men be in charge of anything?

The most significant event of today is that I have discovered that Duolingo has finally added a Finnish pack to their list of languages. I am so there. I doubt that I will ever be able to speak Finnish well because I will have trouble pronouncing the various vowel sounds correctly, but at least I should be able to learn to read it, and to understand something of what people are saying.

I have a huge collection of back issues of Thätivaeltaja to practice my reading on.

One of the Sunday papers apparently featured a picture of Bozo doing press-ups to prove how fit he is. He was wearing a suit (minus jacket) and tie. And of course it was a still picture so there’s no proof he actually did any. Goodness only knows how patriotic British people manage to avoid dying of embarassment. Queen Victoria is doubtless spinning in her grave. How on Earth is anyone supposed to write satire about this nonsense?

It has been rather warm in the UK over the past few days, and having no air conditioning I have resorted to siesta. I’ve been working in the morning and evening, and sleeping in the afternoon. It seems to work.

The inevitable result of the combination of good weather and people being furloughed is that huge numbers of people are heading to the beaches. That seems unlikely to help with virus containment, but Bozo lost all moral authority on that subject when he refused to sack Cummings. And in any case he doesn’t care. As usual he will assume that if people die that will prove that they were unfit to live.

The 7-day rolling average of UK deaths ticked up again today. And we are back over 1000 new cases per day.

Odd as it may seem, I spent part of today doing convention planning. While most of the forthcoming events have had their face-to-face component cancelled, several are continuing online and I need to work out how best to represent Wizard’s Tower at them. There will be announcements in due course.

For some time now I have been tracking the state of the C-19 pandemic in the UK via the official government data portal. I’ve been a little suspicious of it, but not greatly so. Yesterday, however, I saw people citing this site which claims a death toll from yesterday of 280, as compared to 171 on the government site. As the total number of deaths are the same on both sites, I presume this is another case of the government sneakily allocating some of the new cases to previous days so that the “today” figure doesn’t look so bad.

Today, however, people were sharing a leaked report from Public Health England which claims that the actual numbers are much higher. In particular for June 18th, when the government claims there were only 1346 new cases of infection, the actual number was 7000. That’s terrifying, especially with Lockdown restrictions being lifted.

The trouble is that this government lies so often, and so transparently, that no one believes anything they say any more.

Thankfully I have no need to go anywhere except to Tesco once a week.

Wow. 100 days of not seeing any of my friends in person, and not leaving the small town where I live. I’d like to say something profound, but really it hasn’t been that hard. I’ve been constantly in touch with friends around the world by email, social media and Zoom meetings. I’ve continued to have work. I have probably gained weight and saved money. I’m upset not to have got to Sweden, Canada and Finland as planned, and not to be going to Croatia, but right now it seems that international travel will come back eventually so I’m OK about it.

As I have said elsewhere, I am far more afraid of the government than of the virus.

I have got to the end of She-Ra, season 5. If Noelle Stevenson doesn’t get a Hugo for that there is no justice in the world.

I have done some work today, honest. I have also watched 8 episodes of She-Ra season 5. I’m going shopping tomorrow. I need more tissues.

Today was the first day I can remember since Lockdown started that I didn’t have urgent things to do. Obviously I have a huge backlog of things I should do, but nothing urgent. I am so very tired.

Fortunately New Zealand is out of Lockdown by now so there is live rugby on TV. Also I read about half of a novel. And I have started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. Yes, I know, I’m very late to that. But it is now on Netflix so I can watch it and I’m doing so.

I haven’t seen anything much about the outside world today, but I assume that the government will have been lying about something.