The Seven Virtues – or a guide to Skyssian attitudes
The Seven Virtues are how a good Skyssian models their behaviour. Told from infancy through the fairy tales, and reflected in the glorious deeds of their heroes, every Skyssian is aware of them. Origins of the Seven Virtues A while back I thought it might be useful to sketch out the core beliefs of Skyssian attitudes so that I could use them as guiding principles for how minor characters could be expected to act. They also help to set direction for officials and institutions, after all if they aren't virtuous who else would be? At the time I stole the Skyssian attitudes from the Old Norse. A sort of set of Viking Virtues. That gave me the first five below. The local Write Club prompt is to write a fairy tale for the July meeting. So, I thought there ought…
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Adjusting Away from Normal
Like everyone else I've had a turbulent month and I'm adjusting to the new normal. It is a new normal, although hopefully one that won't stay with us for long. Adjusting mentally is harder than it sounds. This is only the fourth blog post I've written on Themself in 2020, an average of one per month, quite far off my height of two a week. I've written more than four posts though this year. Most of them have been written in the last three weeks, since I've been at home. I've made an effort to keep a journal, with photos, of life in the pandemic. It's one of the things that keeps me relatively sane and functioning. Given the change in subject matter I put it on its own domain, although hosted on the same cloud server as this. You…
Into Darkness [WW2 SOE] – June Write Club Story
Into Darkness is the story I wrote for June's Write Club, which is a local group to encourage us to write and share feedback with each other. There were eight stories this month, which is the third time the group has met, but the first time I've managed to join. I did submit a story for the first time, and wrote one for the second time but it got way over the word count and I didn't send it in. I found it a very friendly and supportive group, and it was a pleasure to read the stories that the others had written. The theme was to write something involving a letter. Write Club meets on the second Saturday of the month, with the stories due in a week before that. Right now it's meeting via zoom, although that wasn't…
Hello, Hullo, Hallo [Poetry]
My daughter's writing challenge from school was to write a poem where the first word was Hello. I figured it might be fun to do this myself while she was doing it. So I wrote a villanelle inspired by both the challenge and by our current situation of keeping our social distance. This is a short poem about not being able to see the people that you love. Although I am in the house with the people that I love, I just felt it made the poem work better if the stanzas alternated like a conversation between people that were separated lovers. When reading it imagine each stanza being an exchange between two characters. The first two as a pair, then alternate until the last two are paired. No matter how much you miss people, follow the government advice for…
Modelling Covid-19 or How Long will lockdown last?
The other day I went looking for all the open source data on Covid-19 in the UK so that I could do some modelling on when the peak was likely to be reached and, by inference, when we might hope to be able to resume normal activities. When Will Lockdown End? I'll start with this, and you can ignore the caveats on why it's nonsense (which is what always happens with mathematic models). If the assumptions are accurate (I can guarantee that they're not), then by the end of July about 3 million people will have been infected and the first peak will have run its course. (See the graph below). If we're lucky August will be party season! Daily confirmed ( hospitalised) cases of Covid-19 and expected deaths over the next few months. Note that this is non-cumulative, but…