It’s thirty degrees outside and we’re all, including the cat, feeling languid. The internet is down for much of South London, which adds to the general sense of stolid malaise.
The past few days have been much more active. I’ve been buzzing around the house trying to make it a home bit by bit. It’s a tightrope doing the practicalities while basking in the glow of our fresh, new space. Try to sit in the airy new lounge without a care like you never could before, but also get that shoe rack and cutlery drawer insert ordered. When is the sofa arriving?
This morning I woke up in my own house to sunlight. I got up and took a shower, the water pressure was great. I sat at the kitchen table and listened to the news, and then practiced my Spanish for a while. I hung out some washing to dry. Nobody came along. I had forgotten how it feels to start your day quietly and at your own pace.
The weekend was an endless blur of stress and back strain, but we’re in here now, a home of our own. It is the greatest thing. We’ll have lunch in the garden today.
The Black Lives Matter protests have become the story of the day. Hundreds of thousands of people in cities all over the world have been demonstrating for over a week. We joined the end of a march in Brixton first, hearing about it from a friend who saw it pass through Kennington and cycling out to join the fray. It was the first crowd I’d been in in months. It made the fact that people were shouting in one voice even more striking. A man stood over the crowd with a megaphone and thanked them for assembling, spoke about the need for justice for those killed by police in the UK, and asked us to go home peacefully. The core of the group marched up Brixton Road and demonstrated in Windrush Square. We went to another march this Sunday, beginning as a protest at the American Embassy in Vauxhall and eventually marching over Vauxhall Bridge and to Parliament Square. Unlikely figures hung out of the windows of expensive apartment buildings in Pimlico to show support for the passing demonstrators, banging pots and pans. Many more windows were notably absent of support, given then everybody is probably home. In Parliament Square, I looked at the protestors with a colossal statue of Winston Churchill rising above them and wondered how long its presence would be tolerated; later the news reported his plinth had been annotated to include his status as a murderer.
We’ve picked a new house. It’s going to be a house! It’ll have a garden and stairs and space for the cat, space for us to work and relax. We’re leaving in three weeks unless some recalcitrant property manager or landlord gets in the way.
Outside, COVID-19 measures had begun to relax and things had begun drifting slowly toward normal. Then a few days ago the US exploded with protests against police violence in response to the murder of a man named George Floyd by a policeman in Minnesota. All over the country the authorities have responded with a police riot. Peaceful protestors, the press, and bystanders are being brutalised and arrested all over the country. Black Lives Matter marches are starting up here too; my employer has notified us we don’t need to use up holiday allocation to march. I’ve made some donations to bail funds and encouraged others to do the same.
I’ve been struggling to keep track of links to the relief funds established for Black Lives Matter activists across the USA who’ve been arrested, injured, or killed by the police. I’m throwing them up here, with sources linked at the end, to keep track of them for myself and for others who are struggling to pull them out of Twitter. For now, I’ve donated to the Brooklyn Bail Fund.
There’s now an even easier way to donate to a wider range of organisations fighting for this cause. Just make one larger donation on this page and it will be split automatically. Click here.
We’re getting ready to leave the house. The idea of moving out of this place and into one of our own, already a firm intention before lockdown began, has become a serious one again. Subtly depersonalised pictures of the room we’ve spent so much time in have been taken, and posted online. We are responsible for reviewing applications for our replacements. Young professional, woman, 27, media. Smiley headshot, second photo featuring Aperol Spritz. In the meantime I’m sitting in the armchair. I’m watching the kitten bound around with a mouse toy in her mouth, jumping over Emma who’s dozing in bed. I’m looking at the bookshelves, two of them double-stacked on every shelf. All of it says that the life we have is getting too big for the place we’re in.
The restrictions on movement were lifted a bit. We’re allowed to sit down in the parks rather than hurry through them on the purpose of exercise. Almost immediately, tiny groups in sunglasses and with beers in hand have appeared. We are also allowed to drive a little way for our recreation.
Emma drove us down to the cliffs in Sussex. We packed food and water into a rucksack, and rued that we couldn’t stop in for a preparation pint in the last town before the walk. We passed a dozen idyllic pubs in the glorious countryside. On the walker’s trail everything seemed normal again, huffing through meadows of wildflowers and up through tracks in copses — until another group was encountered and we all duly traced the circumference of a two metre circle between one another.
I wanted to quickly follow up to my recent post about personal infrastructure with some updates I made this week.
I got a warning last week that I was almost at the limit for my allocation of “build minutes” on Netlify. Upon investigation, I found that my personal website had been building too often and for too long on Netlify, and that soon they would start charging me for the overages. Looking at the logs and running the build locally I saw that the vast majority of the build time was down to preprocessing the many images in the “Photo” part of my site to compress and resize them. So, in the short term those have been removed; I wasn’t really presenting them very well anyway.
In some other countries they’ve been re-opening society, slowly. Here things are fraying; many are talking about making decisions for their own mental wellbeing all government advice besides. On Sunday we said, “We’ll see what the Prime Minister says tomorrow.”
“…If we don’t do it by those dates, and if the alert level won’t allow it, we will simply wait and go on until we have got it right.”
Note: There’s a follow up to this because I’ve since made more changes to the infrastructure of the site. Read more.
I’ve been slowly moving over to self-hosting more services and trying to balance that with personal convenience. This post is a quick summary of the current setup I have running to do the following:
My website is built on Hugo, a static suite builder written in Go. I like that all the content on my website can be markdown files with some front-matter, any extra data can be in simple JSON files, and the template system is very simple. I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking and playing with this Hugo site, but really it would work just fine without much work at all.
