Not that working isn’t a daily joy but –

Not too early to start on the cliches. Photo from the train as it travels between the Hutt Valley and Wellington. When the Sun is just coming up and the harbour is calm it is just lovely.

Sadly everyone else on the train is glued to their phone and taking the view for granted.

Our talented friend Holly has baked The Duchess a perfect birthday cake for a crazy dog lady – we might need to shorten the ears but otherwise spot on! (gluten free too)

Our poor Penny has been to the groomers and had the doggy equivalent of a pudding bowl haircut (millennials ask an old person)

She had some matting behind her ears but we hadn’t expected the groomer to completely shave them.

Wor Lass and I have been absolutely gutted all last night (ruining the buzz of her birthday) and all today. It will take months to grow back too. Anyone know of a pet shop selling ear muffs?

Celebrating a big zero birthday with The Duchess today.

Once she’s finished her weekly Citizens Advice shift – dispensing wisdom and tough love to her subjects whether they want it or not – we’re heading out for lunch followed by an Escape Room session. (If I haven’t posted again in 2 weeks send a search party in to Xcape in Lower Hutt.)

Hopefully we’ll have a better day than we had 10 years ago, waiting at the British Embassy in New York for emergency passports to get home after some plonker managed to lose our passports …

I’m still working through the Factfulness book on the commute, and it’s exciting reading. My expectations of how humanity is doing is completely different to what the actual data shows! The great news is that we’re actually doing far better than we think.

The authors publish a website called Gapminder.org, on which they illustrate their points via a collection of lovely interactive graphs.

Take this one for example, showing the spread of global household incomes across a scale, those in extreme poverty on the left through to the wealthiest on the right. I’ve moved it back to 1970, the year of my birth, to give an example of the clear split between the rich and poor and in line with our typical views of “how things are”.

https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=1970;;&chart-type=mountain

Now drag the slider bar beneath the graph to move the date forward to the present day and notice how it changes :-

• Where the “bulge” (ie majority of humans) moves along the line and how the gap between rich and poor changes this century – what does that mean about current lifestyle for the majority of humans?
• How much the bulge grows over time – how much safer has the World become, given that the number of babies per household drop dramatically as income and education grows?
• Which coloured segment (continent) grows the most over time – where will the majority of people be from in the future, and what will that do for shifting the balance of power?

Of course this doesn’t mean too many people are living in hellish conditions or dying unnecessarily, that would be naive and foolish. But graphs like this – and many others you can view on the site – do show how dramatically and quickly things have improved for us, not by fluke or accident but by hard work and co-operation between nations around the World.

A Poem by David H. Bodecott

This is the tale of my friend Jack,
Had an affair behind his wife’s back,
He thought that she would never discover,
That he had got a secret lover,
But she did find out and she was vexed,
You’ll never guess what she did next,
When he went to bed and fell asleep,
Into the bedroom she did creep,
She took a knife with a very sharp edge,
And with it cut off his meat and two veg,
But I’m glad to say Jacks much improved,
Since he had his manhood removed,
Although bereft of all desire,
He sings Falsetto in a male voice choir.

Saturday morning in Maidstone Park, sun just starting to melt the frost. One of my favourite times of the week.

This has been my shortlist of favourite tunes picked up in the previous quarter, effectively the soundtrack to the Coronavirus Lockdown. Some of it is new, a lot of it is old (Harry Nilsson’s been dead since 1994). Some of it you’ll hate, but the odd thing might get your foot tapping. Enjoy!

https://play.google.com/music/playlist/AMaBXykDzYdCW5fl5LKja7ylzbq5XhLaMmf2HpyV3dMR3rRgmTeBTvy1dhGiWcnkHHXAXijTwL2xYocGyEqsEzgDth7mXCCIvg%3D%3D