Animals of October

Bees across the feed, buzzing over the news; Manchester is making its stand again. Yesterday, Hannah and I went on a rare trip to our city centre for a (COVID-safe) visit to the cinema, passing not far from the place where our proud and industrious mayor had just delivered his press conference. Andy Burnham and pals are not happy because, as of Friday, Greater Manchester will be forced into Tier 3 lockdown by Whitehall with a measly £22m to support our most needy. I have a suspicion (and hope) that the negotiations will resume and a better deal will be reached over the next couple of days, but its fair to say, like everything else during this crisis, the government have totally fucked it.  Ten days ago, I was unsure as to whether Burnham was doing the right thing - I very much thought a return to full lockdown was the most important and needed thing as the figures of the second peak climbed ever upwards. But you can see the exasperation on Burnham's face, echoed across the faces of...

Cats with no concern for cinematography, Dogs, gangly, sprawled, a tangle of limbs and mouths, uncontainable within the frame. A hoisted guinea pig is just a brief white void with eyes. One moggy passes across the foreground of one square just before another trots along the background of another square and we might pretend, for a moment, that it is the same cat performing a merry teleportation trick in an effort to reclaim human attention. An unmuted person offers an opinion which is answered first by the yaps of their dog who believe some sort of conversation has begun. Why would it think otherwise? There's no-one else around.  OK, so many of us are quite royally sick of Zoom by now, but we can't deny that it has served us pretty well these past months. And the invasion of our animals into our little mise-en-scenes is never going to not be delightful. Perhaps such small furry moments have helped us paste over some of the cracks of our physical disconnection, and that counts fo...

I mentioned a few posts ago about the re-discovery of local green spaces during the first lockdown. Remember those heady days in late March? When the cold was leaving us and the rolling ticker of infection numbers was driving ever-upwards in dizzying amounts? When masks were a novelty and we all had to relearn how to wash our hands? It seems and feels like centuries ago. There was a strange luminescence to those days, even amongst all the horror of an encroaching pandemic. Our houses seemed to strain with the burden of being excessively lived-in, we became suddenly more attentive about the dullest of things: the shopping experience, the new possibilities of home-based workdays and homeschooling. And then there was this curious reconnecting with nature, our one and only constant friend. The one-hour-of-exercise-a-day mandate came echoing down the pipes as if offered by the coronavirus itself as a sort of partial ceasefire. Among the gloom, we caught glimpses of silver linings in the sh...

One of my favourite lock-down discoveries has been the Tabletop Simulator - a £15 game app that allows you to hook up online with strangers or friends to play all manner of excellent board games. It has your standard Chess and Draughts and Backgammon built in, and lots of folk use it for Dungeons & Dragons style adventuring, but it can also be used to play practically any modern board game you can think of as various clever users have created mods of everything from Settlers of Catan  to Twilight Imperium . There's been a boom in tabletop gaming across the last decade or so, with a rush of ever-more excellent and gorgeous games for casual parties or long hours of trading, battling, negotiating and the careful accumulation of Victory Points. I've been dipping my toes into this world for a while, and have come to love the rush of excitement of learning complicated rules and gleaning smart tactics towards things as simple as building a profitable farm, or as complex as interg...