...the buzzing of the bees in the cigarette trees

Those who decide these things have made May 20 World Bee Day. I'm sure the little busy buzzing pollinators are right chuffed to have a whole day to themselves to put all their feet up, have a long lie in bed and let the world serve them scones with jam and cream ... 

Margot took this.

The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la ...

 

...Breathe promise of merry sunshine

Saturday all shiny and bright and temperatures climbing nicely to a decent 21°C, not too hot (for me) and not too cold, shirt-sleeved Goldilocks temperatures. Sunday and Monday 8°C with a nithering North Easter  off the North Sea and back to winter togs. This is springtime in dear old England; teasing temptation followed by shivering disappointment. Still the May blossom  is out and filling the locked down land or at least my street with a snow like covering which might be actual snow if it gets any damn colder.

Not quite their finest hour

I wonder what future generations will think of the folk who, just the other day, celebrated the bravery and sacrifice of those who defeated Hitler's vision of Aryan supremacy by cowering under house arrest, socially distanced and clamouring for more repression (Keep the lockdown until there's a vaccine!) while, no doubt, playing Vera Lynn with the sound turned up to 11. I'm told there was a toast to the nation at some time in the afternoon and Queenie spreading the Love, perhaps it's not so odd that I missed it.

A little bit special

Whenever I see this tree on my way back from the shop I say to myself I must take a picture of it in its springtime glory. Finally I had my phone in my pocket and so here it is. I think it's a maple of some sort but don't trust me on trees, certainly stands out from all the green stuff round here.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."     

                                                                                                      Mark Twain

We are told that the Fat Controller will be making an announcement on Sunday that might be the beginning of the end (or as he will no doubt phrase it the end of the beginning) of the house arrest phase of the great economic crash of 2020. The narrative all along has been to lock folk up to protect the NHS (and save lives as well it's just that that didn't work out so well, nor could it as we'll see). You can see how proud some folk are, nay not just proud but utterly convinced that their weeks of home confinement have somehow saved the NHS. But as any first grader could tell them this is delusion. There is no evidence to prove this nor can there be. There is no evidence that weeks of watching Netflix or whatever has saved a single life. No evidence for that but plenty that the whole thing has been a colossal wrecking job on the economy and the health and wealth of millions. The figures show that deaths linked to Covid-19 peaked on April 8 which means given accepted incubation periods that infections peaked before the lockdown came into force. Other evidence has demonstrated that the infection rate, the infamous R₀ had fallen below 1 before the lockdown. It appears that the campaign of hand washing and mild social distancing had done the job of killing off whatever was causing the infections but I couldn't say that for sure since I'm not going to ascribe effects to causes; that's not my job. 
No that silly mistake will be left to ministers, politicians, and the media who all should know better, and the vast majority of people who can know no better. They will claim that their sacrifice has paid off, that though thousands have died the totals were nowhere near those of the model produced by the now utterly discredited lockdown lothario Professor Ferguson of Imperial College, London. (I've read that other models elsewhere were equally stupid and subject to constant revision as the figures failed to rise but the Imperial College model was the one used here and it has been found to be a school boy joke riddled with amateur errors and produces utter rubbish, garbage.). They will gloss over the rise in excess deaths that cannot be ascribed to Covid-19 even with directives from Government to be as widespread and liberal as possible in ascribing cause of death to Covid-19. People are dying with Covid-19 who have never been tested, any old person dying with pneumonia has Covid-19 tacked onto the death certificate nolens volens. Which of course means the figures are unreliable and exaggerated.
As to the actual test, what can anyone say, that is anyone with a modicum of scientific knowledge of how things should be done. In the absence of any purified virus to compare assays against a huge leap of faith has been made that the results obtained after complicated manipulation of the sample of snot obtained by ramming a cotton bud up the patients nose (RNA extraction and reverse transcriptase, and multiple though variable amounts of DNA multiplication treatments) actually represent a link to the alleged culprit virus Covid-19. Though thousands of tests have been carried out no-one can say for sure they have measured anything real at all. It's all as I say reliant on believing the method to be infallible despite numerous reports of 80% false positives and almost as many false negatives. A reasonable person, never mind one with a PhD in Biotechnology (OK that's me, you can call me Dr Bill from now on ...), might be led to say the test was not fit for purpose.
So dear reader the shore is in sight... we will be told that all our suffering was worth it but we must not let down our guard (against what? The wizard of Oz? surely not Covid-19 which has peaked, is very uninfectious and has a mortality roughly that of flu, which we annually ignore though thousands die with it), that the Government's actions have been effective (post hoc ergo propter hoc gets 'em every time), that the Fat Controller walks on water (but keeps his distance). We will in short be lied to again and do you know what the lie will be swallowed (yum, yum it's just what they long to hear) and folk will go out tonight and applaud themselves like performing seals but there's more than a faint aroma of foul treachery in the air.

This post is a pile of pants

I admit this was not what I expected to find while out and about the other day.  I don't know who did it, what it's about or any of that stuff that usually follows a photo in this blog. It's on the wall of the dinosaur museum now, like so much these days, temporarily closed.

There was a time in the mid-90s when the phrase "this is a pile of pants" became what they nowadays term viral, common  jargon amongst a certain class of individual, mainly young and hip (showing my age). I don't know if this was just a UK thing (where pants, of course, mean underpants, why would you call your trousers pants? makes no sense but I digress...) or whether it spread across to other English speaking parts of this rocky planet in a obscure solar system. Like many other fads it arrived (from radio DJs as I recall), became ever so common (and annoying), and then faded away just as quickly as it arrived. Does anyone use this phrase any more? Apart from me just now.

Family Fun

On my way back from the shops I stopped to take a picture of the setting sun and the trees on Cottingham Road and this family of cyclists came from out of nowhere and were gone before I could thank them for making the scene just a little bit more interesting.

I've posted from roughly this spot before; it's five minutes from home.

Jaz Cafe Bar, Lowgate, Hull

You might look at this and think that looks like bit like an old fashioned bank and you'd right it was once a bank but now it's a temporarily closed coffee bar. A quick check on the old Google shows that, as I thought, it's a listed building, the details are all here if you want 'em.

Let a thousand flowers bloom somewhere else

I think I last showed this patch of the city of culture, Blackfriargate, some time ago. Back then it had been allowed to do its own thing for years ... I was surprised to see what had sprung up here. I knew there were plans, I just hadn't been round here for a while ... I know it was after all clearance land, a perfect brownfield site and must have been built on before so the loss of wildflowers and things of nature shouldn't really give such a sense of loss should it? I guess I make a terrible capitalist or maybe I'm just going soft in this stupid lockdown (which as you see I'm ignoring). We can't live on pretty wildflowers or views of old churches, Arco must have its new offices (or so it says) and cars, well cars need parking spaces and petrol and roads and free people to drive them ...

and speaking of free people ... I read that the vast majority of folk in the UK are against being liberated from their house arrest. They are scared, in many cases absolutely petrified, of going back to normal activity. I never thought I'd see the day when brainwashing by politicians, media and civil servants but mainly the damned, unforgivable NHS and widespread simple ignorance would combine to destroy the free will of so many. Gah! A plague on the lot of them ... oh yeah.

Bottle Feeder

No, it's not some modern sculpture based on the Jonah myth but a mere rubbish bin. This, close by the now closed (temporarily) and somewhat despairing fish tank known as the Deep, is a receptacle for plastic bottles. Someone more eco-friendly and less sceptical than myself might have shown all the do-goody-save-the-panet-from-plastic signs that accompany this but I couldn't be bothered.

When every day seems like yet another Sunday it's difficult to keep track but I believe that the weekend in black and white should be here if not it'll be along shortly.

Bargains Galore

Today's May Day theme is Shopping. Hmmm. A walk round town this afternoon (yes a sightseeing trip, first in weeks, nothing had changed and yet everything had changed) was really quite depressing. So many businesses closed and quite unlikely to reopen any time soon. I read that local businesses were looking forward to getting back to normal (this was a few weeks ago). Given that even before the ongoing collective collapse of stout parties Hull's shopping experience was a shrinking affair with dozens of empty sites (as I've bored the world with on many occasions) I don't think "normal" is going to be much fun at all. Still not everywhere was closed ...