off-topic

I live in a field. Well, I live in a house, but it and a few other houses make up a tiny hamlet surrounded by fields. My back garden is itself a small field. It’s nice to live surrounded by countryside, but one of the drawbacks of this rural idyll is our internet connection. Our house is connected to the World Wide Web by a copper telephone line (via a British Telecom service), and it’s not a very good copper telephone line either. I joke that wet, hairy string would be just as useful. Our connection speed is, at best, about 5Mbps download and 0.4Mbps upload. That is not a typo – nought point four megabits a second. My dual ISDN line back in 2003 could just about manage that. At busy times it’s worse – a lot worse – as all the houses in our hamlet contend for whatever bandwidth we have back to civilisation. Evenings & weekends it has almost become a not-service. It is not broadband, it’s narrowband.

<<– Creating the Sourdough Starter

Making and Baking A Sourdough Loaf –>>

A couple of people have asked me to describe how I create the Sourdough bread that I often tweet about baking. It’s too much for a Facebook post, and waaaay too much for a twitter thread, so I’m putting it here on my blog. This is part one – you need something called a “Sourdough Starter” to make sourdough bread, this is how I create my starter. Part two will describe making an actual loaf of sourdough.

Something has been bothering me for a while. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it’s been depressing me. It’s you. Well, many of you.

<<<<<
<<<< Why we had to go into lock-down
<< What we could do to help ease social distancing

The UK government is now talking more in it’s daily briefings about what will come “next”, that is after we have seen the number of diagnosed cases & deaths continue to grow, plateau, and then fall. It will plateau & fall, so long as we all keep staying at home and limiting our social interactions. If we do not, we risk the virus spreading out of control again.

<<<< COVID-19 Basics: What it is & what it does to us
<<…. COVID-19 Outlook for the Month(s) Ahead
The Coming UK Peak and Beyond >>

Summary

The impact of COVID-19 on our society and our economy is going to be long and hard. I hope I am not the first to come up with this idea, but just in case…

<< COVID-19 Basics. What it is & what it does to us

  COVID-19: What can we do to Reduce Social Distancing >>

I thought I’d record what the scientific evidence and epidemiological modelling is saying about what is going to happen in respect of COVID-19 in the UK (and, to some extent, elsewhere) over the next weeks and months. As with my intro to COVID-19 this post is mostly “for me”. I’m sharing it but please, please, treat all of this post (not the science I link to!) with some scepticism.

Outlook for the months ahead >>
Reducing the need for social distancing by knowing who is immune>>>>
The coming UK Peak and Beyond >>>>>>

I decided to put together some information on COVID-19 purely for my own interest – but then decided I might as well put it on a blog post. I’m only going to link to what I feel are reputable sources, nothing from tabloid papers or people promoting conspiracy theories.

If you know of a good site I should include or there is an area I have not touched on that you would like more information on, please feel free to let me know.

I don’t really do politics on this blog, it’s often just too damned divisive. But not only am I angry (and vicariously ashamed) of Brexit but I have a strong suspicion of how things are going to go from now…

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