Looking on the bright side again

+Thanks to Apollo magazine for this news . . . Just as the National Portrait Gallery is embarking on a major, multi-million rebuilding programme, who has the government appointed as one of its new trustees? None other than Chris ‘failing’ Grayling. This does not inspire much confidence that I will be able to visit the NPG in the remainder of my lifetime. What has Grayling got that compels such confidence in him? It is one of life’s mysteries.
 
+My blog yesterday on the absence of rainfall has been followed by a slight dampening from the heavens. This was in the forecast of course, so I’m not claiming to be as prescient as say, the President of the United States. But on the same day as some drops fell from the sky, up pops a report from Carbon Brief about climate change impacts on the growing issue of water stress for billions of people. Some of which people have governments that possess nuclear weapons. Might there eventually be a risk here? In the meantime, my water butts are very slowly being replenished.
 
+That quiet but often useful bit of BBC radio output, You and Yours did a story this lunchtime about how easy it is for scammers to use the new government ‘track and trace’ system to rob people. I thought this was quite a big story, but I didn’t hear any more about it later in the news. It seems the track and trace system has all the safeguards which may have been appropriate in 2001, but in 2020 clever tech-savvy criminals have moved on. Already people are being screwed out of millions. I have to say I have little confidence that the track and trace system as now introduced will do anything to assist us, quite the contrary. Malicious reporting (never mind the scammers) will set so many hares running one will have to discount to a great extent the suggestion that the greater populace should place their trust in it. I certainly have decided to have nothing to do with it. But since I’m still following the guidelines on social distancing, etc., why should I have to worry? Surely, we only need to worry about people with the mentality of Dominic Cummings—and such people often stand out in the street, so you can spot them and give them a wide berth. Meanwhile, as Keir Starmer is at last upping the ante a little, Johnson has the brass neck to suggest that Labour is undermining trust in the government’s efforts. Perhaps it’s just as well we live in a country with the world’s second lowest Covid-19 death rate. Hang on a sec . .