As Cyberpunk 2077 makers CD Projekt Red apologise to fans today for releasing a game that doesn’t work properly, I am remembering my dad’s total outrage the first time he purchased a game for my mum (I think it may have been a Rollercoaster Tycoon game) that came on a disk but was buggy enough that it would only work with a downloaded game update. “They sold a game that doesn’t work”, he cried, aghast. It’s now pretty much standard practice to let games go out essentially unfinished. Updates are a feature for the bugs.

We had PCs early in my family because my parents used them in their business as soon as they could get their hands on them, but we never had the most expensive ones and we didn’t replace them very often — when I got my first one in my room, some time in the early 90s, it was one that had already seen some use in the family business beforehand, and I didn’t have my own modem for a few more years after that. I knew if I wanted to get a new game there was a very good chance it wouldn’t run without some serious video and sound card deliberations, and often actual physical moving of the…oh no what were they called, little thingumies that join something together. Hardware isn’t my thing. Anyway. It was always technical and there was always a really good chance the game wouldn’t work or I’d have to wait til my birthday for a new sound card. Monkey Island 3 was probably the flashiest game I ever got working on one of my own PCs.

On the upside, once you got the game working, it stayed working and was the same game until technology moved on and first you had no floppy disk drive and then your old games weren’t compatible with Windows 98 and on and on it goes. I still have some of my original PC games on CDs and look a them wistfully on occasion, aware that it’s almost never worth the effort of trying to get them to run. In fact my current laptop doesn’t have a disk drive, I notice.

Today I bothered to restore an iPad 3 that I’ve scavenged from my son who now has a newer one. I went to get some of the time management games I used to play a lot in the BeforeTwitter times. But the problem with the old iPad games is that you’re entirely at the mercy of the App Store. Sometimes your iPad is too old to play the available versions of the games, and sometimes the game is too old to run on the current version of the iPad, so you may have bought a game that you’ll never be able to access again. But the other thing that happens is the games continually evolve, so whatever version you can get now might be totally unrecognisable from the one you paid for 5 years ago. I’ve just tried to get a game I paid for and loved 9 years ago and it’s “no longer available”. I’m sure I’ve agreed to that in the T&Cs but it seems bizarre to me that you can pay for the use of something and then have to accept that it’s not even a thing any more.

One of my favourite Playstation 3 games was LittleBigPlanet, I used to stay up all night creating levels. But eventually I got frustrated with the game — I didn’t have time to play very often, and every time I went to turn it on, it wouldn’t run without first installing a very slow update (which used up the 20 minutes I had available to play) and a lot of the updates significantly changed the nature of the game. Then of course PS4 didn’t run PS3 games anyway and the PS3 stopped reading disks and then I somehow lost access to the account I’d used to make all my levels so I can’t get to them any more whatever I do because nothing on Heaven or Earth will reset that password without access the mystery email address.

In the loft I have a perfectly good GameCube that I would set up and run again if I could remember where I had put the games I want to play on it, safe in the knowledge that as long as the console still functions and the disk isn’t scratched, it’ll be the exact same gaming experience as before, even if it looks a little bit rustic through my HD-jaded eyes. If, and that’s a reasonably sized if, the TV still has the right input socket.

The concept of owning a video game has shifted dramatically over the last 30 years. The big console games have gone through phases of being difficult to re-sell or lend even if you’ve bought a physical copy, and the shift to downloads-but-at-full-cost means you can only have as many games as you have storage capacity for, and regularly have to make choices about which games to shelve for the time being — with no guarantee they’ll be the same game when you return to them, but certainly a guarantee that you can’t sell them on, which was always part of the value of the physical copy.

Evidently I’m just rambling without direction here, but anyway the Cyberpunk 2077 disappointment today is a reminder that video gaming has always been as frustrating as it is addictive.

*title needs work

This is understandable - nations are flawed. Governments include people with reprehensible views. A glance through even recent history can be a source of great shame. Anyone with a set of morals or political ideals will never be able to look at the whole and say "this country only does good", and with the strive for purity in the modern Left, it can be very hard to accept imperfection, let alone cataclysmic flaws.

The rejection of nationalism invites derision in its place. If you know your country is flawed, has done harm, is doing harm, and you know that misplaced national pride propagates that harm and the international perception of your country, it is tempting to counter nationalism with the argument that all forms of national pride are shameful, specifically in your own country, and maybe some others that are the most aligned with yours. Likely you wouldn’t move to a different country, you’re probably sharp enough to realise that all populations and governments are flawed (some more so than others but that will fluctuate over time).

Flag waving, patriotism and national pride are inevitable and quite probably necessary for countries to exist independently at all (do we need them? The alternative, down the line, is presumably a global dictatorship or global anarchy, neither of which are likely to work out well for anyone but a dominant group…there must be some great minds dedicated to the potentials of a borderless world but I can’t see it myself).

If you only ever counter national pride with negativity, you hand all the power to people who won’t do that and you provide no motivation for nationalists to join you in being proud of the good things you country could do well, for example international aid, hosting a globally respected science community, being home to some of the world’s best educational establishments, having a rich history of music, comedy and theatre.

These are building blocks, you don’t have to claim they make your country better than others but if you refuse to celebrate the fact that the country you are contributing to is capable of doing good things, should be proud of them and should build on them, you are handing national pride and your country’s future to people who don’t care about those things. And they will always hold the power because you can’t win votes with "this place and its people are no good and always will be."

This isn’t how to make chicken soup, it’s just what I did last time I made it and it came out nice. All the other chat is at the end.

All in, this takes about 2 hours to make.

Ingredients

1. Whatever’s left of your chicken carcass & any leftover meat after a roast
2. Some peppercorns (6 in this instance)
3. Salt
4. Celery (2 stalks)
5. Carrots (3)
6. Pearl Barley (half a cup? Ish?)
7. Butter (as much as you dare)
8. Garlic (3 cloves)
9. Leek (some)
10. Herbs (I used dried Herbs de Province because I couldn’t be bothered to go back in the garden for fresh herbs).

Method

First remove most of the rest of the good meat from the chicken and put it aside. Then put all the bones and skin in a big pan cover with water and add salt and the whole peppercorns.

Simmer for about an hour, and then use tongs to take out all the bits you can find. Leave them to cool.

Strain everything else that’s left in the pan through a colander into another container and pick out anything you like the look of. Discard the dregs but keep the liquid on one side, let’s call it stock now.

Chop up the celery, peeled carrots, leek and garlic however you want (I chopped the leek finely because the soup was mainly for my fussy children), and soften with some (or a lot of, in my case) butter in the soup pan over a gentle heat for a good while, so the leek and celery start to go a bit golden.

Add all the good bits of chicken you retrieved earlier, and pour in the stock. Then, when the bones have cooled down enough to handle, pick off all the good bits of meat left on the bones and add those too. You can get rid of the bones now. Also add the pearl barley. I never know how much to put in, so ‘some’ is a good amount.

Flavour according to taste — “seasoning” seems to just mean chuck a load of salt in, but obviously taste it as you go to make sure you don’t overdo it. I cooked mine for about 40 minutes (until the barley has gone soft, basically) and added some dried herbs and ground pepper towards the end.

Done.

The Chat

Do other people still boil up the carcass of a chicken after a roast to make soup like their mother always did or am I a relic of a bygone age?

I hate having to scroll past all the chat at the beginning of a recipe when all I want to know is whether I have the ingredients and how long it’s going to take. Anyway this recipe is here not because I am good at cooking but because among the 2500 people telling me how they make stock (very informative, I don’t think there is any information missing here), quite a few people asked me my soup recipe. I don’t really have an exact one but I’ve typed this out anyway because this soup did turn out quite well so why not. Other soups are available.

This particular roast chicken worked out well too. I rubbed it with fresh rosemary, sage, parsley and thyme from my garden, chopped up and mixed with some crushed garlic and some slightly melted butter, and cooked it at about 150°C for the first hour and then turned the oven up to 180°C to finish it off and cook the potatoes. I use a meat thermometer so I’m not all that particular about cooking times.

I will, naturally, be upping my stock-making game next.

I’ve revisited a blog post I wrote almost 12 years ago, inspired by the news today that TFL have once again removed a Banksy effort from their property. According to TFL the cleaners didn’t know it was by Banksy.

Here’s a similar example from Bristol from 2007:

Bristol council had ordered the preservation of all of Banksy’s work, but council workers removed this one because to them it looked like graffiti, which it is their job to remove. Not all councils have the same policy — I read that one council had ordered the removal of any Banksy stencil work, and Westminster Council recently had one mural removed because it had been painted without permission of the owner of the wall, although this article seems to say “The owner will have this artwork removed as soon as we find out who the owner is.” I digress.

What has always bothered me about Banksy, rather than the easy-target simplistic politics, is it’s never been the quality of the art that makes his work valuable, any more than having Jade Goody’s name on a perfume made it smell nicer. The blame for his art being regularly removed by people who couldn’t tell the difference between a Banksy masterpiece and run of the mill vandalism is somehow attributed to the people doing the removing, and never to the quality of the art. And the assignation of the celebrity status that makes his art valuable has, as far as I can tell, very little to do with the quality of his work. (The Goody comparison carries over here, also, but the original blog was written at the height of her controversy, and had some more comments to make about how those who assign celebrity status also lead us to believe in a false sense of familiarity with what is effectively a set of character traits of a media persona that doesn’t in any way represent reality).

Here’s a fun example of a Council deliberating over removing what seemed to be a fake Banksy. To surmise, someone drew something on a wall and signed it ‘Banksy’. “A city council spokesman said he doubted the work was a genuine Banksy and was likely to be removed.” It is annoyingly apparent that it makes absolutely no difference to people whether the artwork is any good (in this case I’d say not, but I’d say the same about this one). It only matters who did it. If anyone else did it, it’s abominable graffiti and must be removed. If Banksy did it, it’s worth money, makes people happy and can stay.

Has the world only enough space for one subversive artist? Yes — Banksy’s filling the role, there really isn’t any need for any more thank you. Don’t get me wrong, if I had my way, no one would be encouraged to draw on other people’s walls.

It’s not his fault, but subversiveness, in my book, does not go hand in hand with international celebration and over-valued art. Some of the wall art is quite visually appealing, though his political statements seem a bit obvious (a bit petrolly) for the main part. I just can’t help feeling that he is just one of a great many people who use art to question society’s values, and there’s no real reason why he, of all of them, has been plucked for international stardom.

* Also maybe don’t be in the middle of massive constitutional upheaval and a bitter culture war.
** Perhaps just from affected areas to begin with but given people are infectious long before they are symptomatic, maybe that wouldn’t be enough?

Some of this (2–4) seems to have happened in Greece which is now lifting lockdown measures after a mere 150 COVID deaths (amazing), but to compare the UK to Greece, which we must, we need to assess the relative impact on both countries of closing down anything from socialising, tourism, business travel and more. Quarantining or preventing people entering the country in Greece in March is not comparable to doing the same in the UK. The impact on business and tourism would be immense. That’s not to say the UK shouldn’t have done it, but it is to say that it would have been a monumental thing to do back when it would have been impactful to do it.

The UK’s health system, battered as it is by austerity and bad politics, was able to withstand a peak far higher than Greece’s could withstand, so the risk to the NHS was measured on that basis. The knock on effect of dedicating our entire health system to emergencies-only for this period will be felt for years to come — I hope can be mitigated by good spending and management going forward, and I worry that it won’t.

The UK’s death toll is horrific. The continuing spread is horrific. The situation in care homes is horrific. The lack of equipment for the people who have to care for the sick is horrific. When official excess mortality figures from comparative economies can be fully compared for this period it may well be confirmed that for the first wave of this disease, we suffered far worse than our peers. An inquiry may clearly point to our government’s management during the crisis as the cause of this, or it’s possible the blame could be mostly laid on poor planning and management in advance. Factors unique to the UK as a densely populated, business-heavy hub of travel may also have played a role. It’s also possible that we will see we suffered worse overall, when all is tallied up, when this is in the past. We don’t and can’t know that yet.

There is no vaccine and no hope of one being available in less than a year, maybe longer. It is not unreasonable to look at the cost to health and quality of life of maintaining or dropping any and all lockdown options over the course of the next year. Every option should be assessed not only on its potential to limit the impact of the virus but also its impact on the ability of the people and businesses of the UK to generate revenue and for individuals to keep healthy. The money the country makes pays for the services that mitigate the impact of poor health and unemployment. These things do matter. Discussing the cost of lockdown measures and the impact they will have isn’t the same thing as choosing to sacrifice the vulnerable to this disease. Both things need to be weighed up in every decision.

On garden centres: Supermarket-sized shops with large outdoor areas, big employers whose stock will be laid to waste if it can’t be sold soon, whose employees won’t have a job to come back to if that happens. Yes there’s an inequality between the haves and have nots when it comes to having a garden (though it does not necessarily follow that someone who lives in a place where gardens are cheap is doing better in general than everyone who lives in a place where they are not), but there are rational arguments for opening them, it doesn’t have to be part of a culture war.

On VE Day parties and gatherings in parks and beaches: The people partying in the street aren’t the real culprits, that happened because lockdown-reduction ideas were floated irresponsibly. We do need the government to spell out and justify their next moves, but it is absolutely inevitable that most touted plans will be handled irresponsibly by the press and, it follows, sections of the public. As being outside is allowed, and because the consequences of being casual at best regarding social distancing are invisible to most people, the boundaries do gradually fray, limits are pushed.

Outdoor gatherings flouting lockdown violations are incredibly hurtful to people who can’t visit their loved ones in hospital, or have a proper funeral for those they have lost, but dispassionate, rational thinking will tell you why those rules are in place, and are easier to make people stick to. Large indoor gatherings of people who have travelled from different communities are clearly out of the question at the moment, as is even taking the slightest risk of bringing coronavirus into a hospital ward. We do need clearer guidelines about what we can and can’t do outdoors, we need police forces across the country to be properly and universally briefed on the rules and their powers, and we need the media to back that up by spreading the right message. Whether we can have that I don’t know.

On language and communication: Government messaging has been poor. They have aimed, I think, for manipulation rather than clarity, knowing that they have a suspicious, divided public to control, and also self-interested media. I’ve seen a lot of anger at ideas being unofficially briefed to selected outlets, to be discussed and torn apart and then reshaped in-house before becoming policy. It’s manipulative and unpleasant. It might be effective, I can’t really measure it.

The biggest cockup in messaging, in my opinion, was when the government announced its lockdown measures. The Prime Minister said you could go to work if you couldn’t work from home. The government website said the same. The government’s widespread advertising for all that evening said you can only go to work if you are a keyworker, and the message absolutely stuck. A lot of businesses immediately closed down unnecessarily, and a heck of a lot more people got furloughed than the government was expecting. A lot of people who believed only keyworkers were allowed to work gave other people a hard time for continuing to do their jobs. GDP will be affected more than the Government calculated for.

This is what they mean when they say the ‘Stay at home’ message was too effective. Not that the virus has been eliminated, but that people stopped working when that was never the plan. I’m not going to form an opinion about the new ‘Stay Alert’ message until its meaning has been clarified, but I assume it means ‘alert to risk’ as opposed to ‘complacently leaning across me in the supermarket to get to the beans’.

I’d like to see our government’s long-term thinking, and see it compared to France and Germany’s plans for how to get through the year ahead. I don’t think our leaders have been clear enough on what their thinking is, what predictions and interpretations they are working with, and what their goals are. But I also don’t think that information would be responsibly handled by the press on on the social media battlefields so in many ways I understand the manipulative approach they have attempted, even though it doesn’t help me personally understand what they think they’re up to and whether it is wise.

Has our government been too complacent? I don’t know. Have they made huge mistakes? Almost definitely. Did they listen to the wrong scientists or prioritise the wrong things? Maybe. Can we know that for sure right now? I don’t think so. Are they deliberately trying to kill us all? No, no they’re not, and it’s bad-faith arguing on that basis that’s made me reflexively defensive of the UK’s response to COVID-19, although my goal has been to be open minded because I really, really don’t think we will be able to measure who came out of this well for a very long time. It’s not over til it’s gone.

I’ve never seen a screen adaptation of Little Women before. There are a number of books I grew up with that I know inside out and in which the heroines are my friends, and Little Women, absolutely, is one of them. To have someone else’s interpretation painted over the characters who are so alive in my mind is often irreversible and it’s something I usually try to avoid.

The volume I first became acquainted with was my mum’s red-bound copy that she told me yesterday was dusty and ancient when she first read it. Her copy ended at Meg’s Marriage — the second volume is called Good Wives, and as far as I can gather is always included in screen adaptations of Little Women, and sometimes in later editions of the book. I’m not sure how well a film called Good Wives which is about some free spirited would-be-independent girls growing up to be fairly traditional wives and happy home makers would go down these days.

After Good Wives comes Little Men, a really charming story of Jo’s school for boys (which has two girls too including Daisy, despite the film claiming it will be a girl’s school with some boys), followed by Jo’s Boys, which follows the Little Men into adulthood and, frankly, is when the saga starts to get a bit on the preachy side, affectionate for it as I am.

I’d heard good things about the new Greta Gerwig adaptation so when my mum asked me if I wanted to see it with her I agreed. The cinema was full of women in our age range, who talked all through the trailers but didn’t make a sound throughout the film, besides perhaps the odd sniffle.

I really liked the film — the characters were alive and bright, the way the story jumped around kept the pace up in what is not at all a pacey story and added to the drama and pathos, and the spirit of the original story was treated with great reverence.

I particularly liked Amy pinching her nose, though it’s never referenced as far as I noticed, and the nice nod at the end to the Marmee’s birthday scene from Little Men.

Where it missed the mark for me was with the romance. In Meg’s case, the frightening, growing-up-too-fast edge to her romance with Brooke, and the extent to which it disturbs Jo was glossed over, and her relationship felt rather wooden, but I felt Amy’s and Jo’s suffered more.

Amy and Laurie become close in Europe and have a great impact on each other, but they come to a slow and calm realisation of it in the book and the simple proposal in the wake of Beth’s death is charming. To have it replaced with an impetuous hollywood kiss flies in the face of, and I quote, “His second wooing, he resolved, should be as calm and simple as possible; there was no need of having a scene”. Anyway no major harm done but I like the way Laurie proposes in the book.

Jo and her professor are glossed over the most, though I do understand that his rather paternal guiding role in her life doesn’t quite fit with the slightly more independent Jo the film wanted to portray. Mr Bhaer comes to be by Jo’s side because of a poem he’s seen in the paper that she wrote about Beth, at which point their friendship regrows. All the charm of their friendship and romance is stripped out of the story, along with Jo’s guileless, sweet and gentle admission of loving him, and the film makes it clear it would rather have kept Jo single. I also always had the impression he was a good few years older but hey ho.

All the characters in the books are preachy, the young men benefit from the example and set downs of the young women, and the young women are criticised by the men — Jo for writing irreverent, sensational stories, for which she is made to feel ashamed by Professer Bhaer, and Meg for her frivolity by Laurie. In the film the men are censured thoroughly for daring to tell these girls what to do, which is rather modern, and not really how I remember it going in the books, where I think the girls were quicker to repent, but the moralising was a two-way street.

There’s more vocal feminism in the film than in the source material. At the time of writing, girls pondering means and motivations of being independent at all was enough, but the film adds a few little speeches on the subject which may in fact have been necessary to bring the point home to a modern audience.

In conclusion, this film has much of the spirit but not all of the charm of some of my favourite books, but I’m really glad I saw it and it gave me a lot to think about. And I’ve just got out my copies of Little Women and Good Wives to read next time I’m not wasting time talking rubbish on the internet.

However there are a few arguments against it that don’t seem to get addressed to my satisfaction. GDP matters — if your country doesn’t run like a successful, profit-making business, you won’t have money for public services. It is important to make sure the country makes money, that means people making money, paying tax, businesses making money and paying tax, and hopefully exporting to bring in money from outside too. It’s definitely not that simple, and I’m definitely not an economist, but if you are, in principle anti-business but in favour of public services, then you have some explaining to do, in my opinion.

In 2012, economists estimated that each bank holiday costs the UK 2.3 billion. Obviously in a wider scheme, that’s pennies — it doesn’t touch the 22.4bn Corbyn has promised for the NHS, or the excess of 50bn it apparently needs over the next 12 years. But who actually foots the bill?

Government statistics show that in 2017, there were 5.7 million private sector businesses in the UK, I’m going to take the figures from 2017 as current to make writing this easier. 7000 private businesses are “large”, ie they employ more than 250 people each — between them they employ 10.5 million people. 1.36 million businesses in the UK employ between 1 and 250 people, between them they employ 11.45 million people. These are SMEs — small and medium enterprises.

I’ll credit any readers with understanding that turnover and profit aren’t the same thing, but briefly, turnover is how much money you take in, and profit is what remains of that once you’ve covered your costs.

I’m not sure how to quickly get figures on how many of these businesses make a profit, particularly as partnerships and sole traders don’t have to publish their accounts as far as I know, so the next part is going to be anecdotal and hypothetical, but heavily based on experience.

The profits of a sensibly run business do not all go into director’s or owner’s pockets, the bulk of it will be reinvested into the business so that it can continue to grow. If it doesn’t grow it stagnates and if it stagnates it may likely only be a matter of time before it fails. Making a profit is more or less essential for the continuation of SMEs.

Whether or not a business makes a profit can stand on a knife edge. A retail company has many overheads, and the most significant of these are the cost of the stock, rents and rates, and staff. Only one of these figures can be tweaked — the cost of stock and rents are fairly immutable. Retail companies face huge uncertainties, and the profit they end up with may be dramatically less than they budgeted for, and very small things can make the difference between turning in a profit and a loss. Therefore all avenues of reducing spending and increasing takings must be explored. This isn’t Victorian factory mentality with a lazy man in a top hat getting rich — this is a choice between keeping a business that employs people running, or allowing it to fold.

Let’s say a retail company employs 70 people. Some years it turns in 50k profit, other years 700k profit, some years it just, just breaks even. The monthly wage bill is one of the company’s biggest expenditures, let’s say it comes in at 50k plus 9000 in employer pension and national insurance contributions, so the staff cost per day of trading, assuming all departments are open 6 days, a week is about £2360.

If the company stops trading on bank holidays, let’s say it will lose around 15000 in sales, the margin on which may have been about half, so 7500 in profit. In a lean year that could be 10% of the total profit of the business. If instead that company decides to trade on the bank holiday, across all departments, it’ll cost it an extra £2360 in wages. The employees all get paid an extra day, but they don’t get a day off. Either way around it poses a problem for the employer, while awarding a little bit of extra money or time off to an employee who works in an SME.

It’s not just business that would pay for bank holidays, but the public sector too — bank holidays pose a direct cost to public services, via similar routes of logic.

I’m not entirely against the idea of introducing an additional bank holiday. It would make my own working life slightly more difficult because they always do, but I’m not explicitly against spending another day with my kids because their school is shut — it doesn’t pose a huge problem for me because I don’t usually work on bank holidays, but a lot of people do. Another bank holiday outside of school holidays would presumably pose a childcare headache and expense for a lot of people.

However, when you look at how to improve the lives of working people, it’s my opinion that you should look to improve the lives of the people who are the worst off first. Visiting carers who work long shifts and don’t get paid for the time they spend travelling between visits, workers in gargantuan warehouses who are exploited to the very limit of the law, minimum wage employees working 16 hour shifts without the power to refuse. (Recommended reading: Hired by James Bloodworth - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37780792-hired). Every pressure should be put on the government to look at how modern employment practices are flouting the intentions of employment law, and to close the loopholes that make this possible. If I was Jeremy Corbyn, that’s where I’d be looking. But I suppose it doesn’t make such a good headline. Mind you after the 5th time you cry ‘Bank Holiday!’ it officially stops being news.

Lastly, there is a very strong argument against introducing an extra bank holiday now. We’re about to leave the EU on completely uncertain terms, businesses are hugely under threat from this, no one can guess how much without knowing what’s going to happen. Creating more costs for businesses for the sake of 3.6% more time off for the majority of people, rather than fighting to improve the abysmal circumstances of the very worst off? It doesn’t make sense to me.