Paolo’s Weblog

We are getting to the end of the 11th week, 75 days in self-isolation, the weather is beautiful, it’s getting warm and frankly there’s not much else to be reported. I have been a bit more social lately, having conversation in person with three different people in two separate occasions. Other than that, it’s all zoom.

Did you notice how this pandemic has sent everybody down memory lane?

Maybe because we cannot visualise the future, we turn back to the past, which now feels safe and stable. I find myself having odd feeling of nostalgia for the 80s or even the 70s every time a friend posts an old picture.

Or maybe it’s just that we have more time to organise our photo archive. I love how Photos on all Apple devices is keeping my 25K photos all nicely tagged, organised and synchronised. In the last few years I have also scanned a decent amount of printed pictures, trying to date and tag them appropriately and merge them seamless in my archive. This makes falling in nostalgic time-space wormholes incredibly easy.

We all look better or cuter (or both) in old photos, and sometimes on social media they are a good excuse for a bit of name dropping, bragging and back dating: you know, those who “were on the web” well before Sir Tim invented the thing. It’s fine, we all have history.

I got a new pair of AirPods this week. I went for the Pro version, with noise cancellation. Quite expensive, but I have used my old pair almost every day for 3 years until battery life got too short to be usable, they are one of my favourite Apple products. These new ones are good, noise cancelling is very effective but transparency mode is what makes them amazing. We’ll see how well they will work with my daily dose of zoom calls.

Maybe I’m doing this wrong, but I find all these calls draining. After a full day of speaking with a slightly louder tone of voice, without being able to move much, struggling to understand people who could not be bothered to use a headset, having to constantly decode another language and a ton of different accents, my brain hurts. When work is over I might like to have a chat with friends and family, but I really struggle to convince myself to start yet another zoom call.

Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch (but don’t call).

43 days until my flight home. 44 days until my haircut.

I’m preparing for my trip. I have procured face masks (thanks to those who helped), and it looks like there won’t be the need to self quarantine once on the other side. I’m conscious that taking the Central Line, then a train, then an airplane is significantly riskier than never leaving my flat, but at this point I feel like risking a bit. Maybe I will self quarantine anyway for a few days, just to be on the safe side.

Yesterday I went out for the weekly groceries run to Waitrose, it was a beautiful and warm day and the park was full of people. Things are starting to feel normal.

I don’t mean “normal” as “back to normal” but in the sense of “not exceptional”.

I suppose that many are just growing tired of the exceptionality of the last few months. I have mostly given up following the daily updates or frantically checking the stats every day.

Last weekend I went for a relatively long walk to Richmond, but the most exciting thing is that I actually met a friend. Like in person! We bought lunch at Whole Foods Market and then ate by the river. The best day in quite a while!

Being outside my flat for six hours felt nice, but it’s curious like many of my friends and people I interact with regularly are not finding this new lifestyle all that distressing at all (and in some cases are dreading the idea of going back). This is a good time for us introverts who can cook.

Stay safe, be nice, and keep in touch.

Finished another t-roll this morning. The third since the beginning of the quarantine. For some reason I take a picture every time, here’s the complete collection: April 12, April 27, May 14. This is history.

Even if I never had any problem (I didn’t even try to buy any toilet paper, and it was only missing from shops for the first couple of weeks), I don’t think I will take it for granted for a while. Who knew that it would have been the first sign of the end.

The rules are changing in the UK, “Stay Alert” is the new “Stay Home”. Day after day we are learning what this actually means, on Monday I heard a prominent politicians explain that: “People should assume they should go to work rather than presume they should not.” Unless they can work from home. And you can meet one person. Outside. Not closer than 2m.

On Tuesday another member of the government said “The number of people who died has come down”. Basically, it’s the zombie apocalypse.

I found this interesting site displaying the curves of daily new cases using an arbitrary unit for the vertical axis, which makes them easy to compare. Here’s the two countries I’m most interested to follow:

So I have booked a flight home. I visited the Ryanair site and they were offering seats to Trieste starting on the 2 of July. I’m booked on that flight. Still not sure if it will happen, but at least it’s a date on the calendar.

There will probably be voluntary quarantine on the other side, and then again coming back, but it’s not a problem, I’m planning to spend the summer in Italy.

Most likely I will have to wear a mask on the flight. I don’t have one and need to figure out where to find it. I wonder why Ryanair didn’t offer me a mask, instead of the Samsonite trolley which I have been refusing to buy from them for the last 18 years.

Since a lot of friends were recommending it, I have been watching Money Heist. It’s a good show. Since I cannot stand dubbing anymore, I’m watching it in Spanish with English subtitles. So it often happens that I have whole dreams in Spanish, which is odd given that I don’t really speak Spanish.

And here’s a new episode of our podcast:

That’s all folks. Stay safe, be nice, and keep in touch.

We are sailing through the 8th week of self-isolation. I had to count the weeks in the calendar, time has a whole new dimension. I realised that until last week I was waiting for my birthday, now there’s no “next date” to be looking forward to. Of course, eventually stuff will happen, but we don’t know when.

As of today the UK has the highest death toll in Europe, surpassing Italy. Not that this means much, these numbers are mostly meaningless when used to compare situations.

On Saturday I went for a walk in the park for the first time. It’s allowed here, but for some reason I never really felt like just going. The weather was nice, the park was full of dogs and yoga pants running free. Everybody very careful about avoiding each other, often walking off-path to guarantee enough distance.

Found the Covid-19 settings in the latest update of iOS. It was on by default. In theory my phone is now pinging other phones, keeping track of who is getting close. But this information will not be used in the UK, as the government has decided not to use Google/Apple decentralised approach, favouring instead a centralised (and potentially more privacy invasive) system. Still… it feels like a waste of valuable data.

I heard somebody on the radio suggesting that the UK approach is influenced by researchers in Oxford consulting the government. Phew! At least it’s not Cambridge: a city name now synonym with privacy!

My driving licence has expired. I meant to renew it here, but for a bunch of reasons I ended up deciding not to go to a post office in the middle of the pandemic. Not that I need it, but no idea how this will be resolved. There’s also some other bureaucratic problems that I need to solve in Italy, and it doesn’t look like it will be easy to solve them remotely or by catching a quick flight home. I hope these won’t become real problems.

In the good news department, credit cards bills are significantly down from last month and the month before. No restaurants, no online shopping, no public transport, no nothing. The interesting fact is that I could order stuff online or buy takeaway food, but between not having a working doorbell and being very lazy, I just don’t. And the truth is that I don’t really miss any of that stuff. Eventually it will creep back, but I’m going to try to keep this rhythm for as long as possible.

Meanwhile make sure you stay safe, be nice, keep in touch.

I accidentally bumped into someone yesterday.

At Marks & Sparks, I was reaching for a bottle of fresh orange juice, she stepped back from the pub-lunch ready-meals section, our shoulders touched for an instant. “Sorry”, “sorry”. Six weeks to the day since I had any physical contact with another human. I can reset the counter now.

Wednesday was my birthday. Last month attending an online birthday celebration with a whole bunch of people was interesting. Now it seems we have all had enough of online group celebrations. Or at least I have.

But I still want to implement the “Negroni fountain” plan, in my garden, sometime this summer. Ryanair says they will start flying in July. Planning to be on the first flight out of here.

Speaking of Negroni: I have concluded that Italian red vermouth gives me weird dreams. And I mean seriously weird. Must be the wormwood. I also confirmed that Antica Formula is worse than Cocchi (I still have a third of a bottle of Antica Formula, I think I will introduce lunch-time Negronis to finish it away from sleep time).

Everything else is continuing just as before: zoom call after zoom call after zoom call. I was reading this article about bookshelves of celebrities spotted on ‘house calls’ and realised that I miss my bookshelves in Italy. They would be a much better background than my kitchen/living room. I considered other angles in my room, but nothing really works: here it’s back-light, there is booze, the dark door… I’l stick with the “oven angle”.

I hear that things are slowly restarting in Italy, among all sorts of complains (if there ever was a loose-loose situation for a politician, this is it). Things are slower in the UK, and the numbers are still dreadful. I also have the feeling that we are mostly hearing the worse possible predictions, while in fact “no one has any idea of what the fuck is happening or what we should do about it“.

Oh, and we recorded another episode of the podcast. This is a good one.

This is it. Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch.

This is the end of week six. Liberation day in Italy. Francesco Guccini playing in the background. Time for a quick update.

Life in quarantine continues uninterrupted. I’ve been out a couple of times this week, strictly for groceries runs. I like schlepping all the way to Waitrose, I get to walk through the park and wait in line in the sunshine.

I’m still surprised by how this new condition is not as upsetting as I would have imagined.

I’ve been practicing meditation on and off for the last six years. More on than off. Basically I’ve been preparing for this: sitting alone with myself, being in the moment, there’s only “this”, let alone the idea of “shared human condition”… it is all helpful and it works.

On the other hand, I am starting to miss having plans. A lunch in town with a colleague next week. A visit to Kew next weekend. Having a flight home booked for next month.

Yesterday I actually almost booked a Ryanair flight to Trieste in May. It was available on the web site. It’s unlikely to really happen, so I didn’t buy it. But I might get it anyway, it’s not expensive, and if they cancel I will probably get the credit.

Right now every single item on my calendar is a zoom call. Work. Friends. Family. Happy hour. All in a zoom call. I try to use different devices in different corners of my room for different types of call, just to introduce a little change, but I’m starting to feel zoom fatigue.

And it’s not just zoom, it’s communication fatigue. I’m giving up closely following charts, news, opinions, projections, even the latest outrageous proclamations from the most absurd politicians are not as interesting as they were.

I’ve spent less time writing here too. Since I rebooted this blog I got back in a peculiar condition: I’m basically writing posts in my mind all the time. But mostly they are not very interesting, and I don’t want to bother you few readers with them.

Stay safe, be nice, and keep in touch.

End of week 5. At least three more to go. So far, so good.

It has been one month since I last touched another person. It’s not that I particularly miss anything (I’m not tempted to go out and try to touch a stranger), it’s just another item on the “it never happened in the last 49 years” list.

I went to Waitrose yesterday. Long queue outside, it took about 20 minutes to get inside. In other situations I might have been annoyed, but not yesterday. I enjoyed being outside, listening to my audio book, counting tiles on the floor trying to keep track of the 2 meters from the person in front of me. Just being there.

People in this country are particularly well suited for social distancing in public spaces. Outside any pandemic, every trip to the supermarket requires saying “sorry” at least 10 times, just because you happen to walk in the same aisle of anyone else, so no big change, the only difference is that now you should exchange the “see what we have to go through mate?” look.

I still don’t have a very positive feeling about how the crisis is being managed in this country (see? this is me practicing understatement). We have no idea of what the plans are for the future, apparently the populace cannot be trusted with the plan. Boris is still MIA, recovering. So it’s stay home, protect the… whatever.

This week I watched Louis CK latest comedy special. Louis CK was my favourite comedian before the scandal. After watching this, Louis CK is still my favourite comedian (and yes, he does mention the elephant in the room).

And we recorded another episode of the SotN podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms, or just clicking below.

Okay… I guess that this is it for this update. You stay safe, be nice, and keep in touch.

I haven’t been out for almost a week, and it feels strangely normal. It’s just what we do these days.

The narrative has been slowly shifting, in the news they have started talking about the government “exit strategy”, how are we going to get out of this. It’s still early, so to save everybody time I have prepared this:

I don’t watch any broadcast television, but I do see a good amount of advertising on YouTube, and I have noticed how suddenly mid-last week a whole number of new commercials have started being Covid-19 orientated. It feels like all major brands waited for a couple of weeks to see if all this was just going away, and then decided to switch.

I did see a “Crisis and opportunity” white paper describing the amazing opportunity that marketeers have to create content for people stuck at home. Probably true, but kinda sad.

I’m getting a bit of a 2002 early blogging feeling. Some of the same people (including me) have started to re-emerge and do stuff online, it’s great to see again old friends. I can only imagine what it will take to get us back to blogging the next time.

Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch.

It’s Easter Monday. Did you have a good Easter? I did.

Maybe what is happening is an acid test for politicians. I think that the number of deaths in each country will be an indicator of how good they are at managing complexity, and consequently it will likely predict how well and quickly national economies will recover. From this perspective, it’s not a surprise that populists, who tend to offer simple (and wrong) solutions to complex problems are the ones struggling most.

There’s no going back. There never is: we always go forward. We won’t be able to recover the meals in restaurants, the walks in nature, the hugs we did not enjoy in the last few weeks. But we will have more meals, walks and hugs in the future.

There’s a narrative about “going back to normal” which I don’t find very helpful. Change happens all the time, sometimes slow, sometimes fast. This is definitely a time of very fast change, which gives us all the opportunity to improve faster. Or to fuck things up faster.

In the last few days:

• I “went” to a birthday party
• I “had lunch” with my family on Sunday
• I spend a whole day without uttering a word (except for maybe an “hey Siri”)
• I helped fix remotely our Ikea smart home system.

The Zoom birthday party was an amusing experience, with an incredibly interesting and diverse group of people who would have never met in real life. I ended up staying for almost 3 hours, which is about 170 minutes longer than I expected. I realised that what makes these gatherings different from the in person kind, is that only one person at the time can speak. Which should make them worse, but it didn’t.

Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch.

It’s Good Friday. It’s the end of the fourth week working from home, observing social distancing rules.

People celebrate NHS and key workers every Thursday at 8pm, here’s my street last night.

We used to say that the UK was two week behind Italy, but with the Prime Minister still in hospital (but out of intensive care), the number of daily deaths getting at the same levels as Italy at its worse, and still less testing than Italy one month ago, it doesn’t look like the UK used these two weeks to prepare better. The feeling is not particularly optimistic.

I have always found amusing how governments in the UK use slogans to address their citizens. From the iconic Keep calm and carry on poster, to pretty much everything Churchill said, all the way to “See it, say it, sort it” that we hear on the tube and finally today’s “Stay home, Protect the NHS, Save lives”, there seem to be a unique tradition and approach.

So while in Italy people leaving their home during lock down get fined by the police and in India they get beaten by the police, here we are receiving a passive-aggressive messaging from all the government: it’s not that you can’t go out. But you really, really, really shouldn’t.

We’ll count the dead at the end.

I’ve been out for food runs a couple of times this week: there’s a bit less people around, but still plenty. Apparently it’s especially young people who don’t follow the rules. It’s those who mostly voted against Brexit propagating a disease that kills those who mostly voted leave.

Meanwhile I’m ready for another month of this. In the sense that I have reserves of my favourite coffee and tobacco for another month. I’m trying to decide at which point impose rationing and go down to one cup of coffee and one pipe a day. But we are not there yet.

The weather is nice. The tree in my neighbour’s back yard is full of flowers, so my bedroom smells of flowers. Can’t say it’s a particularly good smell, but it’s still nice.

Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch.

Went to the supermarket yesterday morning. There was a long queue, so I decided to try again later. In the afternoon the queue was even longer. People were distancing at least 5 meters, so the long queue didn’t necessarily mean a lot of people. Still, it took about 30 minutes to get in the store. Maybe it’s just that it was Friday.

Since I’m partially writing this as a diary, to read back in some distant and happier future (why would one do that?), I’m recording the fact that right now my expectation is that this quarantine will last at least until the second part of May.

This means that my plans for the Negroni fountain in my Italian garden for my birthday at the end of April are now officially cancelled, sorry.

It’s interesting how expectations change. When this all started, just three weeks ago, I had almost bought the ticket to fly home at the end of April.

We keep trying to guess when we will be able to go back to at least some normality, trying to read the tea leaves, the numbers and the news, but my attitude has been changing.

Just like everybody else I keep watching press conferences, refreshing web pages of statistics, getting more familiar with exponential growth and logarithmic scales, but I’m finally realising that this whole charade is much less meaningful than I thought.

The total number of confirmed cases is not how many people got it, is how many tests resulted positive. This number is mostly dependent by how many tests are performed (determined by political decisions and capacity) and by who is being tested (which changes significantly from region to region): we all know that it is underestimated, but we don’t know how much. But the bottom line is that governments all over the world can manipulate these numbers as much as they like.

So while these numbers might be giving an idea of the trend of the disease, it doesn’t make any sense to compare them. Stuff like “the UK is two weeks behind Italy” is meaningless, because the numbers that we are comparing are not comparable.

I’m realising that we have all been looking at that number because it was a relatively simple thing to do, but of course there’s no simple solution to complex problems, and this is a pretty damn complex problem, with a lot of unknown variables, which even the experts are learning to deal with every day.

In other news from the UK, we have been promised 100.000 tests a day by the end of the month (but they are only performing 10,000 a day now, which is less than what Italy was doing by mid March), tomorrow the Queen will address the nation ? from her quarantined castle, and I’m getting a bit more annoyed every time somebody asks me to “stay home, protect the NHS and save lives.”

Keep calm and carry on.

I need a haircut.

I had my last one just before Christmas and I was planning to get my next one on my first trip to Italy (I prefer to go to my guy). So here’s the situation:

It’s not that bad yet, but as everybody says: it will get worse before it get better. I have seen people grabbing a clipper and heading to a bathroom all by themselves, but I’m not so brave. I will stick to my decision and get my next cut when I manage to go back to Gorizia. With my guy. It’s gonna get hairy.

Yesterday I realised that it has been two weeks since I spoke to anyone in person.

I did go out a couple of times, but I didn’t had to talk to anyone, not even at a supermarket till (I use the app, remember?).

While I was thinking that this might have been some kind of record, and that never in my life I had such a long stretch, and who knows how long it could last, the upstairs neighbor knocked on my door. “Is everything all right?” “Yep, you?” “Yep” “Well, call if you need anything” “Sure, thanks, you too” “Bye” “Bye”. And that was the end of my record.

There’s a Tado smart thermostat in my flat.

It’s not that smart, it just has an app that you use to programme it. The only smart thing it does should be geofencing: detect when I’m out and turn off the heating (which is not the most useful feature at the moment). Anyway, when I went out for 20 minutes to pick up some groceries on Monday, Tado did notice that I was out, and set itself in away mode. When I came back Tado did not notice. So I ended up woking up in a very cold flat on Tuesday morning. ?

Oh, and we recorded another episode of the Sotn podcast. Just one week later.

Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch.

Wow… it’s two weeks since I wrote the first post of this series. Two weeks that most of us have spent shut in our homes.

I’ve realised that I hardly know anyone who has to go out to work. I suppose it’s another case of echo chamber: most people in my social network can work from home or in any case are not part of that large group of people who can’t afford the safety of social separation and have to go out every day to provide some indispensable service.

Aside of the prime minister catching it, there aren’t significant news here. Numbers keep climbing. Nobody knows what will happen, for how long it will happen, what will we find on the other side. But it does look like the worse predictions get more clicks, and this does not improve the media landscape. If you want to read something a bit less gloomy, you might like this article on the Oxford Science Blog: COVID-19 ‘should not necessarily foreshadow an economic downturn’.

In the last few days I have noticed a surge of conspiracy theory links coming from friends and family… still trying to decide how to deal with them. I have also received my first Covid19 joke from my friend Perry:

Yesterday while watching The Stranger on Netflix (I haven’t finished the season, but the first few episodes are not bad at all), I felt a strange uneasiness seeing people going around and standing closer than two meters apart. It’s a bit like when you watch an old movie, where people are smoking, don’t use the web, don’t have a smartphone or you catch a glimpse of the twin towers in New York, and you instinctively realise that the scene was happening in a time “before”. Of course, eventually we will go out again, but at the moment it feels we are all living in a time “after”.

As you might guess I like to be blogging again. I rediscovered the continuous process of thinking about things in the context of a blog post. Some old friends got back in touch, and I also got a few inbound links (thank you Dave and Colin), I had forgotten how good it feels :)

To complete the 2002 vibe, I have also restarted using an RSS reader. NetNewsWire works very well on MacOS and iOS, and I have a Feedbin account to keep things nicely in synch, so now I’m rebuilding my subscription list, reading good stuff every day, and wondering why did I ever give up.

That’s all for today. Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch.

It’s another lovely sunny day in London, and here’s the view from my window this morning.

You know what? I’m fine!

It’s what I keep repeating myself: right now I’m just fine. I’m warm. I have food and booze. I have the Internet. I’m more in touch with my friends and family than ever, and they seem to be fine too. The future hasn’t happened yet, the past is gone. Let’s not get carried away from the news and all those stats.

Anyway, since yesterday we are quarantined for good. We have to stay home. Protect the NHS.

Like everyone else I got the text message from Her Majesty government, which links to a site which displays these logos:

Now… I don’t know why, but the fact that they had to come up with a bunch of bad logos for this slogan annoys me. I’m sure that they employed some nudge unit to come up with the most effective way to convince people. And yes, just telling them to stay home clearly was not working. But still… really? Protect the NHS? Bah…

For future memory, this week the rules are:

• Work from home if you can;
• You can go out to get food and medicines, but you have to stay at least 2 metres away from other people;
• You can go out once a day for physical activity, but only with one other person of your household;
• The police will be enforcing this!

I wonder if the police will come house by house to force you to go out for some physical activity. That would solve a whole set of other problems for the NHS!

But today, after 5 days, I did go out to get some groceries. I still have plenty, but since my experience last week with the desperately empty shelves I was a bit concerned, so I figured that it was worth going out, maybe get the last scraps of food before everything was finished and the great famine of 2020 would start.

My local Marks & Spencer supermarket is now limiting the number of people who can enter the place at the same time, so I joined the nice and well distanced queue.

It took about 10 minutes, and once I got in… I could not believe my eyes!

I’ve been shopping here for 5 years, and I had never seen this place so well stocked! Not only they had everything but they had a lot of everything!

So now I have eggs.

In other news, this week we also had some time to record a new episode of the SotN podcast, as usual get it where you get your podcasts, or just listen here:

We just got some very nice comments about the show. To be honest I would do this even if nobody was listening, I just have fun and every time I learn something new. But knowing that somebody else out there is enjoying these too is great!

And this is all for today. Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch.

This is the state the roll. At this rate and with current reserves I should be good until August.

One week went by and I have left my flat only three times.

After a short walk in the park on Monday, I travelled to central London on Thursday to get some pipe tobacco in one of my favourite shops: JJ Fox (I heard it kills people, it should work on viruses, and anyway this is not the time for quitting).

Even if there’s not nearly the level of shut-down my family is experiencing in Italy, there was a lot less people around. All the tourist are gone. Most restaurants were already closed. Here’s what Piccadilly looked like:

If it is true that the UK is two weeks behind Italy, next week is when things should become serious. I was curious about the effectiveness of the different approaches taken in these two countries: the prescriptive approach in Italy (you get fined if you are caught out without a good reason) versus the collaborative approach here, were people are just advised to stay home and avoid contact.

Well… one week in it doesn’t look like moral suasion is working. Not only there’s still plenty of people everywhere (and they don’t all look like NHS staff on their way to work), but the repeated advice not to panic buy is clearly not being respected.

Yesterday I went to M&S for some grocery shopping. I have been using their shopping app for a while, but now it’s nicer than ever to be able to walk in, get some stuff in my own shopping bag and leave, without having to touch anything but the products I’m buying! It works quite well, highly recommended.

Anyway, the store had been stormed and was half empty. I could still buy everything I had on my list, except for eggs. This hoarding of fresh food doesn’t make any sense, but it looks like it’s still happening and it’s not getting any better.

My initial plan was to go out early this morning to try to find eggs, but then decided not to. I don’t really need eggs, so I opted to stay home and write a blog post complaining about people who did go out and got my eggs.

Everything else is smooth, as expected working from home is not a big challenge, I have re-started meditating regularly (I’m back on Headspace), I’m enjoying cooking all the time.

I’m still wearing my Apple watch every day, just because I find not having to unlock my Mac with a password very convenient, but of course the activity tracking is embarrassing.

I’m still following the news and reading everything I can, but at this point it’s quite clear that nobody really knows what is going to happen. There are bleak projections, slightly more hopeful ones, and in any case we are all waiting to see what happens in China.

So all we can do is take a breath, step back, and realise that in this moment we are doing just fine. Even without eggs.

Stay safe, be nice, and please do keep in touch.

It’s day two AV (after virus era), the UK is catching up with the rest of Europe asking people to avoid other people, but from what I can see from my window there’s still plenty of folks out and about (schools are still open, and there’s a school at the end of the street).

Meanwhile I just made some farfalle.

It’s interesting how France appears to be going with an Italian approach (ordering everybody to stay home, policing the streets to make sure that nobody moves), while the UK is still suggesting people to stay away from others, apparently counting on citizens to do the right thing. Let’s see if this works.

In any case things are changing, and everybody is wondering how long this will last: on one side after a couple of months China seems to be coming back online, but others expect the impact of the virus to last much longer, changing our life for as long as one year. That’s great, by the time I will leave my flat Crossrail will be up and running! (Just kidding, of course we won’t be forced to stay home for a year).

There’s more and more data available every day, but it’s not easy to compare and understand what is really going on. Here’s an interesting article comparing the Korean and Italian crisis, trying to understand why the significantly different mortality rate.

Changing your behaviour for a certain amount of time helps forming new habits (I work with a company that has built a product on this). Some say it takes 66 days, some more, some less, but it does appear that we will all have the opportunity of forming new habits this spring.

A lot of people will get used to working from home and get stuff delivered. It’s a trend that was already happening, but any resistance will be blown away. I think that some companies will start wondering if they really need all that expensive real estate.

On the good news side, we will probably get used to better air quality. I wonder if people will notice and do something about this when they will be allowed to leave their homes again.

And canals in Venice are suddenly crystal clear.

Others are still adapting: I just got an automated spam message promoting discounted parking at the airport. Clearly the campaign was set up in the BV (before virus) era and nobody remembered to turn it off.

It’s sad to see all countries closing their borders (in most cases it’s a bit too late for that), and there’s a strange feeling knowing that I won’t be able to go home for a while. I’ve stayed away from Italy for longer, but there was always the option of jumping on a plane and get home. Now there isn’t. Apparently I could catch a bus to Dover, a ferry and then a train to Italy… the world is suddenly big again.

The internet is keeping us together. There have been a couple of glitches in my connection over the weekend, long enough to contemplate with sheer terror the idea of being offline. It was just a moment, but it did feel more uncomfortable than usual.

That’s all for today. Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch.

So here we go, I’m all ready with my home office set up, from Monday everybody works from home until further notice. Nobody knows when the further notice will arrive, but from everything I’m reading, it might not be very soon.

If you want something to read, Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now is an interesting article that a lot of friends and contacts have been linking. It’s the first time I really pay attention to a pandemic, and I’m loving all the data sets that you find, I’ve been playing with this one maintained on GitHub by Johns Hopkins CSSE.

While back home in Italy everything is locked down, here in the UK there aren’t big consequences yet. Wondering if here they are incredibly smart or incredibly stupid, we will find out later.

The truth is that working from home doesn’t make a big difference in our line of work, I have been working with remote teams for more than 15 years, most of our life run through zoom and slack anyway. I do think that since it’s so easy for us, it’s smart for us to stay home, while people who can’t work remotely will have to keep moving. The less people around, the better, and while there are no limits to movement in the UK at the moment, I must admit that it felt a bit unpleasant travelling squeezed on the Central Line this week.

Meanwhile the local supermarket are out of pasta and toilet paper, but pretty much everything else is available.

I find this puzzling. In the next few days more toilet paper will be delivered, and, okay, those who were without will buy more toilet paper, but at some point we will reach saturation of how much toilet paper you can store in a house, right? And then what? What do these people know that I don’t? Is there going to be a big shortage of wood fibers used for toilet paper manufacturing? Oh well, we’ll see, meanwhile this from Euan is the funniest bit I read on the topic:

But no worries, I’m okay. I have plenty of toilet paper and enough pasta to last a few weeks. As you can see from the photo above I’ve plenty of booze and I’m planning to keep myself disinfected drinking plenty of Quarantini (a Quarantini is a regular Martini that you drink alone).

On the good news side, there will be plenty of savings. For the next few weeks there will be no lunches in restaurants and no shirts to launder (while the jury is still out on use of deodorant…).

Some say that this quarantine will mark a difference between those who can cook and those who cannot. I have a lot of interesting meals planned for the next few days.

That’s all for now. Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch.