Eight Sorts of Solitaries

If you go by what one reads on the internet regarding the lockdown spreading across the face of the earth in the tracks of the coronavirus, there are two sorts of people.

There are those who are bored out of their minds, and resorting to all sorts of eccentricity to pass the time, and there are those who are suddenly gaining a new appreciation for the work of teachers and childcare professionals.

I fall into neither of these groups. I fall into the rather quieter group that lives most of its life at home anyway, and therefore find themselves busier than usual, since they have all their usual work to do still and can’t knock off all their people things at once. Not every meeting can be an email, but they’re all trying to be.

Nieuwe meubeltoonzaal van Van de Meer in Diemen Finse ontwerper Eero Aarnio bij, Bestanddeelnr 927-7336
Busy woman in her bubble.

However, since we are all in the same basket (figuratively speaking; try to avoid joining anyone in a basket unless they are part of your bubble), let us take a moment to consider the many and various kinds of people who have dealt with isolation in the past.

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…But You Didn’t Get It

A quote I have often found myself reaching for of late comes from Douglas Adams: “We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.”

To give programmers their due, it’s a convoluted world to operate in. However, I have recently discovered that the plugin I depended on to send post notifications to those who signed up for them was no longer sending said emails. At least, not to those who had subscribed prior to the ‘upgrade’ at the beginning of this year. For some reason the upgrade set defaults to “do not perform core function unless explicitly re-instructed to do so.”

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“Well, I’m Back,” She Said

Disclaimer: have not been to Mordor (one does not just walk in) nor destroyed any occult jewellery as far as I can recall.
It’s been eleven weeks, more or less, since I vanished on my blog sabbatical, and I have, in that time, discovered a number of things.

Discovery the First: Months of radio silence do not appear to have had a negative effect on my blog stats. If anything, quite the opposite.
Moreover, the old blog – which was mothballed in October 2017 – has done even better. At this rate it won’t be long before I can make a comfortable living being paid not to write, electrifying the world with the richness of my mysterious silences.

Discovery the Second: Farthingales are overdue for a revival. Introverts have been secretly certain of this for a long time; now everyone else is catching on.

Farthingale 2 (PSF)
Keep your social distance, or I’ll smack you silly with my fan!
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