You Don't Live Like I Do

I'm in Bristol for work for a couple of days. The work is annoying - it's a poorly-scoped ISO27001 audit, pencilled in for five days but I reckon we can do it in two, so I'm hoping I don't have to go back next week.

I spent the train down being That Wanker with my laptop out, updating another couple of documents ahead of the audit. Turns out with no Internet or other distractions I can actually get a few hours of useful work done... I cut about half of our Disaster Recovery Plan out, reducing verbiage to make it more streamlined and effective.

I was clever enough to get an earlier train into Manchester for my connection; the train I was recommended only gave me ten minutes to change at Piccadilly, and ended up running at least 7 minutes late. I managed to end up with a table seat, which was nice, but several hours wearing a mask is always going to suck. The CO2 meter was giving levels up to 2000ppm, so it was definitely worth doing (for reference: 400ppm is "fresh air"; 800ppm is where the CO2 helps the virus to breed. I try to stay under 800ppm without a mask).

Got into Temple Meads, bought a milkshake for a homeless guy, and hopped in a black cab to my hotel. It's a Premier Inn, rather perfunctory, but it'll do the job. I had dinner and went for a walk, which reminded me how hilly Bristol is!

I also enjoyed hearing some proper Bristol accents, and had to stop myself mimicking them. I'm close enough to where I grew up that my accent's veering to the rural anyway!

Last night, someone on the local Discord had organised a get together at Roxy Ball Room for bowling. Since our usual Monday gym class was cancelled, me and cosmolinguist went along. Despite being exhausted from a late night and poor sleep, I managed to drag myself out.

We went masked of course, but the venue is well ventilated and fairly quiet on a Monday. The CO2 meter showed relatively low risk, so we were able to unmask and have food and drink in the venue, which was great. My hot dog and E's pizza were very tasty, and we indulged in several pints and a few cocktails.

It was weird meeting people I mostly know online and trying to correlate real names to Discord handles but everyone was lovely. Even the guy who got staggeringly drunk, whom I was keeping an eye on, remained polite and well behaved.

We were all pretty bad at the games. I did surprisingly well for me at the bowling, while E and others picked the bisexual option of hitting both gutters in a frame. They set up a club for it and talked about a secret handshake. Nobody was a dick about doing well or doing badly.

After the bowling we hung around chatting and drinking for a while and considered the other games on offer. For some reason we ended up playing shuffleboard. None of us knew how to play. It involves a very well polished long narrow wooden table, and some very well polished metal pucks which you slide down the board. It is incredibly easy to yeet the puck right off the end and only the gentlest nudge is required to reach a scoring position.

Players are divided into two teams and take turns sliding pucks. You score more points the closer your puck gets to the end of the board, and you can knock other pucks - either off the board entirely or into better scoring positions. We played for what felt like hours, and it was good fun. We cheered good shots from teammates and opponents alike. Again I don't think anyone was seriously keeping score.

Around 9:30 when we'd run out of shuffleboard, most of the group headed off to karaoke but me and E headed home with a Discord friend who lives near us. We walked them home from the bus stop then came home ourselves.

All in all it was a lovely night out. I stretched social muscles instead of exercise ones, and got to relax and chill out.

A few weeks ago was Trans Day of Remembrance. A consortium of trans organisations (Not A Phase, Sparkle and others) had organised the usual vigil in Sackville Park, but given the sub-zero temperatures and bright_helpings' ankle, we decided to go watch a live stream of the vigil from the relative warmth and comfort of the Proud Trust building down by MMU. There were about a dozen people there, including one of the baby queers that E and I had met on the way to Trans Pride Manchester. I'd brought the CO2 monitor and was wearing a mask, of course. Even with a small number of people in a big space, the CO2 levels were very high, building up from 1500ppm to 2500ppm over the course of the event (800ppm is considered a relatively low-risk level). This goes against Proud Places's own accessibility guide which states "Each of the event spaces at The Proud Place has a background ventilation system that automatically adjusts to occupancy levels."

So after the event, as well as passing on my thanks to volunteers, I raised this with both Proud Trust (who own the building) and Sparkle (who'd organised the live stream). I'd spoken with a friend who's a Sparkle volunteer, who said that the Sparkle volunteers at the Proud Place weren't briefed on ventilation, which is a predictable oversight. In my feedback, I said that I loved the fact this policy existed, and would like to volunteer to help ensure that it's followed. I offered help in various ways, from providing procedures and/or training to staff and volunteers; providing Corsi-Rosenthal boxes to improve air filtration; developing CO2 level monitoring solutions so people are alerted when the ventilation is insufficient.

Back in May I came up with the idea of an organisation providing ventilation and filtration advice, devices and support to LGBT+ venues and organisations. I never heard back from Feel Good Club about it either. I still think it's a good idea, but only if we can get people on board. I could fill my shed with home-made CR boxes and they'd be doing bugger-all use unless I can actually get them used in venues.

So far I haven't had any acknowledgement from Proud Trust or Sparkle, let alone response, which is disappointing. Having just one LGBT+ venue in Manchester which can be trusted to provide some level of protection would be a game changer for me personally and the LGBT+ community. We should be used to looking after ourselves while the Government ignores a fatal and debilitating pandemic, after all!

I really wish Facebook had the same kind of content filtering as Mastodon. There are a bunch of news stories about the XEC variant and they're all getting hijacked by the usual anti-vax conspiracy theorists. And as usual I'm doing my public duty and calling these things out, providing links to WHO guidance and so on. Not to change anybody's mind, just to let the rational people know they're not alone.

I'm just So. Fucking. Tired. of this happening all the time. And not just over Covid, over climate change and asylum seekers and pretty much every other issue. We are long past the point of there being a consensus reality. People believe what they want, and what they want is to be selfish and spiteful.

All I can do is keep my own little corner of the world slightly safer, clinging to reality as everyone else chooses to ignore it. And that little corner feels like it's getting smaller all the time. I don't have the power, time, energy or money to push back. I hope that somewhere, people with more power than me are trying to find a solution to the break-down of fact-based reality. But generally people with power are happy to contribute to it, because they can use it to solidify their power base. So my hope is minimal at best.

There's nothing that anyone can do at this point, we just have to ride it out. On Covid, the only way forward I can see is a variant so lethal that Governments are forced to act, and that might shock some people out of complacency and get them to re-evaluate their choices. And I hate feeling like the death of innocent people is the only way I might escape this situation.

Last Friday, cosmolinguist and I met up with a bunch of people from t'Internet for a Greggs crawl. Like a pub crawl, but with Greggs. We started at 6:30 and finished around 8 when most branches closed, and managed to hit up four branches in that time. I had a sausage and bean melt in the first two, a steak bake in the third. By the time we hit the fourth, the teen/twentysomethings we were with were full, but I was insistent that it didn't count if nobody bought anything, so I got a doughnut and shamed some of them into purchasing too.

It was stupid and pointless but it got us out of the house, and got us talking to some strangers. It was more accessible than a pub crawl too - less time to get served, the items were cheaper, and open to people who don't drink or don't like pubs.

Afterwards, E and I did go to an actual pub for a pint and I taught him how to play Pokémon Go. Sadly on the bus back we were harassed by somebody for wearing masks, which is actually the first time that's happened, and it happened all the way back home. 20 minutes of being yelled at is hard to ignore.

tl;dr: It's both worth it and pretty easy to take basic precautions against COVID-19. The more you do, the safer you and those around you will be. Please feel free to share this post - either link to it, screencap it, copy and paste it, whatever - to help spread this message, rather than a potentially fatal, likely disabling illness.

On Friday, I went into Manchester City Centre with cosmolinguist to meet a friend for lunch. We already know the places that we can go with outside seating, and also cover in case the weather's unpleasant. For old time's sake, we met up at Nudo just off Piccadilly Gardens, and sat outside. It was sunny when we arrived, but a passing spring shower made us glad we were sitting under cover. After lunch, we went shopping in the Arndale. I wore my FFP2 mask; E wore his FFP3. We went into a few shops, and E got asked about his striking-looking mask as he often does. Then we went out into Exchange Square and sat outside Salvi's for coffee and cocktails, before popping masks back on for a mooch round Manchester Cathedral. I found a flyer there for the Manchester Jewish Museum, which has just completed an extension and refurbishment.

Our friend parted ways; E and I walked up Cheetham Hill (which is both shorter and steeper than I recall) to the museum. We went in masks on but it was pretty quiet and felt well ventilated; I used our portable CO2 monitor to confirm that the air was reasonably fresh, and we enjoyed the museum and synagogue without masks on. So much so that we lost track of time and got kicked out at 5pm as they were closing! We headed back down Red Bank and spotted Base Bar, a baseball-themed bar with some batting cages in back. Again, it was pretty quiet and the CO2 monitor confirmed we were OK to drink inside; as it got busier we moved out front. After a couple of drinks we were pretty peckish, so headed back towards the city centre and found Cali's Cafe which was good value and unpretentious. Again, it was pretty quiet and well ventilated and the CO2 monitor said we were fine to sit down and enjoy our burgers.

After that we headed practically next door to Bar Fringe, an old haunt from my student days. We sat outside in the beer garden and chatted to some people who were going to a comedy show nearby. It started raining so we finished our drinks and started to make our way back towards our bus home, stopping briefly at The Molly House which has a covered smoking area on the first floor where we could sit unmasked. Again we got talking to somebody there, about the value of the good deeds of evil people, which was a delightfully philosophical way to finish off a night out. Masks on again for the bus home to mother_bones.

I'm posting this not just because it was a lovely day, which it was, but because it was a lovely day that wasn't stopped by the precautions we continue to take, during this ongoing pandemic, to manage the risk to our own health and our immunocompromised friends and family. In a way I'm posting it to demonstrate that it is possible to have a life and still care about Covid. Certainly, having a portable CO2 monitor helps, and that's not something everyone can afford; it would help if the venues themselves were monitoring, publicising and managing their ventilation levels, as they're required to in some other countries. I'm still hoping some venues / promoters can be convinced to do this.

But the way the pandemic has shaken out (in the UK at least) means that people don't know they still need to take precautions, and they don't really know what's possible and what's useful. Doing the research is a big investment of time and energy, and if you don't have a strong reason to do so, then it can be too much work. Not many people know the current WHO guidance for COVID-19 recommends wearing masks indoors:

Masks are recommended following a recent exposure to COVID-19, when someone has or suspects they have COVID-19, when someone is at high-risk of severe COVID-19, and for anyone in a crowded, enclosed, or poorly ventilated space.

I'm hoping that stories like this can be positive examples for people.