Waiting

Well, highly anticipated reader, like me you're probably still waiting for that point at which we break through onto the sunlight uplands of 2021, to times that are so much obviously better than 2020. 2021's response to 2020 so far seems to have been to see it as a competition for how dire things that can get, but they say it's darkest before the dawn, so it's worth holding onto those hopes.

Here in the US it's very much about waiting: counting the days until Trump is no longer President (we're down to less than 5), and waiting for vaccines.

Vaccine distribution here is at best describable as chaotic. What appears to be happening here in California is that our faithful Governor, Gavin Newsom, sets the policy which the private healthcare providers then attempt to implement. However, they're doing that by opening up websites and phone lines for folks in those groups to do open enrollment, so to say it's haphazard is an insult to haps and hazards everywhere. The UK's figure of 5.3% of the population vaccinated is something we can only look at with some significant envy right now.

Here's Gavin laying out in intimate detail what Phase 1c, paragraph 3, subsection gamma-prime will look like should we ever actually get that far:

We're also watching, waiting and hoping for the promised peaceful transition of power. No-one's quite sure what's going to happen this Wednesday, but the recurring quote is that there are more troops in Washington DC than Afghanistan right now. This week, as social media everywhere decided to ban Trump, rumours circulated that a protest at Twitter's HQ in San Francisco could turn nasty. Barricades were erected and security scrambled; in the end, three people turned up. San Francisco is not what you would describe as Trump's "base".

This week I got to indulge one of my favourite weaknesses and buy myself a new fountain pen. In fact, I did this for the second week running, because what's turned into an annual event happened last week: I dropped my pen, it landed on its nib, and thus wasn't usable afterwards. This is the third time I've done this since we moved to the US. My typical writing weapon of choice is the classic Lamy 2000, which is German. When I broke one of these in Europe, my local stationer sent it off to Lamy and they repaired it free of charge. Here in the US, Lamy don't have an official service centre, and instead you need to send your pen to Bob in Arizona who will replace the nib for you, at a cost of $124. The Lamy costs $199 here so it's hardly worth getting the nib replaced, so as a result I'm accruing a shelf weighed down with knackered Lamy 2000s.

So, as I broke the most recent one, I decided I'd go for the "heir and a spare" approach and get two, one being something different. I plumped for the standard Lamy, because it's a fantastic writing instrument, and also added a Pilot 823 Custom, as famously used by the author Neil Gaiman. This is poles apart from the Lamy - it's got that chunky, old-school fountain pen thing going on, clearly "inspired" (aka copied from) classic Mont Blancs and others. I've never quite got on with such pens before, but this Pilot is really, really good. It's also got a filling mechanism which resembles a sink plunger more than anything else, and is totally unique to this pen. I've also found a supply of vaguely sensible notebooks to use over here (my usual UK brand isn't available here, and a decent notebook with blank pages seems almost impossible to come by) - an imported Japanese notebook, which as you can imagine is appropriately expensive - so I can write in a way that feels good. These things matter, honest ;-).

One piece of waiting came to a happy ending last night: Max is home! Who's Max you ask? Only the most famous cat in Palo Alto! Full-colour signs on the majority of lamp posts have been advertising that Max has been lost for a couple of weeks now, and Helen's been avidly tracking sightings, updates and appeals for information on the local social network Nextdoor. We've all been worried about Max and it shows the rich sense of community there is here; I don't think you'd see quite such excitement about this in the UK, but maybe the pandemic and general lack of other things to talk about mean this is just blessed relief. Anyway, we're all so pleased that Max was found, caught and reunited with his staff last night. They even promised to go round and take down the signs, which is a typical level of Palo Alto middle class politeness.

Let's all buckle up and hope for a peaceful week, dear reader, and we'll see you on the other side.