Listening to my daughter’s Zoom singing lesson is making me very proud and a bit emotional. As someone who can’t carry a tune in a bucket, hearing her blasting out songs with incredible precision and confidence is quite something.

And now COVID19 is [hitting the coffee supply chain]sprudge.com/covid-19-…).

Enjoy that cup of joe while you can…

This is interesting, and ties in with what immunologists I know have been saying for a while: disinfecting surfaces is basically COVID theatre, and wasting money we should be using on countering aerosol spread.

There’s plenty of discussion of journalism business models. There’s some discussion about emergent journalistic forms. There’s rarely any deep connection between these two discussions.

And that’s why so much of the industry is still struggling.

I’m not saying we’re deep in middle age, but there is considerable excitement in this household about the arrival of a new washing machine tomorrow.

A quick digest of some worthwhile or interesting nature and outdoors reading.

There’s a good reason we should temper the current Substack enthusiasm in journalism circles with a little caution. It wouldn’t take much for the newsletter platform to reinvent itself as an attention gatekeeper.

And there’s VCs lurking the background, wanting their payday…

A restaurant in Île de Ré, from back when I used to travel overseas.

And go to restaurants.

An Île de Ré restuarant in August 2019.

Frost on the roofs this morning. The girls were very excited. The adults, less so.

Frost on Emerald Quay roofs, Shoreham Beach.

Didn’t take them long to find the refilled feeders.

Closing in on feeders in a tree in a Sussex garden.

I used my new MacBook Pro for an hour this morning to monitor a livestream I was running, dived into a quick Zoom call, have done some emails, edited some photos and worked on a blog post.

And I have 95% battery left. 🤯

Conspiracy theories: making the gullible feel insightful in your Facebook feed right now.

So… this is my first post from a Mac powered by Apple Silicon.

Spending far too long looking at video of myself has been one of the major downsides of the pandemic.

This is a good piece: I found the wall-to-wall COVID coverage very hard to cope with back in the spring. Research shows just how much it dominated reporting.

Blogging is a discipline: it’s a practice of expressing your thoughts in writing, routinely, and with focus. Writing a post every day for Microblogvember has helped reinforce that.

And…done. 🍾

It was a gorgeously foggy morning this morning:

I am, and have been for as long as I can remember, a pedestrian by preference. Walking is my favourite way of getting anywhere.

Shame it’s impractical for so many journeys.

Has anyone else come to quite enjoy wearing a mask? I like seeing the fashion choices people make with them, and will quite miss that when the pandemic passes.

I won’t miss the disposable ones left as litter on the ground, though.

Last night, I faced the dilemma of going to bed early, or staying up and having some quiet time to myself. I chose the former - and was rewarded with a half hour to myself, as I was up before the rest of the family.

Result.