It’s an odd thing to meet someone famous. You already know them, you’ve seen them on TV or in films, you’ve listened to their records.. and somehow they are, all of a sudden, a complete stranger again. They even look different – some are shorter, others are far larger, they all look older…

Perhaps that will become less of a shock with HD television… experience the wrinkles before you meet the star.

It is especially true of actors, though to some extent musicians, that without their act they can appear almost lost. It’s nice to have someone make you look witty or charming, but carrying around an on-the-fly scriptwriter just isn’t an option.

I once met former super-middleweight boxer and UK celebrity Chris Eubank in a fish and chip shop in Brighton. He’s famed for being a presence in that town. As you can imagine he is of the bigger and taller category of celebrity… still, he seemed a little tragic, certainly not threatening, as he stood there wearing a full kaftan whilst queuing behind me for fish and chips. In the ring and on TV he looked like a warrior, in a queue he just looked like some guy with a hankering for battered cod and pickled eggs.

And whilst I don’t want to sound like a b-list (probably closer to c-list) celebrity stalker, I was also at a party with a cast member from the popular teen soap Hollyoaks. Again, he had a certain sort of melancholy about him as he stood by the bottom of the stairs being avoided by just about everyone – The party was full of ‘cool’ people (I don’t count, I was smuggled in)… all being too cool to go up to him and say, ‘you’re on the telly’. To my shame I didn’t talk to him either, but that’s because I know I would have taken the opportunity to tell him everything I think is wrong about his programme, and nobody wants to spend the whole night hearing that.

I’m not saying they’re all like that, indeed I have met a few that are even more charming and charismatic in real life, and Em rates former presenter of The Antiques Roadshow, Michael Aspel very highly.

I hope I don’t ever become a celebrity… I’m happy for my comic to get around (here’s the book appearing in Mr Gray’s 2nd Shift), but there’s a high possibility I would be one of the less wittier, shorter types… that is, of course, unless  I am famous for being short and witless, as so many celebrities are these days.

If the films are to believed the future will be run by computers… and whilst we can get a little hysterical about the world-conquering type, I’d like you to spare a moment for our slave computers.

They are the ones that we have chained to a lifespan of domesticity… they’re in our ovens, our washing machines and our vacuum cleaners…. They’ll be the ones mopping up all the blood after the revolution.

Still, I’m not looking forward to the day that someone can hack into my fridge to make it order an obscene amount of beer for itself, but I am looking forward to using it as an excuse… that and being able to break kitchen appliances on a whole new level.

There are two types of people… those that think animatronics are better than CGI, and those that are wrong.

There’s something about having several people stuffed into a latex alien that makes it more believable. Take Jabba the Hutt – an intimidating monster reduced to a large slug by computerised animation.

There’s apparently a difference between real fakery and fake fakery.

I’ll leave you with a video of perhaps the most talented make-up and effects artist – Rick Baker. The man is a genius and I defy you to find a a computer generated primate as realistic and believable as this:

Right I’m off to go and watch the Making of Labyrinth documentary.

From the viewpoint of science, the North Pole is just another point on the globe, but symbolically it is hugely important. There is supposed to be ice at the North Pole, not open water.

Mark Serreze of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado.

I never thought that I would live to see the North Pole melt…  but apparently I might get the chance. The article I took that quote from suggests that this year we might see, for the first time in human history, a total melting of the North Pole ice.

A fifty-fifty chance at least. I wonder if anyone has actually bet money on it yet…

It’s amazing what you can’t see as you run towards it.

]]> http://theflowfieldunity.com/2008/06/30/myapathy/feed/ http://theflowfieldunity.com/2008/06/29/resistance/ http://theflowfieldunity.com/2008/06/29/resistance/#comments Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:20:44 +0000 Adam http://theflowfieldunity.com/?p=449

Child-resistant packaging. It’s a great way to kick the infirm when they’re down.

Eventually pill-resistant children will invalidate the necessity for the words ‘push down and turn’.

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I went to see The Happening the other day. It’s been getting really mixed reviews, but I thought it was OK, so long as you remember it’s a B-movie.

It mentions the bees too, mostly the fact that they are disappearing. It’s a global problem and no one really knows why… and it’s really not good news.

So, the mixture of watching a fictional disaster movie, combined with a quite possible start of a real one made me think. How would I cope should I find myself in some sort of apocalypse scenario… right now, probably not to well. I’m not Apocalypse ready.

There’s a ton of basic survival things that I don’t know – I’m certainly no Ray Mears, but I think it might be wise to get to grips with some of the basics. I’m not too great with weapons either, I haven’t had much call to practice – I’ve handled a shotgun on a few occasions (and it would be my weapon of choice in a zombie scenario), but that’s it for guns.

And physically I’m not too sharp either. If what I have seen in films is to be believed, there’s going to be a lot of running… I might know what to do, but am I going to be fit enough to do it?

That’s why this weekend I’m going to do a little fitness test and then I’m going to start training. The aim is to be Apocalypse Ready as soon as possible. That means everything, the skills and abilities as well as a level of physical fitness that should get me through most non-extinction event scenarios.

I’m not sure just yet what I am going to have to learn and do to achieve this state and feel free to make suggestions. First however, I need to work out what those situations will be.. missing bees and zombies…

Broadly speaking, the fourth wall is the boundary between an audience and fiction. It comes from the theatre, where a set has three solid walls and an invisible one through which the audience view the stage.

Breaking the fourth wall is a  phrase used to describe the act of involving the audience in the fiction, un-suspending their disbelief, so to speak. It’s normally used for dramatic effect, like when Ferris Bueller turns to the camera and talks to you directly.

These terms are also applicable with other types of fiction – films, novels, video games and even comics.

But not really webcomics…

The reason is that most webcomics break the fourth wall with such alarming regularity that no one has time to reconstruct it again. It’s not intentional, it’s just their nature… the stop-start of the narrative (if they have one), the now obligatory blog, advertising all over the place, not to mention that mostly they are viewed through a monitor or screen…

You’re always aware you’re reading a webcomic – it’s as if we’ve gone out of our way to eliminate the line that separates.

…which is why I have no guilt in asking you to get involved with The Flowfield Unity (it’s always strange typing that, it’s a bit like saying your own name aloud) – I was looking through the archives when I noticed that there are seven comics without any discussion to go with them. They’re from the time I moved the original site, and I have never gone back to fill them in. Here they are:

Man with a plan

Modern Biochemistry

Gary, I found your microbe

The pits

Fragile Love

A cold call

Pharmanoia

So… what I want you to do is simple. I want you to write something to fill the space. If used (and it probably will be) it will be set as a quote and attributed to you.

Begone fourth wall.

It’s bound to happen at some point in the future – falling advertising rates for television, an increasingly savvy consumer society – someone will release an advert that is a bit special.

I don’t know what it will be right now, but I’m guessing that it could possibly take the following format…

In an environment bombarded by flashy ads and attention grabbing jingles to really stand out… you have to go against the grain – A static image, likely a well known logo, held silent on screen for the entire duration of the break… perhaps it will have the word ‘buy’ just above the logo. And not just one channel either, all the channels simultaneously. For a brief time that static image will be Television.

I hope it’s something like that.

I hope I’m not eating/drinking/doing whatever they are advertising at the time. I hate that, feeling like a suggestible creature, driven only by impulse and advertising.

At one point it could have been nuclear missiles… television and rock music… an oil shortage perhaps… but now I’m sure that the one man-made construct that will bring humanity to its knees is in fact meetings.

In principle at least, sitting down and talking things out sounds like a good idea. Indeed, I imagine there are plenty of jobs where this is crucial. The problem appears when every level of manager believes that a meeting is necessary to validate their own employment.

I’ve attended meetings purely about the next meeting. It’s a fractal nightmare with more and more time being sunk into it.

The last place I worked had weekly production meetings. We would sit in a circle and take turns telling the boss about what we were up to. A pretty pointless endeavour that was only necessary since the boss had no idea what his workforce was actually doing. This was made worse since everyone was generally overworked – too overworked to have the time to sit there and listen to everyone else say how overworked they were… this in turn created a loss of time, thereby putting everyone under more pressure. As the pressure mounted, the boss resolved to have more of these meetings to sort it out… and then… well, I don’t know what happened, I left.

By my estimation we will reach total meeting grid-lock in under a decade. We’ll all be sat there having one last meeting about why the world has ground to a halt and why the end is suddenly nigh… I do hope there will be coffee and biscuits.

When I get a little paranoid I like to remember that we’re a nation of people watchers – It’s just a national pass-time, not the slow, steady erosion of personal liberties.

That has to be the reason why we are the most watched civilisation ever to grace this planet… it can’t be because we do anything particularly entertaining, the weather’s too poor for that.

Apparently there is one CCTV camera for every fourteen of us…

… I don’t think that’s good enough. In this time of great technological fecundity, surely it should be our right to at least have one per person. Is there a CCTV shortage that I am unaware of?

And why not go further. If you were to reverse that figure, fourteen cameras for every person, there would be no reason to ever miss an enthralling minute of what we do.

But it still has to be watched and there’s a limit to how many television sets a small, balding man in a darkened room can watch at once.

Ah! You could install a viewing box in every home. People already watch that sort of thing anyway, they’ll love it. You give them a remote control with a big red button on it that they have to press when they see a crime.

It would be great. You’d be able to do away with the police force, or at least strip it down to just people that pick other people up and bring them to the cells. That would save a lot of money… money that could be given out as prizes for capturing criminals.

I know, I know, it sounds too good to be true… but I promise you, we’re doing our best to make this wonderfully hellish dream a reality.

I’m not a coward, I’m just bullet shy…

And with good reason, I mean, has anyone realised how dangerous those things are? Health and safety should be on it pronto.

There’s been a fair bit of news about the deaths of British soldiers abroad. I think I’m in the majority when I say that despite my opposition to some conflicts, I have a large deal of respect for the people actually fighting them.

Except when they do such things as treat prisoners as animals, or worse.

Watching action films, you would think that you could probably take a few bullets before you start to feel them… and that even if you do you can still run around like a nutter with seemingly little impairment.

Just not true… ask someone that has been shot.

And that’s where the respect comes from. I imagine that soldiers get a lot more opportunity to speak to people that have had a bullet enter their person, and yet they don’t let that put them off.

Here’s a short video on ballistics. I thought you might like to watch something get shot. In this case it is milk containers – I’m not sure what the assailant has against them, but he means business.

Did you notice the pro-hollow argument? I found that really odd. Surely they should be making these things less likely to kill someone outright… sorry ’stop’ (which seems to be a euphemism for ‘kill’ in this context).

A collaborative project today.

It’s summer and that means hot, humid nights sat outside with my friends… time to resurrect the portable tape player and slap on some mixtapes.

So, that’s what I want to do – make a mix tape with you.

Let’s get all High Fidelity…

I want you to suggest tracks that fit the ‘hot, humid nights sat outside with my friends’ theme. It’s fairly abstract as themes go, so hopefully we should end up with a diverse mix. You might have to explain why you have chosen a particular track though.

Points will be awarded for suitability, humour, lyrical significance and tuneship.

We’ll also need a title, preferably a smart, funny one that will make me look good…

It’s one of my least favourite sayings, ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions’. I think it means that intending to do good, but failing to follow it through is a bad thing… but surely that can’t be worse that intending to do something bad and actually doing it?

Maybe the phrase could be altered… ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions but the train is pure malice’.

Idioms – phrases with the sole purpose of making non-natives look confused.

And even if you know what those words mean, I’m sure the average person would have a hard time telling you why they mean that.

I assume, this being written in English (or close enough) you understand such classics as ‘letting the cat out of the bag’ and ‘in a pinch’, but how are you with some more obscure ones such as ‘brass monkeys’?

It’s a two way street – every language has its intentionally confusing idioms – Take the Latvian that translates as ‘up a stove pipe’… you could make a reasonable guess what that means, and you would likely be right… right but still unsure.

And it is this global uncertainty that lets you get away with a great pass-time – inserting nonsensical idioms into conversations. Try it, the more outrageous the more points, providing you don’t get pulled up on it.

… I phoned Mike in IT, he said the motherboard had bitten the kitten and that we might as well put the slipper on it for now…

Despite having so little of it, there is nothing finer to your average human than passing the time.

Some like to lose themselves in thought whilst others play games… and then there are those that try to learn a skill when doing nothing in particular.

For some humans though, passing the time is much like passing a kidney stone. They find it hard to amuse themselves. It turns out they have a condition called boredom.

Boredom has a complex epidemiology, but is easily diagnosed by frequent exclamations of ‘I’m bored’ and a certain amount of fidgeting and clock watching.

No single cure has proved effective enough to eradicate the problem.

Outbreaks are likely to occur in circumstances where electrical and communications equipment fail.

Music television is great. It combines my two great passions in life… music and television.

I was a late starter. MTV and the like were not really accessible in the UK whilst I was growing up. Without satellite or cable you were restricted to just the four channels. Sure we had the institution that was Top of the Pops, and you would occasionally see a music video there, but it’s not quite the same.

Recently, however, with the digital expansion, I found myself in possession of multiple MTV-like channels and a particularly bad habit of watching what are essentially adverts for songs all day long. I endured Def Leopard’s top 100 stadium rock yesterday, all one hundred of them… that’s a lot of hair and spandex.

Here’s the Alice Cooper video I saw… the bit about the jacket is at 2.19, just in case you want to skip through the hair posing.

I realise that I have missed some excellent music videos, especially early era ones from the 80s. Stuff like Peter Gabriel’s Sledge Hammer video, and even the full version of Thriller.

I also noticed that the amount of music per hour is often suspiciously low on these channels. Considering music videos are essentially adverts anyway, there seems to be a lot of filler. Finding the music can be a bit of a chore.

But, as usual, I’m behind the times, so I need to sprint to catch up – Music television is old hat compared to the internet, where I can see videos for pretty much any song I like. No longer do I have to watch through the other adverts… the problem is, without TV to hold my hand, I have no idea where to start.

What, in your opinion, are the best music videos? And whilst we are at it, what are the worst?

A functional post today, as opposed to the usual whimsy…

You may have noticed that I’ve been tinkering with the site. It was time for a spring clean, and as usual, cleaning just makes more mess.

At the moment, I’ve just made a few functional changes and temporarily altered some styles. I’m aiming for a cleaner look. It would be a real help if you could tell me what you find useful, awkward or annoying about the site… any improvements you’d like to see and anything you’d like to see disappear.

By request, I’ve added the actual comic images to the RSS feed, as those of you using this method can see. There will also be some improvements to the gallery and search options since the archives are getting on nicely.

I’m thinking about removing all of the colour from the site, going back to purely black and white… what do you think? And how should a show active links, by underlines, by bold?

I have a pretty clear idea how I would like the site to look, but I spend more time making stuff for it than I do actually reading it, so I only think it is fair that you should have a say.

Fire away.

Have you ever noticed that unisex clothing is all the rage in utopian visions of the future?

Like the uniforms in Next Generation Star Trek it tends to be of the romper suit variety.

Yet right now, unisex is very much out of fashion. Unisex anything – clothes, haircuts, toilets.

I wonder what happens in the not-to-distant future to make us change our mind?

… I’ve only ever once worn women’s clothing and it was not a happy experience. Let me explain…

I was being picked up for work and had slept in. I was woken by the sound of my lift beeping his car horn outside. I jumped out of bed, threw on some clothes from the pile on the floor, made a brief trip to the bathroom whilst still fastening buttons and the like, and then ran outside.

I really didn’t have time to think.

It was only when I got out of the car again that I realised I had put on Em’s jeans by mistake.

The first thing that struck me was the lack of blood to my legs. I don’t know how, considering the difference in our waist measurements, but I had managed to do all of the buttons up… and the waist was so tight that I was unable to undo them. You know what it’s like trying to undo buttons when you’re starting to panic?

At last the top one went and I felt the weird throbbing in my feet stop. I undid a further few buttons just for safety. I was relieved.

The second thing that struck me was the fact that the sole purpose of these jeans was to highlight the differences of the male and female anatomy, not just the wearer (by being rather tight) but also to the casual observer (by being rather tight).

I dealt with this by walking in a manner fit for a Monty Python sketch – pretty much propelling myself along, bending only at the ankles… it was a sort of foot-scurry.

I lasted until lunch time before begging for a lift home to change and received a round of applause when I returned.

I think what I’m saying is that I have had my taste of figure-hugging clothing, if only the bottom half of my person… I can’t imagine what it would be like to have my torso restricted in a similar fashion… I couldn’t survive in a romper suit and that is why I must prevent the human race from achieving utopia.

I don’t really want to jinx it, but when was the last time you read anything about GM foods? You remember, the Frankenstein variety of tomatoes that were going to to turn vegetables into animals and children into monsters.

It’s funny how fashions come and go so quickly.

Obviously, climate change is the science debate du jour, with occasional side dishes of politically charged abortion discussions and a dessert of selective embryos.

Humans, it appears, are unable to hold down multiple debates at once, especially as far as science and the media are concerned.

This could be an advantage… I think scientists should create a dummy issue. Something so terrifying and horrible that everyone will have to object to it.

Something along the lines of a study to see if it is possible to capture flesh eating monsters from another dimension to put in zoos where they are fed on kittens…

Something they have no intention of ever even looking in to, but that would at least take some of the flack away from research into life saving techniques.

Maybe a cure for religion – ‘Scientists find believer gene… plans to deactivate it’.

Something like that.

I would say that it is in my top five things when looking for a new job… low likelihood of death.

I have a high self-preservation personality… coupled with more than a little cowardice.

Still that hasn’t prevented me from a few close brushes with the grim reaper. I have broken bones, I’ve been electrocuted, I’ve narrowly avoided being squashed by a van and I’ve had some truly gruesome paper-cuts.

So I have great respect (and a little suspicion) for journalists, especially those that like to get in the thick of it. Without people like that I wouldn’t know half the awful things I do.

The only similarity I can imagine between myself and someone that is willing to stroll around an artillery peppered no-man’s land just to tell everyone how it is going, is that we have a thing for notebooks.

Laptops are fine, but I think they’re probably not best suited to a conflict environment. Whereas pen and paper operate in pretty much any condition.

I think the rate of note taking is measured in the units of moleskines per year, but isn’t necessarily specific to that rather famous brand. Indeed, Ben and Roo happened to mention that they have used waterproof notebooks, perfectly acceptable…

…unlike the bad habit of just writing ideas on scraps of paper. The concept of writing something so delicate and easy to misplace on something that also displays those qualities is a crime.

So then, the anticipated responses to this are:

1. What is your MPY?
2. Your preferred note taking materials
3. A full and frank confession concerning the information you have lost from writing it somewhere inappropriate. Leniency may be shown, but don’t expect it.

I noticed recently that I had fallen out of love with my home town, and I’m not sure we can patch things up.

It’s not the same town I started the relationship with some 28 years ago when I was born here. Back then it was a pretty little historic northern city that supported culture and creativity – it had been at the heart of the industrial revolution and the remnants stood to remind everyone of our ingenuity and work ethic.

Then it let itself go a little… put on a bit of weight, most places do as they grow, but this is not the healthy muscle of homes and communities, it’s the cellulite of massive supermarkets

This in turn has left the smaller, independent stores with little passing trade leaving the town centre a hollow shell. I think it’s a form of consumption.

Realising this, the place decided it would need constant work and face-lifts – it could appear like a young and vibrant place – but these were nothing more than cosmetic alterations, some of which went quite wrong, scarring its once delicate features.

But none of this is why we should break up, I’m not really in it for looks. The reason why it looks as if we are going to have to part ways is purely an ideological one.

Over the last few years I have found my home fighting against everything we once both stood for. It seems to be intentionally throttling its own community. First went the public swimming baths, then the culturally-based music venues and art galleries. At some point the local newspapers stopped admiring intelligent people and the university, branding them as ‘boffins’ with quite a malicious tone.

It doesn’t want musicians, artists or intellectuals, it wants consumers and immediate capital… and that’s just not me.

Recently we have had a chance to regenerate a section in the centre of town. Perhaps we could jump-start its grey, still heart. Maybe we could build a public space, like the ones we’ve lost.

Nope. It’s going to be a shopping complex.

On a lighter note, I’ve just made a little video for Fresh Creation, a website that was kind enough to show some of my previous animations. The Music is by Josh Woodward… he creates a lot of fine music under the creative commons licence.

If there is one defining mathematical characteristic of humans, it’s that they are terrible at estimating probability, just awful at it.

I include myself in that statement, I’m terrible at games of chance… I regularly lose my quarterly poker stake (£3) because of some terrible maths going on inside my head.

There’s a classic textbook exercise that asks – There are 30 people in a room, what are the chances of two of them sharing a birthday? I’ll let you think about that…

I also heard that you have a greater chance of being killed by a refrigerator than you have of winning the lottery jackpot… 1 in 13,983,816. Judging by the number of people you see queuing up to buy a lottery ticket you would think that refrigerators would be banned by now.

Even my old maths teacher made a fundamental mistake when he said that he was tempted to take a bomb onto a plane since the probability of there being two independent bombs on the same plane were quite small… actually, I think it was a bluff. He also used to host a Christmas poker game and would regularly fleece the students.

So I’m poor at calculating chance, and I had a teacher who stood to profit from the ignorance of his students… what is the probability that he deliberately mislead us in order to supplement his salary?

This cubicle farm is more like a wildlife reserve.

The flocks of paperclips, the elastic band nests… and a food chain that ends at the shredder.

There’s a monitor that looks as if it has waded through a deep swamp of filing, only to emerge covered in parasitic sticky notes (Trieminus postits).

Apparently burning them off with a zippo lighter is not the done thing.

The problem with very new technology is that sometimes you can’t tell whether it’s the best invention ever, or the worst.

That period of uncertainty is characterised by a phobia of hindsight… will I look like an idiot for using this in five years time?… five months time… five days time…

And even if it is a good invention, it doesn’t mean that it will work. Take the Betamax/VHS wars, no one could have predicted the fall out from two competing formats.

Technological anxiety.

Here’s a list of what R&D Magazine calls the ‘10 most brilliant inventions of 2007‘. You’ll notice that a lot of them have military functions, or are based upon advertising… brilliant.

Compare those, then, with this list of the ‘10 greatest inventions of all time‘. A far more sensible list… I have yet to find a military application for plumbing. Those inventions actually help people, they make our lives better.

If put on the spot, I’d probably choose the printing press as an all time high point, closely followed by antibiotics in second place. But they’re both getting on a bit, how about something more recent? Computers, the Internet… Mp3s? I don’t know… maybe this:

There are still some cultures knocking about that use simple counting systems – that is to say they only have two numbers, usually, ‘one’ and ‘many’.

That’s the sort of maths I appreciate.

There isn’t even ‘zero’ to contend with, since if you have nothing of something, there’s not much point in talking about it… you don’t go to the market to buy no cows…

I’m spending the day trying to conform to that system and so far I have yet to stumble across a failing. I’m actually using ‘one’ and ’some’.

I can negotiate times and meetings, mostly using television as a reference – I’ll meet you some time after The Simpsons.

…and in response to questions such as ‘how many cups of tea?’ I have to answer, ‘One for me, one for Steve, and one for Dan’. It’s not efficient, but it works.

It’s a shame really, it can’t go on forever. Sooner or later I’m going to be ambushed by a number that has to be said to avoid dire consequences… I just don’t know what that is going to be or when it is going to happen. Perhaps it’ll be when setting my alarm clock – they’re pretty tricky to negotiate without using numbers… or maybe it’ll be when I walk into a shop and my offer of ’some money’ just doesn’t do it for them…

I want you to think of this as a destruction testing seminar. Is there any possible way you could live, reasonably, in modern osciety, without using more numbers?

I’m trying to work out how long it would take me to escape my country, legally.

It’s not quick, but it is quicker than I thought…

First, I don’t have a current passport, so that would mean a trip down to Liverpool, and since I don’t drive a car, the quickest way of getting there would be by train. That takes about an hour and a half, and getting the passport itself takes about four hours for a renewal.

That gives a running total of five and a half hours… plus say another hour to account for getting to the train station and walking to the passport office, plus another thirty minutes of inevitable delays on public transport.

The new amended total is therefore seven hours.

Liverpool fortunately has an airport, (possibly the easiest way to leave your country), the excellently named, John Lennon Airport.

They advise you turn up at least two hours before the flight to check in. Assuming that I get there and book a flight in half and hour (I’m not fussy, I just want to leave – I just have to make sure I don’t choose anywhere like the Falkland Islands), I could be in the air within 3 hours.

Plus, say an hour to get to the airport in the first place, and then the mandatory security checks that seem to happen to me quite a lot, they last about thirty minutes… giving a grand total of eleven and a half hours.

…and depending in which direction I head in it could be anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour before leaving British airspace. Let’s call that half an hour too… Twelve Hours.

So, that’s the time to beat. I expect strong challenges from everyone already in the possession of valid paperwork and passports, that’s the advantage you get for being prepared.

And spare a thought for anyone who, no matter what, is unable to leave their country.