'Tis seasonal

My sister and mother told me separately that they woke up to a covering of snow - OTOH they live four doors apart, so not getting the same weather report would be weird. And my sister added that she spent part of the last day of March herding 30 8 year olds back to school from the other end of town in a blizzard, which she hadn't planned for (she had to step in to cover part way through their field trip to the river).

My brother-in-law's Covid case has been confirmed by PCR in the hope of getting him on one of the anti-virals, which may go through tomorrow, even without them he's actually looking far better than my sister was at this point in things, despite being 12 years older and having multiply screwed lungs. And meanwhile his younger grandson (5?) has now got Covid for the second time (not via his granddad).

I'm holding off on booking my trip North for Easter until I see how things develop.

April Fools and other stupidity

It's a measure of the state of the world that I'm still not sure core-elements of two April Fools Day stories aren't true even after having them identified as April Fools by the authors/context.

The two in question would be the Guardian's story from Mari Tyme on Tory MPs wanting to use the seized Russian yacht as a new Royal Yacht, and another one on the Avalanche Press site about Florida passing a law against upsetting whites 

And this story about US-style library book censorship spreading to the UK is a disturbing read, though it completely fails to address the censorship of books on neurodiversity alluded to in the sub-heading.

Meanwhile Boris has been showing off his inner coward by backing down twice in a day over banning gay conversion therapy First a leak revealed he had backed down on banning it, with the Guardian citing an alleged backlash*, presumably from the handful of Christian extremists and backbench Tories who see torturing kids because they're gay as perfectly reasonable behaviour. You can bet if it was extremists from any religion other than Christianity that the same handful of Tory backbenchers would be howling in protest against it. And then he backed down from the backlash to the leak and people started briefing that there would be legislation after all, but it would only cover gay conversion therapy, not trans. *headdesk*

I can't help wondering if this double u-turn of Boris's actually means that it was always targeted at Trans people and they just couldn't be bothered to separate out the Gay part at the first cut? So not just hateful, but slap-dash. They're now trying to argue it is to allow gender identify clinics to function, but that's clearly not what the ban on conversion therapy was aimed at.

And I also can't help wondering if it was deliberately leaked yesterday to distract from the first fines being issued over No 10 Covid parties

* I'm not clear if the Guardian bothered changing their headline between the two versions of the story, I initially completely missed that it had been re-written last-night to say that he'd u-turned for a second time.