Skipping coffee won’t do it

Diary of the last eight hours

8.00am

For the first day since the middle of August Karren sets off to her actual office.

Back to the ferry, back to a world of desks and meetings, back to the pleasure of having other living people around you as you work. She missed the conviviality, the energy of it.

For the first day since the middle of August, I start my day in the empty World Headquarters of More Than A Feilding.

I have less need for the desks, the meetings, the conviviality, the manic energy. I have Twitter.

This may not last very long at all, obviously. These Orange summer days have a bit of a last week of August 1939 mood to them as Omicron lines its forces up along the border.

Are we ready for the blitzkrieg? Has the government maybe bought a little more time by delaying the next round of MIQ bookings? 

Yes, maybe they could have acted sooner. And yes, maybe if they had, people would have objected to the suddenness. 

And yes maybe they’re not nearly prepared for an Omicron onslaught because where’s the evidence of any preparation? But also; maybe there is a bunch of work being seen through to completion before we’re told about it. Because that’s something that also draws fire - isn’t it ? - the bare bones of a policy announced before all the specifics have been worked out. 

All good, no worries. Announcements will arrive in due course and will be received in the usual cordial manner. No-one will lose their rag. Gee, just imagine how wearying this whole thing would have been if people had kept flying off the handle and asking every three minutes are we fucken there yet?? You’d be utterly sick of it by now wouldn’t you?

Heavy caution works fine for me, thanks, and keep those vaccinations coming. Omicron may be somewhat less deadly, but I would not willingly walk into its path. Apart from anything else, it's too soon yet to know just how many cases of Long Covid stand to be left in its wake, and that is for sure something to worry about. It can be sustained misery to find yourself with a condition about which the medical has only limited experience and knowledge.

This, from Private Eye’s medical columnist, about patients trying to deal with ME, is very pertinent.

The bottom line is that ME is real, and horrible but high quality research is lacking. We have no cures and so - as with long covid - you just have to learn to live with it…some people with ME do seem to improve or even recover, but we are not sure why or how.

Moving on, the lesson for ME (and Covid) is clear. We need properly funded large scale randomised controlled trials to achieve definitive answers. But first we need to agree on ME research priorities so more time and effort and money aren’t wasted.

My own crisis experiences with the medical system have always been to do with extremely known quantities: the cardiovascular system, the reproductive, the orthopaedic, the ophthalmic; all medical realms about which the knowledge is wide and deep and the expertise vastly reassuring. I have felt abundantly confident when they tell me I will be just fine.

But if your illness is not well-known, not well understood, not well-documented, opaque, unclear, you can be set for endless frustration and worry and, when nothing seems to work, and they seem to doubt what you're telling them, despair.

How much this proves to be the story of Long Covid may depend on how much expertise and resource now gets mobilised to find definitive answers. Will it follow the track of the Covid vaccine? Or might Long Covid patients find themselves having to plead for consideration like the HIV patients of an earlier pandemic?

10.30am

Into the village to spend money on coffee. No, not really, we make it at home, mostly. 

We did treat ourselves yesterday though, it being our last day of Working From Home together for perhaps as many as four days.

Oh but spending money on fripperies like coffee is always good for debate when the conversation turns to young people and the monumental unaffordability of houses.

This story - Kiwis share ideas for managing the escalating cost of living in New Zealand - offers a litany of penny and pound-wise advice. Of themselves the tips are not by any means wrong. There are many habits of thrifty living worth acquiring. But what’s being proffered here is just hopelessly out of proportion to the scale of the actual problem.

Even if you had $160,000 IN CASH ready to buy a $800,000 house a year ago, 
tweets @Yorrike,
you’d have to have saved an additional $385 per week ($55 a day) over the year in order to keep pace with house price rises and still have a 20% deposit.

It's an individual solution to a  STRUCTURAL problem,
tweets Becs.

I would add, hear hear and also: this is essentially a vision of tunnelling to Australia with a teaspoon.

The money we earn, most of us, is not remotely reflected in the sales tags that now hang upon the houses.

The market is utterly distorted and gee, I guess I must have typed this A HUNDRED times already but here we still are because so very many people remain so very seduced by the idea of a house being a glistering commodity that can be bought and sold in an ever-rising market for untaxed gain. 

I still maintain the best, maybe only, way out is to get the State to step in and buy and build like nobody's business on an epic scale and leave the profit element completely out of the whole bloody equation.

You know it's serious when the surgeons tell you you're down for a general anaesthetic. What we need is a general anaesthetic for our economy. I want to see us scrub up, go in and do a complete housing market transplant.

This, from The Conversation, begins with a useful reminder that such a thing really can be, and has been, done.

What Singapore has that Australia does not is a public housing developer, the Housing Development Board, which puts new dwellings on public and reclaimed land, provides mortgages, and allows buyers to use their compulsory retirement savings (what Australians call superannuation) for both a deposit and repayments.

There’s more to it than that. It limits eligibility by income and age, requires owners to hang on to the property for five years, and limits their resale to only other eligible buyers.

Eight in ten of all the dwellings in Singapore today were built over the past half century by the Housing Development Board.

Read on here for the specific proposition, an Australian version called HouseMate that could halve the cost of buying a home. Do feel free to let me know it sounds a bit worryingly close to KiwiBuild, but let’s not let the thinking stop there. We need to rip this thing open. Skipping coffee won’t do it.

2.00pm

Hello reader Kaz! I like this kind of anecdote. 

It goes very well with the 95% of the adults in this nation who have been happy to believe the expert advice and get themselves vaccinated.

4.20pm