With pointless and those ridiculous jackpots. It takes blood sweat and tears to win and all you get is a measly thousand pounds.

Alternatively go on tipping point, press a button to drop a pretend coin and come home with twenty grand.

Not impressed.

What do you do slap bang in the middle of a global pandemic? Increase your subscription charges to a captive audience of course. What a bunch of muddy funksters Netflix are. There’s only one thing for it… Cancel my subscription for two months of the year to make up for their hand in pocket blatent thievery.

The solution is as obvious as most of their storylines.

I remember back in the early days of the Internet if you wanted to create a homepage you purchased a book from Amazon (which was basically an online bookstore at the time) and threw together some basic code to display 5 sentences of text and some pictures of your bedroom. Job done, you’re online and running the show.

It took about ten minutes to load said homepage and about fifteen seconds after reading it you were bored. Oh how life has changed. For one no one really does the whole homepage thing any more now they have Facebook to control everything for them. And for sure very few people are coding from a book.

I took the creative commons license route for mine. Going to one of the many online sites that offers pre-created templates that you can tweak to your hearts content. Html5up is the site I used. Very slick content that’s easy to break down and understand (okay I did have some html and coding experience coming into that process)… I guess what I am saying is it’s not too difficult to have a pretty slick online presence that you manage yourself nowadays.

7am by the river at Thames Valley Park. Yesterday’s rain washed away almost all of the snow. All that’s left are the skeletal remains of the many snowmen all competing to be the last ice man standing (albeit in their somewhat sad decomposing forms).

Benson is in his element chasing various flocks of geese back into the water from their resting place. It’s fairly mucky by the river bank and I’m being stalked by a pair of ducks.

I came here this morning to give Benson a break from Langley Mead. He had a dramatic fall from the boardwalk into the stinkiest mud puddle yesterday. All my fault I might add. Today he smells apple fresh. I’m sure that won’t last long. The ducks have given up. Probably figured out I don’t have bread after all.

Watching the coronavirus news conference last night it was hard to comprehend that over 100000 people have now died since the outbreak began. The number is probably much higher than that. This time last year we watched China lock down the city of Wuhan in disbelief that such draconian measures were needed to control the spread. Now we understand that it was essential and lockdown are a normal part of our every day lives. It makes me wonder how much the Chinese government really knew and didn’t admit to. We’ll probably never know. Perhaps history will be a better reporter of the true facts after we are all fertilising daisies. But to the point, 100000 mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, lovers lost to this virus. People like you and I many of whom watched the news a year ago thinking that the World Health Organisation were probably overreacting a little bit. Or perhaps not, perhaps for some there was fear of it getting into their locality. It makes me sad to think about all those people suffering such a horrific death.

The history books will measure each governments response to the outbreak. For now our focus needs to be on getting back to some sense of normality.

This whole social media purge is becoming an obsession. What started as an idea has snowballed into something that’s occupying every waking hour outside of work. It’s gone from a novel idea, an experiment per se, to a fully fledged drive to create and curate a feature rich site where I can host my thoughts and images securely.

I’ve been known to flit from one idea to the next so whether or not this actually makes it to the real world is yet to be seen. But as each day passes and I invest more into it the chances of it being real increase.

Eurovision may be looming on the virtual horizon but no I am not writing about the Johnny logan classic. Navigating my way through the various rat runs of early morning news outlets it seems 2021 may not be the breakthrough year we’ve all been hoping for after all.

Talk of more travel restrictions, quarantine hotels, and the EU clamping down on vaccine exports. Will this madness ever end? I suspect it will end with a fizzle as opposed to a bang but don’t expect to wake up some morning to a surprise headline announcing that it’s all over and we’re getting an additional public holiday to celebrate.

Went for my regular morning walk with Benson and passed a load of snow men and women…. Most were poor efforts if the truth be known but this one warrants inclusion.

Winter is definitely coming. I walked the dog by the river yesterday and even with my leather gloves on the tips of my fingers were frozen. I’m starting to think I might have Reynolds or perhaps some circulation issues. With that said I purchased one of those oxometer things that the ministry of fear have been promoting recently. The oxygen levels in my blood were 99 to 100 percent and that measure was on the tip of my finger so perhaps not a circulation issue after all. Jesus this covid world is a dark place full of dark thoughts.