Tuesday, October 3

 

 

The rain that started yesterday evening continued all through the night. The weather forecast predicted that it would last all day. I abandoned my bicycle in favour of an umbrella and a short walk to the bus stop.

Sunshine went out for ten minutes and came back completely drenched. I dried him and he went and lay down on a bed, with no interest in going out again.

I spent the morning working on my new method of teaching WordPress theme development. I have built an absolutely minimal theme called Stupidly Simple that has just three files: index.php, style.css and screenshot.png. The stylesheet has nothing in it at all except the comment that WordPress needs to recognise the files as a theme.

I spent the afternoon using this to teach WordPress theme development by starting with nothing; adding functionality, piece by piece; and, hopefully, making clear in this way how the logic of a theme gets built up. Some students had to leave early because of a timetable clash, but by the end of the session those still left all claimed to understand what they had done.

We shall find out the truth of this when we continue on Thursday.

At 16:00 I left Arcada and headed to the centre; to Tuomiokirkon krypta a few minutes walk from Käisäniemi in the pouring rain.

The British Embassy has organised a second town meeting in the church crypt. This time we have a British politician in attendance: an actual junior minister from the House of Lords. She explains how the Brexit negotiations have progressed smoothly as hundreds of negotiators from both sides work their way through the technical problems calmly and professionally. She declares that everything will happen by March 2019, and the final outcome will exactly resemble what everyone wants. I photograph some British citizens as they watch her avidly from the side.
How will everyone get what they want, someone asks at question time, since some people want outcomes that flatly contradict what others want. The minister smilingly waves this away by declaring that, deep down, everyone involved wants what seems best for both Britain and the EU27 (as they have now become) and so, in the end, everyone wants exactly the same thing. And they will get it.
I will leave feeling that I have wasted my time in exactly the way I guessed I would, while at the same time pleased to see such panglossian nonsense spoken with such apparent conviction. I will ponder the minutiae of the techniques she used to achieve this effect most of the way home.
The weather will prove so bad that the cat will make no effort to go out at all in the evening. Instead, once I have gone to bed, it will howl and drag carpets around for a good portion of the night.