Oh my, on our morning walk with ‘Pip the Dog’, the cows had moved to a different location in the fields, which meant we had to walk a different route around the fields to avoid them. This was absolutely fine and we didn’t come across any dog walkers, which was even better.

Following breakfast, this was going to be D-Day. Taiko West — Japanese Taiko Drumming — across the UK Midlands, would be going live in terms of letting students know that we’re going live. I spent over 6 hours with James our Taiko teacher to get the communication right for the email and the webpage, plus doing some further technical audio testing. Phew it was a marathon indeed.

I also mastered creating formulas inside Airtable, allowing us to embed a schedule of classes. We borrowed this from another Taiko Group in Germany and I was already familiar with Airtable and thanks to Clair already having created some formulas in there for me, I was able to copy and understand what she had already done.

Pivot is one of my favourite podcasts with Kara Swisher and Professor Scott Galloway. In one of the episodes this week they discussed Apple and Google teaming up to track COVID-19 around the world through our phones? It’s really worth listening to. I’m just so glad Facebook are not involved.

[embed]https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/pivot/id1073226719?i=1000471428171[/embed]

In other news…

Is there any other news? Well today the UK Government announced a further 3 weeks in lock down. I had predicted right at the start that this would be a 3 month period and we’re maybe even looking beyond that now I believe. I will predict here that we won’t be out of this until at the earliest end of July and maybe going on into August. And even then life will no longer be anything like we have ever been used to for at least years to come. A sobering thought and sorry to have to say this and we have a saying at home;

‘Expect the Unexpected’.

Michael de Groot