Another morning rising from the haze, sense of smell still working, heat once again clinging to the air, 32 degrees by 0900, the pollution index climbing into the red. From the construction site the sounds of drills hammering their relentless rhythms, impossible to escape, the rattling bursts rising, breaking the melody of the day.

You can feel the pollution in the air today, something different in the way that the breath catches, a sheen of muck mixing with sweat as the air heats, rising humidity sucking the energy from the legs. Another wander in the hills, finding different paths, walking the narrow trail towards Muzha, broken stone and guide ropes clinging to poles rising above steep falling slopes, the enclosing woodlands offering shelter against the surrounding heat, damp air clinging to each step. Through a gap in the foliage the city sprawls beneath, the hills of the Taipei basin gone, horizons become immediate things, Yangminshan a faint blur hanging, occasionally, in the distance. Reaching the end of the path, a short descent to the road which winds along graveyard hill, the sun shining full upon shortened shadows, all shelter relinquished upon the hilltop.

Back in the flat, catching up with events, laughing that someone from Milton Keynes has been stopped by police in Snowdonia, unaware that only the English have relaxed lockdown rules. There's a kind of masochism involved in following things now, as if the social canvas is being unravelled stitch by stitch by this inept and self serving government, promises unkept, plans unwritten; new information surfacing upon a daily basis. The far right drooling pestilence upon the airwaves while, unprepared, the invisible clown of Downing Street bumbles and fumbles with customary and catastrophic ineptitude.

And that seems to be it, the general coming together in the face of the pandemic is over, the consensus broken by the return of the nasty party, as if they'd ever gone away. Brandishing the Brexshit playbook, De Piffle Paffle embracing his inner Drumpf, lying at pmq's and then denying it, his ineptitude laid bare for all to see, again; three Tory mps posting contemptible far right video smearing Keir Starmer while not being required to apologise, a quiet word deemed sufficient and, no doubt, a pat on the back behind closed doors. Distraction is better than detail after all.

So, the smear campaign's already begun as, unable to defend their ineptitude, all the Tories have are dirty tricks, this modern day equivalent of the Zinoviev letter, spread by the inhabitants of rodent ridden gutters where these representatives and their friendly press lower the standard of discourse with their every utterance. If history doesn't repeat then it certainly manages to rhyme. So it's no real surprise to find the headline “Let teachers be heroes.” The infestation which is the Mail following it's blackshirted tradition and trailing discourse into the, hitherto, merely suspected depths. The resonance of WW1 propaganda is difficult to deny, the Somme split into a thousand lower primary classrooms, a sacrifice of teachers to encourage low paid parents to get back to work – sending them unprotected upon overcrowded transport, plague ships for the new century, no doubt to be followed by a campaign to have them memorialised upon soon to be constructed mercy columns rising before that blackboard where are written the fundamental equations of capitalism – the urge to funnel the profits of the whole to the few, the nobility of sacrifice for the many while wrapping their motivations in the same old lie.. “Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori..”