Farewell to Freaky Fridays
THEY’LL have to come up with something good next Friday. We have now become addicted to major drama every Friday. Rumour has it that Leo Varadkar liked to refer to it as Freaky Friday, after the popular Lindsay Lohan movie. In recent weeks, we quickly forgot the grim Fridays and it was all about Freedom Fridays. Remember how giddy we were when they confirmed that 2km would go to 5km, and then 20km? Innocent times.
Recent Fridays have become downright celebratory. They even manufactured an extra, early Friday, last Friday week, where they told us the things they would be telling us the following Friday. Then last week, they threw in an extra Thursday for good measure, just to reconfirm the things they had told us the previous Friday. By Thursday, the outgoing Taoiseach was looking increasingly relaxed, his hair grown out as he faced into his gap year from being Taoiseach. We wouldn’t have been surprised if he was wearing woven friendship bracelets around his wrist or a ‘Connell from Normal People’ chain. He even threw in air bridges for good measure.
It’s unclear if the CMO was totally on board with the air bridges. He stood there at his plinth as usual and didn’t openly heckle the Taoiseach, but he has certainly made it clear since then where we can shove our air bridges, or any idea of foreign holidays. Air bridges could be just a great myth doing the rounds right now to keep us subdued. Boris is promising air bridges, too, and the poor Brits think they’re off to Spain, when in fact the best they can hope for is probably Brazil or Sweden.
Leo also got to be the one to open the restaurants and some bars. We all love talking about reopening bars or restaurants. Mind you, most people won’t actually go to them, but we will be dying to hear from those who do. We’re told Ireland has the world’s first vaccine. Apparently, having done various tests, on toasted sandwiches, fish and chips and baskets of chicken wings, scientists here have discovered that a substantial meal worth nine quid is an effective Covid vaccine.
Friday just gone will be hard to follow. We needed a showstopper and we got it, in the form of three-quarters of the Greens, the end of the Civil War, and an actual elected Government, another one of those things we used to take for granted.
But Micheal Martin will want his Fridays, too. Maybe we should keep up the Friday check-in, where the Taoiseach gets up each week and offers up some good news. And maybe the CMO should come and stand there next to him, to lend it a bit of gravitas.
We can only hope, as people decide that the end of lockdown means the end of Covid, when in fact it means we need to be even more careful, that the next Freaky Friday is not a badnews one.