The Great Percy Pig Pandemic
WILL we remember a time when you could get cheap, plentiful hummus on supermarket shelves as the high point? Will we say it was after that that our civilisation declined? Will people tell their disbelieving grandchildren that in those days you could go to the supermarket in regular clothing, without PPE? Will they regale them with tales of a place called Marks & Spencer, where you could get a deal every weekend on food that you just had to put in a thing called the microwave, plus a bottle of wine and dessert? Will historians of the future find painting on the walls of our homes, which became our caves, of a pig’s head icon? Will they conclude that as the West declined, people worshipped a pig called Percy and predicted that the world would be safe when he came again?
The funny thing is we barely react anymore to some fresh assault on our life as we knew it. Even a year ago, any talk of empty shelves in supermarkets would have led to frantic stockpiling of pasta and toilet roll. Now we just shrug our shoulders and move on to the next disappointment. Which is maybe the collapse of American democracy as a TV spectator sport. Or the Tánaiste telling us that most businesses shouldn’t plan on opening for the next three months at least. Barely a ripple. There was a time, just a few weeks ago, when such a statement would have led to an outcry. But these days we just accept our lot, accept we’ve been beaten by this thing for now, accept there is no arguing with it.
We have no expectations anymore. Half the country don’t believe our children will ever go back to school. We educate them now. That’s just how it is. Soon we’ll give up on academic work to focus on teaching them the life skills they will need in this new world. How to catch and skin a squirrel maybe. How to make hummus from stones ground in water, how to fashion a Percy Pig from discarded chewing gum you scrape up from the road.
After all, there won’t be a Leaving Cert, so what good is book learning anyway?
Older people will remain locked in their houses or corralled in “homes”, shut off from the outside world. Historians will say that having learnt our lesson in the great Christmas tragedy of 2020, we stopped meeting older people. They will say children grew up not knowing what an older person sounded like, that they just waved at them from a safe distance.
They will say that the sad part of it was that there was an answer. Unbelievably, they’ll say, there were vaccines, millions of them, that could have been dispensed before people gave up. But, they’ll say, we dillydallied. Things were so bad, they’ll say, that at one point Ireland was best in class at giving them out. But that was just a reflection on how badly everyone else was messing up the roll-out.
The historians will be Israeli of course, from the only country in the world that still has reading or writing or history by that point, the only country that didn’t give up.