Funny ha ha or funny peculiar

I’ve been observing some mask wearers in my village recently

It’s an education in itself, it really is. Take the old men sitting outside the band club. Most wear their masks more as chin straps, rarely do they ever cover their noses and – I am seeing more and more of them simply defying the law and wearing no face covering at all.

But having said that, the ones that do comply with the regulations have developed various ways and means to eat, smoke and drink while still remaining masked… sort of. Pietru is a sprightly octogenarian who spends most of his day outside one or other of the local bars, chatting to his friends and smoking the most disgusting smelling cigars. A mutual acquaintance told me he buys his smokes from the “Friend to All”, but since all the bars are sadly currently closed, he must have other sources. Mind you, even when they are open Pietru never seems to spend any money in them… maybe they tolerate him for his sparkling wit – but I somehow doubt it. His cigar never seems to be out of his mouth, so naturally his mask has to make room for it. This he achieves with the extraordinary manoeuvre of reversing his mask to cover the back of his head. I suppose if he was ever apprehended he’d say: “I am wearing a mask, nobody ever told me how.”

I was watching Pietru and his mates the other morning, sitting on crates outside the locked down Friend to All BAR. The most vocal of the crowd is a retired road sweeper called Twanny. He does wear a mask on the front of his face… sometimes, but in order to smoke a cigarette, while still wearing it, he has actually poked a hole through the said paper camouflage in order to avoid having to raise and lower the thing whenever he takes a drag. I watched him puff away and I thought, how ingenious. And – since he rarely, if ever, is seen without a fag, he has hit on a way of maintaining his habit uninterrupted. God help him if the bloody mask ever catches fire. Maybe there’s an opening in the market for non-flammable face coverings?

The rest of the smokers are not as ingenious as Twanny. Those who actually wear face coverings tend to lift the bottom of it up in a flap, take a pull on their ciggy, then let the flap drop down again once the smoke has been inhaled.

There is a short YouTube video of one enterprising chap who has made a mask out of the crotch of a pair of jeans. The clip shows him with the mask in place covering the lower half of his face. Then he shows a bottle of beer to the camera, grins, undoes the middle brass button on the mask’s “fly”, pokes the neck of the bottle through the fly, takes a swig, lowers the bottle, grins, then buttons up once more… job done. Very clever, but I don’t think I could stand a mask made out of thick denim for too long before I’d be gasping for breath… and that rather defeats the object of compulsory maskwearing.

Still mask-using does make for a harmless diversion in these tedious pandemic days.