We need clear direction – not more confusion
ANYONE else feeling confused? Again! On Monday, yet another new pandemic rulebook came into force, limiting meet-ups to no more than six friends or family.
As with previous official pronouncements, it seems full of too many ifs, buts and maybes. Add to that the fact England’s rules are different to Scotland’s, Scotland is different to Northern Ireland’s and Wales is different, too. In some, all kids are included in the new rules, in others under-11s are exempt and in some it’s the under-12s.
I’m off to Wales for a day or two soon, and once I get over the border to Chepstow I can currently meet up outdoors with 30 others, but woe betide when I get back to England just a short hop across the River Severn if I try to pull that sort of stunt on home soil.
It’s daft, why can’t we just put on a united front to fight the virus?
This sort of disjointed bureaucratic behaviour would be OK if we occupied some massive chunk of the world’s land mass. We don’t. We are an island with many densely populated areas.
So why not do the sensible thing and make these latest Covid laws simple to understand and all the same wherever you live in the UK? Then hammer them home with a powerful message.
After all, we have advertising agencies who create some of the catchiest, snappiest, on-the-tipof-everyone’s-tongue slogans anywhere in the world.
Yet, it seems to me, no one in the Government or its Civil Service has managed to successfully harness this talent for slogans in the current pandemic as it gradually begins to break out across the nation again.
Most of the “catchphrases” used since March, I reckon, have been unconvincing and the accompanying official pronouncements open to misinterpretation, the worst one being the weak and watery “Stay Alert”. How about using the words “Stop”, “Do Not” or “You Must..”?
It’s crying out for some thumpingly good ones to ram home exactly what we all can and, arguably, more importantly what we CANNOT do in an absolutely clear, no-nonsense way.
If you reel back the years to the dark days of World War II, brilliant poster messages were everywhere doing just that, created by the Ministry of Information.
One of the best remembered “Careless Talk Costs Lives” could easily be altered for today to “Carelessness Costs Lives”.
Anyway, that’s enough of a rant.
Now for something rather more spiritual. Or just downright weird and slightly spooky, depending on your beliefs.
Mrs Davey and myself were carefully socially distancing in a friend’s garden the other night. As the light of what had been a lovely sunny day quickly evaporated to early evening gloom and then darkness, our discussions turned to thoughts of winter. All four of us admitted it was something we were not looking forward to.
How, we wondered, in the short, often dull grey, wintry days and long dark nights that will soon be upon us, could we stay positive in our thoughts whilst avoiding becoming Covid positive?
As we pondered this in the darkness, sitting out beneath a clear night sky, a shooting star whizzed across right over our heads on its voyage through the Cosmos.
It stopped our deliberations in their tracks. Was this a sign from some awesome astral power and, if so, how should we interpret it? We had no answers.
Of course, there could be another explanation. It may have been the high-flying light of a trans-Atlantic jet and that our perception was being slightly blurred by the consumption of a glass or two of Malbec.