We’ve clapped so why not moon for these money-grubbers too?
I’VE had this virus for 10 days and it’s about as welcome as a longlost sibling turning up on your doorstep with a Tommy Robinson tattoo on their forehead.
I just feel permanently sore, nauseous and knackered, a bit like the months after I became a dad again at 46, and thought I’d turned into an extra in a zombie film. My wife’s in the same land of the living dead, so we’ve been taking it in turns at night to self-isolate on the couch in case the other person’s coughing, sweating or wheezing tempts us to self-smother.
The best thing is you lose your sense of smell, so picking up dog mess is like gathering blossom petals, but the worst is you lose your taste, meaning opening a bottle of Rioja brings on the Jesus effect in reverse. It turns wine into water denying you the pleasure of drinking away the pain.
Plenty of friends are going through the same ordeal making a mockery of the small number of cases alleged to be out there.
Like us they can’t test, so don’t know if they have Covid-19, even though it’s odds-on they do. My wife and I are lucky, as we’re both journalists who work from home, so we can still do our jobs and get paid.
Some self-employed people with the symptoms are still turning up for contract work for fear of being sacked. Others, who live with vulnerable family members, have been told if they want
to self-isolate they won’t get paid. Which feeds into the narrative being set by some of those household name, selfmade, business mavericks, whose initial response to the crisis showed they don’t give a toss about anything other than their place in the Sunday Times Rich List.
You know these noble patriots: Sir Richard Branson, the tax exile worth around £3billion, whose first reaction was to tell his Virgin Atlantic staff to take eight weeks’ unpaid leave, before demanding a £7.5bn government bailout. He has since put £215million into his vast empire to keep it afloat.
EasyJet owner Stelios Haji-Ioannou telling pilots and cabin crew to take two months’ unpaid leave while paying himself £60m in dividends. Tim Martin, who begged for his Wetherspoon pubs to stay open despite the threat of infection, then advised his 43,000 workers to get a job at Tesco. He’s since been embarrassed into a U-turn and is now taking advantage of the taxpayerfunded staff retention scheme.
Mike Ashley trying to keep his Sport Direct stores open on the grounds that the nation would collapse without an endless supply of cheap, white socks. Then ramping up the cost of home exercise equipment. After the PR disaster he now says he’s sorry.
Celebrity chef Rick Stein posting on social media about the need to look after staff then refusing to pay their wages, and Gordon Ramsay ripping up the contracts of 500 loyal employees with no guarantee of being rehired, despite him being worth around £140m.
Let us honour them, fellow Britons. Now that we’ve Clapped for the Carers why don’t we Moon for the Moneygrubbers.
Tonight, at 8pm, everyone drop their trousers or lift up their dress and bare their buttocks to the world, while booing loudly.
Let us thank these merciless shysters from the heart of our bottoms.
You know these noble patriots, so let’s honour them, fellow Britons