Boris... it’s not your job to run our lives!
WHO didn’t see this coming?
Absolutely no-one. We are well and truly back on the COVID merry-go-round of fear, extra jabs, compulsory masks, and the inevitable lockdown which is almost certainly just around the corner.
Right now, they’re just warming us up by insisting on masks on public transport.
Which will of course cheer up the nutcases who’ve carried on wearing them since the summer, even when they’re riding a bike in the open air about 30ft away from you.
When we were out for Sunday lunch, I noticed posters on the wall advertising the pub’s Christmas entertainment line-up.
Bands, quizzes, raffles, ticket-only events for Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
A chance for the two most COVID-battered industries of hospitality and entertainment to claw back some of their catastrophic losses of the last 18 months.
So you can imagine how they are all feeling right now. Doomed. The difference this time of course is that there will no “eat out to help out” scheme. No “substantial meals”.
Beleaguered Or Dishy Rishi Sunak’s generous furlough scheme to help out beleaguered employers from going under, and leaving jobs open for people to return to.
Not even a squeak about any of that.
And how bad is this new variant of the virus, anyway?
It depends on your definition of “bad”.
True, it apparently spreads much quicker than the previous batches, which doesn’t sound good.
But according to the scientists in South Africa who discovered it, people who get it suffer from what they themselves describe as mild symptoms, with achy arms and legs for a couple of days.
There is no loss of taste or smell, but you might get “a slight cough”.
And because of that, they are now gearing up to shut the country down again.
No word yet from the teaching unions but you’d imagine they will be walking out of school as soon as they can. Or going on strike from the comfort of their own living rooms, waving not anti-Government banners but bottles of Prosecco.
Restaurants and bars will be closed again. Theatres shut down, killing off the lucrative panto season they already missed last year.
And of course, the most deadly place you can ever be, cinemas, will be ordered to close their doors again.
The irony is Daniel Craig’s last James Bond outing, the only real blockbuster of the year, was delayed several times because of the pandemic.
Its title is No Time to Die, which the Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Co seem to be reading as an instruction, rather the name of a movie.
Anti-vaxxer
I am no anti-vaxxer. I had my first two months ago and await the booster, which I’ll have, but quite reluctantly.
Because the Government, and any Government, is there merely to facilitate the country.
But it is not there to run our entire lives.
We’re heading down a sinister rabbit hole where the powers that be will keep doing this to us all at the drop of a hat, cheered on by the usual suspects. Got a cough? Stay in for a fortnight. Next door neighbour got the winter sniffles?
Exterminate!