Michael DEACON
What is it with this fuss about face masks? Not that I like the things. I don’t. They’re stuffy. They’re uncomfortable. They’re ugly. They make the lower half of my face look like a badly wrapped sandwich.
But sure, I’ll wear one down Tesco. If scientists think it will help prevent people without symptoms from spreading the disease to the more vulnerable, then I’ll take their word for it. They tend to know more about these things than I do.
But in any case, if I refused to wear a mask, I suspect I’d feel like a tiny bit of a crybaby. I’d remember the vast personal sacrifices that previous generations were willing to make for the sake of others in times of national crisis. And here I am, I’d think, having a tantrum because I’ve been asked to wear a small strip of cloth for two minutes in WH Smith.
I mean, how would I have behaved during the Second World War? Would I have refused to put up blackout curtains during the Blitz? Would I have furiously accused the air raid warden of denying me my ancient liberty to host an all-night rave during an aerial bombardment by the Luftwaffe? “Why, if a gentleman is no longer free to turn his entire neighbourhood into an unmissable target for bombers, then the Nazis have already won!”
Maybe I’d have refused to carry a gas mask. Maybe I’d have complained that wearing it made me feel all stressed, and that anyway I wasn’t in the “clinically vulnerable to chemical weapons” category. Or maybe I’d have claimed that gas masks were actually mind-control devices, and accused Churchill of a secret Left-wing plot to turn the British public into braindead sheeple. Of course, I’d like to think I wouldn’t have done that. But it’s impossible to say for sure.
Then again, if I’d been a member of the wartime generation, presumably I’d have been less likely to moan. After all, they grew up in a completely different culture from ours. They knew about hardship and self-sacrifice and not always getting what you wanted. They were used to it. By comparison, our lives have been pampered, cosseted and easy. We know little of self-denial. So I suppose it’s only natural that, when asked to endure extremely brief personal discomfort for the benefit of others, some of us are shocked, and outraged, and treat it as a monstrous imposition. You can’t really blame us. After all, we’ve never had to give up anything for others before.
In our defence, we aren’t the first to resent a new rule that forces us to undergo fleeting inconvenience in the hope of saving strangers’ lives. In the Sixties, there were complaints about the introduction of breathalysers for drunk-drivers, presumably because they violated the ancient right of every freeborn Englishman to drive into a lamppost after 12 pints of Watneys. Still, people seemed to get used to them, and indeed the monstrous imposition of seatbelts (enforced, despite scandalised protests about personal liberty, since 1983).
So perhaps today I can find a way to cope with having to wear a little scrap of fabric in M&S Food. And if I still find my mask uncomfortable and stuffy and horrid – well, I’ll just try to remind myself that it’s nothing next to what my grandparents had to go through.
Speaking of which, I assume we’re still going to wear poppies this year. Even though the pins are terribly dangerous. I mean, I might prick a finger.
If you want to know how far gone
the hard-left are, listen to them gloating over the financial plight of The Guardian. Apparently, they blame it for Labour’s drubbing at the election.
For the rest of us, this particular thought process is not easy to follow, but I’ll give it a go. Essentially, the Corbynistas seem to be saying that, if only The Guardian had endorsed Jeremy Corbyn with greater enthusiasm, millions of people who have never read The Guardian in their lives would have voted for him.
To me, it sounds a touch improbable. Still, who knows? Perhaps that’s what Momentum activists kept finding on the doorstep in Red Wall seats. “Sorry, lad. I’ve voted Labour all my life, but not this time. Not now that Jonathan Freedland, a newspaper columnist I’ve never heard of, has written something mildly disobliging about the Labour leader. It’s all anyone’s talking about on this estate. Not Brexit, or immigration, or jobs, or any of that nonsense. It’s the less than full-throated support offered to Jeremy Corbyn by Polly Toynbee in her Guardian column this morning. I mean, none of us actually take the Guardian, but when something as important as that happens, obviously word gets around.”
After a fall in online ad revenue,
the bosses at Twitter are looking for new ways to bring in funds. Allow me to make a suggestion. Monetise trolling.
Every time a Twitter user wants to type a volley of abuse at Piers Morgan, Julia Hartley-brewer or whoever, he or she has to pay a small fee. Not all of it would go to Twitter itself – in fact, most of the fee should go to the target of the outrage, partly in compensation, and partly to encourage them to keep on pumping out scandalous opinions. But Twitter would still make comfortably enough to stay afloat.
There could even be a price list, setting out the fee for each insult. Say, £2.50 to call someone a neoliberal shill, £5 to call them a fascist, £10 to call them a Tory, and so on.
Perhaps that sounds a little steep, but it’s important not to underestimate the deep sense of personal fulfilment that Twitter users derive from bellowing righteous invective at a complete stranger on the internet. I think most would consider it excellent value for money.