Let’s all party, for tomorrow we die… er…

The invitation was very appealing, upbeat even.

It read: “Mega party to celebrate the end of the Coronavirus pandemic. Hotel Splendido Palace, watersports centre at 20,00 hours… bring a cozzie.” No, I didn’t get the invite, good lord no, I’m considered a dinosaur in partying parlance, no it was sent to my next door neighbour Raymond, the hairdresser. He didn’t go either, nor did his partner Juan, but two of his female employees did.

When I spoke to Raymond last evening he wasn’t too amused. He told me: “Silly cows. Like walking into a blazing inferno. I know the quarantine period is only 14 days, but I told the pair of them not to show up at the salon for three weeks. Just to teach them a lesson.”

I asked the obvious question, did either of them get tested and/or show symptoms of COVID 19. Apparently one of them did. Raymond expanded on this: “Yes, Nadia told me she had lost her sense of taste. I told her: Judging by that acid green swimming costume you were wearing in that mass photo… you never had any taste to lose in the first place… let alone good taste.”

Another friend of mine has a 17-year-old son, Gavin, with the usual teenage raging hormones. Gavin is a great fan of the PM’s: “get out there and get a good dose of COVID” philosophy. He informed his father that since he felt that being young he was in little or no danger of contracting the Corona-virus, he was going to bloody well party, come what may. His dad replied something to the effect of: “Fine, go ahead, but when you wind up in the ITU at Mater Dei, don’t come running to me for sympathy.”

Quite how poor Gavin could go running to anybody, if he was hitched-up to all the usual kit associated with an ITU, he didn’t elaborate on. Needless to report, Gavin decided to take a rain check on partying… for the time being.

As someone way past my partying sell by date, it’s not difficult for me to say I prefer a quiet life to an unspecified time plugged into a whole colony of life support in the ITU, but when I was a teenager I was up for anything and the “seemingly” remote threat of some unmentionable disease (Oh yes we had them back then too), would probably not have dissuaded me from living it up.

What would have put me off was the imminent threat of a very unpleasant death. By all accounts expiring with COVID19 is not something to aspire to. And yes I know we’ve all got to go sometime, but to actually go looking for a protracted and painful demise seems to me, at any rate, perverse… to say the least.

But looking on the bright side, I see we are now informed that, with a bit of luck and constantly touching wood… an effective vaccine should be available by the middle of next year, 2021. That is if that mega moron Trump hasn’t commandeered the lot in his seemingly constant quest to make America “grate” again.