Suffer the little children

Iknow somebody who knows somebody who recently adopted a baby in her fifties. The woman, not the baby. Although it must be said that Donald Trump has shown it’s quite possible to be a baby well into your seventies.

I hope I’m not offending anyone when I say you would have to be certifiably insane to want anything at all to do with babies right now. I mean more the deliberate conceiving of, I suppose. If the whelp has already been spawned and is up for adoption and you feel your life hasn’t been disrupted enough, then good luck to you. Personally, I’d sooner adopt a dog.

The freshly born add little to the conversation or general mental well-being of us fully formed adults. Sure, you can slap a mask on it and store it in a soundproofed cupboard between feeds, but then they start getting bigger and making increasingly irrational demands. Much like some of our union leaders.

I should probably change the subject because the right to have as many children as your uterus can possibly bear without detaching and falling out of your bottom is apparently top of the log in the human rights league.

Any suggestions to the contrary and one is swiftly labelled a pro-sterilisation eugenics freak with a disturbing penchant for creating übermenschen in the garden shed on weekends.

I’m already a placard-carrying member of the #NoLivesMatter movement and it might be a good idea to avoid antagonising absolutely everybody. Especially now, when everyone you encounter is quite likely suffering from one or other low-grade psychosis.

Let me just say, though, that new studies show that children are major drivers of Covid-19. I wasn’t allowed to drive until I came out of the army and here these little ingrates are, driving an entire pandemic all by themselves. It’s not right.

Children 14 and younger are capable of transmitting the virus more effectively than adults. At this point, teenagers might well be capable of running the country more effectively than the ANC, but that’s a matter for a separate study.

So, what happens is this. The bantam delinquents go to school, pick up Covid-19 after doing disgusting things to each other during break time, then go home and kill their parents by simply coughing on them. In my day, we had to be more creative. We had to murder our parents by getting them to drink a deadly poison from stuff we found in the fridge. With dead ants mixed in. Or capture a leopard, train it to attack on command and then hide it under our bed until the time was right.

So, it’s clearly not the elderly that ought to be in isolation. It’s these squalid, permanently hungry, superspreading organisms who leech off us that need to be sealed in their rooms. You really want to start a family? Now? You might as well go to a coronavirus ward at a state hospital and lick the bed pans. It would be quicker and cheaper than raising little Vector who, at some stage, is probably going to commit patricide with his morning death breath while badgering you to get up and reset the modem.

So, yes. I shan’t speak of children for fear of causing offence.

Moving on. A British ex-pat friend asked if I thought my government was taking its cue from her government in terms of lockdown regulations. I inadvertently ejaculated illicit alcohol through my nose and told her it’s far more likely that our mob is already deep into bone-throwing and ancestor-summonsing territory. Nothing’s off the table. Apart from wine with dinner.

The strategy seems to be working. Or not. There’s no way of telling. Right now, it’s entirely up to the way the bones fall. As for the ancestors, well, I wouldn’t ask mine for advice. They’re originally from Europe and were probably involved in the most appalling atrocities.

My mother once said my forefathers were mostly vegetable sellers, but I think she was trying to protect me from the horror. Anyway, it’s the foremothers I worry most about. I feel their bad blood churning in me as I write. It could equally be this bootlegged filth I’m chucking down. I certainly don’t remember gin smelling this strongly of methanol. Ah, what the hell.

It’s an interesting question, though. There are outliers like Sweden, the United States and Venezuela who care not a damn what anyone else is doing and plunge headlong into their own wildly experimental scenarios. But I like to think that sensible governments are watching what others are doing and responding accordingly.

I suspect ours has, as I mentioned, taken more of a mix ’n match approach. Keep an eye on governments that give a reasonable impression of knowing what they’re doing, but also throw in some drumming, a bit of coin-tossing, a little dream analysis and a lot of Googling. I suppose we should be grateful that we’re not doggedly following the North Korean model, which seems to be to ignore the virus and ramp up efforts to destroy America.

Britain’s messaging has been about as unruly as their prime minister’s hair. They kicked off with “Stay Home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives”. Then they reached a point where they needed to encourage people to start coming out of their homes, so it was changed to “Stay Alert. Control the Virus. Save Lives”. This confused the great unwashed even more. Can’t stay alert coz I’m working three jobs innit. And never mind the virus, mate, I can’t even control me bleedin’ kids.

Realising that the queen’s subjects can’t be arsed with fancy notions, Downing Street has now changed it to “Hands. Face. Space”. It’s like something the Teletubbies might have come up with.

America’s pandemic slogan is “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV”. This is in keeping with the Trump administration’s policies on pretty much everything.

Our proudly South African slogan is “Tender. Loot. Deny”. Also, we are unique in that we don’t subscribe to the conventional usage of the acronym PPE. Here, it stands for politically protected elite.

The British government is quite unlike ours in a few ways. For a start, they don’t steal absolutely everything in sight. And they make an effort to ensure that people don’t starve to death. Bad move. Once the commoners sense their government cares about them, they’ll never hear the end of it. You won’t find our leaders making that rookie mistake.

The latest campaign by Boris Johnson and his peculiar assortment of squirrelly henchpeople is aimed at helping restaurants to survive. People who eat out on Mondays to Wednesdays during August will have half their bill covered by the government. Talk about mollycoddling. Why not have civil servants on hand to feed those who tire from shovelling subsidised food into their freeloading gobs? That’s not a government. That’s a bleeding heart charity, that is.

A proper government would make it impossible for restaurants to do business. They’d impose an evening curfew and a ban on alcohol. There’d be citywide roadblocks. Maybe they would even set up a website to name and shame repeat diners. Bloody restaurants and their fancy food-cooking ways. How dare they.

If our government could work out a way to skim something off the top, they’d pay people not to eat out. I’d be first in line. There’s no point going for a meal if you can’t have an adult beverage with it. You want to properly celebrate not having to cook for yourself. You want to get staggering drunk, paw the waitresses and throw up in the koi pond. If your restaurant doesn’t have a koi pond, you have no business eating out.

Britain’s messaging has been as unruly as their prime minister’s hair