Toast to normal service resuming
The end of covid restrictions is in sight
I’m sure I have readers out there wizened and wrinkled enough to remember the days before microchips, printed circuits and flat screen technology.
I’m going back to the days when our televisions were stuffed with wires, tubes and valves and it took two guys from Radio Rentals just to carry the damn thing into your sitting room! They might have delivered the newest set on the market – buy you still weren’t guaranteed a great picture. That was down to the communicative skills of the Radio Rentals aerial fitters – one hanging out the window, the other hanging on to your chimney – shouting “up a bit”, “doon a bit” and “aroon a bit” as they strived to get the ‘test card’ in the sharpest focus possible.
In my house – even that wasn’t enough to promise hours of troublefree viewing. We got interference every time Mrs Dougan next door neighbour put her Hoover on.
And you got no picture at all if there was as much as a low cloud near the main transmitter – in some God forsaken place called Blackhill.
If you watched any telly at all in the early 60s – you got used to seeing the phrase “Normal Service Will Be Resumed As Soon As Possible” – flickering across the screen.
Those words came flooding back to me last Monday as Wee Nicola relaxed the covid restrictions she hurriedly put in place in December.
And it occurred to me that the whole nation has been waiting almost two years for . . ‘normal service to be resumed as soon as possible’. It also occurred to me that there are thousands of people who have lost loved ones in the last two years through covid.
For them, ‘normal’ will never be resumed.
But hey – we’ve all come a long way. It was January 29, 2020 when the first UK cases were diagnosed
– a Chinese couple in York tested positive after returning from their ancestral homeland.
I remember the scenes a few weeks later when the RAF flew British nationals out of Wuhan – and guys in germ warfare suits were waiting to spray them down then herd them onto a bus. Now, we’re hours away from January 29 2022 – and kids are bringing covid back from school like homework.
On the night in March 2020 when my humble boozer was closed down - there wasn’t a single person there who knew anyone who had caught Covid. Now . . . its hard to find anyone who hasn’t had it. It could be March 2030 before the real story of Covid is told. Did Boris react too late? Did Nicola over react? Was ‘furlough’ the saviour of our economy . . . or a giant waste of billions? If we’d gone for herd immunity at the start – would the projected “hundreds of thousands” of deaths been a reality?
Or was lockdown a national necessity until the miracle of vaccine galloped to our rescue?
I imagine the eventual Covid Inquiry – under Lord Somebody – will confirm that the handling of care homes and their residents and staff was an unmitigated disaster.
But by the time the report comes out, the people who made the disastrous decisions might well be in care homes themselves. On Monday - as a put my bar stools back to where God intended bar stools should be – it felt different. Well, different than the last time, anyway. I had a Churchillian moment . . . is this the beginning of the end . . I pondered.
Is normal service really about to be resumed?
And well, I like to think it will be. Science hasn’t completely triumphed yet – but it’s proved more than a match for Covid and its wee variant pals. It’s time to move on.
After the bar stools – I sat down to write the questions for Monday nights’ pub quiz – like I’ve done every
Monday for over a decade now.
And I wondered what my questions might be like in another ten years? Q) Can you name the former army captain knighted in 2020 for raising tens of millions for the NHS?
Q) What were the British public invited to do every Thursday at 7pm during the peak of the Covid outbreak?
Q) What landmark event propelled 90-year-old Margaret Keenan into the national headlines on December 8 2020?
Then, realising I was writing questions for a quiz that might never happen – I decided I must be going completely bonkers.