I’m free, but pings ain’t what they used to be
There are more empty shops now than at any time since the pandemic started, and more people have to stay at home than for a year. Because it’s the week we enjoyed Freedom Day.
It’s as if Winston Churchill announced there would be a huge celebration to mark the end of the war, in May 1940 in the middle of the Blitz.
Only Boris Johnson could announce we were all free while he wasn’t even allowed out himself.
Freedom is marvellous because we can now go into a shop without a mask. It’s true the shop is shut because all the staff are stuck indoors, so the only people who can get into some shops are burglars and they wear a mask anyway, but we’re FREE.
This could spark a whole new industry, in which people celebrate things that have not yet happened. People can have retirement parties the day before they start their new job. And Port Vale Football Club could hold an open-top parade for winning the Champions League, after the first game of the season when they’ve lost to Fleetwood.
The app that pings everyone is wonderfully useless. You get a message that says: “You are part of the same species as someone who has Covid. You must live in a bucket for 10 days.”
If you whistle a tune that has ever been whistled by someone with Covid, you get pinged. If you dream about someone who has Covid, you get pinged.
The only way to stop this is to not have
the app. This is a marvellous breakthrough for medicine. The cure for any infection is to make it impossible for anyone to tell you that you’re infected.
It’s a shame they didn’t know this in the eighteenth century when lots of people died of smallpox. Instead of mucking about inventing a vaccine, everyone could simply have put a carrot in each ear. So everyone could say: “I’m fine, because I can’t hear the doctor as I’ve deleted my ears.”
So now there’s such chaos the rules are changing again, and only some people who get pinged have to stay at home.
If getting pinged means you are a genuine health risk this is a disaster, but if it’s not a risk it means the whole pinging business is pointless.
So instead of insisting on this app, they might as well tell random people to selfisolate. We should all have to sit still with a straight face, and the first five million to giggle have to self-isolate.
Or all the men in the street have to wee in a flowerpot, and the ones that spill the most have to stay at home.
Or it could be part of the National Lottery. The announcer says: “This week’s Pingball is 37”, then anyone with 37 has to sit in a wheelbarrow until Tuesday.
At least the NHS Covid app that has made everything worse has cost £37billion. If we hadn’t wasted it on this, we’d only have used it to send nine more idiots into space.