Cold Blue Eyes: Make It One for Covid...

Drinking in pubs resumed at 6 a.m. this morning in England as Prime Minister Boris Johnson rushed back to "normality" in spite of the UK death toll from Covid19 remains stubbornly higher than the combined European Union members. The Tories have been accused of pushing the country back to "normality" to satisfy the profits of their funders ahead of the safety of the public.

It's quarter to breakfast

Everyone's in the place

Including you and me.

So set 'em up Gove 

You obsequious bell-end

I think you should know

That you're not my friend, 

At the end of this dire episode

So make it one for blue Boris and one more

For covid.

I've got the routine
Put more fake news in the machine
I'm feeling so bad
Can't you make the stats easy... less sad???
I could tell you a lot
But none of it true, you old toad
Just make it one for blue Boris, and one more
For covid...

You know I talk shit,
but Mikey we're a great fit
And hid all these deaths we kept off TV.
So when I get boozed, won't you listen to me
'Til I've snoozed away
For my doze on the commode?

Make it one for blue Boris and one more
For covid.

Well that's how it goes
And Mike, I know you're gettin' anxious to close...
In on wasted old me,
So hope you didn't mind my not paying the fee
But this truth that I found,
It's gotta be drowned
Or the voters might explode.
So make it one more for blue Boris and one more
For covid...

The long, it's so long, the long, very long.... Oh God...

Johnson with ally Tim Martin, owner of Weatherspoons, who initially refused to pay his staff during lockdown and angrily told them to get other jobs. He also briefly tried to stay open during lockdown.

The CovidWealth

I watched a program about coronavirus in Italy last night. So sad, seeing an 18 year old guy on a ventilator and a teenage daughter sobbing with fear over the safety of her two doctor parents. While here we have Bournemouth and in the USA people coughing over others to proclaim their right to not wear masks.

I remember the start of the Aids pandemic. It was new. It touched gay men especially, at a time when they were stigmatized even more than now, some even having been to jail for their sexuality in the not so distant past.

And I remember the panic, the fear and discrimination. I remember the plastic gloves put on the board in the staffroom where I worked in Liverpool for us to wear in case a customer bled on some of the building society's money. I remember the obscure iceberg adverts and the prejudicial bile smeared over tabloid front pages. The horror when Diana touched "these people".

And I remember the dead. So very many of them.

There was prejudice aplenty and alongside that discrimination and lack of care. But one thing stands out - no one doubted Aids was real. No one said it was invented or caused by TV ariels or whatever. No one said it was made up. No one said it didn't pose a danger, although admittedly there was plenty of misunderstanding and exaggeration, a good dollop of it the product of homophobia.

But now, 30 to 35 years on, as covid spreads, what has happened to us? Tens, hundreds of thousands die while millions have been on ventilators or at death's door, yet tens of millions more ignore simple safety measures, demand the right to have a haircut or get to a pub. They've not been sick. They don't personally know any corpses. They want a f***ing burger and they want it now.

We shouldn't be surprised. For 30, 40 years, our rulers have told people to look after themselves.  No such thing as society, community is the nostalgically misplaced wetdream of smug liberals' imaginations. If you have a hard time, it's the fault of migrants, shirkers, malingerers and thieves.

The private has replaced the public. The individual trumps the collective.

So if you've not been sick.... Or maybe even if you have been, mildly... Other people's problems aren't yours, though maybe they are inconveniences, problems in themselves. Why should you stay at home, or wear a mask, or miss a pint or haircut or the sales...?

It's actually wildly against human nature not to care, not to help. The folk who claim otherwise are misguided or signed up sociopaths. Our nature is to pull together, to hold each other up. The archaelogical table, historical records, psychology, even faith... All speak to the essence of homo sapiens being our social nature, our compassion and empathy, our ability to see ourselves reflected in the eyes of others.

Apart of course from when we've been subjected ceaselessly to propaganda saying we don't, that we are inherently selfish and need to look after ourselves as otherwise no one will. When we have been excluded, stigmatized, fed a diet of hate by supposedly responsible media and with ultimately anti-social "social media" amplifying rumour, innuendo, conspiracy, threat and downright falsehood multiple times over, the common breaks down and the individual stands, and falls, alone. Thatcher's legacy comes finally to its toxic fruition in a bleak, terrifying wasteland.

But set aside our inherently good Nature, our compassion and empathy. Atomise our society, look inwards and destroy the solidarity and deny the common good, and one day the problem, the barrier bayed at by the Angry, the scapegoat driven into the Wilderness...
Today it may seem a ridiculous thought, but it could so very easily be you.

Travels In Time And Space: Cummings to be new Dr Who!

 Who?

Dominic Cummings, adviser to Boris Johnson, has landed the prestigious part of the new Doctor Who.

BBC producers insist that this is not to mollify the eugenics advocate and former night club manager's plans to castrate the corporation, but is rather down to his ability to be physically present in two spaces at the same time, as well as his astonishing power to cure covid without so much as a twist of his sonic screwdriver.

Who could have failed to be moved to tears just four weeks ago, as the BBC gave his wife, Spectator journalist Mary Wakefield, a special slot to talk about how she had fallen to her knees and begged the Timelords to spare her gravely ill partner? Who wouldn't have had to stifle a sob as she recounted how, after rushing home and bravely nursing her, he struggled breathlessly with the apparent insolence of the covid virus in daring to infect a genetically superior body like his ripped torso? As the presenters choked back their grief, she compellingy described his existential battle, seemingly confined in their London home, something she later wrote more about in her rightwing magazine.

Yet at the same time, neighbours of Dom's parents were peering over their hedge 260 miles away on Teeside to observe the Master Race's mightiest hoofer bopping to a high volume outdoors rendition of Abba's Dancing Queen in his age-vulnerable Mum and Dad's garden. Given that he had until then been apparently hovering between this world and the next, some have speculated if he may have been undergoing some form of regeneration process.

It was this astonishing ability of Cummings to alter the very fabric of truth and reality, while also dispersing any traces of shame or hypocrisy at a sub-atomic level, that apparently swung him the part. "And he comes complete with eccentric clothing," a BBC spokesperson enthused, though adding wistfully, "At least, when he actually wears some."

She did go on to admit though that scriptwriters are in crisis conference trying to work out how to explain to Cummings that "exterminate!" is in fact the catchphrase of his dalek enemies and that it would not be a good plot twist for the new Doctor to put them in charge of managing care homes.

Lockdown: Humanity On Notice

Empty city. 

 

As we stumble about wondering what we are allowed to do and where we can go, here are some scenes from York in simpler times of total lockdown a couple of weekends ago. Normally packed streets devoid of all but the occasional passing jogger or cyclist. And a little gargoyle waiting at the Minster for work to resume one day.

 

I am fortunate indeed to have this beautiful environment easily in range of a walk for my permitted daily exercise, doubly so to experience it so deserted. It speaks to how well people are continuing to respond to the need to protect not just ourselves but our vulnerable fellow-citizens from the coronavirus. 

 

And also, as I could hear pigeons rather than people as I walked along Parliament Street, it points up how quickly nature will fill any vacuum left by humans.

 

Perhaps we are on notice.