Well, lockdown is fun, isn’t it? Actually, I’ve not really noticed the difference. As I work from home, I rarely go out of the house anyway.
But I imagine for others it’s more difficult. Teenagers who would normally be in the park smoking dope and acting like arseholes can’t seem to quit doing either of these activities and I’m sure their parents are arseholes too because they’re not stopping them doing it. Can’t they all just smoke dope in a big Skype chat or something? But more seriously, the elderly and infirm who live alone can’t exactly be having the time of their lives at the moment.
We’ve been urged to follow government advice and stay at home as much as possible. I know this is the same government, at least in part, who told us “people have had enough of experts” and they are now trotting out actual experts to tell us stuff — take note, Alanis Morissette. And I know this is the same government who couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery, and not just because it would make it difficult to observe social distancing rules, so it’s easy to discount most of what they say about anything. But look at what other countries whose governments aren’t made up of fringe characters from Fraggle Rock are doing — the same things we’re meant to be doing — and it seems to be the right advice, albeit vague AF in a lot of areas.
Obviously looking to other countries for inspiration doesn’t apply to the US (sorry, American friends), as failed businessman, fake news enthusiast and space-hopper-with-a-wig, Donald J Trump, believes that the stock market is more important than citizens and that no human sacrifice is too great. Or Brazil (desculpe amigos brasileiros — if Google Translate hasn’t mugged me off here), where their isn’t-it-weird-how-some-Nazis-escaped-to-South-America-after-World-War-II-and-then-an-actual-Nazi-ends-up-as-president-of-one-of-their-countries-75-years-later-as-history-clearly-teaches-people-nothing leader declared COVID-19 to be a hoax, then contracted the virus, then said it wasn’t all that bad really and effectively told everyone to “man up”.
Anyway, I’m going to assume that anyone reading this is sensible enough to be doing all the right things anyway. Some people who are not necessarily doing the right thing are those in the media. The Daily Mail are guilty, and who could possibly have seen that coming? of encouraging people to travel to tourist hotspots en masse last weekend after they published a “go and see these places while it’s quiet” article which backfired spectacularly and saw Snowdonia National Park record its highest daily visitor numbers EVER.
However, one publication I expected better from is Libtard snowflake rag, The Guardian. Today there was what was no more than an opinion piece about COVID-19 entitled ‘Think you know how coronavirus will change Britain? Think again’.
It basically points out that nobody knows what will happen or when it will end — so far, the scientific community has been unable to provide any realistic answers to this conundrum. But for the writer of the piece to dispute Donald Trump’s “it’ll be over by Easter” claim — which, to be honest, does seem more than a little bit pie in the sky — and then say “It probably won’t even be over by Christmas” is irresponsible. To continue with further speculation about how our political system, society and way of life will be irreparably damaged is just that, speculation. But to start from a “no one knows” standpoint and then present everything in an “actually, this will happen” way will do nothing to quell panic buying and growing unrest.
Remember, as Brits, if someone tells us that something good might happen, we’re all “yeah, well, I’ll believe that when I see it”, but when someone predicts something bad, we gobble it up like the good little subjects we are. And if the Guardian believes that their readers are much cleverer than readers of other publications and therefore won’t panic as a result of this piece, then they aren’t as clever as they think.
But to paraphrase 80s crooner, Sydney Youngblood, all we can do is sit and wait. Spend your time reading, decorating, exercising, writing, learning something you’ve always wanted to learn, binge watching all of Netflix or whatever floats your boat and maybe one day we’ll all be able to look back on this and laugh. Maybe even in one of those ‘pubs’. Remember them?
