Tired of sharers. Sick of ‘experts’.

One of the most gruelling aspects of ‘the age of coronavirus’ is just how much people feel compelled to share. It was bad enough already with Facebook and Twitter and idiots like me pouring their thoughts and opinions out all over the place and making everything dirty. But now that we’re locked down and locked in it seems that almost everybody wants to be an exhibitionist; and if that was tiresome 6 weeks ago then it has now reached the level of fucking horrific. Literally. I’m horrified at the lengths people are going to just to get noticed. They may think they’re doing it to cheer you up or to get a big message across or even to fool you into thinking they would normally care this much but really they’re just doing it for themselves. They don’t just want to be seen, they want to be seen to be seen. They’re desperate for you to turn round and tell them that they’ve had a positive impact on your life but in 99.99% of cases it won’t happen because 99.99% of sharers are narcissistic fuck burgers or just very, very lonely.

That said, if sharers are unquestionably a perpetual irritant in this drama then the misery they spread is nothing when compared to the ‘experts’. I’m not referring to the real experts here but the other ‘experts’; the people who very happily tell us all about what is going to happen next when in fact they are about as well informed as an undiscovered troglodyte community situated somewhere in the bowels of the Amazon jungle. The core fact about the situation we have at the moment is that nobody knows anything. The government doesn’t know anything, which is why they keep saying they are guided by the science. The science says it is very important but in truth the science can only know so much because we have yet to master time travel and so we don’t really know what is happening and how we can deal with it definitively. In this case the scientists and the government are both trapped in a dark room and are looking for a door handle, but only the scientists have the faintest idea what a door handle feels like and even less of an idea how it works.

Taking this information another step forward the scientists are invited to offer their best bet about what is happening and why and then what the best way to come out of it without stinking of shit is. Every day is a gamble, of course, because as I said nobody knows anything. The government, as you may have noticed, are generally arrogant pricks who are for once slightly chastened by the fact there is something out there more powerful and mysterious and grubby than they are and so even they are being cautious, though we all know that deep down (actually it’s really obvious, it’s right there) Boris and his bum chums would just love to have their Churchill moment and nuke Covid19 into extinction and then strap on a cape and save the rest of the world. So essentially they’re taking advice from people they are not used to taking advice from and the people who are giving the advice aren’t entirely sure whether they’re going to be proved wrong so when the government says it is being guided by the science then they might just as well say that they are being guided by Greggs the bakers or by a racing pigeon trainer operating on the outskirts of Dorchester.

But even then one has to concede that if anyone might just know something right now that’s actually worth knowing then it’s definitely the scientists and the government. Definitely, absolutely, 100% sure about this – the rest of us know fuck all. And so, after what I realise has been a lengthy digression, I return to the ‘experts’. Be they pathetic mongers of scare or clueless givers of false hope they are talking purely from their selfish, bloated rectums and should be stopped at all costs. These were the twats that said in the early days of the lockdown that no one will be able to leave their house and if they did they would be shot in the face, or that we’d all only be allowed to eat baked beans on a Tuesday or that nobody over 75 would be sent an ambulance because, well, what would be the point. That kind of stuff anyway. And now they’re saying that schools will open next week, or is it next month, or is it never again, and only for Years 5, 9 and 12 and any kids with a club foot or a wonky eye, or that restaurants won’t be open until 2023 and that we’ll all have to engage in social distancing for ever and ever and that we’d better master the art of self-dentistry pretty sharpish or our teeth are going to go all middle ages. And whatever else they’ve said is also total bollocks because they just don’t know. They don’t know because they can’t fucking know.

And what will they bring us next? That bell ringers can resume on June 14th but must operate in isolation so that even a simple little communal peel requires the cooperation of 17 parish churches and a specially commissioned satellite dish? That circus clowns can resume scaring the shit out of kids but only when the daily death toll is below 35 and only from a distance of 600 yards? That we are free to collect our fish and chips again but on the condition that each individual chip is cleaned thoroughly with an antibacterial wipe before consumption? That pubs will reopen but with a strict policy of only one person inside at any one time and a one out-one in system at the door? Or better still – that anyone who posts their breaking news online or otherwise that hasn’t extracted it directly from the breaking news (fresh from the government that we’ve all just heard anyway, who have made a decision guided really rather closely by the science) should expect to be showered with bricks and fire the moment they dare to leave their sordid, damp little living rooms and come blinking into the light. There’s a time and a place for making shit up and passing it off as the truth and that time is not now. I hope you don’t believe everything you hear, because even I stopped doing that weeks ago. And I’m really stupid.

G B Hewitt. 06.05.2020