Son of a fu*@ing lockdown.

For fuck’s sake. Or as those pesky acronym monkeys would have it – FFS! Stupid people everywhere. Shall we just pop out to Regent’s Street to see the Christmas lights? Yes, let’s, I bet no one else will be bothering. And there you have it. A month later and we’re in another bloody, fucking lockdown and this time we can’t blame the Chinese and we can’t even really blame those politicians, because the severity of the situation right now is chiefly because of us; the stupid people. Amongst us lurk some of the dimmest and most selfish – the wanky couples that insist on shopping together despite any real reason to, the tossers who stop in the middle of the street to chat, the arseholes who don’t seem to understand that if you go into single file on the pavement it doesn’t mean they don’t have to as well. Outside is festooned with morons and this virus, much like stupidity itself, is spreading far faster than the experts ever imagined.

So here we are in another full lockdown. Apparently. I haven’t noticed much difference. It’s definitely nothing like the first one. There’s plenty of traffic on the roads and in the absence of ‘non essential’ services many seem to just be indulging more in the ‘essential’ ones. Who knew that an M&S angora pashmina was such an essential? It’s true that I’ve been venturing out, but a supermarket shop a week and a bit of exercise every day is not the same as a house party or a stroll with a friend and a flask of hot tea. Those two ladies in Derby who were shocked to be surrounded by police and then fined for their trouble shouldn’t have been too upset: nobody needs to drive eight miles to go for a walk, at least not at the moment. The rules and regulations may have been up and down like a bottle of lube at a orgy but they seem remarkably clear at the moment – when you’re not doing something essential just stay the fuck at home.

And it’s a given that people will find it hard. No one wants to be stuck indoors for another stretch that will end up being months rather than weeks. Yes, we know we’re a social animal, but surely we can see that this is no time to be dancing around with each other and going to car boot sales. Quite incredibly there are a few foul smelling bullshit collectors out there who are even more stupid that the clowns who just can’t keep themselves to themselves, namely the conspiracy theorists and Covid deniers. Some say that everybody loves a conspiracy theory but I say that generally speaking conspiracy theories are the preserve of the lonely, the confused and the long term unemployed. Hitler doesn’t live in Canada and Elvis probably doesn’t work at the Ryman’s in Abergavenny. If Covid-19 is a conspiracy then it’s one that has got rather unsustainably out of hand, and yet we are treated to scenes of crowds chanting “Covid is a hoax”, gathered outside hospitals full of dying people. There has been a suggestion that these deniers should be refused treatment but I think that would be too kind a solution; they should be deliberately infected with a few other things too. You know, just to be thorough. As I understand it doctors are actively treating patients for Covid who don’t even believe in it; if that doesn’t gast your flabber then I don’t know what will.

Should you want further proof that being sceptical of Covid and the current lockdown is a losing, and losers, game then just look at the voluminous dickheads that are on that particular front line. There’s Toby Young, the archbishop of jumped up little pricks, who has conjured up a toytown job as the editor of a website called ‘Lockdown Sceptics’. There’s Piers Corbyn, brother of Jeremy (incidentally, Boris is a cock but Jeremy would have handled this even more amateurishly, and subsequently disastrously) who claims the whole pandemic is a hoax and a way of controlling people, but if that’s true then it has clearly backfired massively because the population appears to be running rampant. There’s also Katie Hopkins who, to put it delicately, is an organ chewing virus all of her own, and who thinks that the hospitals she hasn’t visited are “virtually empty”. Lastly, but sadly not finally, in case you’re still dithering on this there is David Icke, who went totally mental decades ago and still believes he is being kept alive by aliens who stoically maintain the cycle of shit that connects his mouth to his rectum. If it wasn’t happening you couldn’t make it up, and yet still people are trying to.

In decades to come (if the plural is appropriate) what is left of humankind will look back and, fingers crossed, see that this pandemic was made much, much worse by the way it was handled. But that’s OK in some senses. You can point and name call but I doubt there was ever a perfect way of dealing with it, and you can be sure that if it happens all over again we’ll still fuck it all up. I suppose in reality it is happening all over again, but this time it’s more scary; more real if that’s possible. There was a sense before that people could behave with some level of common sense but that seems to have evaporated away over the months and what is left is much more of a ‘I’m-looking-after-number-one’ attitude. On a more positive note I firmly believe that this isn’t the worst that will hit humanity. We may get over Covid but while it won’t have taught us as much as it should of it will pale in comparison to some almighty game changer that will be on its way sooner or later. When that meteor crashes or the bosses press the red button we won’t have a hope, and we’ll say to ourselves “why didn’t we deal with that, we thought we were clever animals”. No, some humans are more clever than others but even the really clever ones are pretty stupid too. It’s just nature, doing its thing. Happy lockdown; starting the year on a high.

G B Hewitt. 09.01.2021