Tag Archives: COVID

Having Covid: A Worrier’s Tale

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I recently had Covid, which means that I now possess a sort of temporary super-immunity. I could invite you all to cough in my mouth, I could lick every surface and door-handle in your house, and I probably will, because I’m dirty like that.

Having Covid is like someone standing on the spongy surface of your brain and ripping into it with a pneumatic drill, the force of it sending tremors down your limbs and through your hips like some malevolent Mexican Wave. Somewhere down below, a man with unfeasibly large palms plays your balls like bongo drums. One minute you’re cold, like an ex-girlfriend; the next minute you’re boiling hot, like you’re trapped in your 78-year-old grandmother’s living room on a balmy summer’s day while she’s got the heating on full bung cause she’s ‘bloody freezing’.

The shakes were intolerable. On the second or third day I went for a piss in the dead of night and genuinely couldn’t stop my body from shivering and spasming. I felt like some sort of James Brown tribute act. Or the Ghostbusters when they crossed the streams. I certainly gave my young sons a run for their money in the ‘pish all over the floor’ stakes. But then I often do.

My sister, my youngest son, my girlfriend and her kids all had Covid at the same time. The worst aspect of this virus is the worry it places on you for the people around you. I can take it – you think to yourself, as hope and scepticism battle inside you – but what about them? After all, this isn’t the flu (although that can kill you too – fat grandpa, I’m looking at you). Headlines like ‘PERFECTLY HEALTHY DOUBLE-VACCINATED MARATHON RUNNER DIES OF COVID’ don’t help. Especially since the marathon runner was hit by a train the day he tested positive, but that information’s buried in the last paragraph of the newspaper report, and who the hell reads past the headline these days? Unless it’s an article about two celebrities shagging each other, of course.

The second worst aspect is the isolation: feeling like a leper; desperately missing all of the mundane rituals you’ve always fervently hated. So you actively plan a two-week comeback safari around every supermarket within a fifty-mile radius starting the very second your quarantine ends. There soon will be photo albums filled with snaps of you shaking hands with the Tesco security guard and laughing fondly with the old checkout lady at Morrisons.

Covid fucks with you. It’s a trickster God. A few days into my viral experience I felt an inexplicably powerful surge of energy and enthusiasm. I woke up feeling not just better, but superhuman. Cheery, vibrant, ready to seize the day. Was it my one little dose of vaccine starting to turn the tables on the Cov and kick its bat-munching ass? Was my immune system doing a victory lap? Had someone slipped crack into the water-supply? Whatever the reason, I was on fire. I set about re-organising furniture like a Tetris champion; ridding cupboards of junk in the same manner a lion would rid an antelope of its intestines, and taking to housework with the zeal of Magda from ‘There’s Something About Mary’ after a gub-load of speed. The next day, however, I woke up feeling like a dragon had shat in my brain, then flambed it. The headache was back. The virus kicked in the saloon doors of my internal organs and went on a rampage, visiting first the stomach and bowel, then moving upwards to fuck with my lungs. I felt exhausted. Depressed. Wretched.

I still had to look after my youngest son, thankfully with some help from my similarly afflicted sister (great name for a death metal band, that). Christopher was infected but mercifully asymptomatic. This meant that he had bags of little boy energy and I felt like an old man breathing his last on his death bed, which admittedly isn’t that different from the norm. Luckily, I was co-parenting with the nearest thing I could get to Dr Spock: the television. God bless you Peppa Pig and Ryan’s Toy Review. I promise I won’t mutter so much about killing you in your sleep once this is all over.

Once our isolation ended my son and I journeyed to Aldi. I’ve never been so pleased to stand at a check-out while shopping was being launched at me with the speed of a champion tennis serve. On the return journey my little boy said to me, ‘You’re the best daddy ever.’ That’s beautiful, I thought. He realises how hard it was for me to nurture and entertain him in my weakened state. He appreciates me. By god he appreciates me.

‘What makes you say that buddy?’

‘Because you just let me watch TV all the time.’

Great. Just add ‘always cooks me chicken nuggets’ and ‘never makes me wear ironed clothes’ and we’ve got the Divorced Dad Hat Trick.

I was due my second vaccine jab the same week I got Covid. Great timing. I got my first jab earlier in the summer at a walk-in Vaccination centre in my home town. Over-40s are – or at least were – automatically ear-marked for Astro Zeneca. For some reason I was very worried about the well-documented risks of strokes and blood-clots associated with Astro Zeneca, despite spending very little time worrying about the reality of being a middle-aged Scottish man who smokes, eats junk food and takes zero exercise (at least if any of those things cause my head to explode I’ll have earned it). It does boggle my brain, though, that we’ve taken care to shield the aging and the elderly from the worst effects of Covid, but think nothing of subjecting that same age group to a dose of something that might cause their cerebrum to burst like a soggy grape.

I’m not anti-Vax. I’m simply anti-positive-interpretations-of-my-own-luck. If something harbours the ability to give me a fatal blood clot, I’ll get a fatal blood clot. If I walked into a money-filled room wearing a jacket made of sticky-back plastic I’d snag a cool few million, but later die from paper cuts. Lady Luck, it seems, is just not that into me. So I told the people at the centre that it was Pfizer or nothing. They acquiesced to my request, though the man dispensing the vaccine told me I’d bought into propaganda. He did have a sense of humour, though, as evidenced by our little pre-needle exchange:

‘Have you any preference for which arm you get the jab in?’ he asked.

‘Surprise me,’ I said.

‘OK,’ he said, leaning forward in his chair, with a mad glint in his eye, ‘I’m gonna give you Astro Zeneca!’

You don’t have to know the relative merits, risks and drawbacks of the two vaccines in order to make an informed choice. Just switch off the investigative part of your brain and listen to how the two names sound. Take Astro Zeneca. It’s terrifying. It sounds like a 300ft tall killer robot from outer space. “I AM ASTRO ZENECA. I WILL BATHE THE EARTH IN BLOOD AND SET FIRE TO IT USING THE BURNING HEART OF THE SUN. AND I WILL DO IT JUST FOR A LAUGH.” Pfizer, on the other hand, sounds like a goofy cartoon rabbit. The sort of heavy-lidded nincompoop who’s shite at everything, but adorably shite, so he gets away with it. He just spends his days laughing at his own farts, and wondering what clouds taste like, as the animals around him scrunch their faces and coo, ‘Ohhhh, Pfizer!’

But, obviously, my aversion to Astro Zeneca wasn’t solely shaped by a terror of ungodly space robots. In reality, not every reservation about Astro Zeneca can be filed under ‘c’ for ‘crackpot conspiracy theory’. At one point, most of Europe had banned it, and you can’t chalk all of that down to some Eurovision Song Contest-esque political point-scoring in the wake of Brexit. Plus, plenty of medical data (find your own fucking sources) suggests that Astro Zeneca, more than any of the other available vaccines – and I’m going to be using some very esoteric scientific language here, so do try to focus – fucks shit up.

To a point, you can’t blame people for being sceptical. Conspiracies have always existed, throughout all of human history. At a minimum, all you need is three human beings, and time. Here in our dog-eat-dog modern times, capitalism’s long and lasting legacy of greed and inhumanity – its veneration of luxury and profit and excess – encourages, nay sanctions, the use of conspiracies and corruption and psychopathy as handy tools to drive share-prices up. The only limit to success is a corporation’s imagination: it certainly isn’t ethics.

In the 1970s, Ford incurred a record-breaking fine when it was discovered that executives had known about and declined to fix a potentially fatal design flaw in Ford’s Pinto model. Ford’s own tests had shown that owing to the position of the fuel tank, a rear-end collision would be pretty likely to result in fire and death. However, Ford’s own cost-benefit analysis determined that it would be cheaper to run the gauntlet with law-suits than to take preventative – and life-saving – action, so they kept quiet. People died. Quelle surprise.

Medicine isn’t without its share of hubris, greed, miscalculations and scandals. We need only look at the opioid crisis in modern-day America, or the recent hefty fines slapped on GlaxoSmithCline and even on Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant I appear to trust, for some insane reason. And let’s not forget the horrifying scandal of the late 1950s and early 1960s when thalidomide, marketed as a safe treatment for morning sickness, was ultimately responsible for thousands of lost pregnancies, birth defects and deaths.

So it’s not inherently crazy to think, ‘I wonder if the profit-driven producers of this piece of medicine really have my best interests at heart?’ That being said, some objections to Covid vaccinations in general have flirted with full-blown insanity, particularly those pointing to the satanic nature of Bill Gates.

It’s hardly a new idea to point out the cognitive dissonance inherent in someone of the tinfoil-hat-variety decrying the vaccines for containing tiny, liberty-thieving micro-trackers, logging your every movement, whilst that person is doing all their decrying on a mobile phone, a device that actually does log your every movement. Bill Gates doesn’t know that you went to your grandmother’s last night and then went home to whack off over dwarf porn, but Google and Microsoft sure as shit do. Some conspiracy-minded folks among us even suggested that nanobots inside the vaccine would allow Bill Gates directly to control the vaccinated, perhaps through use of a joystick or PlayStation controller. Perhaps in concert with Elon Musk, the two of them playing real-life Grand Theft Auto using wee Jeanie and Ethel from Motherwell as avatars.

“Christ, Bill, Ethel must have gout or something. She’s not getting away from the cops fast enough! Jesus, I didn’t notice she was on fire.”

“Ha ha, Elon, I’ve just made my old Scottish woman do a loop-the-loop in her wheelchair INSIDE Home Bargains, so fuck you.”

“Damn it! Ethel’s burnt to death. YOU’RE USELESS, ETHEL! Hang on, taking over another avatar…. Senga…. age 76, from East Kilbride. Let’s see how much vroom this old bitch has in her tank.”

Anyway, I’m going to get my second jab as soon as I can.

Don’t tell Bill Gates. And if the vaccine kills me, feel free to come back to this blog-post and piss yourself laughing. Be well.

Father Christmas’s Covid Countdown

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Santa lumbered towards the gantry. The platform jolted and quivered as his fat frame thumped down onto it, one tree-trunk-like leg at a time. His head elf, Grogu, jumped. Not because he was scared, which he certainly was, but because of physics. The jump was entirely involuntarily. Each one of Santa’s crashing steps sent him flying into the air and back down again, the world’s most reluctant astronaut. Santa suddenly stopped. Once the aftershocks had settled Grogu bowed his tiny head, scrunched up his face, and braced himself for impact. Santa usually liked to announce his arrival with a swift, open-handed slap. This time he didn’t. He simply ignored Grogu. Either that or he’d decided to leave the violence until the end of their exchange for once. After all, versatility is the key to good management.

Santa looked down over the half-empty factory floor below, a wave of steadily mounting disgust ruffling the corners of his nicotine-tinged moustache. He gripped the railings as if they were elf necks.

“What in the name of sixteen sodomised snowmen is going on down there, Grogu?” he boomed. “There’s next to fuck-all elves on that shop floor! What am I paying them for?”

Grogu shuffled uncomfortably. “You, eh…” he mumbled, “You aren’t paying them, Mr Claus.”

“And they still get too much!”

Santa looked down at Grogu. Well, there wasn’t really any other way for Santa to look at him. A thoroughly contemptuous sneer fanned its way through Santa’s moustache. “What sort of a f***ing name is Grogu anyway?”

Grogu kept still and quiet, like you would if there was a T Rex in the vicinity.

“Well?” asked Santa. “Where are they all?”

“I think Covid is to blame, sir.”

“Covid? Is he the little one with the warty face and the funny eye? I’ll f***ing swing him by the ears into a polar bear’s arsehole, by Christ. Called a strike has he?”

“Covid is a disease, sir.”

“You’re f***ing right he is, Grogu, and my boot’s the cure.”

“No, no, no. Covid isn’t an elf. It’s an infectious virus. We’ve been issued with directives insisting that we socially distance while on the shop floor.”

Santa’s face twisted into the furious sort of shape you’d normally associate with people who’d just had an arse fart directly into their face. “WHO ISSUED THESE DIRECTIVES?” he roared.

“Em… Elf and Safety.”

Santa thumped the railing with a giant pink fist, the clang reverberating across the entire factory. It sounded like the tolling of a bell calling the elves to execution, which perhaps it was. Grogu’s heart started hammering so quickly that if you’d seen his bare chest you’d have sworn there was a woodpecker trapped inside it. The elves below all looked up in unison, the collective cricking-snap of their up-thrust necks plainly audible. Santa went a deep sheen of ruddy pink as he noticed the coverings over the elves mouths.

“IF THAT’S MRS CLAUS’S KNICKERS YOU’VE GOT STRAPPED TO YOUR F***ING FACES I’LL THUMP EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU INTO THE SNOW WITH A FROZEN DEAD WALRUS! DON’T THINK I DON’T KNOW THEY’VE BEEN GOING MISSING FROM HER DRAWER!”

“Sir, they’re masks,” said Grogu, half-apologetically, half-terrified. “To… to make it less likely the infection will spread if one of the elves contracts it.’ Grogu squinted down into the sparsely dotted collection of his fellow elves. ‘Em, except for Yulper and Chimrick in the far corner there, they actually do seem to have pairs of your wife’s skiffs stretched over their lips.’”

Santa’s face turned as red as his suit. He reached deep into a pocket of his coat, and in a finger-click of a second pulled out and threw a hard, green Christmas bauble. It zapped across the room like a comet, making an ominous thunk-clunk noise at it struck first Yulper’s skull and then Chimrick’s, ping-ponging between them and knocking them both to the floor, where they sprawled like chalk outlines.

“I WANT THEM BURNED IMMEDIATELY!”

Grogu nodded and leaned over the railing. He shouted down in his loudest voice, which admittedly wasn’t all that loud. ‘BURN THE PANTS!’

“NOT THE F***ING PANTS!’ corrected Santa. ‘THOSE TWO FILTHY, CROTCH-SNIFFING, TRIANGLE-EARED C***S WHO SWIPED MY WIFE’S LIP-LOADERS!”

A couple of burly gnomes in leather jackets jogged onto the factory floor , grabbed Yulper’s and Chimrick’s legs and dragged their unconscious bodies out of sight. The elves continued to stand there, gazing up at Santa with bulging, unblinking eyes.

“How did this happen, Grogu?”

“Well, best guess, she left some of her sexier undies drying on the radiator by an unlocked window and the temptation was just too…”

Grogu raised his head from the cold steel that was pressing against his cheek. It took him a few seconds to realise he’d just been punched half-way across the gantry.

“I MEAN THE VIRUS, YOU UNSHAKEABLE DANGLEBERRY!”

Grogu staggered to his feet like a reanimated corpse and shambled up the gantry to Santa. “Well, the scientists, em, aren’t sure, sir, but there’s a popular theory that all this started when a gnome in the South Pole ate a penguin. Or fucked it. No-one’s quite sure.”

Santa stamped a foot and sent Grogu flipping over onto his bum. “OF COURSE THEY FUCKED IT, THOSE FILTHY, FISHING-POLE MOTHER-F***ERS! THEY’D ROUST A MALE WHALE’S BLOW-HOLE IF THEY THOUGHT NO-ONE WAS LOOKING! AND I’VE GOT ABOUT FIFTY OF THE VIRUS-RIDDLED BASTARDS RIGHT HERE IN THE NORTH POLE!”

Santa again grasped the railing. He leaned over the top of it like he was going to be sick, but only angry words vomited out onto the elves below, who were all still staring up at him.

“WHAT ARE YOU ALL STILL GAWPING AT, YOU DIMINUTIVE DICKBAGS? GET SOME BLOODY WORK DONE!”

There was a momentary silence during which the elves were either too brave or too stupid to move. Santa’s eyes bored into them all with the strength of a superhero’s laser-beam. One of the elves coughed, and then one of them said:

“Fat c**t.”

You could have heard a pin drop. Santa was far too furious to react. His system was overloaded with rage to the point of impotence. His head twitched from mask to mask, mask to mask, in the vain hope of detecting some minute disturbance in the fabric suggestive of recent speech. Those jaggy-eared rats! He turned to Grogu, who’d just managed to get back on his feet, ordering him calmly:

“Grogu, I want standard issue masks issued to each of the elves on duty, with North Pole branding. Every elf must wear one, supplied by me, no exceptions, from now on, a fresh one each day. Bring a box of them to my office first though, just before my 12 o’clock shit. I’ll teach those mouthy little f***ers to gob off.”

***

Santa thundered to his office and called an urgent Zoom meeting with corporate. He sat at his desk, feet up, eating tubes of Pringles like they were Smarties, and intermittently scratching his balls. The oily, smarmy, eminently punchable head of the Head of North Pole Corporate Strategy flashed onto the large screen mounted on the office wall in-front of him. Santa reached into one of the desk drawers and fished out a bottle of whiskey; started glugging it straight.

“Claus, you old son of a gun, you!” schmoozed the Head, an obscene grin bisecting his face.

“Graham, you fucking c***!” Santa growled back, with no trace of a smile at all. “Question: I’ve only got about a third of the workforce on the shop floor because of this stupid virus thing, productivity is down 300 per cent and I’m way behind on quota. What am I supposed to do? Move Christmas to f***ing April? Cause that’s the only way I’ll be able to pull this shit off.”

“I know it’s a challenging time for you,” said Graham, and then nothing further. He just stood smiling. Santa thought for a second that the connection had frozen.

“Anything else?”

“We’re behind you one hundred per cent.”

“No help though? No ideas, no suggestions?”

The waxy-skinned corporate statue grinned at him for another few seconds more. “We’ve got one hundred per cent faith in you.”

“Graham, I’ve got to make toys for every little c*** in the world and then deliver them to every little c*** in the world. These are impossible circumstances.”

“Not the Muslim world.”

“What?”

“Well, you said the whole world. It’s not the whole world, though, is it? Barely one per cent of China, almost none of Africa. The majority of your work goes to the English-speaking ‘A’s: Australia, America and the Arseholes Who Still Think They Rule the World. Tell you what, if you think it’ll help, you can cut out Switzerland. No one really likes Switzerland anyway.”

“Oh great, so I can knock some chocolate and cuckoo clocks off the f***ing list. That still leaves countless hundreds of millions of houses!”

Graham’s smile cracked, quivered, went flat, then returned to normal. “You’re being outperformed by Amazon, do you know that? They’re making your operation look like the amateur cluster-copulation that it is. They’re doing what you do once a year, once a day, and they’re doing it perfectly. And let’s put something in perspective here. You’re living in a shack in a snowy wilderness surrounded by your wife’s underwear and dying polar bears, while Jeff Bezos is living in a billion dollar fortress on the moon. The moon! All your sponsors, Coca Cola, Mattell, every single one of them would pull out today if not for the high Santa brand recognition and the advertising revenue that comes from it, and the fact that you maximise their profits by using slave labour. Sorry… zero pay contracts.”

Santa slammed his whiskey bottle down on the desk. Not to make any dramatic point. Just because it was finished. “Exactly: we use slave labour. So we bring back those lazy ass elves from furlough and we make them all work together, harder than ever, round the clock, and who gives a f*** if they get sick. I’ll put the gnomes on a plane to the South Pole and they can bring in the New Year gang-banging penguins. Problem solved.”

Graham winced. “Ooooh, bad PR, Mr Claus, bad PR.”

Santa leaned back in his chair. “So people don’t care if the little f***ers are being worked to death, just so long as they don’t get sick from a virus while they’re doing it?”

“Absolutely,” smiled Graham. “The market research confirms it.”

Santa leaned back in his seat and smiled thinly. “Jesus Christ, and I thought I was the evil bastard. So, in summary, Graham, you’ve been absolutely and completely f*** all help.”

“Always here for you, Mr Claus.”

“Always here to do f*** all, you mean.”

“I feel this has been a most productive meeting. Oh, before I go, just one more thing: you can’t go into any houses this year.”

Santa shot upright. “Come again?”

“Covid restrictions. We can’t risk the spread of infection, especially since you’ll be flitting between hundreds of millions of homes.”

Santa laughed. “So what the f*** am I supposed to do? Drop a payload of presents from the sky like I’m a drone above Fallujah? Shout ‘HEIDS’ as I rain down animatronic puppies over Paisley?”

Graham smiled his widest smile. This was the smile finale. The big one he’d been working up to. “I trust your judgement, Mr Claus.”

And with that, he was gone, smile and all.

“We’ll see about that, you grinning plastic prick,” growled Santa mischievously.

***

Grogu was a little surprised to find himself standing in-front of a mounted camera dressed as a slutty nun, complete with crotchless panties and blood-red lipstick.

“Em, remind me how this is going to help save Christmas again, Mr Claus?”

Santa stood tweaking the camera and laughing. “Well, now that all of you workshy little twerps have got OnlyFans accounts set up, you’re going to be raking in money from all the world’s perverts, money that I’m going to use to order all the world’s presents through f***ing Amazon. Let Jeff Bezos take the strain, the swotting, bald, Bond-villain c***.”

What a fantastic idea of Santa’s. Even better that he’d stopped the gnomes from burning Yulper and Chimrick. Their OnlyFans account featured them parading around in his wife’s pants while wearing shit-covered face masks, intermittently kissing each other, and it was his biggest earner. There really was a frightful amount of perverts out there, and between them and their deep pockets they were saving Christmas for a generation of hopeful, cherubic children.

“And, em, what’s this?” asked Grogu, holding up a bendy latex implement that possessed the dimensions of a large poloni sausage.

“That’s a double-ended dildo, son.”

“And…em… what am I supposed to do with it?”

“I trust your judgement, Grogu,” said Santa, as he lumbered from the room.

“SANTA?” wailed Grogu, “WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH IT?”

“Go f*** yourself, Grogu!” he called back.

It was the best Xmas Eve ever. Santa didn’t have any presents to deliver, so he spent the evening flying through the skies, from Coatbridge to Copenhagen, Berlin to Brisbane, halting the reindeer every now and then to hover over a FedEx or DPD van and take a great big curly shit on it from the air.

At precisely 5am on Christmas morning, Santa snapped the reins and called to Rudolph: “Make haste for the moon, you red-nosed nobber. I’ve saved a bit of supper for that shiny-headed son of a bitch, Bezos, and it’ll soon be time for my six o’clock shit.”

Merry Christmas everyone!

 

2020’s Plenty: It’s Been a Lung Year

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How we laughed at the turn of the year.

“Some mad wee Chinese guy has eaten a bat, and now the Chinese are cutting about looking like tribute acts to Michael Jackson and the Chemical Brothers. That’ll teach them for eating weird shit.” It could never happen to us, right?

How smug we were. How we gorged on schadenfreude. All the while comically blind to the fact that our diet consists mainly of terrified chickens bathed in the shits of their caged friends; cows fed on sheep’s brains; horses that have been secretly mulched into beef mince; turkeys tenderised by the baseball bats of bored Bernard Matthews’ workers, and – I wouldn’t be surprised to learn – the genetically modified arse cheeks of some vile abomination like the croco-penguin. Even still we heaved the wrecked, diabetes-ridden husks of our bodies from pub to pub, takeaway to takeaway, chewing chocolate bars through one side of our mouths while smoking three fags out the other, just managing to say, ‘I dunno, the shit those people put in their bodies’ before pouring a carafe of vodka down our throats.

And, while we were lost in our completely unwarranted sense of western superiority, we forgot about something else: planes. The Great Wall of China doesn’t encircle the entire population, hemming them all in. Millions of people from all over the world fly to thousands of places each and every day, doubtless many hundreds of thousands of them Chinese. [Side fact: if you got all of the Chinese people who travelled by air each day and got them to link hands along the Welsh coast, it would be completely and utterly pointless] Maybe we didn’t forget. Maybe we just sort of figured that if there was a highly infectious disease with the potential to bloom into a pandemic rampaging around the continent of Asia that the UK government would do something to block or control entry from those countries that had been affected. That was a bit silly of us, wasn’t it? Even though we didn’t really trust our beloved Boris all that much to begin with, I dare say we trust him now about as much as I trust a fart after a surprise horse vindaloo.

For the first few months of the outbreak we decided to play a nationwide game of Supermarket Sweep, with the ghost of Dale Winton shouting encouragement at us from the clouds: “Fasta fasta, grab all the pasta!”

And, of course, booming out the show’s famous slogan: “Next time you’re at the checkout and you hear the beep, think of the old woman who now can’t wipe her arse, you inconsiderate freak.” Why toilet paper? In case we needed to wipe our lungs? What would we have stockpiled if the WHO had warned us of an impending diarrhoea outbreak? Halls Soothers?

The first lockdown confined most of us to our homes with the option of one hour’s outdoor exercise per day. We were essentially prisoners, but with worse diets and even greater substance-abuse problems. Subsequent lockdowns kept some shops and amenities open but essentially stopped people from socialising, prevented them from going to pubs and for nights out, and pretty much compelled them to stay at home feeling miserable and grumpy, thereby turning large sections of the population into, well… me before the coronavirus.

Refuses to wear a mask, but for some reason he’s down with safety specs.

The arrival of the Track and Trace system made rebels and doomsayers of a large swathe of the country’s intellectually challenged. ‘Slip siding into a fascist state, are we?’ they cried, though perhaps not as articulately as that. ‘We’ll see about that! If those hired goons at McDonalds think they’re going to write down MY name and address at the door, like the fucking Stazi, they’ve got another thing coming… oh, McDonalds is doing an on-line promotion where you can win free Big Macs for a year?! Hold on, I’ll just type in my name and address…’

I understand being wary of governments and corporations in our digital age. It’s perfectly possible that the ostensibly innocent gathering of information in our – thus far – only mildly corrupt society (see Analytica, Cambridge et al) could one day be turned against us should the right (or possibly wrong) person or organisation take the reins. That’s why I admire that rare breed of zealot who dedicates himself to a life off the grid, living in a shack, or up a tree, in the wilderness, roaming naked or in rags, eating wild potatoes (much more dangerous than the domesticated version), shitting in a hole in the ground, and teaching badgers how to do basic CPR should they one day go down from a heart attack. But as for the rank and file? Those who participate in modern life while at the same time decrying it? If you’re going to holler ‘Invasion of privacy! Infringement of civil liberties! What’s next: a microchip??’ it’s best not to walk around all day with a hand-held device that contains an actual micro-chip. Your phone knows where you are and what you’re doing at all times of the day and night, and any gaps in its knowledge can be helpfully filled in by you voluntarily narrating every movement of your excruciatingly pointless existence – even your bowel movements. If this technology had been around in the 30s and 40s we’d all be reading ‘Anne Frank’s Instagram Feed’ instead of her diary, and it would feature just one picture: a selfie of her in the loft with a caption reading, ‘I’m in this loft, but, shhhhh, don’t tell the Germans #secretloft #loftnights #letmebeFrank’.’

Masks, too, were another source of upset, with angry people – whose only source of news was the digestion of headlines on anonymous blogs posted in a Facebook group called WE’RE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, SHEEPLE – spluttering that masks had no proven track record of preventing harmful microbes or virus-laden effluent from passing through them, much to the shock of surgeons and SARS-blighted Asians everywhere, who’d happily worn the efficacious face-panties for years.

On a side note, the Tories have appointed a ‘Minister for Loneliness’. The Tories. The party of ‘every man for himself, pip pip, if you slack or fall it’s your fault, bally ho, no such thing as society’. This is like finding out that Ted Bundy was once appointed the minister for ‘Making Sure People Don’t Get Brutally Murdered by a Stranger’.

It’s got to the point now where millions of people would rather get their advice on the virus from David Icke, an ex-goalkeeper with big fish lips who believes that the Queen is quite literally a shape-shifting lizard from outer space, than from thousands of epidemiologists and scientists who’ve spent their lives studying and combating viruses.

It is, however, understandable that people have grown weary of restrictions and lockdowns, given that the guidelines sometimes seem like they’ve been made up by a bunch of heavy drug-users with type-writers.

“You can’t go into a textile shop wearing blue, unless it’s only on one leg, and you can’t go to the butchers’ unless your aunty Beryl is there with you, but only if she’s wearing her glasses down on the tip of her nose, and even then she’s only permitted to speak if she’s doing a David Attenborough impression. You can go swimming, but only in puddles, you can go to the cinema, but only if you’re blindfolded, you can go to the gym, but only if it’s on the roof of a council estate tower block, but, remember, Tuesday is opposites day, and every second Wednesday gives priority to Chihuahuas. In summary, then, don’t cross the streams, don’t feed them after midnight, don’t you forget about me, don’t blame it on the good times blame it on the boogie, don’t cry for me Argentina, and don’t you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me. Don’t you.”

At core, though, if you read behind and between the lines of official communications, you’ll find this simple message: don’t be a dick. This is something that doesn’t appear to come naturally to us, in the same way as it does to people in South East Asian countries like Taiwan, who’ve pretty much got the virus licked. It’s a tragedy that we can’t bring ourselves to care more, because people are dying. Celebrities are dying, for Christ sake, this is serious! At the rate comedy double-acts were halved this year you’d have thought Thanos had snapped his fingers. Bobby Ball, Eddie Large, Barry Chuckle. All sadly gone. Perhaps the surviving members could form a triple act and call themselves ‘Little Chuckle Cannon’. I’ll just have to find a new nickname for my penis.

Regrettably, both Krankies have thus far survived.

And now, of course, we’ll be hoping that it’s all over by Christmas. Just like the Great War… You know, the one that lasted four years and was followed by the two-year-long Spanish Flu outbreak?

Happy Pandemukkah.

 

Alcohol is a Bigger Problem Than the Coronavirus

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This country in the iron grip of a pandemic; one that strikes down the young and the old alike with little regard for social strata or circumstance; one that our lawmakers, doctors and social scientists are doing their best to strategise against in pursuit of the greater public good.

I’m not talking about the coronavirus (although the two have become connected): I’m talking about alcoholism – specifically the pervasive cultural alcoholism in which we’ve all been drowning for most of the last century. Possibly even since time immemorial.

It isn’t until you break the spell of alcohol by ceasing or reducing your intake that you realise its ubiquity; how it’s stitched into the very fabric and rhythms of your life and conversation; how you’re likely to be viewed with suspicion or derision if your social life doesn’t revolve around some description of flavoursome, mind-altering douche-soup.

I defy you to scroll through an average thread on social media and not find at least one classic shot of a manicured hand gripped around the stem of a wine glass. Perhaps it’s ‘wine o’clock’. Maybe it’s been a ‘hell of a week’. You might even see a group-shot of some perfectly coiffured, elegantly dressed women huddling on a couch or around a cocktail-laden table, raising a toast to their own self-satisfied sophistication. Men are just as guilty of normalising problem drinking on-line and in person, although generally they don’t tend to put such a soft, Instagrammic sheen on things – cravat-wearing city slickers and snooty whiskey onanists being the clear exceptions.

Then – here in Scotland at least – there’s the cultural component. A Scotsman not taking a drink is like a Texan not standing for the US National Anthem. Or a Parisian not setting fire to things in response to a mild civic restriction.

So what’s this got to do with the coronavirus?

Well, as you’ve doubtless noticed, by government decree all pubs, clubs and restaurants must close their doors at 10pm, a decision that has precipitated a flood of memes and sarcastic comments along the lines of, ‘Aye, Covid only comes out after dark, right enough’. I must admit, there is indeed, on the surface of it, something comical about the thought of the virus donning a cowboy hat, kicking in the saloon doors at 22:01, firing its guns in the air and shouting, ‘Ye’v bin warned, varmits, this here is a Covid bar now! YEEHAW!’ Or the thought of the Purge alarm blaring into the night sky as bands of terrified drunken revellers try to dodge past legions of heavily-armed Covids on every street corner.

But, really, if you think about the curfew, it makes perfect sense.

Imagine what impact a 10pm curfew would have had on pre-corona Britain, never mind our present reality: fewer numbers of booze-ravaged men and women roaming the streets between 10pm and 6am, rubbing shoulders and various other body parts with friends and strangers alike, getting into arguments, getting into fights; sharing saliva and semen and sexual regret as if they were office Christmas cards.

If you’re looking to curb the excesses of human contact, both positive and negative, that prolonged exposure to alcohol brings, and to free up the hospitals from the depressing cavalcade of head-wounds and bleeding knuckles and alcoholic collapse that characterise an average weekend in this country – wholly preventative medical scenarios that  divert attention and resources from more serious medical cases, or make hospital-based transmissions of the virus more likely – then a curfew for licensed premises is a no-brainer.

I get that pubs are more than just places to get drunk. Pubs in small villages and towns can double up as social centres, places for people to meet, play cards, read the paper, sing and dance – the real life-blood of the community. My question would be, great: but why do we have to be pissed to do this?

Cultural Contrasts

Social media can be a cesspit of unsolicited opinions, simmering violence and half-baked half-truths (often helped along by the cyber-agents of other countries), but it’s still occasionally capable of smuggling hard nuggets of sense and reason into a debate. I suppose the cesspittyness of any given corner of the internet at least partly depends upon the people whose virtual call-signs you surround yourself with.

In any case, I stumbled onto a debate on Covid, masks and civil disobedience on a friend’s Facebook page the other week, and found it to be interesting and enlightening. A good chunk of it was about the difference between mask-wearing habits in the west and the east; how community spirit, compliance and cohesion appear to be hard-wired into, for example, south east Asians, perhaps on account of their long history of rice-cultivation for food and export, a field (forgive me) in which the key to success and survival was, and still is, co-operation.

Here in the UK we’ve a long tradition of embracing the malignant, mutant sense of individualism that has sprung, no doubt, from centuries of industrialisation, unfettered free-market capitalism and consumerism. It appears to be challenging for many people in the UK to imagine a world bigger than their own individual drives and desires. It wasn’t always thus, but it’s certainly thus now. We reject unity, nuance and sacrifice in favour of doing, well, whatever the fuck we want.

Ah’m no daein that!

There’s a sub-section of male society that regards the exercise of caution as tantamount to effeminancy. For example, Health and Safety exists and is enshrined in law – and upper management usually pay lip service to it – but in male-dominated industries, especially down at the literal or figurative coal-face, it exists in the same way that Norse legends do. Complaining about a ten-metre-long spike sticking out of a wall at head-height is less likely to lead to a change in company policy, and more likely to result in you being labelled ‘a wee cry-baby poof’.

A similar thing is happening with Covid. There’s a widespread feeling that the prissy egg-heads and boffins – with their glasses and their little dorky white coats – are a bunch of pussy-whipped scaredy cats who don’t have a bloody clue about how the real world works, and have no right to tell real men how to live their lives. Load ay shite aw that science, anyway. Ah saw a video on YouTube and it’s aw bollocks. Mair chance ae bein’ hit by a bus than getting’ that Covid, CAUSE IT DISNAE EXIST!

These are men who are distrustful of and resistant to authority as a baseline, whose reaction to most obstacles or restrictions, or even their own feelings, is a dismissive wave and a ‘FUCK OFF’. Just add more rules and try to subtract alcohol and witness the results.

Back in 2018 the World Health Organisation noted that Scottish alcohol consumption is among the highest in the world, with Scots guzzling more than 13 litres of pure alcohol a year. When considering alcohol unit pricing The Scottish government was even moved to concede that ‘alcohol is an integral part of Scottish life’, a rather depressing, and sobering, thought. Although it qualified this by saying that there is ‘clear evidence that for a large section of the Scottish population their relationship with alcohol is damaging and harmful – to individuals, communities and to Scotland as a nation’.

It is these people – many of whom are locked in a cycle of physiological, psychological or cultural dependency – that are perhaps strongly to blame for the further corona-curbing restrictions we’re facing: the problem drinkers souring the city streets; the students and younger people having raucous, jam-packed house parties; the chattering classes brazenly hosting large dinner parties.

It’s madness that our right to drink appears to be trumping the rights of vulnerable people to live their lives without fear; libraries and sports centres and community hubs to re-open; schools to remain operational. Granted, there are myriad other issues connected with this issue, from income disparity to institutionalised poverty to trauma to addiction, but still, the reality remains.

The biggest mistake the government could have made, in times like these, was to forgo legislation in favour of trusting the great and thirsty British public to police themselves.  Many of us can’t be trusted to think – and especially to drink – for ourselves. And we drink therefore we are

… selfish and disgraceful.

We need to have a long, hard look at ourselves and our relationship with alcohol, and get our priorities straight. And not just for the sake of halting the spread of the coronavirus.