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Tuesday 24 March 2020

341. Covid Comedy & Catastrophe UK


You couldn’t make it up…

…unlike Boris Johnson
The man who lied and deceived his way to being the Prime Minister now expects us to trust him in a crisis.

We’ve had random ad-hoc self-isolation suggestion and a social distancing prerogative but unnecessary junk mail is still being delivered through my door (and presumably everyone else’s) with nice glossy covid-friendly surfaces.

Tube trains in London were MORE crowded because the current government of the cossetted forgot that public transport is an ESSENTIAL service for ESSENTIAL workers getting into London and only skeleton services were running.

On a minor scale - here in Edinburgh those women who walk three – four abreast and never break rank for me are now flinging themselves out of my way so tis not always me who ends up in the gutter or the dog shit. Yay.

There are huge financial proposals from the government for business but not for those who are going to suffer quickest – on zero hours contracts or self-employed. Yes the Tories shook their money tree. The one that only works when they or theirs want something. Like when the Windrush ethnic cleanser Theresa May needed to buy the support of the DUP to stay in power.

Schools are closed except if they aren’t.

Trump – the dullest tool in the shed has a racist sharpie!

South Korea – (birthplace of K Pop!) is beating covid-19 with organisation targeted like a guided missile while Britain and the US look like drunk fumbling senile uncles behind the wheels of dangerously un-roadworthy but speeding vehicles.

Lots of people – the sort the government doesn’t seem to care about - can’t self-isolate to their second holiday homes but are self-isolating in multi-occupation flats with shared air-venting.

As I said in a letter published in the press recently – maybe we can get that idiot tape-worm Gavin Williamson (now Education minister)  he of slapping Russia on the wrist for murdering people on UK soil – fame, to come and tell Covid-19 to “shut up and go away”.

Footnote.
For those of us who have been paying attention for years to the whole issue of pandemics and the environment and other things that threaten human existence on this planet - on this blog and in other writing Zero One Zero Two the current farce is driving us crazy.

If the old media don’t stop terrorising the young with scare stories that distort the truth - into doing what they should have been told to do in the first place in an organised way - panic fatigue will set in and people will rebel even against the necessary but belated measures being put in place.

Clearly explain to young people that we need social distancing to protect the vulnerable and to protect hospital workers like two of my daughters struggling in an NHS that has been underfunded by this government and its Tory predecessors for a decade.

We have two untreatable strains of covid-19 and that suggests it’s good at mutating. As I keep saying in this blog we need to learn from this. This is the warning tap on the shoulder not the real deal.

We need to oust the liars (Johnson) and the incompetent (most of the cabinet) and the corrupt (Johnson and Patel), cancel Brexit and make sure we can be on an emergency footing coordinated with the rest of the world in hours not months or when Boris Johnson and his dad have finished having a pint down the pub.

And Finally - On the way back from the shop just now where I bought ONE carton of milk and ONE small bag of lentils and some reduced price hot cross buns, I was preceded along the pavement by a big fat bee swaying drunkenly in the warming breeze and that reminded me that if we learn the other essential lesson of this crisis that we can pretty immediately turn the pollution tap off IF WE WANT TO we could buy ourselves some more decades on this planet.

Friday 20 March 2020

Freezers & bog roll



Freezers are hot now covid is here
Bog roll is scarce and hand gel is dear

Stockpiling dried pasta surely will mean
You won’t need the loo roll - your bum will be clean
(you’ll be constipated)

China’s on lock-down don’t go to Beijing
In the UK its more kinda do your own thing

Trump thinks racism’s the right thing to do
It’s not covid-19 but the new Chinese Flu

Johnson dreamed of being king of the world
Not an actual leader while a ruin unfurled

He thinks he is Churchill all stoic and brave
But Boris would make Winston turn in his grave

And with years of Conservative government malice
We’re draining stale drops from austerity’s chalice

Too few ventilators, doctors and beds
The ‘b’ team in charge scratching their heads

‘Working’ from home means couples have clashed
Coincidentally Netflix has crashed!

Few have been tested so nobody knows
Who has the virus so everyone pisses themselves if you blow your nose…

But at least air is cleaner now travel’s curtailed
Covid succeeded where the UN has failed.

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And do check out My BOOKS  thanks


Tuesday 17 March 2020

340. Loo-roll IS required for covid-19…



…because Trump and Johnson are so useless. Faced with the modern world’s first real pandemic and buffoon leaders, Brits and Americans are pooing their pants.

Yes, I’ve worked out why everyone is panic buying loo roll. It made NO sense before but among other things, Covid-19 has shown us, for example, what a pile of crap Boris Johnson’s verbal vomit ‘levelling up’ really is.

We are well into the pandemic now without clear or consistent guidelines from the government. In fact with contradictory guidelines. We’re going for 'herd immunity' was the initial line, smacking mightily of allowing a human cull. We want to protect the elderly and vulnerable but we are going to shut schools and universities is also a line but this  puts millions of young people back into the community and many into the immediate company of elderly relatives who would be called on to look after young ones excluded from school.

And the government were ‘negotiating’ with private hospitals for bed space. Johnson was ‘encouraging’ manufacturers to make more ventilators! If there is ever another great fire of London will he, during the blaze, pop around to the people who make fire hoses and suggest perhaps they could maybe rustle up a couple more…

This could only come from an administration stuffed with those who pontificate on the NHS but have private health schemes and won’t be turning up to an over-stretched GP surgery any time soon to log in on a germ-smeared touch-screen desperately wondering when their already delayed treatment will get back online .

As long-haul flights are stopped and the hideous petri-dish pollution dumping cruise ships lose their glamour and the easy availability of crap-we-don’t-need-but-buy-buy-buy is less available – covid-19 may just have bought the planet and our children a few more decades… but it has shown us the unbelievable stupidity of  non-cooperation and coordination epitomised by Trump and Brexit.

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if you are on lock down do check out my reading list. 
There are books for adults and children plus a humorous novel and some comedy poetry.  All are available in paperback AND e-book. Obviously you may want to avoid Zero One Zero Two which now wouldn't make a relaxing read.

Tuesday 10 March 2020

339. Deadlier than Covid-19 - P-3 is already pandemic...


Covid-19 is lethal but so are these - every single year...

·       Poverty – For the first time since WWII the UK is seeing a significant turnaround in longevity in poor parts of Britain and the discrepancy between rich and poor is huge and growing. In some pockets as much as 30 years difference.

·       Pollution – 36,000 premature deaths per year in the UK are from pollution (Public Health England 2019).

·       Pharmaceuticals  - Drug related death is the no 1 killer in the US with many of the 61k+ deaths recorded in 2017 from prescription drugs.


IF any further Perspective is needed – while deaths from the new flu globally have reached 3,900 in total (since the outbreak) – deaths globally from road traffic accidents are 3,700 Per day.

P-3 has been at pandemic levels for many many many years…


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NB - it may be interesting for any regular readers to bookmark this post if - when everything calms down - we eventually see the number of lives saved due to the reduction in pollution levels.

Tuesday 3 March 2020

338. Stand up for yourself however, wherever, whenever you can.

If you are already sick of reading about Boris Johnson's latest impregnated younger woman and the behaviour which - if it were translated to a council estate in the North - would earn him the derision, condescension and criticism of the party he (partially) represents, then try some acerbic comedy diversion.

In the vacuum of leadership that the West finds itself in and also the dawning reality that no one is ‘in charge’ and the adults left the crumbling, disorganised, bully-infested school playground a long time ago – there is an even stronger argument that standing up for oneself is not only the right thing to do but whatever the outcome it can make you feel better.


Check out my comedy short story on the subject here on the John Byrne Award website


And try my adult novels and books for children