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.

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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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. 

My Books

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.

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.

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

The Battle of Glass Penis St.

And try my adult novels and books for children

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337. SYRIA - Our moral compass is pointing to Hell.

What is wrong with us?

Among liberals in both the US and UK a regular question seems to be

How did we come to this?

It is a conundrum I pose myself.

How did the US and UK, two global powers that would appear to have it all in the eyes of much of the rest of the world, sink so low? And how come Washington and Westminster are now so bent on navel gazing self-destruction that Syria is going almost unnoticed? 

Syria is a conflict that has lasted almost as long as WWI and WWII combined and is now creating the largest humanitarian disaster of this century.

How did the pre-eminent power on the globe end up run by a sociopathic, semi-literate, infantile, deluded narcissist and how did the contemporary world’s first modern democracy end up run by a racist, elitist, womanising, low-life liar?

One very broad answer to both seems to be that the countries that had everything somehow managed to persuade those living there that they are victims. More importantly they are victims not of the elites who cream off the profits and take more than their fair share but they are victims of those at the bottom. Somehow. And the narrative goes on. Now that the people spouting that poison have won high office they are – as the Americans say – doubling down by overturning hard won rights of ordinary people.  Both administrations dish out tax cuts to the rich and ‘free up’ the rich from regulations that might reduce their ability to make even more profit while harming the environment and living conditions of those lower down.

Here in the UK, as the rich benefit and Boris Johnson obsesses over more legacy projects for his glorious memory  (we are considering building an unwanted, unnecessary bridge from Scotland to Ireland over WWII munitions dumps) a drop in life expectancy for poorer women has just been revealed and shames us.

MEANWHILE SYRIA.

In all this mess and ridiculous wasteful diversion, we’ve managed to ignore one of the greatest human tragedies of modern times.

Since I last wrote about Syria things have worsened significantly – from horrendous to unimaginable. (E.g. ref – posts 172 also 152 158…)

It is not (yet) the biggest disaster numerically in terms of human deaths but the abomination of harrowing misery and the depths of human suffering in Syria are happening in a world that we decided –post WWII - would be civilised. After Hitler we said no more. We decided after Pol Pot we would not allow this again. We agreed that monstrosities like those perpetrated by Idi Amin and The Rwandan Genocide and the Kosovo ethnic cleansing would be no more. This deliberate violence against the most vulnerable, the abandonment of the innocent would not be part of the human story in the 21^st century. But it is. And no one with the power to change things cares.

This time the horror is barely making the news. We have run out of compassion and decency. Our moral compass is pointing to HELL and that is reflected in the current administrations of both Washington and Westminster.

336. Coronavirus is just a tap on the shoulder.

It’s not that I wish to detract from the seriousness of serious subjects. But, coronavirus – or Covid 19 - is just a very polite tap on the shoulder. It is the hors d’oeuvre to the heavy sit-down 8 course banquet. It is a delicate overture to a deceptively long dark opera, it's foreplay.

Unlike the UK pop press  I just like some perspective.

On the one hand I’ve written many times about the fact that we are ignoring the things that are going to (and are in the process of) destroying the way we like to live. Or just live.

And yes – I have form on this - check out a very old post  Armageddon Will Not Be Televised

But while focus is on celebrity nonsense, royal nonsense, and column inch after column inch is taken up by stories that are virus-like in their proliferation and destructiveness, we somehow daintily side-step the stuff that matters.  At the same time as whipping up hysteria about things that are big enough to worry us but not so big that we can’t ‘worry safely’ we ignore tragedies under our noses. And tragedies that could escalate into something far worse than covid-19.

So while my last letter published in The Independent went like this -

Dear Editor,

Any new undocumented virus is going to send shock waves around the world but the media-fuelled hysteria over coronavirus is almost medieval in its disproportion. Coupled with the increase in ridiculous posts about our remaining hard-core royals being portrayed as latter-day Waltons – Britain is starting to feel like a cheap, badly produced soap opera.

Let us for balance pick out one interesting stat regarding premature deaths.

Each year – just in the UK – it is estimated that up to 40,000 premature deaths are linked to pollution.

Pollution is not an unknown quantity. Pollution is not something we are powerless to control.

Why don’t we care about that?

What happened to our sense of proportion?

I’m not suggesting that we should not be paying attention to Coronavirus.

We should simply realise that as Cummings/Johnson administration negligently experimenting with the lives of around 70 million Britons is simply pointing us in completely the wrong direction. As is the Trump/Miller abomination across the pond. 

Whether its border walls or HS2, blaming Mexicans or Muslims, failing to produce tax returns or details of holidays in the Caribbean,  building bridges from Scotland to Ireland over WWII munitions dumps or Space Force - the real problems are out there.

Festering away in a refugee camp with roughly 1.7 millon abandoned refugees on the Turkish Syrian border perhaps or in a migrant camp in Greece or in a human trafficking shed in Libya – a disease more deadly than Coronavirus or an ideology more destructive than ISIS may be festering in the misery among the abandoned.

So, while I ask for perspective on covid-19 – don’t mistake the reason. I just don’t think this is THE ONE. Coronavirus is a tap on the shoulder. If we don’t turn around and pay attention very soon the next one will be a hobnail boot in the face.

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