Well the coming week is alive with possibilities. I get a haircut and my first round of vaccine on Tuesday. I thought about spreading these hallowed events out to prolong the excitement but on the other hand I wanted them both as soon as possible in order to try and get back to normal.
After a year of this lockdown nonsense I am truly fed up with my life being on hold and my liberties being a prisoner to the whims of ministerial diktat. Not laws passed by Parliament, properly voted on by our elected representatives, but, the often contradictory, whims of ministers. These pronouncements are then embellished by our local officialdom into the truly bizarre. These controls must end and on the time table given by the PM, at the very latest.
I wonder how many people share my eagerness to get back out there and how many are going to have been terrified to the point where they only ever eat Deliveroo meals for the rest of their days? A depressing number of the latter I fear. This whole saga has brought out a weird, self-indulgent, panic in people that I had previously considered sane. A disease that is certainly nasty, particularly for the elderly and the obese, has been treated as if it was a death sentence by people who would more likely die of flu, a disease they would ignore. This bug is not Ebola. The vaccine now exists. Therapeutics have improved hugely. The medics have a good grip on how to deal with this. So stop panicking and start living again. The spring is here, the weather is getting better and it is time to be with our fellow humans.
Time to look forward. Time to go and shop, eat out with friends. Even in the unheated outside last Friday the sight and sound of a busy restaurant full of people was a welcome return to normality. Time to go dance again. Enjoy being alive. If we are supposed to live our lives fearing our immediate death, doing nothing, we might as well already be dead. Life is a risk business and none of us knows what will cause our end. I wonder how many people have been run over because they jumped into the road to avoid passing within a few feet of another pedestrian, clutching their mask like a holy relic and ignoring the real danger of the oncoming vehicle?
Jeremiah Hope 