I’ve got Covid. I’m not too ill apart from the kidney ache that I get when I have a bad cold, which is what I thought it was, but something about that ‘having a cold’ experience (also known as Being English) wasn’t right. Before lockdown I used to get a cold twice a year, once in Spring and once in Autumn, so I wasn’t too surprised. Except it’s not a cold. It’s caused by stupidity, lies and selfishness.
This is the third time I’ve had Covid, but I only had it twice. In January 2020 my partner and I both had a bizarre pain in our left arms, sudden left arm weakness that didn’t go away, and hacking coughs. Winter cold, we thought. Bad one, but a winter cold. Funny about the arm thing.
We both think that was the first bout of it, while Her Majesty’s Government was doing what it does best, prevaricating, denying scientific evidence when it doesn’t suit its own dogma and lying.
We had a great lockdown, thanks. Seriously, it was brilliant. I got furlough pay, my partner’s business boomed as people were forced to stay home and look at their curtains, think ‘hmm, these are pretty tatty now’ and order some decent hand-made ones from her. But best of all, we got to walk for a couple of hours every day, along field paths where we never saw anyone else ever. When we got back we’d play three games of chess. Our game improved fabulously. It was a pretty good time, for us at least.
The second time was just before Christmas 2021. My partner had a hacking cough that wouldn’t go away. I didn’t have anything but we both went to our nearest test station, to get the official test. There were about eight people in Hi-viz vests in a carpark. No signs saying which way to go in, so we went in the ‘wrong’ way. After that, and the tongs through the car window and the mix-up with the tests (we saw them do it) I got ‘diagnosed’ positive and my poor partner hacking away in the passenger seat was ‘negative.’
But this. We had all our jabs. Unfortunately, we also had a government led by a convicted liar which basically can’t be bothered to do much, whether it’s keeping its international obligations, enforcing its own immigration laws or having a proper track and trace system that isn’t run by a government Minister’s wife with a consistent track record of failure, a system that managed to chew-up tens of billions when a perfectly usable German system was offered to it free-of-charge. The same government was led by a man who boasted of not wearing a mask, encouraging millions of thick people to do the same. Which they still are. Which they almost all were in London when we went the week before last.
Which is why I now have Covid. I’m not mellowing as I get older. Just getting more angry with the cult of stupid.
