Lockdown is beginning to happen, very slowly and certainly not surely, but beginning to happen it is. As soon as Sajid Javid said this morning on Andrew Marr’s final (hooray) show on the BBC, this was not “a lockdown at all by any means”, which is literally true at the moment, you just knew it was not the whole truth. He continued: “I think that the British people do understand that this pandemic requires extraordinary actions, so it’s up to you whether you go out on the lash with all your friends, party like it’s 1999, because Tory backbenchers will go mental if we lock down again, which of course we won’t, unless we have to. Shit! Did I really say that?” I may have made up most of his comments but if Javid has wanted to front up that’s exactly what he would have said.
Full disclosure: I don’t want another lockdown. I can live with some rules, like mask-wearing and social distancing, but the ones which say everything should be closed down and I must stay at home, I can do without. They literally drive me mad, make me ill, call it what you will. The first lockdown turned me, unwillingly, into a homebird, and another one might send me over the edge. Yet I know that soon – who knows how soon? – Boris Johnson will be on my TV, with his toddler haircut and a Union Flag to shag, telling me that I must stay at home. He will say we can’t go anywhere or do anything but don’t worry: this will not be “a lockdown at all by any means”.
My prediction that Boris The Liar would address the nation on Sunday night and cancel Christmas appears to be yet another poor one by me so I’ll stick with my original prediction (wild guess) that the bad news will happen on 27th December, by which time everywhere else on Earth will have already locked down.
Finally, the pessimist in me – actually, the pessimist that is me – thinks we have greatly underestimated Omicron, by reading Facebook and concluding this strain is nothing more than a cold, and that within a week or so the NHS will be overwhelmed and a lot of people are going to die. At least Brand Sunak is back from his four day jolly in Los Angeles where he met with various businessman to pursue the hidden Tory agenda to flog off the NHS.
