Just lock us down

Sunday 3 January 2021:

Andrew Marr: “Should parents send primary age children back to school tomorrow in England?”

Boris Johnson: “Yes, absolutely”

Monday 4 January 2021:

Boris Johnson: “Just kidding.”

Even the I Love Boris Brigade must surely be despairing of their hero. Those who still enjoy Johnson’s carefully cultivated scarecrow appearance, his deliberate bumbling, his flowery language and his bogus Man Of The People shtick will have to acknowledge the dubious wisdom of having a journalist, TV chat show host and after dinner speaker in the most powerful job in the country. I never saw the joke, mainly because there wasn’t one. You wouldn’t want Mrs Brown or any of her wretched boys to be prime minister, so why Johnson?

I don’t know what I dislike most about him. It’s hard to get too worked up about his lying because lying is what he does. I dislike his incompetence, his recklessness, his laziness, his inattention to detail, his narcissism and did I mention his lying? And the worst thing is that all his many failings affect people’s lives.

As I write, a couple of hours before Johnson speaks to an anxious nation, I’m anxious. I’ve got a little part time job which involves working in a busy office and going into the homes of third parties for long periods. I know there’s no point in speculating as to what’s going to happen, but how can I avoid doing so? Yet Johnson must have known for days, maybe weeks, that trouble was brewing and even up until yesterday he was suggesting that everything was fine and dandy.

Tonight, we will be on Level 5 and not Tier 5, or maybe we’ll all be in a more strict version of Tier 4. Whatever Johnson calls it tonight, it’s lockdown all over again. So just do it. Lock us down until the vaccine has worked through the vulnerable groups and when the R number is well below 1.  Protect the NHS, protect the vulnerable, protect you and me. We can’t go on like this, muddling along aimlessly from day to day, from week to week and from month to month.

And it’s not just a physical thing, either. Friends have told me they are suffering from anxiety, stress and depression for the first time in their lives. They find themselves crying for no obvious reason. Some, like me, I have to say, are finding their brains aren’t working particularly well, forgetting to do some things, misplacing others, forgetting very simple things. And they find their heads are spinning or about to explode.

I’d like to go to bed and stay there until I’ve had the vaccine. That’s not going to happen, but I wish it would.