There is little left to say about the disgusting spectacle of our monarch HM The Queen sitting alone, clearly upset and masked at her husband’s funeral, but I will try. I was uncertain whether to be impressed that Her Majesty showed solidarity with the rest of Her population, many of whom have similarly suffered, or angry that she did not stick two regal fingers up to the COVID-19 regulators and defy the guidance. After all, The Queen is above the law; she cannot be arrested. But beyond the specific case of Her Majesty, the utter stupidity of the whole situation we are in was exposed in all its glory. Take the situation that would arise if I dropped dead today. Given that I am past my mid-sixties and that the land is being stalked by a killer virus the prospect of my imminent demise must be considered. To paraphrase the seventies band Atomic Rooster, death walks behind me.
[I attend Mass in my local church where, to accord with regulations and keep the COVID-snoopers at bay, we have a very clever system of social distancing and tracking and tracing that allows us to fill the church to a reasonable extent. I reckon that approximately 100 people attend weekly on a Sunday. But if I drop dead, my wife can only invite a total of 30 people[1] to my funeral and she would have to sit and cry[2] alone, despite the fact that two of our children attending would still live at home and are in her ‘coronavirus bubble’. Everyone else would have to space out as if they were complete strangers. Why, when 100 strangers can attend a routine Mass, can so few related people attend the final celebration of someone’s life?]If this were the only anomaly in the current set of insane guidance it may be possible to have it changed. But so enmeshed are we in a web of contradictory and unnecessary laws and advice (can you tell the difference? The police can’t) that it is just impossible to know where to start. But some are trying and this was at the heart of the confrontation between the heroic pub landlord Rod Humphris and Captain Coronavirus (it’s his ‘superhero’ chin!) Sir Kier Starmer. The landlord’s frustration was palpable, he was quoting and holding a graph that day from the ONS which showed how low the COVID-19 cases were and asking why Starmer was not doing his job and opposing the government, as he is supposed to do. Starmer’s patronising response was pitiful. Rod Humphris’s pub has been closed for seven of the past twelve months which seemed be of no concern to Starmer.
Some people have reached breaking point over the continued COVID-19 restrictions and if the governments and assemblies of the UK cannot see that, they are heading for a significant period of civil unrest. We are heading in the right direction, but not quickly enough and the Damoclean sword of further lockdown swings above us. I cannot be alone in my sincere frustrations. If I cannot wave my frequent flier card at an airline official soon or present my passport to a representative of UK Border Force before long and head off to foreign parts, I will scream. And these are, I realise, very middle-class and First World problems. Since March 2020 over 11 million people have been furloughed, over 800,000 have already lost their jobs and more will join them once furloughing stops. Forty-eight high street shops close for good daily.
Major businesses are heading to the wall and the government thinks it is its responsibility to build further walls to keep them from heading back again: masks for a further year; social distancing to prevent pubs and restaurants filling; and the prospect of shutting them all down once more. With due respect to those who have gone before us and duly acknowledging the abject grief of those left behind, how many people have considered ending it at some point? It is claimed in the BMJ that suicide rates have not increased, but this simply does not tally with what I hear from colleagues in the police, mental health services and from reading my local newspaper. I witnessed a body bag containing a young suicide victim being removed from the housing association flats opposite my house a few weeks ago; in 22 years of living here that was a first. Justice must be seen to be done if martial law is ever lifted. If there is not a reckoning when all this is over, then justice will simply not have been done.
- This assumes my wife could find 30 people wishing to attend my funeral.
- This assumes she would be upset.
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