Immunity on the Blighty

The Last of the Virus Diaries XXI |23rd June 2020

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

The Coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, has been beaten! Rejoice, we’re victorious! June 23rd will forever more be known as VV Day – Victory over Virus Day… wait a minute… what a coincidence! It’s also BR Day – Brexit Referendum Day – let’s sign a petition to make it a Bank Holiday from now on, yah? Well done Britain and well done our world beating leader, Prime Minister Boris Winston Johnson Churchill. He not only brought us Brexit in ’16, but has been incredibly successful in containing, mitigating and beating the deadly COVID-19 Coronavirus, with only just over 62,000* excess deaths in three months. Good work too from the fabulous front bench heroes of Team Tory who, with their World-Beating Test & Trace App© tested Britain’s gullibility range to the very limit and still found room to bamboozle even their own scientists with complicated spaghetti charts, three word slogans and in a master stroke of upper class spunk, as exemplified by their love of horse racing and jobs for Dido Harding, are happy to now be gambling with the lives of the British People… and the British People bloody love it!

Just look at the queues at Primark, awesome. Everyone needs a bit of cheap designer smatter after a hard lockdown. Wait until the barber shops and the hair salons start taking orders. Before you know it you’ll be chatting with your cutter as she runs her blue, rubber-gloved fingers through your hair and asks you muffled questions through her surgical mask and face screen – Just say “Short Back and Sides” and be done with it. After all… there could be a spike… But shhh, please don’t talk about The Spike, the pubs aren’t even open yet.

Speaking of Pubs… I can’t wait. I love pubs. I love beer, I love the social atmosphere, the music, the gigs… and I’m really excited about the new Post-Covid innovations such as having to show your ID or register when you go to the pub so our World-Beating Test & Trace App© can trace your whereabouts in case you’ve been somewhere within One to Two metres of someone who has symptoms of and later goes on to test positive to the virus which, if you get it and you’re a 60-something pub geezer, will possible kill you. Would you give up your anonymity and show your ID for a pint?

But then – No worries – the Virus is Over! We have beaten the virus, we must stay alert but we must boost the economy. We must boost the economy while looking after ourselves as the Government can’t be held responsible for everything. After all, the Government knows best and the British People chose them for the next five years because Boris Winston Johnson Churchill is thought of as the country’s greatest Flag Shagger since the late Nigel Farage parted with LBC and KT Hopkins was Twitterised forever.

In the beginning there were the words and the words were “you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking as many draconian measures. I think we need to strike a balance…” He discounted this course of action but did everything in his power to put off taking the measures he was advised to take. This takes courage, bloody-minded Churchillian courage – to walk into a hospital and shakes hands with COVID-19 patients, after telling us to sing Happy Birthday while washing our hands for 20 seconds. It takes a real GAMBLER to do that – win some, loose some, or as they say when the Queen’s favourite is pipped at the post: “Fuck it!” He catches the virus, and a when, a week later he is rushed to hospital, even I felt lashings of sympathy and a scintilla of fear at the thought of our POTUK actually succumbing to the disease. But no, he recovers, disappears for weeks, reappears looking shit and for the next two months leads by Invisibility, only appearing at night to make special, British People-friendly announcements like ‘Pubs can open on the 4th of July.’

Hurrah, a song by the Dubliners and the Pogues springs to mind ever time I hear that date. But of course the 4th of July is also auspicious as American Independence Day and that’s what this will be for us – UK Independence Day – independent from the damned virus, which really has fucked up the Brexit plans but we’re going ahead anyway, it’s what they want, the British People, at least the English People do, or some of them. A lot of them… just ask the Labour Party.

And of course, while the virus has been distracting us, we’ve struck some World beating Deals with our friends across the Pond, with Chicken imports on the menu in exchange for our NHS; and our boomerang exports to Australia will be paying dividends when we are awash with lashings of Vegemite and Tim Tams and on the same ship there should be a container or two of Oyster Bay Chardonnay, yum yum. Can’t wait for the Brexit either – then we can have our cake, and eat it too.

Of course the whole virus thing could be an elaborate HOAX. Many people think so – I know some – they’re friends. It’s not surprising that people think it’s fake. Nearly everything we see, hear and read these days could be accused of having some falsity about them, something that in itself is illusory, but combined with every lie, obfuscation, distraction, misquote and so on, leads us all to question our own fucking existence. Elvis got it right, “We’re caught in a trap… We can’t go on together
With suspicious minds, And we can’t build our dreams, On suspicious minds…”

So the Virus crisis is NOT over. Even if it looks like it’s over, smells like it’s over and especially if a Tory tells you it’s over… it’s not fucking over, even if it’s a hoax, it’s not over. We are currently using The Save the Economy Model also known as The Herd Immunity By Any Other Name Model, having taken a glancing blow on the chin, we seem to have weathered the crisis with just over only 42,000* COVID-19 official, attributed deaths, dropping us down to Third Place behind Brazil, with the USA at the top. Nevertheless, not bad for a small island still “Punching Above it’s Weight”. Bloody World Beating.

*Numbers not necessarily accurate