GrumbleSmiles

BODJ IS IN A QUANDARY

He has been for a while

He doesn’t know,

whether to laugh to laugh or cry.

He was much more decisive about Brexit,

And “got it done”

Except not yet.

After that triumph,

Coronapop came along to spoil it all,

Bodj said “we can beat it.“

But not yet,

We have enough PPE,

But not yet.

We are going to have a world beating track and trace system

But not yet.

We are going to develop a vaccine.

But not yet.

READY.       STEADY.        WAIT

It’s not that Bodj is indecisive ,

He just can’t make up his mind !

We have been in “lockdown” in the UK for FIFTEEN weeks or more.

I am losing track of time, but is that so bad?

What have we got to go back to ?

Many people are straining at the leash.

Let me out, let me out !

Even the Government wants us to get back to work.

But will there be jobs to go back to ?

Building houses that nobody can afford.

Constructing new offices now everyone is working from home.

Or a high-speed train, when nobody is in a rush.

Or how about a flight to nowhere.

IT’S A NEW WORLD OUT THERE.

Coronapop is not done with us yet.

We may have locked it down,

But it will be back with a vengeance,

if we get out of our beds and lift our heads.

Right from the outset of  Coronapop the country has been faced with a challenge as big as anything we have seen  in most peoples lifetime.     The Government was and still is slow to react in a rapidly changing situation.     No doubt this will continue for months to come.
The lockdown has changed most peoples way of life and there may be no going back.   Similarly many businesses and institutions have had to adapt to new ways of working.

Some people are already taking advantage of the excuse of Coronapop to push for changes they have been advocating for some time :-

• Banks have all but shut down on the High Street, on-line banking is what they really want us all to move to.
• Retailers have also switched to cashless payments, take it or leave it, that’s health and safety.
• All Government information  and forms  are on-line, if you can find them.
• GP’s have gone to ground, without too much of a sound.
• Hospital A &E departments have emptied now that the pubs are closed and the roads are free of traffic.

We do not need to go back to where we were before.    Rather we need to adapt to the changes that have been forced upon us, to better accommodate everyone :-

• Banks have made themselves redundant by paying no interest to savers, and offering little help to lenders.
• Retail shops will have to offer a whole new experience in shopping to compete with on-line sellers.   They have said it before, but they didn’t do it.    How about tea, coffee an easy chair and a personal shopper who fetches and gift-wraps your goods.   Some thing they already do in luxury shops and Japan.
• Government communication needs to be simple clear and honest.      Only localised,  face to face delivery will  make this possible, supported by instant technology delivery systems.   If Amazon can do it, why can’t the Government?
• GP’s have deserted the front line of health care with group surgery’s, locum doctors and deputising services.   They need to get back in touch with patients and be the face of preventative medicine and the gatekeepers of acute care.   Bring back the trusted family practitioner.

Hospital A&E  should only be free for emergencies.    Anyone else turning up should be charged.

THAT IS A START.

We will all have to adjust to Coronapop being with us for years to come.

Yes we may get a vaccine in a years time,

but by then we will be bankrupt as a country.

Along with many others, who have been living beyond their means.

As a Nation we need to be more self-sufficient.

Grow our own food again.

Live within our own energy bubble.

Re-think everything.

Embrace technology,

but make it user-friendly for all.

The old need to learn from the young.

But so do the young need to value the wisdom of age.

Nothing is free, you have to work hard for everything worth while.

And then take time to appreciate it.

One day there will have to be an analysis of this Coronapop era.   Not a five year long public enquiry, which is a shelf to hide things away.   More a quiet contemplation, with a few guideposts for people to consider and hopefully act upon.

Two things mark the way  already:-    EGO  has played a large part in navigating through the uncharted seas of Coronapop.    Preening politicians are full of it, they didn’t get to be an MP without it.   Make them a Cabinet Minister and put them on the tele and they get a double dose.    The excess of ego  is matched by a marked lack of HUMILITY.    Indeed these are two sides of the same coin and equally blinding.

The two attributes can be a toxic combination, rather like Coronapop itself.   Navigating in the dark is difficult by definition, but it can be helped by the more distant view of a satellite scanning other horizons.   In other worlds you would call this benchmarking.    But ego resists that, ego prefers to find its own way.

All this has been acted out in the media frenzy of headline-hungry journalists and the furious friend-gathering twitterarty.   None of which leads to cool heads or quiet reflection.

Into this cocktail you then have to add a mixture of science and speculation.   Equally brimming full of professorship egos, with a host of certainty and uncertainty.    Academic careers to be crowned or crushed.    Seldom tempered by the peer review of common sense.

On reflection there might have been another way.   We didn’t need to wait for the Government to tell us what to do.    Without the EGO of us all believing we are different and with the humility to accept simplicity, we could have saved lives ourselves.

Washing hands is free.

  Social distancing is easy.

Masks are not a great imposition.

There is a new Must-watch soap opera on the  box every day.     It has wiped all its competitors off the screen by requiring them to social distance and isolate all actors over 70.

So now we have a fresh group of characters who could be scooping up all the British TV awards this year.    The initial problem is that they were largely unknown to the general public, before Coronapop came along and threw them into the limelight.     Previous appearances were limited to the BBC parliamentary channel, which only extremely bored people watch on rainy days.

Obviously everyone knows the main star – Bodj – from his celebrated performance hanging off a zip line at the Olympics several years ago.    He only had small parts after that as Foreign Secretary in Mrs MaybeMaybenot’s Cabinet.

Now as Prime Minister Bodj, he is still playing the role of court jester, as he announces a new strategy every day in the fight against CORONAPOP.

The supporting characters are less well known.    Here are some of the emerging “stars”:-

•  Health Minister – Doormatt Handwash – who only has one pink tie, praises everyone endlessly,  feels grief for everyone who has passed away and everyone of their relatives and always looks like a rabbit in the headlights.
• Money man – Richie Havesomemoney – who just loves to give away £billions and make people happy.
• Slippery Micky Grave —- Right about all the things he is not responsible for and solidly behind his colleagues, until he is not.
• Dominic Draab —- who finds no difficulty living up to his name.
• Pretty Hopeless —- assertively, angry about everything, but important —self-important.
• Happysnaps. Transport Minister —- who just seems happy to be here now that all the transport has been stopped in its tracks.
• Gav “the child” who talks like a preacher at a temperance meeting and will grow up when he leaves school.
• Whitty twins — two conjoined grey suited grey people who are expert at saying nothing and making it look intelligent.
• Jenny “um” — who is a nurse or a scientist or both, but who displays her uncertainty by prefacing every thought with an “um””)
• The cameo extras — these are anonymous cardboard cut-out experts, who are rolled in occasionally to divert attention to their specialist subjects — policing, health & safety, testing or not testing.  They rarely speak and nobody asks them questions.
• Dom the puppet master — the backstage director, who never knows if he is cummings or going.

It is a low budget production with just three props —- three lecterns for the daily sermon, which are  bulletproof and reflect questions automatically,   with advertising slogans for the would-be shogans..

Audience participation is provided by a gaggle of irritable journalists,  whose every question is tinged with vitriol hoping for tomorrow’s headline.   They zoom in and out, with the on /off button controlled by the politician of the day.   Sometimes if they ask an especially hard question, they are never seen again🤡

The 5 o’clock time slot used to be called children’s hour, which is probably why they talk to us like children.

SEE NEXT WEEKS THRILLING EPISODE, WHEN CORONAPOP RIDES AGAIN!