In the 1970s when I lived in London I would walk past an elderly man who stood near Charing Cross station with a perpetually worried look on his face and a piece of cardboard on which were neatly written the words, ‘The end is nigh’.
Of course, his dire warning to passing commuters may well have been utterly wasted because most of them wouldn’t have known what ‘nigh’ meant. Only those of us with a decent A-level grounding in archaic English would have been able to decipher the message that it was the end of the world that was imminent.
The problem with nigh of course is that it isn’t time specific and the old guy with the piece of cardboard didn’t really look the type to expand on his warning. So, having walked past him for the best part of three months, I decided that the end wasn’t that nigh and rented a flat just off the King’s Road in fashionable Chelsea. It had the added benefit of being above an Indian restaurant and right next door to a very good pub, which attracted all sorts of sporting and arty celebrities. The rent was rather more than I had been paying previously in beautiful downtown Raynes Park, but I figured that if the end was nigh I might as well go out in style. And if it wasn’t nigh, then a fashionable address in SW3 was a vast leap up the social ladder from SW19. These things were very important during the era of Sloane Rangers and early Yuppiedom.
Forty five years later and I can now see that the guy at Charing Cross station was a complete bullshitter. The end wasn’t nigh at all. He just had a miserable life and wanted to introduce some gloom into other people’s lives too. Rather as the mainstream media are doing today with the coronavirus outbreak. I have to say I rather prefer the COVID-19 name because it sounds like something out of a James Bond movie; much more sinister than plain old coronavirus. SkyNews have excelled themselves with hysterical blanket coverage and shots of reporters pleading with politicians for hope as they arrive at Downing Street. William Rees-Mogg offered the sage advice to wash your hands regularly, but I imagine that’s something most people do after handling pets, paper money, food, going to the toilet, shaking hands with a politician or travelling on public transport (whatever that is). We were brought up as children to wash our hands regularly, so I can’t understand why this piece of sensible advice seems so earth-shattering to the post-baby boomer generation.
Of course it’s now been revealed by the mainstream media, who are riding this story like a bucking bronco, that washing your hands is all very well but you also have to dry them and preferably not on the same towel that everyone else in the communal washroom uses. So now you need hand sanitizer, which is a sort of goo that you rub all over your hands to kill germs. But it can’t be any old hand sanitizer, it has to be a high-alcohol one or else the little bacteria critters just shake themselves down and get on with the business of infecting you. So, surprise surprise, the stocks of high-alcohol hand sanitizers have run low with the amount of panic buying. Nervous citizens are now wondering whether craft gin does the same job. I’m told that, at 43% alcohol by volume, you’re better off swallowing it.
Something else that has disappeared from the pharmacy shelves are face masks. Fortunately, the Bullard household has a large supply because we like to play doctor-and-patient occasionally. Now we’re just playing Scrabble (with sanitized letter tiles, of course) and waiting for the secondary market price for face masks to rise. There’s now some doubt as to whether wearing a paper mask all day can protect you from certain death by COVID-19. Apart from making you look like a complete dork and making it very difficult to pass through border control in every European country, you can also develop dermatological problems due to your own exhaled bacteria which have been trapped in the mask, holding a party around your mouth and breaking out in unsightly blemishes.
Then there’s the problem of greeting. No more handshakes, hugs or continental mwah mwah kisses on both cheeks. Now we have to be content with a nod or, at best, an elbow bump. Just in case the person we are meeting with is unknowingly affected.
The gala launch of the new Bond movie ‘No Time to Die’ ( a confusing title for the Australian market, where the stock response could be ‘well, how about tomorrow, then, mate?’) has been put out to November when it’s assumed that COVID-19 will be under control. If other movie houses follow this example we are in for a pretty lean time when it comes to new releases this year and we can expect movie theatres to be empty. Buy shares in Netflix and Amazon.
Other events that will be affected are live concerts, conferences, trade fairs and even motor shows. The Geneva motor show was cancelled this year due to coronavirus and it looks as though other motor shows may follow suit. This is disastrous for freebie-loving motor journalists because the whole point of the job is travelling round the world at somebody else’s expense down the sharp end of planes and driving unaffordable cars in exotic locations. Mind you, there won’t be much travelling of any sort if the dire predictions of the doomsayers are anywhere near true. Who in their right mind would want to get on an aircraft and travel through crowded airports risking certain death? So, fewer carbon emissions and St Greta of the Rising Oceans finally gets her wish come true.
President Cyril has correctly noted at a media briefing at Waterkloof Air Force Base that COVID-19 will have an adverse effect on the economy. This little news snippet made it on to social media and resulted in highly unpatriotic comments about the damage the ANC virus had already done to the economy. At least with the coronavirus there is reasonable hope of a vaccine at some stage. Not so the ANC virus.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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