During the course of the pandemic I did a daily blog in which I vented my rage and disbelief at the levels of incompetence and corruption I was witnessing. It was also a diary of the day to day things we were doing and the effects of the lockdown on our life. The humour, mundane tasks and changes that had taken place.
It acts as a social commentary of our times and an insight into the sequence of events in the pandemic. I have gathered those first 210 blogs together into this book. It makes for interesting reading. These are the first 210 days of lockdown!
An extract:
The Corona Diaries – Day 144
Posted on August 15, 2020 by Opher
I have been following the outrageously crap exploits of our Education Minister Gavin Williamson and wondering how much longer he’ll last before they throw him to the wolves.
But then you have to ask why a guy who sold fireplaces was put in charge of education in the first place!
It turns out that they asked the teachers to use all their experience, the mock exam results, the classroom performance and their personal knowledge of the students to use their professional judgement to assess their students’ grades. Sounds reasonable to me.
But then, they decided to ignore the teachers and put 40% of the grades down using some electronic algorithm (probably designed by Dominic Cummings) that picked on schools in deprived areas. But the good news is that if you were from a rich kid’s school, like Eton or Harrow (you know the ones with personal tutors, extra help, excellent facilities and a lot of cramming) your grades stood. Great eh?? Keep all the council-house kids in their place!
Oops – there aren’t any council houses – Thatcher gave them away for a song!
But you know what I mean.
This prat Williamson has certainly turned the heat up, hasn’t he?
But is it just his fault or was this cooked up in No. 10? Another fiasco to add to the rest (the list is getting long – PPE, Ventilators, slow to lockdown, Cygnus report, complacency, dithering, chucking infected elderly out into care homes, Brexit lies).
Our new cases more than doubled today to 2569. Opening the pubs and restaurants and the eat out for Britain deal (getting people needlessly inside) is backfiring horribly. I was worried about them opening up too soon. You won’t catch me eating indoors until things are safe.
Encouraging people to stop working at home, to go to work and use public transport – a great idea! A great idea if you want to speed up transmission, that is.
Are we going for herd immunity again??
Never mind, the furlough scheme is coming to an end, the infections are rocketing, the job losses will be rocketing soon, then we will have Brexit, tariffs and red-tape to contend with!!
Yipee! These Tories certainly know how to make things work! We lead the whole world in both numbers of deaths per million of population and worst hit economy. A number of them are making millions out of this Coronavirus and Brexit. I think Rees-Mogg is getting a huge pay-out for Brexit! I hope he’ll donate it all to the homeless.
Well done everybody – you elected a clown and we’re stuck with him for four more years! He’s even managed to do a worse job than Trump and I wouldn’t have thought that was possible.
Meanwhile, the other populist leaders – Trump and Bolsonaro – continue their campaigns of idiocy – The USA has another 53,561 cases and Trump is again called out for lying and spreading misinformation – Brazil has another 41,576 new cases. Somehow, despite the mass graves due to incompetence, there are still people who back these three imbeciles.
Today was as murky as the future. It rained on me when I went for my walk but it did not dampen my enthusiasm. I came home, worked on my book and played the Doors very loud.
Tomorrow is a new day. Perhaps people will come to realise that these populist governments are completely incompetent and we can have a new start with people who care!
Stay safe everybody – tighten your belts, we’re in for a rough ride!
This is what gets me about Eng politics – people can walk in off the street as it were and decide for everyone else. No expertise or organising skills needed.
Certainly none displayed by this bunch of nincompoops. Spin and lies. They’ve been completely inept and corrupt with it!
Opher, what do you think of Heather Hallett?
I reserve judgement. I hope she thoroughly investigates everything, doesn’t sweep anything under the carpet and brings justice to the victims. I hope she exposes the complacency, panic, ineptitude and corruption and does it quickly so it’s out before the election. Then we can lock all the lying bastards up, claw back a little of their ill-gotten gains and expose their evil games. We’ll see. So far, so good.
Couldn’t agree more.
BTW, you asked on another thread why it might be that you have stopped getting spam. Something has certainly changed on your site – e.g. I didn’t get e-mail from WordPress when you “liked” and commented on the above. Looking back, the last time I received e-mails from your site (rather than you as an individual) was on 4th May. Did you switch off some WordPress option in the intervening? The two might be related.
Hi Neil, I am not aware of switching anything off. Something has definitely changed though. Everything is ultra slow. Traffic is a quarter of what it was and I never thought I’d miss spam. I used to get tons of it. Not a single one! I might have to get someone in.
It may be that someone has tracked down a major source of spam and bot “traffic,” and eliminated it. I suspect that your new traffic figures may reflect reality better than the old ones did.
But why you find everything slower, I don’t know. Unless it’s your hard disk doing the same as mine did.
You cynic you! I reckon my old figures were really the tip of a huge iceberg of support! It’s probably Johnson and Rees-Mogg who have scuppered me!
I hope it’s not my hard disk going! I may have to bite the bullet and get someone in!
Just had my first spam in a week!