wfl(which front line)

Is “lol” laugh out loud or lots of love ?   Anyway I would like to thank the Sussexes

for a headline which caused me to laugh out loud buying the paper in the convenience store this morning  – “Harry and Meghan quit social media” – and a man I’ve never met before, busy restacking a shelf, came racing over to ask what I was laughing at, so I showed him. And we had a conversation of mutual accord, beaming at each other round our masks. 

I have long believed that social media, the love affair with the mobile phone, little children taught to use screens from their earliest beginnings, records on line – all of it – is some kind of fashion,

aggressively marketed for the rewards of Croesus.  Of course I can theorise about it but I doubt very much that anybody reading 700 words approx. of neat wordage wants pseudo intellectual whiffle. 

Every time our relatively simple tech has pre menstrual tension, Pam the Painter – she bigtime corporate PR in an earlier life – and I take turns to tell each other how what we really long for is paper and pencils, carbons and a typewriter.   In the old days (yes, we say this to each other, giggling) we remember how much was done with half the kerfuffle.    I am just waiting for televisual notice from a lugubrious fellow in a bad suit who will turn out to be the Cabinet member for “stuff” telling us the grid’s on the blink, the banks have fallen

and the government has had to make the painful choice between keeping us warm and letting us liaise worldwide about the conspiracy theory in Wuhan, the Putin variant or why Orange Man is right.  Which will take two weeks.

And once again it is the middle ground that is missing.  Choice is being eroded.  A woman I like pointed out to me a year ago that, to manage my life, I might have to have a mobile.   The Fire Fairy (so named because of the colour of her mind let alone her hair) – deep in alternative medicine, serious reflection on the law and the meteorology of our threatened life – wouldn’t waste the time of a policeman on demonstrating about the conspiracy of the virus.  Oh, there’s a virus all right.  And like most viruses it mutates. 

Smart beast.  And the model with which we are trying to contain it doesn’t work.  And the present powers that be have taken too long to make decisions which might have been more effective which, coupled with the over medicalisation of our perception of ourselves, have made the system stagger.    Not so much Happy New Year as same old, same old.

Gosh it was nice to laugh.  And I wish those elderly children who beat it to California all the luck in the world, living in a staggering state at the heart of the Covid beleaguered citadel of the US of A.  And I loved America.  Really.  In life, you do what you do. However, what you have to accept, if you do what you do with a virus, is that some other poor devil winds up paying for it  – in skill and sweat to save your life,

or not. 

Two girls decided to go for a walk in Derbyshire.  They got in the car ( we presume they are in some sort of bubble, maybe not) and drove five miles to a beauty spot, to walk.  Where they were arrested by the police and fined £200 each.   What became clear in their interview is that “local” means different things to different people.  That what was presumed to be clear, isn’t.  Wal thinks if you get in the car to take the dogs to the park, to walk them – it’s local.   I think if you can walk to it, it’s local.   In the parlance of the pandemic, what does “local” mean ?    And if we have to ask so late in the day, you can see why the lockdown is inefficient.   Which means the police will be increasingly invoked to enforce it – without benefit of testing or vaccination, although they are front line.