Mad World

For the times when there's really no option but to mask up, a few words scrawled on them might retain some semblance of individuality. These are my first efforts. Also considering: "Hi! I am one of Boris Johnson's mute, subservient zombies".

“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2 There’s a very funny video up on YouTube that reimagines a trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s classic horror film The Shining as ’Shining’, a cute romantic comedy . You can also watch trailers for Dumb And Dumber as an Oscar contender , Inception as a Christmas holiday movie  and Mrs Doubtfire as a horror . Why am I telling you this? Because these clever and brilliantly edited videos represent how the same material can be spun differently, how you can generate a completely different mood with altered presentation, how you make people feel any emotion you wish to, if you’re cunning enough. Which is what our government has done with its presentation of the threat of the virus. Any advertising executive knows what's gone on here. In fact, it’s probably day one in their classes at Advertising School. It’s the image that goes along with the product, not really the product itself. Perfume ads are the ...

In June 2019 then prime minister Theresa May sought to move the subject of mental health up the political agenda , saying that, “ Tackling this burning injustice has always been a personal priority for me.” How tragic that her successor, Boris Johnson, has plunged the country into its worst ever mental health crisis, which will only worsen in the coming months.  Our government appears to only be interested in focusing on physical health, not mental. Actually, scratch that. They appear to be only interested in one aspect of physical health, Covid, rather than cancer, heart disease, strokes and many other ailments, the death tolls of which continue to mount. With just 307 healthy people under the age of 60 dying from Covid in the UK  this seems a strange, myopic, nay murderous , policy. While it is clearly unpleasant and sometimes fatal for the very ill, very old or morbidly obese, the truth is that of those who catch this virus, 99.97% will live to tell the tale. Coron...

A friend of mine is a taxi driver in a northern city. I thought it might be interesting to relay what he is telling me his customers are saying to him about you know what - which, to be fair, is pretty much all we can talk about nowadays, all being prisoners of this government's heinous experiment in relentless psychological terror. I'll update this post regularly. The comments at the top will be the most recent ones. I think they give something of an idea of the mood of the nation, because people like to give taxi drivers their thoughts (as he knows well). And yes, I know there was no Confessions film of the headline's title - the closest was Confessions Of A Driving Instructor, and there was also Adventures Of A Taxi Driver - but it has a ring to it, I think you'll agree. Okay, here we go... 27/11 Just had a woman in the car whose husband is high up in the council. She told me that the government made their decision to put the North East in tier 3 based on figures as...

  1 Terrorise the nation for six months, never giving any positive news or any perspective on Covid figures. 2 See the economy plunge into the gutter. 3 Take incredibly expensive measures (eg furlough, Eat Out To Help Out) to alleviate the gargantuan problems the scare campaign has created. 4 See the national debt soar. 5 Either raise taxes or slash public spending (probably the former) to furnish this, and further enervate the economy. 6 Stand back and see how you’ve reduced one of the most successful countries in the world to ashes.

On the scale of life-taking diseases that have plagued us throughout human history, Covid-19 only just scrapes into the top 20, at number 19  (appropriately). The average age of the person who succumbs to it is around the average life expectancy mark; the vast majority of these people would have died within a year anyway; the vast majority of healthy people under the age of 60 will get mild to moderate symptoms should they catch it; not a single child has died of Covid alone; around 1,600 people a day die in Britain - at the time of writing around 10 people a day die with Covid (and that’s with , not of ). So why have our rulers trashed the public finances, obliterated large swathes of business, crippled us socially (and, in many cases, emotionally), wrecked education, allowed the NHS to build up a horrifying backlog of non Covid cases, torpedoed civil liberties, suspended democracy, stamped out the hospitality industry and much more besides? I believe it’s the result of the way w...

Just a collection of a few things I've written down over the last couple of months (most recent first): Can't believe what they've now done in the north east. Well I can, because they're utter fools. They still haven't realised that it is lockdowns that CREATE problems, they do not SOLVE problems. The more you have, the more problems you create. It's like someone with a sore head being told to bang their head against the wall to make it better. And then after they've done that and it's even sorer, being told to bang it a bit more, that'll make it better. And so on and so on. This government is revolting. I see their policy thus: To give a VERY SMALL amount of people a FEW more months life they have made the lives of MANY people MUCH worse for a very LONG time. And what's more their policies aren't even saving lives, they're taking them - people are dying of worry, of loneliness, of other health conditions, from suicide. Boris Johnson is ...