Today it's six months since the Prime Minister addressed the nation and ordered us to lockdown, and the toilet roll ran out and the economy collapsed and everything was cancelled and thousands of people got sick and died and we didn't see one another for weeks and months, maybe still haven't.
And last night he was broadcasting to the nation again, reversing some of the normality he'd chosen to unlock and warning us these restrictions might be in place for another six months, six months, crushing normality until next spring or even longer, who's to say, that is if normality ever comes back at all because our old lives might just be gone and this is how things are now, forever maintaining a distance from one another as the economy crashes beyond the point of no return and everything we ever built up is systematically destroyed by a mismanaged pandemic.
They urged us not to catch the virus and then caught it themselves, they told us to stay at home if we were ill and then drove across country regardless, they failed to plan ahead and left millions vulnerable, they appointed their mates, they misjudged the tipping point between freedom and common sense, they paid us to eat out and then told us off for mingling together, they urged us to go back to work and then urged us not to, they promised a world-beating system which failed to deliver, they dripfed us rules too complicated to follow, they blamed us when everything went wrong, they left us to burn.
The country's been going to hell in a handcart for some time now, society has somehow been divided into two opposing factions, entrenched positions well beyond the fault lines of normal politics, prejudices keenly whipped up by social media and a hysterical press, fellow citizens hurling insults and invective, each side hating the other with deep-seated intolerance, how dare they think that, breaking us apart at precisely the time we should have been working together, whatever happened to consensus, it's now one extreme or the other and woe betide if you dare to disagree.
And it's not just us here in the UK, other countries have found themselves engulfed by division, America in particular, what did they do to deserve the current incumbent of the White House, a man so self-obsessed that he lies by default, a dangerous ignoramus who should never have been allowed near high office in the first place, and yet he could easily be re-elected in a few weeks time because millions believe what they're told without question, and admittedly we've survived almost four years without him pressing the nuclear button, or worse, but that's no guarantee we'd survive another term.
Meanwhile Brexit is still ticking away, not the endless agonising debate that's now behind us but the awkward truth of what happens next if at the end of this year a deal fails to materialise, like that hasn't been the underlying plan all along, unless it's all a grim game of poker and our side is holding out against sanity until the last gasp, but the Irish border question remains logically unsolvable, an entirely undeliverable pipedream, so best expect paperwork meltdown, queues at the border and gaps on the shelves one week after we've all failed to meet up for Christmas.
How did we end up with a government like this at a time like this? Boris's election strategy last year flushed out the moderate MPs and appointed only lickspittle disciples, ideal for voting through the necessary agenda but hardly a pool of talent, from which has been selected an inexperienced cabinet dealing with problems the like of which nobody has ever seen before, for which the country will pay the price for a generation, and all the while forwarding a radical deregulation agenda, because what better time to tear apart our national institutions than under cover of a global disaster.
The economy was always too finely poised, the rules of competition forcing companies to function on the narrowest of margins, hard enough to make profitable in the best of times, nigh impossible in a year of unprecedented disruption, and if you had the bad luck to be in a business targetted by social distancing doubly so, some jobs simply won't be coming back, so when furlough tips over into redundancy millions of workers' livelihoods are doomed, it's a benefits lottery on a grand scale, and while it's possible to continue to throw away billions to keep the wolf from the door the country'll be indebted for years, if not the rest of your life, if not forever.
Our fellow citizens have become intransigent and bitter, getting furious about things they'd never previously been angered by, jumping to conclusions based on incorrect assumptions, twisting words to ridicule opinions never intended, cancelling others on limited evidence, emboldened by support from people as irrationally furious as themselves, screaming into the void and poisoning public debate, because this is how we live now, in an echo chamber of hysterical fury, overlooking consensus, seeing only the bad, raising hackles rather than listening to reasoned arguments, forever ignoring the fact we might be wrong, and history warns us where all this ends up.
Meanwhile the ice sheets melt and the atmosphere warms up, inexorably, because although we could do something to stop it we can't be bothered, why save the future if it might inhibit the present, and yes we might create deserts where there are none, and yes we might end up flooding the land where billions of us live, and yes we might eventually struggle to feed the planet, and yes if you think the migrant crisis is bad now just you wait, but never mind because it's only our grandchildren who'll suffer so who cares that an investment not made today will be a catastrophe tomorrow.
And who's to say there isn't another pandemic waiting in the wings, and what happens anyway when all our antibiotics stop working, and a single solar flare could neutralise all our technology tomorrow, and we're only ever one large meteor away from total destruction, and artificial intelligence is sure to rise up one day rise up and override us, and it only takes one human error to create the doomsday scenario that destroys modern society, and what if 2019 was genuinely as good as it ever gets and from this point on we are merely freewheeling to our doom?
We are but one tiny planet in the vast emptiness of the universe, maybe even the sole example of cultural intelligence in the history of creation, custodians of innumerable generations of human advancement with a whole range of possible models of society at our disposal, and yet we seem happy to throw everything away and live in increasing misery, led by idiots we somehow elected to a position of absolute power, brought to our knees by a virus we always expected but never prepared for, and all because self-interest and short-term thinking trump foresight and cooperation, until the whole of human existence collapses around us and if we weren't all dead we'd only have ourselves to blame.
