In this mid-October edition of his diary, Pissed-off Toff fears that our national suicide is sending him mad; reflects on the abolition of sex outside an ‘established relationship’; and wonders where this tyranny will take us.
More than six months into what was meant to be a temporary ‘lockdown’, I am losing my grip. For the first few months I was happy enough to play the grand piano in solitude and to record the madness all around. But I can hardly bear it any longer. I gave up on the TV news ages ago; and for the last week or so I have not even read the papers; whilst the mere sight of a photo of ‘Boris’ Johnson or ‘Matt’ Hancock is enough, now, to make me seethe with rage.
My mood is increasingly fragile and erratic, and when I watch a film set in the pre-Covid world (Four Weddings and a Funeral, for example), tears often flow down my cheeks. I am also losing my judgement. The other day I sat down to write something for this blog, and realised, the morning after, that it was rubbish, an outpouring of hatred and loathing made entirely unreadable by anger. (Thus the delay in fulfilling the promise, made only a fortnight ago, concerning the regularity of my offerings.)
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I refuse to wear a face-mask. Luckily my local Waitrose is adopting a lax muzzle policy, where customers are concerned. But my stance makes life slowly more difficult. When, a few days ago, I walked into a nearby Macdonald’s hoping to purchase the first Big Mac since March, the burly Polish gatekeeper, her hair dyed purple, insisted that I should put on a mask. I walked away. Then only yesterday I wanted to send a box of Fortnum’s truffles as a token of thanks to a friend who had hosted a dinner party at the recently-opened Maison François, surely the chicest bistro in London. But since I won’t wear a mask, I asked a neighbour to post the parcel for me, on his daily rounds.
And then there’s compulsory hand-washing, with which I again refuse to comply. It’s an insult. “Who knows what you’ve been doing with that right hand of yours, Sir?” they might as well say. So I won’t co-operate. With the result that most premises are now closed to me.
Which leaves just Waitrose … where, the other day, I chanced upon a group of three coppers, armed to the teeth in their high-visibility jackets, like in a sci-fi vision of hell. Fearing that they were going to issue me with the punitive new £200 fine for failing to wear a mask, I kept a low profile; and if they saw me, they ignored me.
What, though, would I do if I were issued with such a fine, which – like so many of these ‘lockdown’ measures – is probably illegal in any case? I have toyed with the idea of not paying. And what would they do? Send me to prison? I have toyed with that idea, too. It might almost suit my book to be the first person in the country to be sent to prison for refusing to wear this badge of servitude. I must perhaps put contingency measures in place: hide my assets; always keep the number of a lawyer on me, in case of arrest; perhaps even take all my money out of the bank.
In the meantime, I evade the issue, and have also discovered that if I go to the large local Sainsbury’s just before the 11pm closing time, I can simply walk past the gatekeeper who attempts in a half-hearted manner to make customers put on a mask; and the chances of running into the Stasi at that hour are slim.
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The ‘lockdown’ has markedly increased the public-sector/private-sector apartheid that had long been evident in our country before we all decided to commit national suicide. But now we see it more clearly than ever. Protected from the lunacy of the course on which we are embarked, the public sector – which produces nothing and yet enjoys every guarantee in terms of pensions and job-security – continues to live at the expense of the wealth-producing private sector; which they are busily destroying. It can’t last. In the end the whole thing has to come crashing down.
In the meantime, not every company in the private sector is suffering. I am thinking, specifically, of The Daily Telegraph, which from the beginning of this imaginary ‘crisis’ has been running full-page Government-sponsored adverts from which they must be earning a fortune. On Saturday 26 September, for example, the paper came with a cover, front and back, consisting of four huge broadsheet Government adverts selling us the ‘lockdown’.
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Let us now look at one of these pages, which might have come straight from Pravda. “The NHS Covid-19 app helps protect your loved ones and community faster,” it announces. How? Well, by “Quickly alerting you if you have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive for Coronavirus” … and also by “Anonymously notifying anyone you have been in contact with if you enter a positive Coronavirus test result.” Two further ‘advantages’ of this Big Brother app are then listed, which I do not quote here.
Put another way, in plain English shorn of lies and trickery, we are enjoined to download this app onto our smartphones in order to be controlled, monitored and enslaved by an all-seeing State. “Alerting you if you have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive” does not in fact mean that. For ‘alert you’, read: ‘order you to lock yourself away for 10 days’. As for “Anonymously notifying anyone you have been in contact with,” what that actually means is: ‘we’ll lock up your friends, too.’
The deceit is breathtaking. Or perhaps not, since we long ago entered the dysfunctional territory of Orwell’s 1984. And whereas I had been toying with the idea of getting a smartphone to replace my ancient Nokia mobile, I am not sure that I will, now. In the meantime, if, in any pub or restaurant, I am required to give my name and mobile phone number so as to be ‘alerted’ (i.e. locked up), I will just produce fake information.
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What, then, does one do to avoid going mad? This now being a distinct possibility.
I rely on friends. Not all of them however. One girl I recently got back in touch with made it clear that she is all in favour of masks and is fully signed-up to the Covid-19 scare story that has been shoved down our throats from the beginning. It’s a ‘lethal pathogen’ she said, parroting the official line; she personally knows two people who have died a horrible, agonising death from it; the ‘lockdown’ to which I object with all my being is entirely necessary, she thinks, and anyone who disagrees is a Nazi, a Fascist, a fool and a murderer.
It is a waste of time to point out to this girl that in terms of its lethality, Covid-19 is now proven to be no worse than a nasty winter flu. Further contact seems useless … prompting me to fall back on my various posh male friends on whose affection – barring some more than usually foolish cock-up on my part – I can probably rely till the day I die.
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Otherwise, one has the grand piano. And reading … in particular, Rupert Everett’s autioboigraphy, entitled Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. I can’t afford new books any more, and so pulled it out from my shelves after a mention in the review pages of The Spectator reminded me that I had read it years before and had enjoyed it.
Everett will not mind if I reproduce various lines from his description of Madonna at a dinner party in LA, when she was going out with Sean Penn. “There was an energy field around her, like a wave, that swept everyone up as it crashed into the room,” he writes in Chapter 20. “She was tiny and pulpeuse with long auburn hair, slightly curled … [Her eyes] were the palest blue, strangely wide set; any further and she would look insane, or inbred … In no way was she conventionally beautiful … She was raucous but poised, elegant but common. She had the cupid-bow lips of a silent screen star, and it was obvious that she was playing with Sean’s cock throughout the meal. She was mesmerising. She oozed sex … There was no male who would not fuck her.”
Oh, and Everett’s black labrador Mo adored her, he writes elsewhere, and couldn’t stop sniffing her crotch. Not that Madonna minded.
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Which brings me to sex in our own day. Almost incredibly (except that nothing is incredible nowadays), Matt ‘the prat’ Hancock, health commissar in the Politburo, has ruled that sex is now allowed only in the context of a so-called ‘established relationship’. So if, for example, you were to meet a girl in a pub (they are still open, just, as I write; in London at any rate), and if the two of you were later to find yourselves in your bed or hers, you would both be breaking the law on two counts. Firstly, because from this weekend onwards it is illegal to have any guest in your house. And secondly, because anything outside an already-established sexual relationship is now illegal.
Put another way, all new sexual relationships are banned until further notice.
Has this ever happened at any stage in the history of mankind? Did even Mao or Stalin attempt such a thing? But that’s where we are now, caught up in madness and tyranny without limit.
