the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Last night Marge told me that London was now under ‘Tier 2’ lockdown. Whatever that means. Marge did try and explain it me, but as she did, all I could think of was of football. Specifically, the football match between the Brits and the Germans on Christmas Day 1914. You know, the famous one, the one everyone goes on about, like it somehow meant something that some men took a break from trying to kill each other over some bit of land and had a kickabout on it instead.

I couldn’t help but think that the coronavirus isn’t going to give us a Christmas truce. It doesn’t care that we need a jolly. And it doesn’t care that we’re tired of it all, all of the this, all of the that, and especially tired of all of the other and we just want a few days off when we can just be.

If it did have a consciousness, it might conclude that the government’s scientific advisors have given their advice and the government had decided to do what is practicable and enforceable instead. That the government had looked back to last summer, the hordes of people swarming to the south coast in breach of the lockdown and decided, quite rationally that they didn’t want a repeat of people doing their own thing.

If Boris Johnson had wanted act statesmanlike, as if he was somehow above doing things based on political expediency but instead took the less popular but more courageous one, he could be fairly described acting like his political hero as Churchill, and acting in the national interest. Instead, he went for a quick win, and by so doing, inadvertently scored an own goal.