Susan’s radical view

My view of  Covid-19 is this:  as a 79-year-old, with every heart problem that can be had while still being alive, I am definitely in the high-risk group.

However, I would  far rather have let the disease rip and let the chips (or me) fall where they may, rather than have the world economy go down the drain, with all the terrible suffering that’s happening.   It breaks my poor damaged heart to walk around the city seeing businesses closed, many of them forever, to hear stories of people losing their jobs, possibly forever, hearing about people who worked hard over many years to build up enterprises seeing them now disintegrate in front of their eyes (my son is one of those).  Will the suicide rate exceed any potential Covid-19 death rate I wonder.

It’s a mild disease for almost everyone it seems.  People get it like we get the flu or a cold, and then get better.   Probably not in my case, but that’s OK – I’d happily put my hand up to slide quietly away for the sake of saving the whole damn world.  Unfortunately they went ahead and didn’t pause for a moment to even ask me what I thought!

Trevor washes his hands

No matter what problems life dishes up, there’s all sorts of people out there that know lots about them; they’re called ‘experts’. In straightened times like these they achieve god-like status to confused poor sods waiting for the worst to happen. They’re invariably academic, imprecise and of course healthy, but not of the common world. I suppose being a ‘Virologist’ or ‘Epidemiologist’ sets you apart from the common flock. There can’t be an overdose of that sort of stuff floating around in normal times, but ‘cometh the hour, cometh the person’ and my TV screen is cluttered with academically inspired gravitas. I have a general rule in life, ‘If I can’t spell it, I neither embrace nor eat it’. Basic I know, but it does save extensive discussion and discarded food.

They mean well of course, but like I said, they dwell in theory. Take sanitation: ‘Constant use of a hand sanitiser is the main weapon against infection,’ advised one hygiene expert. Great! But there’s a huge shortage of the stuff and it’s dearer than Dom Perignon. The most effective is alcohol based and that’s when the little wowser revealed his true colours, ‘Vodka and Gin can be effective,’ he intoned wistfully. I drink neither of those, but I do have a small stash of Single Malt that I use for emotional cleansing and I’m buggered if I’m going to let the miserable sod convince me to part with that in the interest of disease control. Layman that I am, my advice is  keep your spirits where they belong, in the glass!

Yours from the Ponsonby bunker

Trev