Июнь, 2020 - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

There are lies, damned lies and statistics

Britons think life will change dramatically after COVID-19 ~ but they are not sure why or why they said it

Published: 6 June 2020

The world will never be the same as it was when it wasn’t, and many Britons would not want things to go back the way they were before they weren’t, ie before coronavirus when they had to go to work, a survey for No Real News has revealed.

Will Life Change After Covid-19?

Coronavirus has been a confusing experience, not least because in lockdown many people found themselves in the park, driving to places where they ought not to go ~ especially should their spouse find out or if they worked for the government ~ and sometimes arriving in Skegness when they least felt capable of explaining why.

A lot of people suspect that far from separating them from family, friends and loved ones, coronavirus has brought them closer together. This is particularly true for those people who visited their family more just because they were told that they should not, and for people living 45 to a house who know what it is like to travel to the UK in a very small boat.

The survey has done all sorts of funny things to those who took part in it, from people saying that they will never have to commute again to shops being a thing of the past. However, more than a third thought that this was wishful thinking, particularly those who sell on eBoot, and a large percentage of the same group predicted foreign holidays would be abandoned for a day out on a grass verge at the side of the M25.

Life After Covid-19 ~ the post-coronavirus world — The post-coronavirus world

Zoom & Skype: what are the symptoms?

85% concluded that they would not miss socialising by Zoom and Skype, because they did not know what these were, and the remaining 25% knew that they had them but were still learning how to turn them off or, conversely, how to turn their computers on ~ the latter group tended to be in the baby-boomer range, 50 to 65 year olds, who would rather be down the pub.

A recent poll by WeBelieveYou for Pie in the Sky found that 70% believed that life would be so different that nothing would be the same as it was when they weren’t drinking, whilst only 15%, those returning to work, thought that the only change would be their underpants.

A majority, 2%, ardently wished that they had done better at maths at school. Of this group, 30% said they would like the world to be different, but they did not know how, and the remainder believed that the world they have helped to shape would have been very different indeed had they gone to school instead of mugging people.

‘… but you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone’

By far the largest ‘world changers’ were those who remembered how better life was before social engineering. 45% of these claimed they were building a TARDIS, whilst 25% thought they ought to be quiet, as they wanted their company pension, many of which are police officers.

Asked what they thought they were supposed to say is the most important issue the world must face when Covid-19 is over, only 10% cited tackling future pandemics as they liked staying at home, 78% said climate change ~ particularly in England where it rains too much ~ and less than half of the number you originally thought of then doubled hadn’t got a clue or couldn’t give a flying f!*? ~ and the greatest percentage of these were university students.

Sorting out terrorism had sunk to an all-time low of 1.5%, possibly due to the fact that no one goes out anymore or, alternatively, that the figure is a false one, and the controversial subject of migration and refugees was odds on favourite depending on Brexit going ahead and Dominic Cummings keeping his job. However, a second poll by TurnLeft for PC UK, put this figure on 1% and noted that within this group 95% were fascists and the remaining 5% waiting to be labelled as such.

{At this point articles of this nature typically run out of anything new to say, so they start repeating themselves in order to create more space around which to wrap their advertisements. But we will buck (yes, I said buck) the trend:}

75% of people who think, think that after the pandemic there will be no change there, then; of those who don’t think, 50% were demonstrating and the remaining 50% were having difficulty fitting the words of their slogans onto their cardboard banners; all were defying calls for social distancing, prompting one sociologist, who has never had a proper job, to suggest that this might be their penultimate demo, the last targeting a government conspiracy where certain groups are incited to demonstrate to ensure that they get coronavirus (source: Mr Anonymous, Antifart).

The majority of people thought this last comment spot-on, with a fictional majority invented by the press admitting they were demonstrating but had never left their house. There were signs, however, that some of this group had changed their name to Short and others to Cummings.

Will Life Change After Covid-19?: Conclusion

In conclusion, of those polled 75% who think things will change significantly believe that they will probably change their minds later and of that there is no doubt.

Of those not polled, 100% wondered why, as they don’t agree with any of this.

The majority of an unspecified group had grandparents who sat on Skegness beach for 20 years waiting for the tide to return from Calais whilst wearing a knotted hanky and eating fish and chips.

And everyone, including the world and somebody else’s wife, had not a shadow of a doubt, because they never went into that part of town and always looked behind them, that after the pandemic the magnitude shift away from trusting what the media said to relying on notes in Christmas crackers would eventually lead to no more bullshit.

100% and the rest of the world could not stop applauding this!

100% agreed that this was 100%.
(Photo credit: kai Stachowiak; https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=223310&picture=100-percent)

Exciting coronavirus-stimulated bored games

Lockdown!
Exit Strategy
Clueless

Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 74 [1 June 2020]

If we must argue, there’s always coronavirus

Published: 1 June 2020

Have you ever found yourself embroiled in an argument when you are not quite sure what the argument is about?

This is what is happening with us. If it is not a result of being cooped up together in coronavirus lockdown, then it might possibly be another of those mystery symptoms of coronavirus itself.

My wife, Olga’s, stance has always been one of ‘I can’t understand this virus … how does it work that some countries have such a high rate of infection and others don’t? From this position, the question evolves into ‘how is it that countries that are practising isolation, lockdown and social distancing often have more cases, and more serious cases, of coronavirus than those who deviate from the assumed correct procedures (inevitably, given its geographical location, the first example of such deviation has to be Belarus ~ where the trend has been bucked, where life goes on much the same but the stated incidence of coronavirus is relatively small).

Then there are questions relating to the ever-changing, never constant miscellany of theories, suppositions, and half-truths (perhaps sprinkled with one or two no-truths) thrown at us by the world’s media. These questions revolve around the inconstancy, which inevitably becomes the contradictory, and before you can say mass vaccination, we are off down the slippery slope into the sink of conspiracy.

Let’s move on.

In Russia, as with almost every other part of Europe, the trend has been towards a relaxation or easing of the social distancing rules and associated limitations widely acknowledged as restricting or slowing the spread of Covid-19 based on a day-by-day assessment of risks and the trade-off between those risks, ie the chances of contracting the virus, loss of quality of life and the good of the economy.

Here, the strategies adopted vary from region to region depending on circumstances specific to each region ~ Russia is a big country, so this makes sense ~ and it is up to those in charge of each region to decide whether to lift certain restrictions, persist with them or even, if the situation warrants it, increase them.

So far so good, but the sticking point for my good lady is that in the Kaliningrad region mask wearing, so she informs me, is compulsory on the streets, and of this she is most skeptical.

My get-out clause is that as I travel only from A to B (A being the house and B the shop) rather than to all the other letters of the alphabet, wearing a mask as I stride along the cobbles is not insupportable. Like her, I do not much care for it, as I do not have a demister for my sunglasses, and I, too, am not entirely convinced that masks do more good than harm ~ is a sweaty face a magnet for coro? And the next time you are out and about see how many people are fiddling with their mask, thus touching their face with their fingers and hands, and how many times, for no apparent reason than just because you are wearing a mask, you feel the instinctive need to scratch your nose!

On the efficacy of this imperative it would seem Olga and I find common ground, but where we diverge pointedly is in her accumulative insistence that ‘something funny is going on’ in the world, that is the world of coronavirus. In the all-encompassing, claustrophobic world of coronavirus, this is a constant bone of contention, which is unfortunate if you are, like me, vegetarian, but her main problem ~ apart from me ~ is that she is incapable of accepting that as this is a new virus the situation is an evolving one and that our politicians’, health specialists’ and scientists’ opinions, and it follows their strategies, are subject to revision as and when new circumstances come to light.

The continual race by the world’s media to be the first to report it, does not help. Invariably, some media organisations seem to be one jump ahead of themselves, do not have all the facts or deliberately misinform, the name of this age-old game to sell newspapers and also nowadays to get you to click on their online feeds to satisfy their advertisers.

With their help, and not a little assistance by Facebook Fannies, Olga has stumbled so far into Conspiracy Mire that she has arrived at the most unenviable point, the point of no return. It is a dark and misty place. But wait, who is that ahead of her? Can it be? Could it be? Indeed, it is that man ~ the man who wants to vaccinate the world. Why? Because he wants to chip us all!

Arguing in Coronavirus Isolation ~ will we all be chipped? — THERE IS A CONSPIRACY THEORY THAT THEY ARE GOING TO CHIP ALL OF US!!
(Photo credit: Frank Vincentz – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17942659)

In the words of an old song, ‘Oh, can it be that it was all so simple then‘. What happened to the days when the only chips we had to worry about was the fatty-fry much-lardy kind that came soaked in vinegar and wrapped in newspaper?

With cholesterol, sorry, I mean coronavirus, is it plainly a case of having your chips and eating them? Stay safe but not at any price?

In those moments when we least understand each other, and there have been one or two over the past 20 years, my wife alludes to the difference between the Russian and English mindset. Apparently, the British populace are all too willing to play by the book. They are told to do something, and they do it. I did not like to draw her attention to what I consider to be the Skegness syndrome, namely that at the beginning of the lockdown rules a good proportion of British folk flouted them, preferring a day in Skegness (and other places, no doubt) and to hell with the pandemic. And that, only a couple of days ago, over the Bank Holiday period, hundreds were packing their suntan oil and tinnies for the pleasures of Brighton beach.

I am, of course, aware of a recent article on RT headlined Almost quarter of Russians believe coronavirus is fictional, according to new study¹ and note this comment, which appeared at the end of an article about Russians still being interested in foreign holidays: “This is the mentality of Russians — they don’t give up².”

As I said to my wife, I am not surrendering yet, but where coronavirus is concerned, whatever your suspicions or beliefs, as my old mate Falstaff said when we last had a pint together in the days when Wetherspoon were allowed to open, ‘Discretion is the better part of valor’.

References
¹https://www.rt.com/russia/489996-quarter-russians-believe-coronavirus-fictional/ [accessed 31 May 2020]

²https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/05/29/russia-wants-to-spark-a-domestic-tourism-boom-will-it-work-a70411 [accessed 31 May 2020]