Архив метки: Social distancing & rioting

Important to Keep in Touch During Coronavirus Christmas

Important to Keep in Touch During Coronavirus Christmas

Important to Keep in Touch During Coronavirus Christmas ~ Cheer them up with a card and personal letter!

Published: 17 November 2020

So, what I have been doing for the past week? Did news that they had installed a Democrat in the White House appall me so much that I have not been able to focus and write? No, even stranger than that, I have been busy writing my Christmas cards ~ either a case of there’s forward planning for you, or its time he invested in a new calendar.

Nothing quite as spectacular. I have been writing cards to folks back home, to friends and family in the UK, and cognizant of the fact that the post from Kaliningrad to England is not exactly the 21st centuries’ answer to a hypersonic version of Pony Express, I hope to have mailed them in good time.

Another reason for planning ahead is that every year I include a ‘brief’ note with my card. This has become as traditional as Christmas dinner, party hats, Christmas crackers and auntie Ivy turning Christmas day into a rugby scrum as she insists on clawing open everybody else’s presents.

Important to keep in touch during coronavirus Christmas

My Christmas letter has become such an important element of the annual Christmas ritual that its up there with seasonal sayings like ‘just what I always wanted’, when it is quite obvious that you didn’t (I mean, who in his right mind would wear a jumper like that, and when did your gran lust after a WWII German tin helmet (or even a WWII German in a tin helmet?)) ~ and ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have!”, when you obviously didn’t: that’s the aftershave you were given by someone last year and which you personally would not touch with a barge pole and neither would anyone else. Mind you it makes the perfect Christmas present for social distancing.

The thing about my Christmas letters is that although you have to state out loud at UK post offices these days what you have in your ‘packet’ ~ and my letters are known for being rather bulky, so they always ask ~ they always get through, even though sometimes I cannot resist answering, at first in a whisper, “It’s an inflatable doll,” and then, in response to the lady behind the counter urging me to ‘speak up’, to call out stridently, “It’s an inflatable doll,” so that everyone can hear (you should try this sometime, it really is fun!).

No stopping those Christmas letters

Yes, my letters always get through. Like Reader’s Digest junk mail, electricity and gas bills, even if the Post Office had been sold to China (what’s that, oh, it has been) and my letters rerouted via the M25, carried in the pocket of a young thief travelling on a skateboard during rush-hour, my letters always get through.

They zip past defiled statues, hoody-wearing muggers on handbag-stealing mopeds and bearded men burning poppies. They cruise through ganja-stenched knife-secreted carnivals, through nice areas deprived by people. As slippery as Hope not Hate, they riot their way down Looting Street, defying all manner of social distancing, lockdowns and Tiers for fears and, before you can say Hoorah for Brexit or Joe Biden is as honest as Clinton, they sail up your drive, through your letter box and plummet onto your doormat quicker than the stink from a suspect scientific claim.

They are so popular, my Yuletide missives, that family and friends leave home for them, and come back after Christmas ~ a long while after Christmas. Some people board up their letter boxes, others disguise them as something intimate in such a way that were you to insert a letter through them, you’d have the neighbours shout ‘pervert!’. Some teach their dogs to savage them, and others, those with ‘Beware of the Cat’ on their doors, train their feline friends to hide them under the Christmas tree ~ and scrape the soil back over.

One year my brother shoved his letter under the mistletoe, prompting his gay friend to say that he would rather kiss his own arse. He is a lonely guy, but no worries, he is double-jointed and quite the contortionist.

Selfish people, those who stockpiled toilet rolls when they heard the word pandemic, convert them into paper hats and hide the Christmas crackers for pulling on their own when they think no one is looking. Ahh, but someone is always looking, especially in these days of essential travel only. Do they really think that they can get away with it?

“Where are you going in that Support Bubble Car?”

“I am a victim of self-isolation and social distancing, officer. I am shunning all that I have ever known and all those that know me, even those who have tried to lose me, give me away or pretend that I don’t exist, such as my mother. I am going somewhere where they can’t track and trace me, and there, in the privacy of somebody else’s Tier 1 home, I will hide from the world and pull my Christmas cracker.”

“Very well,” says the Social Distancing Marshall, “but no laughing at the joke inside the cracker, mind. This is no time to be enjoying life, and don’t forget to wear your mask.”

Sorry, that was uncalled for.

“Hello, I think I may have coronavirus. I have been trying to telephone the hospital for the past three hours and nobody has answered.”

“Sorry, the hospital is as full as boatload of migrants from France. Wait a moment. Oh, it is a boat load of migrants from France. Please hang yourself. I mean hang up and try the Samarlians.”

The Samarlians ~ a not-for-profit organization that will talk you out of the ‘easy way out’:

Answer machine: “Hello, you have reached the end of your tether. I am sorry, due to a high volume of excuses about coronavirus we are unable to take your call at the moment, please leave your name and telephone number and you will never hear from us again. You might like to waste what remains of your life by visiting our website, goingaroundincircles.con, where you can often never find what it is you want to know using our FAQ Offs ~ Frequently Asked Questions Offline ~ alternatively, you will find the end of the line at your nearest Midland Mainline Station.”

Once, all you had to do was press Button A to be connected and Button B to get your money back. Now ‘you have the following options’, more numbers than the National Lottery and about the same chance of winning.

What my coronavirus Christmas letters mean to the recipients

Rumour has it that carol singers have written songs based on the contents of my Christmas letters and sold the rights to Leonard Cohen.

Christmas vicars have read them out in their sermons and have been summarily excommunicated.

Edgar Allan Poe, who essentially travelled by TARDIS, was inspired to write The Masque of the Red Death having read my treatise ‘Lockdown ~ the most effective life saver since leaches’.

Important to Keep in Touch During Coronavirus Christmas
{See end of article for image credit*}

My letters have tweaked the ears of statesmen, tickled the underbelly of boat-owning philanthropists and have sunk a thousand ships, or would have if I had my way ~ where is my letter to Sir Francis Drake?

Napoleon stuck his arm up his vest after reading one of my letters, and what would Lord Nelson have asked Hardy to do for him had he read my letter before someone shot him first?

Thank heavens Adolf burnt his letter!

As for ordinary mortals, some wrap their present to auntie Joan in them and still others wrap them around uncle Martin’s chestnuts, who would otherwise lose them on Christmas morn as he struggles to adjust his mighty pendulums attached to his very large grandfather’s clock (thank the Lord for Spell Check!).

Looking forward to my letters

People look forward to my letters so much that they ‘wish it could be Christmas every day”. One day they will write a song about it and play it every year with depressing regularity.

This year they are all busy singing to, ‘So this is Christmas and what have you done. Sat in self-isolation it isn’t much fun.” I know, let’s open one of Mick’s Christmas letters and cheer ourselves up (gunshot off stage).

My letters have a sentimental and emotional appeal. They are up there, tugging at the heart strings like that old romantic Christmas Carol, who your mother caught your father with (also Christmas Connie, Christmas Christine and Christmas Cordelia, well, Christmas comes but once a year).

Ahh, the old ones are the best (Connie was 73).

Lovely old Christmas carols

What memories these well-known carols:

“Drug King Wenceslas looked out from his boat to Dover

 When the snow is not found out we’ll roll the UK over

Brightly shone the hotel sign, the waiting bus was free

It was worth the trip through several countries and across the sea, He! He!”

And do you remember this one:

“Away in a 4-star I don’t pay for my bed, the tax-payer in England pays for it instead …”

And how could you possibly forget:

“Twinkle, Twinkle celeb star who the F..K do you think you are?

Pontificating up on high?

Spreading all those EU lies.

Twinkle, Twinkle talentless star paid too much, too much by far”

NOW, WHO DOESN’T DESERVE A CHRISTMAS LETTER FROM ME? (Important to Keep in Touch During Coronavirus Christmas)

Dear old Christmas Carol, one of Charles Dickens’ favourites. This will be the one year that Ebenezer Scrooge will be looking forward to a visit from the ghosts of Christmas Past, anything has to be better than Father Boris’s Christmas Present.

Important to Keep in Touch During Coronavirus Christmas

Although it is very important to keep in touch during a coronavirus Christmas, I don’t as a rule send the prime minister a Christmas letter, besides he will be far too busy this year reading and listening to fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm. Chris Witty and Sir Patrick Vallance, sorry I don’t know them ~ and neither do you, but there is a sort of chemistry there. It reminds me of that Chad Valley Junior Scientists set I was given at Christmas a long while ago. As I recall, it was a very disappointing present, all smoke and mirrors, bits missing, as incomplete as a Liberal manifesto and it had a very funny smell about it, something slightly fishy.

Send them a Christmas letter? I would not give them the steam off my turkey. What I do like to do, however, is spice up my Christmas offerings with the odd anecdote from Christmases past.

“Please, pretty please do tell us one.”

Well, all right, if you beg nicely.

Once upon a time, long ago, when England was really England, I worked part time as a waiter. I was young once, and in those days I was a teenager. These were the bad old days, before teenagers became entitled and were able to live at home with mum until their 45th birthday (you can ~ could? ~ always take a loan).

Teenagers in those days were not deprived as they are today. They were lucky, in that they did not have the internet from which to plagiarise articles to pass their exams with and, without keyboards and computers, they had the fun of writing all of their essays out by hand, correcting them by hand and then rewriting them by hand for presentation. This meant that they had less time for anything else, which was good, because there were no smartphones in those days and nothing to twiddle on, no Twatter, Arsebook, Snapcrap and the like. Instead, after school teenagers went out and worked.

I worked at the Talbot Hotel in Oundleshire, a very prestigious establishment, with a long history dating back to Elizabethan times and with a staircase that was said to have come from Fotheringay Castle where Mary Queen of Scots lost her head and on which staircase I almost lost my job for telling two old ladies that Mary was always looking for it in the rooms that they had paid for.

It was a posh place, the Talbot of Oundle, and still is. Standards were high. We had to wear black trousers, white shirt, cummerbund, little white pointed tail jackets and a black dicky bow. We looked like clockwork penguins. We were always well turned out, apart from one person whose flies were never done up, as if, we suspected, by no fault of accident. 

It was three days before Christmas, us well turned out and him with his flies undone, that we were called to wait upon a very important table, several tables in fact containing the governors and alumni from Oundle’s prestigious public schools.

I had two salvers: one with Christmas seasoning and the other containing peas on my arm.

Several of we waiters moved along in single file serving our guests of honour. And then it came to her.

She was gorgeous, stunning, wearing a low-cut dress. She had the most diaphanous orbs you could ever imagine ~ yes, her eyes were beautiful. Mesmerised by love, or something that starts with ‘L’ and has the same number of letters, I leant over her and with the seasoning in my hand, asked:

“Would you like stuffing madam?”

The timing could not have been more perfect. Hardly had I realised that I should have used the word ‘seasoning’ than my waiter friend at the side of me, my pal, my very good pal, gave a purposeful nudge to my elbow and off went a spoonful of peas straight down the lady’s cleavage.

Talk about Captain Kirk’s ‘Space, the final frontier’!

And really, what did it sound like: “Madam, can I help you?” As she is reaching down inside, red faced and all a fluster, for those penetrative peas.

Sounds like something out of a Carry On film? How about Carry on Down the Cleavage? Rather that than Carry on Down the Pandemic.

Important to Keep in Touch During Coronavirus Christmas

But what has this got to do with it being very important to keep in touch during coronavirus Christmas? I confess, I have digressed, when my real intention for writing this piece was to say how nice, affectionate and charming Russian Christmas cards are. Different again to the crass and vulgar things that they churn out in the UK.

Every year in the UK,  Christmas cards get bigger, which is a problem for my family and friends, for it means that instead of a ‘short’ letter I can really go to town and insert a tome like War & Peace. But British Christmas cards do not just get bigger they become more vulgar each year. In keeping with declining moral standards, smutty innuendo ~which is as traditional as laxatives on Boxing Day ~ has given way to images of a semi-pornographic nature and to captions laced with obscenity. It is enough to make you lie and say that Rubber Band has comedic talent!

How much nicer these traditional Russian cards are. They remind me of the sentimental cards that were produced in wartime England ~ soft, delicate, romantic and affectionate

Of course, they are not really Christmas cards as such, as this is an Orthodox Christian country, and Christmas is celebrated on 7th January. No, these are, for the sake of accuracy, Happy New Year cards ~Snovam Gordams.

Snovam Gordam (Happy New Year!) I shouted that last year on the stroke of midnight. You did too? Really?

Hmmm, we’d better shout twice as loud this year, as I don’t think He was listening.

By the way, sorry if you did not receive my Christmas card and letter.

No, I shouldn’t think you are!

Leonard Cohen: Waiting for the Miracle ~ A song for 2021

  • Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death
    (Image credit: Harry Clarke – Printed in Edgar Allan Poe'sTales of Mystery and Imagination, 1919., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2348546)

Copyright © 2018-2020 Mick Hart. All rights reserved. {Dickens & Masque of the Red Death images are In the Public Domain}

What Really Matters

A day at the seaside ~ with beer
[3 July 2020]

Published: 6 July 2020

Forgetting where I was for a moment, I looked nervously over my shoulder. That man on the opposite side of the road? Did he not look a little like Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader? Relax, I thought, this isn’t the UK? Even there, there is no Ed Davey Matters movement. Even there, he and his party does not matter very much, and here he does not matter at all.

Besides, I was not about to go legally to the pub and enjoy a pint like Nigel Farage and be accused by the liberal outrage industry. In fact, I was not about to break social distancing laws in any shape or form. After 106 days in self-isolation I was off to the seaside for a change of scenery.

What Really Matters

As we sped off in the car towards the coast, I thought to myself a couple of days at the seaside matters. It matters very much to get out into the fresh air and enjoy the bounteous gifts of nature. Sun, Sea and Sand Matters, I thought. Fresh Air Matters. A Change of Scenery Matters.

We were staying for two nights in a friend’s dacha. Good Friends Matter. The cottage was an old German building. History Matters. It was not far from the sea. Being Not Far From The Sea Matters.

Before we went to the beach we sat in the conservatory, ate a pizza and cracked open a bottle of wine. Good Company Matters. Good Conversation Matters. Good Wine Certainly Matters.

The seaside town was busy but not overcrowded. Being Busy But Not Overcrowded Matters. It was clearly a family occasion. Families Matter. There were mums and dads with their children. Mums and Dads with their Children Matters.

The sea was warm and good for a swim. Warm Sea Matters. The atmosphere was family-friendly with no hint of anti-social behaviour. No Anti-Social Behaviour Matters.

What Really Matters

In the evening, I bought a couple of bottles of quality beer. Quality Beer Matters (ask Nigel Farage!). And as I relaxed and drank those beers I thought to myself, everything that I have seen today and all that I have experienced matters. It matters a lot.

What wasn’t there to matter as it did not matter at all was a matter for commonsense. But that’s another matter which in the fullness of time will matter little and then will matter a great deal less.

I took another sip of beer and something closer than the celestial spheres whispered to me in the voice of history, “Consider the matter closed!” it said. “There are those that can end the matter now if push really comes to shove, and that is a matter of fact!”

Mick Hart in Zelenogradsk musing on  what really matters
Sitting on a Bench in Zelenogradsk Drinking Beer Matters!

It’s just so Outrageous!!!!

Copyright © 2018-2020 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.

Watching the Riots on TV

Musings on the 10 June 2020 ~
or the joy of being TV-free (Part 2)

Published: 10 June 2020

“Threw the television out and it was one of the best things that I ever did,” so said my friend Collin, as I recorded in my previous article.

What ignited this conversation on independent minds and symbolic images of TV sets tossed resolutely into rubbish skips, was the mutual notoriety that we had both gained from the public knowledge that neither of us owned or watched TV. Whenever I revealed this fact to anyone, I could guarantee responsive shock of seismic proportions: “What, you haven’t got a telly?!” ~ they would cry in disbelief.

Time for a bit of Frank Zappa

This is not to say, unfortunately, that I am happily oblivious to what is going on in the world. In today’s technologically hard-wired world, even though I eschew ownership of a so-called smartphone, I still use a computer for research and by which to write, and on this necessary evil the news is but a click away.

When I want to know what is happening, feel the need to know what is happening and/or just feel the need to annoy myself, I go to Google News, that is Google aggregated news, or as I have christened it, Google Aggravating News. And there it is: the whole world and its ills. However, lest we forget, it is the whole world and its ills predominantly filtered through the lens of the liberal left.

At no other time in my personal history of non-TV ownership have I had so much reason to rejoice as recently. I cannot imagine how awful it must be to be placed on a strict diet of coronavirus doom and gloom. I know that there are people out there who suffer from the same inability as mobile phone users ~ they simply cannot turn the telly off. How do such people survive? Do they survive? In this age of news surfeit, with rolling news channels churning out the same disturbing images over and over again, underscored by the same relentless and inevitably biased commentary, it is a marvel we can think at all. We do, don’t we?

Frank Zappa again.

Reasons to be cheerful part 2 was when I heard from my wife, who is an inveterate social media twiddler, that it was riot season again. No, I am not a liberal subversive. My joy came from the realisation that as I did not have a TV, I could ‘tune off and drop out’ ~ that sounds suspicious!

As soon as I was apprised of the facts, white cop USA kills black suspect, I thought, ‘Hello, here we go!’  I knew as you did, that we were in for a grand media fest: acres of newsprint and airtime given over to mob rule, rioting, street unrest, arson, violence, looting. I had, in effect, one of those distinctly déjà vu moments.

Watching the Riots on TV
I’VE BEEN WATCHING THE RIOTS ON TV
(Photo credit: Michael Lis on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/@mq1?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)

The following day a couple of articles in the UK liberal press confirmed my suspicions that the fallout from a crime committed on the other side of the world was about to be encouraged in the UK.

Naah, I thought, don’t need it. My status as a non-TV owner would grant me some immunity, but in order to batten down the hatches I would need to avoid goggling on Google. One part of me was arguing, surely not. That is to say, that surely people are not so stupid as to start rampaging through the streets in the midst of a pandemic. It was a little ray of logic that I knew was but a straw. Letting go of that, I life-rafted into the comfort zone of where I was located, thankfully far away from the artillery of the western media and scenes of abject capitulation that surely would follow as dark follows light. Alas, my incorrigible twiddling wife driven by her social media addiction, could not help but leak snippets of information to me, which I tried to avoid as if they were carnivals.

With Covid-19 conspiracies cascading around our ears like confetti at a fallen angels wedding, who could blame anyone for entertaining the suggestion that in the matter of the riots extreme liberal factions are at work behind the scenes provoking and antagonising, attempting to disempower law enforcement agencies so that they ultimately lose control of the streets. Or is it all just an epic miscalculation? After all, something similar happened in the UK about thirty years ago with the premature curtailment of stop and search laws, the disastrous result being …

I was just thinking wistfully bring back the Sweeney, flared polyester trousers, thick knotted Axminster ties and proper-job policing, when the words of my old childhood physician echoed in my ears, and other parts of the body. “Clear the decks!” he would say, meaning drop your trousers, which he always asked you to do when you presented with an earache. They’d certainly have pulled his statue down if he had had one erected! Come to think of it, they probably wouldn’t.

With his words ringing in my ears (he never did get to the bottom of my tinnitus) and my trousers still on, it did make me think that it was time to take evasive action before the decks of my mind became strewn with the sort of liberal tat that I would not get five bob for if I took it to Peacock’s auction.

“Wife!” said I, “Desist!”

I do not know whether she understood me or not, but the cat did, as he promptly sat on her mobile phone.

And so it has been that for the last four to five days I have, how does the expression go, simply ‘not gone there’, and by boycotting Google News and in fact any kind of media output, I have harvested the twin benefit of not only avoiding the ghost of Enoch Powell  but also losing touch with coronavirus confusion. It has certainly been a win-win situation!

Of course, with Arsebook never far away, my wife continues to sneak information piecemeal to me, but I have adopted the expedient of placing my hands over my ears. It cannot be right can it?  That they uprooted Nelson Mandela’s statue in Parliament Square and tossed it into a cabbage patch? Perhaps it was Lord Nelson’s statue or the statue of Ron Nelson, a fish and chip man from Scunthorpe … or could it have been …*

*For one night only, due to Rioter’s demands, BBC 1 presents the National Historic Figures Statue Desecration Ceremony live from the Arthur Hall (please note that Prince Arthur is currently being investigated under the Racist Statues of England Act so will not be in attendance. The fact that he died many years ago does not make him less culpable of things he never said or did in an age which is so remote from our own that even a female Dr Who is having difficulty finding it.)

Will the rioters remove The Statue of Liberty?
What du yu reckon when it’s gone ~ Martha & The Vandellas?

If you live in a country that has not yet ventured down the road of multiculturalism, pause for a moment. The social experiment comes at a price, and the interest on the debt is something you’ll never repay ~ Source: a man who did not make it into The Museum of Tolerance but was later inducted into the Hall of Sagacious Fame (please note statue removed) and was then prosecuted for inciting commonsense

In brave new America, leaders kneel and looters are saluted.

Copyright [Text] © 2018-2021 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.