Diary of a Self-isolator: Day 645 [9 December 2021]
Published: 8 December 2021 ~ Vaccination Passports Stop the Spread of Underpants
Diary of a self-isolator is one of a series of posts and thoughts on self-isolating in Kaliningrad. Links to previous posts appear at the end of this post.
It’s amazing isn’t it! Just when you were gullible enough to think that zippety zoo zah, zippity ay, I have had my two vaccines everything’s going my way. You read articles and see videos that claim* that:
a. Vaccinated people can catch coronavirus just as easily as unvaccinated
b. Vaccinated people can spread coronavirus just as easily as unvaccinated
c. Vaccinated people can catch coronavirus, become seriously ill and die just as easily as unvaccinated
d. Your two jabs are not enough, and you need to have another … and another … and another …
{*Don’t believe everything you read, see on the telly and is printed on underpants’ labels}
And then, just when you’ve consoled yourself with the barely consoling thought, well, hey ho, it’s almost Christmas, along comes the WHO with a deadly new strain of coronavirus, and its off the ladder, down the snake and back to square one again.
I am not too dismayed by these revelations as I never left square one.
Sitting here in Kaliningrad, the only strain that I am feeling is the strain on my underpants. Perhaps, I should elaborate. Sorry madam, what was that? Yes, I spelt it right, strain.
The one downside of self-isolating that is rarely touched upon is the toll it takes on your underpants, by which I mean from all that sitting. The wear and tear on a self-isolator’s underpants are possibly something that the office of statistics has not yet got to grips with. The upside of self-isolating ~ and by default one of the positives of not having a QR code ~ is that with nowhere to go you will definitely save on shoe leather, but the downside, in your pants, is where does that leave them? “Ahh soles!” you might think to yourself, if you are prone to too much rambling (Don’t bother saying it! I’ll get to the point soon enough!), but pants are pretty low, without elastic, and in one’s clothing-monitoring kecking order they are bottom of the pile.
Thus, it never occurred to me, as most likely it has never occurred to you, that two years of social distancing had taken it out of my pants. My word, I thought, peering into my underpants, they are looking tired and shabby.
Nevertheless, I didn’t give it a second thought. Why should I? The logical thing to do was to go out and buy a new pair. But sometime later, whilst reading about the anti-vaccine passport riots in Canada and Australia, something alarm-like went off. It couldn’t have been the elastic twanging in my pants, as there was not enough spring left in them. No, it was something far more dire than that. It was the impromptu possibility that pants were now off-limits! That the introduction of QR codes had rendered them non-essential!
My mind began to race. I felt like I was on the start line of Santa Pod Raceway, the drag racing strip in England, where I used to drink and work (and in that order). You could almost see the skidmarks (Richard Skidmark, damn good actor, almost as good as Burt Shirtlifter.). The chilling possibility that QR codes had effectively rationed underpants was a blow below the belt; it was the thought process equivalent of a ‘bleach burnout‘. Ahh, and what about bleach!? Could you still get it? Surely, bleach, like bog rolls, is fairly essential stuff. And what about bog rolls? How essential are they?
How I laughed two years back at the maddening crowd of Brits who at the start of the so-called Pandemic rushed out mob handed to buy up the country’s bog roll reserves. The boot was on the other foot now. It was a silly place to put it, but I was in such a rush to find and recycle my old, used face masks that I had hung seven next to the toilet suspended by their straps before the thought occurred to me that since grub was deemed essential and toilet rolls and bleach were sold in every supermarket, access to this commodity could not be denied. All well and good, I thought, but where did that leave my underpants?
Taking underpants off (the essential list that is) just does not seem right. It’s unethical, not to mention unhygienic, but in these straitened days where essentials are defined by the right to bear a QR code, ease of access to underpants is no longer the civilised liberty that once was taken for granted.
Let us hypothesise that you are one of the QR codeless, and therefore unable to enter non-essential shops from which to buy your underpants. Would the answer to your dilemma be to entreat somebody else, someone in possession of a vaccination passport, to buy your pants on your behind, behalf? Appointing a pant-buying proxy would certainly get them off the hook, but, as with everything to do with this pandemic, and equating it to the state of my pants, there has to be and is an inevitable snag.
The crutch of the matter is that here, in Kaliningrad, the size ratio of men’s underwear is a trifle obscure. If you were given to conspiracy theories, you might easily infer that underpants have fallen foul of the misinformation/disinformation industry and that the mere mention of them would be enough for Facebook to redirect you to a place which purports to sell you the truth about the size of pants in Kaliningrad. This may not be such a bad thing, as the last time I bought a large pair they fitted me like Houdini’s straitjacket! I returned to the market where I had bought them, and no, I did not ask to exchange them ~ I now use them as a pocket handkerchief ~ but I did say, with unabashed pride to the lady from whom I had purchased them, “Nice pants, but they don’t fit. I need an extra-large pair”.
Vaccination Passports Stop the Spread of Underpants
Between you and me and nobody else, I must confess that I was rather chuffed. I’d never bought a pair of XXL’s before, but somewhere between tearing back on the bus to try them on and getting home to do so, it occurred to me, quite sadly, that the reason why XXL pants are the only option in Kaliningrad is that all pants come from China ~ the one place in the world where smalls are what they say they are, small.
As the mystery of the extra-large underpants unravelled before my eyes, much to my chagrin, the ‘Made in China’ connection still did not explain how big burly Russian men manage to fit into such tiny pants. Had I just discovered the answer to the West’s rhetorical question: Why do Russians look so serious? If so, then my understandable disappointment at having debunked the myth that mine were a large pair was more than compensated for by my having stumbled upon the answer to a riddle as far reaching and out of sight as the Soch Less Monster question, “Do Scotsmen wear pants under their kilts?”
Alas, getting to the bottom of this one may forever elude us, as may the answer to the question how come more stockings and suspenders are sold in Scotland than there are females in the population? A statistical anomaly that may all change now that vaccination passports have been inflicted on the Scots (Well, you would vote old hatchet face in!)
The good news, proving the maxim that every pair of underpants has a silver lining, is that according to popular rumour, QR codes will not be extended to restrict access to public transport. Thank heavens for that. Imagine dusting off the old Soviet bike and rattling across the Königsberg cobbles on two flat tyres with the suspension gone in your underpants.
I imagine that bikes are not classed as essential items, and if they are not classed as essential items then without proud possession of a QR code you won’t be able to buy new tyres or buy yourself a bike to go with that saddle you bought last month.
But as my philosophising Indian friend is wont to say ~and say too often: “Every problem has a solution.”
Vaccination Passports Stop the Spread of Underpants
I had already worked out that if socks had been declassified as essential items, I would still be able to buy them, if not on the black market, then from the roadside market. Babushkas make lovely thick, warm, colourful, woollen socks. I am not altogether sure that babushka-made woollen underpants would be quite that lovely, rather like wearing a British 1940s’ teapot cover, but needs must when the Devil drives. “Hello, could you put through me to the Scottish Import Department, please.”
What else might be deemed non-essential in the new QR code age? I looked out of the window and noticed that our neighbour had been thinking along the same lines. He had a spare bog standing in the garden, just in case. He had also leant a long plank outside his house to enable his cat to climb up to the first floor flat where he lived. He had cut down the silver birch tree that the cat used to climb up, presumably because he knew something that we didn’t, possibly some obscure Covid-restriction connection between QR codes, cats, trees, planks and toilets in gardens.
Not 100% convinced that QR codes would not appear on transport, I put on my mask and went to the home of a used-car dealer who wanted to talk sales. On the way there I saw my neighbour sitting on a box in his front garden. He had not been able to get into his house for a week as he had lost his key, and, as you know, keys are non-essential items.
It was raining hard, and my neighbour’s arm was sticking up into the air. Normally, it would have had an umbrella on the end of it, but as my neighbour had no QR code, and as umbrellas are non-essential, he could not get into the shop to buy one, which serves him jolly well right! The last thing that you would want a conspiracy theorist to have is an umbrella!
At the used-car salesman’s place, after a glass or two of home-made vodka ~ Ha, who needs shops! ~ I became the proud owner of my first Russian car. It was a snip at twice the price I paid for what it is really worth. It has an irrefutable pedigree: One getaway driver, 2000km on the clock (which the seller told me he would let me have after he had finished working on it), a full tank of whatever it is, six months MOT valid until April 1967 and a tin opener.
I cannot wait to drink with him again. He is also selling a helicopter.
On my way back home, wondering why I had waited so long to pay twice as much for a car that any sane person would not have bought in the first place, at least not for that price, a thought crept into my head from the gaps around my face mask. It was that the coronavirus age had probably spawned a lot of bored people with nothing better to do than sit at home and count their bog rolls, as well as homespun philosophers like me, modern-day Kants, who sit around in attics writing at large and in-depth on underpants.
One thing I know for certain is that my wife’s belief that prickless people will be made to wear a yellow star to enforce their segregation is not worth the material that my underpants are lacking.
On the contrary, the unrepentant vaccine eluder will be instantly conspicuous from the serve-him-right effects of his inadmissibility. With his long hair, worn out jeans, brightly coloured babushka socks, his bikeless saddle thrust sadly between his legs and more holes in his underpants than Jodrell Banking arsetrologers could hope to see in a lifetime of peeping up their telescopes, should the unvaccinated leper still fail to catch your eye, then you really should consider taking that trip to Specsavers. A word to the wise, however, don’t forget to show them your vaccination passport or they might pretend that they cannot see you through the spectacles you are wearing.
“I wouldn’t be seen dead in a pair of underpants like those!” ~ shouted a man who had just been vaccinated. Tut, if only he’d bought the XXLs.
Copyright © 2018-2022 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.
Image attributions:
QR Code: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Commons_QR_code.png
Toilet rolls: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=53180&picture=toilet-tissues-isolated-background
Man in pants: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Underwear-man/73457.html
😉Some other posts to keep you out of mischief!
Old Tin Buckets & QR Codes
A New QR Code Era in Kaliningrad
QR Codes Enforced in Kaliningrad
Diary of a self-isolating Englishman in Kaliningrad
Previous articles:
Day 1 [20 March 2020]
Day 6 [25 March 2020]
Day 7 [26 March 2020]
Day 9 [28 March 2020]
Day 10 [29 March 2020]
Day 16 [4 April 2020]
Day 19 [7 April 2020]
Day 35 [23 April 2020]
Day 52 [10 May 2020]
Day 54 [12 May 2020]
Day 65 [23 May 2020]
Day 74 [1 June 2020]
Day 84 [11 June 2020]
Day 98 [25 June 2020]
Day 106 [3 July 2020]
Day 115 [12 July 2020]
Day 138 [30 July 2020]
Day 141 [2 August 2020]
Day 169 [30 August 2020]
Day 189 [19 September 2020]
Day 209 [9 October 2020]
Day 272 [11 December 2020]
Day 310 [18 January 2021]
Day 333 [10 February 2021]
Day 365 [14 March 2021]
Day 394 [12 April 2021]
Day 460 [17 June 2021]
Day 483 [10 July 2021]
Day 576 [11 October 2021]
Day 579 [14 October 2021]
Day 608 [2 November 2021]