Some "new blood" in terms of input would be absolutely great for the Watch jelerak. I see you first joined in 2004 - wow! Here's hoping that the intervening years have been good for you! How long did you remain a regular poster? I've been around for a good many years now and can't remember that we've 'met' before.
But irrespective of this, good to see you around and look forward to hearing what you have to say on any topic that piques your interest!
Meanwhile...........
The papers today inform us that Britons are going on their holidays abroad in droves as restrictions are reduced. Well not in my street they're not. Despite what the media would have us believe, for the average Joe (and I speak to hundreds a week) holidays in the sun remain a distant dream. The quarantine requirements, combined with the cost of flights, the testing requirements and the limited (to say the least) number of green-list countries, make it damn near impossible for the bulk of people to travel, even if they were disposed to navigate the thousand different obstacles and risks that threaten to disrupt their plans at short notice, which most aren't. On the street when you question people, despite what the papers report, the story is always the same; for this reason or that, for the risk of loosing their deposit or not being able to fulfill this requirement or the other, they are deciding to put any plans on hold. The Government's mixed messaging on this has been appalling and this also has not helped.
But in many respects this situation in respect of holidays is mirrored right across the so called easing of restrictions and in my opinion is simply another example of the duplicity with which this whole business has been shot through. Ian Hislop on last week's
Have I Got News For You referred to this whole thing as "the return to freedom which isn't" and I absolutely agree with him. Further, I'd go to say that the whole manner in which it is being carried out is a deliberate and calculated means by which people will be attempted to be hoodwinked into believing that "things are going back to normal" via repeated messaging in the media, while simultaneously freedoms are returned in dribs and drabs with little alterations here, little omissions there, such as the Government want to retain or alter in respect of the way we are allowed to live our lives. And all the while a clarion call of "freedom is returning" is blasted into our ears to convince us of just that. This is manipulation of the population in a manner and on a scale that would have had any totalitarian leader of history clapping in applause.
It's bullshit - don't buy it. Freedom will have returned when we can do all -
all - of the things that we could before the pandemic without let or hindrance. When business can throw open its doors to who it likes, when it likes and in the manner it likes (or at least to the degree it could before the pandemic struck). When we can move around without our faces being covered, when we can meet with who we choose, in what proximity we choose, when we choose and where we choose. When we can decide freely and without being coerced by the implied threat of imposed limitations in terms of what we will and will not be able to do should we decline, about what we have injected into our own bodies and when.
But reality check - it ain't happening. You know that and so do I. That we are entering an age of more centralised authoritarian governance, where freedom of travel is a thing that will be limited to a limited number of people in certain designated ways - and most likely freedom of movement and association in our own country as well. How quickly it has happened. It's all been done under the auspices of the pandemic - for our own good, so we're told, and maybe so. But even under another name it remains the same. As the old saying goes, "If it walks like an elephant, talks like an elephant, looks like an elephant - it
is an elephant!