Collateral damage

Head Rambles Posted on by 1

The current wave of panic sweeping the world has had many unintended consequences.

Sadly Penny has become a victim of the madness.

I wrote last January about Penny and her love of the coffee shop. Every time I brought her to the village she would demand a visit. It didn’t matter where I parked she unerringly tried to head in the right direction, like a homing pigeon with a perfect compass.

The routine was always the same. As I drew near to the shop she would march ahead and shoot in the gate, around to the door and then in to greet everyone. She would receive her fistful of chicken and then politely go back out to reserve a table for me.

That has changed.

I noticed the change the first day I visited after the shops reopened. There was the same excitement – she drew ahead of me, shot in the gate and marched up to the door which happened to be open. But she slammed on her brakes and refused to go in. The staff all saw this and proffered her her chicken treat. No. That didn’t work. She flatly refused to cross the threshold. They had to come out to feed her.

It has been the same each subsequent visit. She’ll charge up to the door but that’s it. Nothing on earth, not even a feed of chicken will entice her to enter. We pondered this little conundrum. Nothing had changed so why was she behaving this way? Then it struck us…

Disinfectant!

They had been liberally spraying the stuff all around as per instructions from The Powers That Be, and there was a distinct aroma in the shop. Penny obviously prefers good fresh air.

Those bastards have a lot to answer for.

Social means antisocial

Head Rambles Posted on by 3

When will this current madness end?

The longer it goes on, the more concerned I become.

When will we see the end of those ubiquitous and horrible “social distancing” signs or the painted spots telling us where to stand? When can I actually enter a shop and chat to the shopkeeper without a fucking big plastic screen in the way making it difficult to converse? When can I wander the village without people frantically throwing themselves out onto the road to avoid me? I grant that the last has little to do with the virus and a lot to do with my reputation but still…..

The longer this goes on the harder it will be for some to break their new-found habits. We are breeding a generation who are terrified of themselves and of each other. Risk Averse has risen to a whole new level where everyone is becoming an imaginary threat. A hug is now seen as the kiss of death instead of a friendly gesture.

I see our gubmint is throwing millions out to villages around the country to make them “covid friendly” or some such nonsense. I gather that a lot is to be spent widening footpaths to allow us to avoid each other which implies that they mean us to be antisocial for some time? They are also widening footpaths to allow shops to increase outdoor seating which is fair enough but also are building cycle lanes everywhere. I still haven’t worked out how cycling is supposed to prevent a virus but maybe I missed something somewhere?

All I want is to be able to walk into a shop and browse the aisles. I want to be able to talk to people without them recoiling in horror because I’m not wearing a nappy on my face. It would be nice to go a full twenty four hours without constant reminders jumping at me from the Interwebs or the television.

Most of all, I would like to be able to sit outside the coffee shop and strike up a casual conversation with the occupants of the next table without having to shout.

Is being social the ultimate victim of the virus?

The Saga of the Moving Statues

Head Rambles Posted on by 8

There is a lovely little story simmering all week in the meeja here.

The Shelbourne Hotel is one of Dublin’s great landmarks since 1824. There are few Irish who aren’t familiar with the building.

The front of the building is graced by four bronze statues holding lamps. They are part of the essence of the hotel façade and an integral part of the architecture.

Click to embiggen

But now they’re gone.

Last Monday, the hotel removed them. There was no reason whatsoever other than pandering to the Black Lives Matter rabble and mob rule ideology. The statues apparently represented two princesses and their two slaves, so any mention of slavery had to be removed according to the spineless management. [Working on that theory then presumably we’ll have to abolish Saint Patrick from the history books too as he was a slave?]

Hotel management said on Tuesday they took the decision to remove the pieces, which have been in place for 153 years, in light of world events and the Black Lives Matter movement calling attention to the legacy of slavery around the world.

Anyhow, there was a bit of an uproar over the removal of the statues. Dubliners weren’t too happy with the removal of something they reckoned was part of old Dublin. And then the Council got involved. The hotel is a protected structure and the statues are considered to be part of that structure and so planning permission has to be obtained before removing them. Naturally they didn’t have that.

There is a lovely further twist in the story of the moving statues now. A leading art historian seemingly took an interest in the story and has announced that the statues aren’t of slaves at all. The anklets on the feet of two of the statues are presumably decorative bangles and not manacles as the management assumed. They do in fact depict two Egyptian women and two sub-Saharan women. You could even argue that the statues honour the very people that Black Lives Matter are on about?

So now presumably the hotel will have to replace the statues.

The moral of the story is simple.

Don’t kowtow to mob rule.

Let us be tankful

Head Rambles Posted on by 3

It’s nearly the end of the month.

This is the time when I try and remember any outstanding bills that may need paying. The likes of the Mastercard have a nasty habit of penalising me if I forget and it is strictly against my religion to pay the banks any more than I have to.

So I paid off my Mastercard [€30 tax – fuck the gubmint!] and remembered that I had an outstanding bill for refuse collection. The refuse mob used to text me reminding me of bills and also they used to text me each week to remind me what bins to put out. They discontinued the texting as they had their new “app” which is fuck all use as it doesn’t remind me of anything unless I remember to open it. There is a little flaw in their logic there?

Then I remembered we were low on heating oil. The little nozzle symbol on the gauge has been flashing for weeks now which means the tank is almost empty. So it was time I put in an order for some oil. I get annoyed when my nozzle flashes.

I went into the web site to order and just out of idle curiosity I checked previous orders. I had had a delivery last January and it cost a shade under €600. So I gritted my teeth and placed the order. A shade over €350! I’m impressed. If only I had a second tank…

I had heard that the price of oil had dropped a bit because of the Virus and the lack of demand.

Maybe we should have more pandemics?

The Cure for Covid

Head Rambles Posted on by 10

It’s as predictable as the sunrise.

No sooner do they introduce new regulations across the Irish Sea in their “war on obesity” than our lot start screaming for the same, only harsher.

The Irish Heart Foundation (IHF) said the government should follow the UK’s lead “through tough new action to tackle obesity that has been made more urgent than ever by evidence of a link to increased risk from Covid-19″.

Of course they have to bring the Virus into it. Having tried to scare the shite out of us all with their doom and gloom over the past few months they are now going further by trying to scare any remaining shite out of the overweight. Lose a few pounds they say, or you will die a horrible death.

Under new UK plans, restaurants will have to display calories on menus, ‘buy one get one free’ deals on unhealthy items are banned and TV ads for junk food are not permitted to air before 9pm.

So here we have advertising bans, the equivalent of health warnings and restrictions on what can be sold. They seem to have missed the plain packs bit, but that’s only a matter of time. We all know the Tobacco Template.

The IHF said the Irish government “should now look at going even further” than this through actions like mandatory reformulation of unhealthy food and drinks and extending the sugar tax on drinks to include confectionery goods.

Oh sweet fuck! As if they didn’t tax us enough.

And how the fuck are they supposed to introduce “mandatory reformulation of unhealthy food and drinks”? What does that even mean? Who decides what is unhealthy? I suppose that given free reign, they’d probably ban everything except tofu and cashew nuts. I have never heard of anything more insane.

By their own claims, 23% of adults are obese. Not overweight, you notice, but obese. This would mean that they are happy with the 77% who aren’t but those 77% are going to have to suffer the same penalties such as higher prices and tasteless crap for food.

Incidentally I don’t know where that quarter of the population lives but it’s not around here. Maybe they are all confined to Leitrim?

“The more successful we are in limiting the impact of the virus the quicker we will be able to return to some sort of normality, so the case for decisive action on obesity has never been more compelling,” the IHF’s head of advocacy, Chris Macey, said in a statement.

So there you have it. All we have to do is lose a few pounds [whether we need to or not] and the pandemic will be over.

Who thought it could be so easy?