• The epidemic eases and our bourgeoisie are reinvigorated – rushing around like headless chickens desperate to recover that lagged lost time – action speaks loud to the Protestant ethic – as validation of a meaningless life.
 • What if you’re allergic to sodium hypochlorite? The essential ingredient in common old bleach. With every doorknob, handrail, balustrade, post and panel wiped over hourly; righteously; religiously; probably foolishly. My eyes were running after one short trip to the last launderette – fingertips smelling oddly lemony.
 • Locked-down old guard institutions routinely abuse consumer loyalty. HELP OUR WORKERS – or more especially our shareholders’ cut. Football clubs with bookmaker sponsors: Do you love your team? Well, confirm your faith by branded betting all your furlough funds. Airline tycoons drawing government grants – macho crowing, keen to compete – until they can’t. As wage-support subsidies for laid-off workers are laundered in and out of their closeted accounts.
 • Saw an ambulance team parked up by the shops. To cheering crowds; rose petals strewn; trumpeters blaring; fireworks rocketing; buntings hoisted; coffee and croissants freely availing, vape pens gifted with spinach-pear smoothies. Must be time to resurrect that nurse’s uniform down from the attic… try it on… see what transpires…
 • Ubiquitous news channels’ countdown tables; pandemic deaths and testing totals updated daily. Reminds of the sixties Auckland Star had a body count panel for the Vietnam War – front page, top right – Gooks v Yanks – to boost the morale of your twelve-year-old trooper sweating the Communists coming our way.
 • I am often ridiculed for railing against plastic; not as packaging, as a building material or utensil component; and not for its utility, specifically for its fucking ugliness, which daily upsets my aesthetic esteem. I removed a bit on antimicrobial surface function from my neglected novel – how metals KILL viruses, germs and fungi – GOLD as the Daddy, followed by SILVER, to COPPER and BRASS. Is the reason they’d drink from metal-rimmed cups in olden times, to neutralise any pending poisons – as silver-coated tableware destroys bacteria between each course – the list goes on. And ends today with the urgent issue of Covid-19 – would be rapidly removed from public places if we still used brass for doorknobs and bannisters, latches and lamps – instead of those awful stainless-steel handles, hafts, holders? Those utilitarian cost-cutting cunts. Collateral killers?
 • On personal hygiene. With all this social distancing no one gives a damn about halitosis; I’m ladling garlic all over all. And as for body odour, I’ll never forget my grandfather’s motto: I have a half-hour bath every Saturday night; whether I need it or not.
 • So, when are we getting full-body condoms for VERY safe sex?
 • And what about distance-measuring sensors ultra integrated to satnav systems with track and trace networks party programmed to chime like a bell whenever an infected citizen appears? Or just get a dog can smell your diseases – basset or beagle?
 • Received a shipment of fangled facemasks. Silkily satin? Feels like you’re wearing women’s knickers over your face… I would image…
 • Some day soon will someone in authority admit that precautionary pandemic restrictions are utterly pointless? While pandering to panic for the middle classes as the only persons able to afford that vanity-promoting social distancing – in which they wallow. That NOTHING would function in our modern world if actual workers obeyed those rules.
 • I wonder what they’re paying the sad sack sucker sat in some cubicle scanning the big-screen video fan walls flickering over all football matches? Immersive bunkum installed to mitigate each echoing stadium. Our hero alert to boob or bollock? Fingers poised over Alt-delete in anticipation of a mega massed mooning? Which you know we football fans are keen to complete!