Essays in Idleness

“I don’t want a covid vaccine. I just want an effing haircut.”

The speaker is a dear man, once a tax accountant or something awful like that. Well, try to think of Saint Matthew. And like the Apostle, my correspondent has come around. Now, at the respectable age of eighty-seven, he hates the gummint as only the knowledgeable can hate it. Slightly deaf in his advanced maturity, he is blessed with half-Maltese descendants who speak very loud; and in the face of our seemingly perpetual, and mostly contrived, “crisis,” he observes that, “The Rosary is the only way out.”

For the irreligious, there are other, partial remedies. Telling the truth is highly offensive to the liberal, progressive types. It won’t do you any good to annoy them, but it is fun all the same, and sometimes they forget to punish you.

I’ve never met this correspondent, although he lives not far away. But as I have indicated, I love him dearly, and eagerly turn to his emails for each new instalment of diary and memoir. Indeed, I am blessed with other correspondents who “keep me in the loop” of their lives and adventures. I am a wretched correspondent in return, but a voracious reader, and quite touched when anyone trusts me. When quoting, of course, I do not give their names and addresses. But by now I’m sure the RCMP has files on all of us, which they share with the FBI.

Most are optimistic, in the sense of mildly indomitable; but also optimistic in the sense that they think the Batflu will end, whenupon things will return to “normal” (whatever that was).

A priest forwarded a link that alarmed him. It was from Israel, and explained that international travel will not be deemed safe until some time in 2024 — by when the whole world (including Antarctica) may have reached “herd immunity,” by multiple redundant tests. This, according to bureaucrats in Israel — who are not among the world’s most anal-retentive.

Sir Priest asks: “What is the point of living in a crumbling imperial civilization if the goodies are no longer within reach?”

My own sense is that the Batflu will “just go away,” like other plagues, at its leisure; probably quicker than the Spanish Flu, which was forty times worse. (Another year of it, slightly more or less; possibly less with the dangerous vaccines.) But the lockdowns and restrictions will not end. Our gummints love them so much, that with the help of the “health nazis” (no apology) they will extend them indefinitely, on one excuse or another. There is always a Doktor Fauci for hire.

Did you know he is paid better than the President of the United States? Though if you count perks, the President comes out ahead. For instance, Fauci still lacks a fleet of helicopters.

“Climate change,” too, while it is B.S., offers endless opportunities for the control freaks. And vast populations have proved they can “adapt.” Natted States Canada grow every day more like a less successful Red China. (Our “social credit” system is already coming in, courtesy Big Tech.)

So yes, no more goodies.

But, I assured him, the Catholic Church will survive — the way it does in China.