Self-reinforcing Suspicion Matrix
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Two weeks of isolation has been enough to gravely aggravate my gout and I now yearn for the sweet release of death. May the darkness, that soft quilt of eternal night, descend over me soon.
Perhaps this tragedy was avoidable. But I had a larder bloated with rich meats and sweet wines that needed to be urgently, even greedily, consumed. These things won’t keep indefinitely and I – patriot that I am – refuse to waste good food (very good food) while my country is in crisis.
Consuming guinea fowl for seventeen meals in a row may seem like a heroic act but it was truly the least I could do in these desperate times.
In order to take my mind off the agony coursing through my feet, I have decided to blackleg my own strike, as we all knew I would from the outset, and turned my attention back to the Office.
Her Majesty’s Government has yet to respond to my repeated and insistent queries as to whether ‘autocratic periodical editor’, ‘vociferous cultural commentator’ or even (shudder) ‘lifestyle blogger’ have been accorded Key Worker status.
As such, until they tell me otherwise, I will bravely continue with my essential duties, sewing confusion, fear and discord wherever I can in the hope that, on that bright morning when the Dread Virus has passed, the sun spills its golden light upon the tender shoots of a burgeoning forest of pure PANIC.
I have been sent a number of fretting missives clamouring for my sage counsel. I have picked one, from a respectable emissary of Middle England, which is representative of the quandary many find themselves in right now: am I right to grass on my neighbours?
Dear Sir
As a lifelong and unrepentant curtain-twitcher, never happier than when my sanctimonious beak is snugly ensconced in other people’s business, this public health crisis has presented something of a golden opportunity.
By day I prowl the streets on my government-permitted exercise, chastising (at a cautious distance) anyone who looks like they might stray too close to my two metre zone of exclusion; by night I bellow out of my window at gathering herds of cats. Honestly, I have never known contentment like it.
However, tensions have arisen between me and my neighbours. Yesterday, I took the opportunity to criticise the woman next door when I spied in her shopping bag a number of items that I deem to be non-essential (chocolate, a copy of the Guardian, tampons, etc.) When she started to cry I called her a traitor.
Her husband has since called me and left a voicemail (I was out at the park shaming any children who gazed longingly in the direction of the swings) threatening to ‘do me in’ and likening me, in most graphic terms, to a woman’s reproductive vestibule.
I have since called the police’s new number for ‘concerned citizens’ and reported the man’s wife for her thoughtless purchases and cavalier attitude towards the health of myself, our nation’s elderly, and our NHS (about which though, I must admit, I’ve not been fond of until very recently).
Please, dear sir, give me your opinion as to who is in the right here.
Yours, in predatory vigilance, and under the delegated authority of all Right Thinking people in Britain,
Harold Velcro-Wasp
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Dear Harold,
These are indeed troubled times and we must all play our part. In the words of regular homosexual and sometime poet, W.H. Auden, ‘We must love one another or die’.
Like the gusset of my slacks, when we come under sustained and unpleasant pressure it is so much easier to split asunder than to hold together.
But, like the gusset of my slacks, who is to blame for that sundering? Is it the general seam, holding the line in the face of adversity? Or is it the loose stitch, wayward and irresponsible?
All of this is a roundabout way of saying is that your neighbours are those loose stitches, whose selfish and callous rebellion places my undercarriage at perilous risk of exposure.
If the fabric of society (and, to belabour the point, my slacks) gives way, where will we be?
I’ll tell you: with our vulnerable testicles dangling in the unforgiving air, tongued by a cruel wind.
That’s the message I want you (and, just as importantly, my tailor) to take from this hideous metaphor .
So yes, inform on your friends, your family, and perfect strangers if they dare to stray from the ancient rules and customs that have determined our way of life since they were imposed a week ago.
I strongly believe that if any good is to come from this dire and troubling situation, it will be the creation of a self-reinforcing matrix of suspicion and pious judgement among the people of this country.
And, in that spirit of always assuming the worst intentions of everyone, how, pray, did you post your letter to the Panic Office? Did you post in on your sanctioned constitutional, or did you make a special journey for this unnecessary errand? Answer me Harold, you filthy anarchist! You want to see us all dead? You hateful burden, you excrescence, you defiler of the social compact! Burn in hell!
Yours affectionately,
The Editor
