Carping On

 Jacob Rees Mogg lounged about in Parliament, readjusted his top hat, twiddled his monocle and pronounced that us oiks needed to stop ‘carping on’ about how difficult the government was making our lives with the botched test and trace system and be grateful for everything they’ve done for us. It was a moment of jaw-dropping incredulity. Parents are waiting hours in queues, miles from home, with coughing children to get them tested, so they can send them back to school and go back to work. They are not asking for something they want. It’s a government requirement.

He might as well have said, “Let them eat cake,” or got out his fiddle to watch Rome burn. 

This kind of attitude, from our government worries me more than anything. They want to blame us rather than admit to their own mistakes. Their job is to try to make our lives easier and at the moment everything they do seems to make it harder.

Oh, but hindsight is a wonderful thing, you say. That’s no defence in a situation where there was hindsight (from other countries who were ahead of us) and we chose to ignore it. Actually, that’s not fair. It wasn’t ignorance it was incompetence. I don’t know what the right way to handle it would have been but they really should have taken one path and been clear on it.

Unfortunately, numbers of people in hospital and on a ventilator are again on the rise. The proportion of people testing positive is going up, so it looks they the second spikers have got their wish. The government can’t now tell people that it can be ignored because they spent too long terrifying us in the first spike. 

Anyway, I had no intention of going on a rant about the government I was just going to talk about how important ‘carping on’ is an activity. 

In my view, it’s a sport, in a similar vein to a grouse shoot and therefore should be exempt from the rule of six. The health of the nation would improve considerably if groups of thirty people could get together to participate in a spot of carping on. If the government likes, we could invite a, what my daughter always used to refer to as a ‘fish-boy’ to stand in the middle, holding a proper carp.

There are Celebrity fish-boys too

Humans need social interaction. It is more important for our physical and mental health than we realise. The people who have worked, where they meet humans face to face, the whole time, have no idea how devastating that lack of connection can be. Obviously, this is mostly the young, who are now being blamed for killing the old folk, while the old folk, are actually rapidly declining because their opportunities for carping on have been lost.

Churches, choirs and bereavement groups that aren’t charities have all been forced to close (if they ever managed to open in the first place). The AA group that meets in my local green space has been forced to ask a member to leave, which I’m sure is fine. I mean they can always stay at home and have a drink on their own, right?

I worry about how this country’s all cause mortality is going to look and so I would like to propose that carping on becomes a national sport. We would win Olympic medals at it, the fish-boys of Essex would become famous and our government’s current management style has given us plenty of material to work with.