Travel is very much in the news this morning. You know the world is properly upside down when a conservative government nationalises part of the railways and Priti Patel thinks.
Now that it appears the new variant of Coronavirus isn’t vaccine resistant and scientists have realised that calling it the variant first described in India helps people to be less racist, we still have a small problem with travel because no one wants someone to bring in a variant that does get round the vaccine. The government are actually in a difficult position. Gradual unlocking is harder. It’s much easier to say,”No,” than to ask people to use their own judgement.
Amber means go but don’t go. Get ready to go but don’t go, or keep going but get ready to stop. The amber on a traffic light has always confused me. When I was a kid we used to play a game called traffic lights that I don’t fully remember the rules to but I think it was a running around game and when someone shouted red you stopped and green you ran. Amber, I remember, as being the confusing one. There were different types of amber too, just like in real traffic lights, there was amber on its own and red and amber and I think in our game we added green and amber into the mix. I remember always getting it wrong and in my small person’s brain, thinking that maybe I shouldn’t learn to drive. I was always overly logical. I talked to my dad about it and he laughed, “No one really understands the orange traffic light,”he said, refusing to use a poncy word for a colour we all knew, “but when you are driving you just have to bump into other cars. It’s simple.”
The government want us to stay at home but they also want the economy to start moving, which actually means that lots of us shouldn’t stay at home. Tricky, isn’t it? Holidays are a particular minefield. It seems decadent to want a holiday at the moment but the travel industry will collapse if we all stay at home for ever. Also, many people deferred holidays from last year and if they don’t go, when the government says the ‘could but shouldn’t’ then they won’t get their money back.so, the solution is that people should go if they have to but should not leave the house for ten days when they return, which is absolutely fine if they don’t live with anyone who didn’t go with them (but we won’t talk about that logic).
As we don’t have hotel quarantining for amber list countries then people have to be trusted to do what they’ve been asked and we know that the people who are going on holiday when they can but shouldn’t probably aren’t taking the threats of this virus very seriously.
It will probably all be fine, although I’ve said that before and been wrong. But I think that most of us will be pretty fed up if we’ve given a year of our lives to this thing, been jabbed with stuff we didn’t particularly want in our bodies to have it all messed up by leaky boarders. I mean, what did we vote Brexit for if it wasn’t to keep control of who comes into our country?
Never fear though, Priti is here. The Home Secretary has been thinking. She can save the day. What we need to do it make random checks on people who should be quarantining. Send the police round at random times to check that they are at home. That will work. She’s personally seen to it that 10,000 checks a day can be made. That’s brilliant. In normal times Heathrow has 80 million people arriving each day and 270,000 are travelling to amber list countries from the uk this week so I’m sure it will be fine. Good old Priti.
Seriously though, I am considering getting myself a guard penguin. If only their poo didn’t smell so fishy.
No comments:
Post a Comment