Away from worldwide bizarre politics, we must still remember those on the Covid frontline. Whether they’re shop workers, teachers, drivers of public transport or nurses of all kinds.
Our nurses are still there mopping our fevered brows as well as mopping up our bodily fluids. In the midst of this pandemic, these angels of mercy are still having to tend us when we are poorly or recovering and they have to push pills into our mouths and stick their thermometers up here, over there and sometimes down there as well.
In the current situation, they are under immense pressure and having to share tasks with whichever departments need their skills. One minute they could be trying to get a grumpy patient to take more chicken soup and the next they could be helping out at a difficult birth – such as a caesarean section.
I won’t go into detail but it is often just known as a c-section nowadays. I myself was a c-baby. We are just ordinary people. The only difference is when we’re in sleeping bags, we really love someone else unzipping them.
If there is one person who would zip it and not say “I told you so”, it is I. Yet the utter foolhardiness of elite footballers jetting off to the United Arab Emirates for a spot of luxury shopping, being celeb-spotted in the shadow of the Burj Khalifa, the famed 830ft tower in downtown Dubai, as well as a spot of light dribbling on Arabia’s much-manicured green and pleasant land, just defies belief. In the past few years, the bosses at Parkhead thought the players had benefited from sun, sand and selfies. So it’s alright this year, then?
Although Celtic FC got the green light from the Scottish Government when restrictions were more relaxed as the rate of infections dropped, the sudden emergence of a new more-infectious strain of coronavirus did not make the club bosses have a re-think about the trip.
Arrogant, overpaid, uncaring elite sportspeople need their R&R too, apparently. Just because they were likely to be infected and become a danger to other people did not make them wonder whether maybe, just maybe, the jolly boys’ international outing should be postponed until next year.
Most soccer people are not known for their intellects. The most ardent low-IQ Covid denier, however, would have thought twice about that squad of smarmy selfishness going when they did.
That they messed up and at least one Celtic player, Christopher Jullien, has Covid and 13 others, plus manager Neil Lennon and his assistant, are isolating was predictable. Karma.
People like them are dangerous to the safety of others. News – Covid is often fatal. They’re almost as dumb as those thousands who swarmed Congress in Washington last week for their violent and lethal act of insurrection where five people died.
The reactions to that atrocity has shown that deluded apologists for them are everywhere.
The new prime minister of Australia, Michael McCormack, described last week’s terror incident as merely “unfortunate” and instead slagged off Twitter and Facebook for rightly blocking Donald Trump’s inane rants.
All together now: “There may be trouble ahead …”
While the unwashed hordes were still lurking in the grounds of the Capitol, one person cut through the chaos with a well-chosen tweet. That was dear, sweet Susie Dent.
You may know her as the clever clogs in Dictionary Corner on TV’s Countdown. Admit it, most of us have watched it in the past year – and the rude, late-evening version with Jimmy Carr.
She has a word of the day which is usually a brain thumper. Last Wednesday it was sequaciousness.
Heck, Susie. What…? She explained it thus: “The blinkered, slavish, unreasoning following of another.” It’s a somewhat unfamiliar term from the 17th Century. Brilliant.
We all think in terms familiar to us. We can’t help it. A young fisherman rushed his pregnant wife to hospital a while back. The new arrival was very imminent but, as sometimes happens, there were some complications.
His father texted him at Western Isles Hospital and told him to ask the staff what the complications were so he could tell his own wife.
After a few minutes, the fisherman texted back: “The midwife said she is going to have a sea section. I have no idea what that is.”
His father, an old fisherman himself, texted: “I think a sea section just means she is going to have a very big buoy.”
