Finding Happy

The world about me is more cheerful. It’s noticeable. It really is. People are happier, and less bothered by other people. Lockdown has come to an end, and despite all the chatter about ‘end of lockdown anxiety’, most people have emerged from their caves and started going about their business as normal. People have stopped dying all about us, and we’re all less likely to get upset by that mindless proportion of the population who choose to take needless risks with other people’s lives.

Sure, there are a few super anxious folk who are refusing to leave the safety of their home. Some of them are still engaged in a degree of curtain twitching and note taking. But they’ll find their way back to normal in their own time. In the meantime, leisure travel on the railways has suddenly returned to pre-pandemic levels. And I suddenly have work to do, once again. Gosh, this will take some getting used to.

So we’re all very cheerful, even though infections are rising exponentially once again. The key difference is that this time the dreaded virus is making its way through a population where the oldies and feeblies have been well and truly vaccinated, and the youngsters just have no sense of their own mortality. Young people since the dawn of time have quite cheerfully headed off towards certain death with a smile on their face and a spring in their step. This bizarre quality is literally the only thing that makes war possible.

I suspect the government will just let the virus rip and see what happens. But you can never really be sure what they’re going to do. I don’t imagine they have much idea of what they’re going to do, beyond the fact that it almost certainly won’t be what they said they were going to do yesterday. But we mustn’t grumble. This is the expected consequence of electing a certain type of person to a position of power.

The twits have decreed that I shan’t be going off on a foreign jaunt this month. Technically, going somewhere is easy enough. It’s the coming back that is the problem. Copenhagen, Cairo, Cleveland, Canada and Cambodia are off the cards. So, Cotswolds, here we come…