Cruising takes a bruising
As our doughty UK businesses emerge from lockdown in order to take the country back into the bright sunny uplands of a post-Brexit, post-coronavirus world in which we start paying for the famously mega-big “unprecedented’ level of Treasury support that the Tory Government has thrown at everything in sight in any effort to keep the show on the road – inevitably occasional glitches, inconsistencies and lunacies come to light.
Depending, of course, upon which interest group you’re from and therefore your perspective upon the “protection of public health” versus “Sod that, let us get back to work before our businesses completely wither on the vine because we’re not allowed to … (get back to work, I mean)” argument.
One that has erupted since I went to bed last night is over the vexed subject of sea cruises.
Those Rusters who have survived the coronavirus crisis will be aware that in the heady, early days of the pandemic – before anyone, still less Boris, was taking it seriously – it appeared that the most unfortunate place for anyone to be at the time was on board one of the vast cruise ships that were traversing the world full of wealthy oldies trying to fill their daily lives with something useful positive and possibly educational before the Grim Reaper comes calling.
The facile way I began describing this part of the holiday travel industry to my drinking buddies in the Frog & Bucket pub down my road was that it was the equivalent of a fleet of giant off-shore residential care homes in each of which, should the virus descend, there would be very little chance of avoiding being infected in living quarters – both public-spaced and private – that were structurally ‘aired’ from top to bottom by air conditioning ducts circulating every germ on board 24 hours a day.
And so we come to the current “emerging from lockdown” situation in which businesses of every kind are desperate to “get back on the bicycle”.
The sea cruising industry is not best pleased by the latest advice being given out by the Foreign Office that people should avoid it altogether.
See here for a link to a piece by James Robinson, Tom Pyman, Sophie Borland and Mark Palmer that appears today upon the website of the – DAILY MAIL
My only comment would be the obvious one that – in these strange times – there are just as many members of the UK population who, to one degree or another, are still mightily (and understandably) scared of catching the virus as there are who “want to get back to normal life in every respect” as fast and completely as possible.
