I guess you could make it up …

As, apparently right on cue, summer’s weather arrived in the UK last weekend it occurred to me that the Global Covid-19 pandemic is going to be dominating the news pages for a long while yet.

During my occasional excursions out into the wider world of shopping and other “normality” since Tuesday there has been plenty of evidence that the general public already regards the crisis as over – well, perhaps to be more accurate, that because the Government (albeit with caveats) has announced it’s going to be over by 21st June, it jolly well is going to be – so (hey ho) we might as well relax and enjoy ourselves now because the daily death rate is down to single figures and anyway who cares?

Elsewhere, of course, you can always find “alternative views”.

The medics and scientists have suddenly emerged, blinking, into the daylight to press their collective “panic button” with the proposition that the country is potentially on the edge of a “third wave” and therefore it would be catastrophic if the Government were not to delay the “final return to normality” three weeks hence.

One thing’s for certain, however. With the UK’s hospitality and entertainment industries now so close to finally being “let out” there’ll be widespread dissent – if not disorder – if at this late stage the Government were now to heed the latest scientific/medical advice and postpone the event.

The business community had clearly decided “Enough is enough – we must really get back to real life or else fall apart”.

This view is, of course, incompatible with the alternative line that we must “kill the virus” first before releasing anything – or else risk having to go back into another (and harder than ever) lockdown by August.

This week one of the stories hogging the media headlines has been the vexed and complicated issues affecting the world of landlord and tenants.

The Government’s moratorium upon tenant evictions has been widely praised as a necessary cost of “helping the nation through” – except, of course, by landlords – but now that it is scheduled to end, pro-tenant lobby groups are taking to the airwaves to point out that several millions of people will soon be under threat of eviction or bankruptcy having run up huge tenancy arrears.

Interestingly – in one interview I saw on the TV News – a landlord countered this by pointing out that, whilst the moratorium upon evictions had indeed given many disadvantaged tenants security at a difficult time, there was another significant proportion who, though clearly having the means to pay their rent, had used the temporary “no evictions” protection to take a personal “rent-paying” holiday.

When it comes to education matters – let’s leave aside the massive disaster of the 2020’s “exams-marking fiasco(s)” and what I understand this year is likely going to be a carbon-copy repeat (albeit for different reasons), the current “issue de jour” is the lengthy campaign of academic bellyaching about how far behind with their education the closure of school has left school kids generally.

This is a representative example of the notion that – if anyone can identify a disadvantage caused by any random event of history then (1) it is never the fault of anyone directly involved … but instead (2) always the Government’s duty to resolve.

It was therefore perhaps inevitable that – as soon as the Government announced its funding and general scheme to deal with the problem and “help kids catch up” – it would be roundly criticised from all sides not only for being “too little, too late”, but also for proposing that our already “put upon” teaching fraternity should play a part in rectifying the issue.

Yesterday I spent more time that I would have liked listening to and watching farmers and businessmen involved in agriculture holding forth in the media about how – despite the huge rise in UK unemployment caused by the pandemic – they just cannot get the staff to do the seasonable hard labour of picking fruit and vegetables for a standard minimum wage.

It’s a difficult choice as to whether to laugh or cry.

Most British farmers I come across tend to be both hard-line Brexiteers and yet also happy to admit that – without the regular influx of foreigners from EU-land’s poorer countries prepared to work for next to nothing that their businesses have always benefited from – they’d never get the bulk of their food and veg to market (or supermarkets).

Last year and this they’ve had tens of thousands of vacancies both because Brexit has put off foreign workers and our “wonderful” native British unemployed find the work either too hard or too-lowly paid – and so therefore will the Government please sort it out.

And so to finish with another example of pandemic madness:

The lovely people of Devon and Cornwall to no small degree depend for their livelihoods to upon the annual migration of “staycation” Brits and foreign tourists to their part of the UK.

On the other hand, they are also highly conscious of the fact that their general infrastructure (hospitals, public services etc.) is barely capable of coping with the hordes of “outsiders” coming their way every summer.

Added to which, of course, there’s the widespread concern over the prospect of “outsiders” bringing Covid-19 with them and/or failing to comply with any social-distancing rules and other precautions.

Which is why stuff like this happens – see here for a piece by Raven Saunt on a pub in Devon which is barring tourists that appears today upon the website of the – DAILY MAIL