An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – To Go or Not To Go

 

The Daily Star's front pages have overtaken Private Eye for outrageous humour... and this headline which it splashed on this week really did sum up the situation now facing travellers.

I'm not going on holiday but I'm bound for Ithaca. When work is writing and editing travel articles, who needs a holiday? So for me, it's a no brainer. I have my paperwork to show I'm working and that I've had two vaccinations, and I've filled in my passenger locator form for the Greek government. I've even started packing...

But what about the people who are going on holiday and have booked everything, only to be told that they shouldn't have done? Do they cancel? Or do they go ahead. Either way, they'll be following government advice – and not following government advice.

It's been argued that the mixed messaging from Downing Street is a deliberate exercise in behavioural psychology, designed to confuse and soften up the population to make them crave rules and be more malleable.

Is there really an intelligent plan behind it all? Maybe Dominic Cummings will shed some light on this and much more this week...

Fundamental Problem

Staying on the subject of compassion... or rather its absence. Comments from Joe Public about the deportation of Abu Hamza to the US read like something from Private Eye's From The Message Boards... but really you couldn't make them up: "only another 3.4 million to go" and joky comments about Hamza's suitability for waterboarding and death by firing squad...

Are people really so unaware of what they are saying? Is this real fundamentalism? Fundamental self-unawareness? What exactly is the difference between these fundamentalists of the right and the fundamentalists of the Taliban?

Or perhaps the question is: what is the obvious similarity?