Let’s leave the coronabug alone for a while. Every time I switch on the television or radio or even dip into the newspapers, I am bombarded with gloomy ‘facts,’ figures and theories about it all. I am told that we are all doomed, that the dangers are being overstated and that the current lockdown will last another three weeks/six months/three years and so on.

I know I am not a man of huge intellect, but I am becoming ever more confused,

Thankfully I am back home on Dartmoor and can readily confirm that despite so many reports to the contrary in the mewling media, the lockdown is definitely working – at least on the roads. My journey back here last Sunday was almost a pleasure. The motorway was virtually empty and despite the many warnings I had received to the effect that I would undoubtedly be stopped and not allowed to come back into Devon, I didn’t see a copper or cop car throughout the journey.

Anyway, let’s see what else I can dredge up.

I read with a certain degree of horror that the United Nations has just handed China a key role on the human rights council.

This is surely madness! The Chinese government have an appalling and well-documented record of human rights abuses and there is widespread suspicion that they are lying through their teeth about the origins and extent of the current pandemic, which The Trumple described as Wuhan flu.

Still, what else have we come to expect of the UN, which delights in such perverse behaviour? Repressive states have been given seats on human rights bodies before. I seem to remember Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya chairing the committee at one stage.

As it stands, China will be sitting alongside that other bastion of democracy, compassion and fair play, Chad, which has repeatedly been accused of human rights abuses by Amnesty International and is the base of the Boko Haram terror group.

At this rate, it will only be a matter of time before China is put in charge of the World Health Organisation.

Then we can all tremble. I am sure most Chinese people are decent, neighbourly folk but for a long time they have been led by men without morals and suddenly they are putting themselves into a position whereby they could well end up ruling the world. They already control much of Africa and are responsible for so many problems in that continent. After all, who is responsible for the wiping out of the rhino, the near extermination of pangolins, the sale of lion bones and the escalation of the ivory trade, but China.

They are destroying national parks and wild areas in Tanzania and Ethiopia to make way for farms, highways and massive dams. They are exporting over one million tons of indigenous trees a year from Central and Southern Africa and taking payment in the form of mines and millions of acres of land for the building of roads and dams that can only benefit China, because they send their own people in to construct these projects.

And with the horrific logging in Africa’s great forests, wild animals are being decimated for the bush meat trade. Again, over one million tons of illegal meat leaves the forests each year, entirely due to China.

They have plundered and pillaged the oceans around Africa, killing fish, coral, sharks for their abominable soup and basically flattening every living things in our oceans.

And now because of the wet markets in their country where animals from different corners of the world live side by side in enclosures and cages, the coronabug developed and spread to the extent that entire countries are likely to go bankrupt and countless thousands will die from the disease or associated causes.

When is the rest of the world going to wake up to the danger and ban trade in Chinese products, even ban their people from other countries.

To me, the Chinese nation as a whole is very similar to the ‘bug’ that left their land and is now infecting almost every country in the world – silent, dangerous and destructively evil. Yet even the United Nations are kow-towing to them.

I know I said I wasn’t going to write about the coronabug and I have but I always marvel at the way Mankind sticks its collective head in the sand and ignores great danger if there is a hint of profit in it for themselves.

It seems that the boss of Ryanair, Michael O’Leary has sparked a race row after calling for Muslim passengers to be checked at airports in a bid to prevent terror attacks, as he claimed ‘that is where the threat is coming from.’

I don’t suppose he is a hundred percent correct, but he has a point. O Leary went on to say that terrorists ‘will generally be males of a Muslim persuasion’ – and that families with young children should be let through security as they are less likely to blow people up. He added that the only way to deal with the threat was to vet single male Muslims travelling on their own.

I am not sure whether he was being brutally honest or suicidal as he must have foreseen the uproar his comments would provoke in this ever more sensitive age.

The Muslim Council of Britain said the comments amounted to discrimination against Muslim passengers and branded the comments ‘racist’. Hate-crime monitoring group Tell Mama (surely an apt sort of name) suggested his ‘flippant’ words could end up having serious consequences for the budget airline.  

O’Leary told The Times, ‘Who are the bombers? They are going to be single males travelling on their own. If you are travelling with a family of kids, on you go; the chances you are going to blow them all up is zero.’

A spokeswoman for the Muslim Council of Britain said: ‘Michael O’Leary should be under no illusion: his comments are racist and discriminatory. He openly advocates discrimination against ‘males of a Muslim persuasion,’ which presumably is not based on specific intelligence but solely whether someone ‘looks or acts like a Muslim. This is the very definition of Islamophobia.’

The spokeswoman said Muslims already face challenges in airline travel and added: ‘It is a shame that such racism is being expressed so openly, and that the CEO of a large airline would so want to discriminate against his customers so brazenly.’

And Tell Mama said the comments could come back to bite Mr O’Leary’s business, likening them to jewellery firm boss, Gerald Ratner’s disastrous remark in 1991 when he called one of his own products ‘total crap’ and was later axed after profits tumbled.

Labour MP Khalid Mahmood said Mr O’Leary was ‘encouraging racism’ and asked why he wouldn’t suggest white people be given the same treatment ‘to see if they’re being fascists.’

‘If he can tell me what colour Muslims are then I’d be very happy to learn from him – you can’t judge a book by its cover,’ he told the Times.

‘He’s being very blinkered and is actually encouraging racism.’

O Leary’s comments were probably somewhat thoughtless but if they were followed up, we would not have the interminable nonsense of largely useless security checks in modern airports and air travel would probably be considerably safer.

Not all terrorist attacks over the past two decades have been carried out by Muslims, but the majority of them were and all the false righteousness of various lobby groups won’t alter that.

Many folk here in Britain are already complaining bitterly about the current lockdown and the problems it causes. Even though I am not at all sure that lockdown is the best way to tackle the coronabug, I accept that Bunter Johnson and his team of ‘experts’ are doing what they feel is correct.

I have spent the last few days trawling through what has been and is being written about this pandemic and how to tackle it but stories coming out of my own country, Zimbabwe and the rest of Southern Africa really tear at my heart strings.

We are constantly advised that frequent and thorough hand-washing with soap and water is one of the most basic weapons against the coronavirus but in Harare alone, one million people are without running water.

Last Sunday, a crowd of more than fifty people gathered at the community borehole in Kuwadzana 3, a high-density suburb west of Harare. They needed water and social distancing was far from their minds.

“We have not had water for three days,” said Nozipho Mpambawashe, a twenty-five year old mother of one who added that the water supply has been erratic for the past two weeks

“We are worried because we don’t have a reliable water supply. Even with a lockdown, I will still need water for cleaning, washing, cooking and drinking,” she said.

Frequent hand washing will be far from her mind or the minds of the people collecting water with her.

In the safe environment of my Cotswold retreat, I have peered with a feeling of desperate foreboding at pictures of big crowds desperately trying to buy maize meal in Harare and Bulawayo. No chance for social distancing, no sign of masks, just a massive squash of people trying to get food for their families – people who have to choose between hunger and an invisible virus. Almost five hundred people have been arrested this week for being on the streets in breach of the government lockdown. They were crammed into police lorries and taken away but in the same week one thousand six hundred and eighty prisoners were released because prisons are overcrowded and congested. Where is the logic in that I wonder?

In the early hours of the morning on day five of the Zimbabwe lockdown, the police raided Sakubva market in Mutare and confiscated three tons of fresh vegetables which were later set alight. Burning food when the country is in lockdown, people are desperate for food and over half the population is dependent on International Food Aid to survive, is very hard to understand.

With incidents like this taking place in my own country, I despair for the people if this coronabug establishes itself there as it seems almost inevitable that it will.

Thus when I hear people complaining about the situation here or read about idiots like Piers Morgan ranting on television about government inefficiency in controlling things, my blood pressure tends to rise sharply. It seems to be those who are most comfortable that are making the most noise.

Mind you, even after all my reading on the subject, I have huge misgivings about this pandemic. We know that the epicentre of the outbreak was Wusan in China. Most of the Western world then reacted by following ‘scientific’ data originally supplied by China and propagated by the World Health Organisation.

Yet none of it makes sense.

How is it that five hundred miles West of Wusan, lies the city of Shanghai, with a population of twenty-seven million people, which has to date reported only three hundred and thirty-nine cases with three hundred and twenty seven of them recovering? Similarly some thousand miles to the North of Wusan lies Beijing, with a population of twenty-one million people, which to date reports four hundred and sixteen cases with three hundred and ninety-four getting better.

How can this be when cities around the world have thousands of cases and hundreds of deaths?  London is five and a half thousand miles from Wusan, New York seven and a half thousand, Spain over six thousand and Italy and Paris both about five and a half thousand. Yet all these places are struggling to cope with thousands of cases.

Surely it cannot be that the western world’s medical preparedness and scientific abilities are less competent than the Chinese? Or is it that our Western governments are just more inept than those of the East?

And of course there are the figures. Worldwide, from 1^st January to 21^st March 2020, seventeen million people died. Of those, eleven thousand, one hundred and seventy-seven deaths were attributed to Covid-19. In China, during the same period, two and a half million people died and only three thousand three hundred from the virus. Also bear in mind, we may never know if this tiny percentage of global deaths, was actually due to the virus itself or if people, who were dying anyway, simply died with the virus. What we do know for certain although the whittering media don’t tell us this, is that most of those who have died have been old, infirm and ailing, and/or, suffering from debilitating immunodeficiency ailments. This is regrettable of course, but it seems that very few healthy people have anything to fear from the coronabug.

Writing in The Spectator, Dr. John Lee, a retired pathologist put it this way, ‘We have yet to see any statistical evidence for excess deaths in any part of the world. In Britain, it appears that in the first week of March this year, almost exactly the same number of people died as in the same period last year.’ Dr. Lee then quotes figures from the US Centre for Disease Control which show that since September, flu has infected thirty-eight million Americans, hospitalised just under four hundred thousand and killed twenty-three thousand. This does not cause public alarm because flu is familiar.

The catastrophic danger peddled by much of the media is increasingly being exposed as statistical manipulation but regrettably, too slowly. In some countries with high mortality rates, we are now told they only count those who are hospitalised as Corona cases. This conveniently ignores many who have the virus but much less severe symptoms. This generates headline mortality rates that have little statistical validity but terrify people.

With social media and the news outlets misleading the world, it would be nice if we could look to the World Health Organisation for reassurance and guidance based on the facts, but alas, that is not the case.

It is now clear that the WHO-Director General Tedros Ghebreyesus, who appears to have limited medical training owes his appointment to China. Not surprising then that he colluded with the Chinese health authorities early on in the crisis by peddling the original falsehood that there was no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus. The story then was that it was only being transmitted between animals and this delayed the raising of the alarm. This was a blatant lie and he knew it, but he was happy to do the bidding of his benefactor.

Tedros, by the way, is the same bloke who picked Robert Mugabe who devoted his life to ruining the lives of millions to line his own pockets, to be the WHO’s roaming Goodwill Ambassador to the United Nations. Now half the population of Zimbabwe is reliant on outside assistance for food thanks to the late president’s land-seizures. Just what Mr. Ghebreyesus knew about Mugabe and saving peoples’ lives that we don’t, I really cannot imagine, but to have this man serving as the world’s Surgeon General, tells me we’re listening to someone who cannot be trusted to tell the time of day. Thanks, in no small part to him, we are faced with a situation which I suspect is unprecedented in history, in war or peace, where governments have stopped their people going to work by executive decree.

Going back to Southern Africa, South Africa itself has come to a standstill, there is widespread panic and fear of dying stalks the land. In South Africa, roughly half a million people die each year of various causes. If we assume that the virus has been in the country since the beginning of the year, then approximately one hundred and twenty-five thousand people have died this year of other causes. Out of this total we are told that five have died from the virus.

With the South African economy now in freefall, it appears there is very little hope of a better life for the vast majority of the citizenry and everyone is destined to be poorer. Because this is Africa and not Europe or the US, the knock-on effects of a real depression are certain to be far more severe. While richer countries have greater resources to cushion the fall as people lose their incomes, this is not the case in most of Africa and with most African governments effectively bankrupt, the future for the continent looks pretty bleak.

Posturing politicians tell us that this is not about money but human lives but few of them are looking at the reality for those on the lower end of the income scale. It is bad enough here in Britain but in Africa with millions of penniless people cooped up in shacks in squalid conditions without an income, mass starvation seems almost inevitable. This will almost certainly lead to civil unrest, violence and more deaths than would occur with the coronabug.

Yes of course this virus is alarming and a danger to humanity, but so are many other things and I find it difficult to accept that the Corona contagion is more lethal than the response to it. And as I have said before, I believe that much of the blame for the misery ahead lies with the media and their enjoyment in imparting and embellishing bad news.

One of the joys of my house-sitting stints is to watch someone else’s television. Their screens are invariably far larger than the one at home and they have access to SKY sport.

This stint – and it just might end in a day or two – has been very different. For a start, there is no sport to watch as it has been closed down all over the world. Yes, I can watch historical sport but for me, the pleasure of any sporting contest is not knowing the result till the last minute and that is impossible with games that have already been played.

I have been here nearly three weeks now and although to begin with, I watched the news and news programmes, for the past ten days, I have only watched the odd gentle comedy programme like Last of the Sumer Wine. News programmes no longer give us news. Instead we are bombarded by a series of ‘experts’ warning us all that the end is nigh.

Much of what these people tell us is completely illogical or with yawning gaps. Are they deliberate I wonder and if so why? Could the real situation be a great deal better than we are being told? Clearly Bunter Johnson is not sitting in number ten making up fanciful scenarios, nor is he doing his own research. He relies on his surrounding officialdom, but the template he has been advised to accept as gospel truth is the ultra-gloomy prognosis of Imperial College London, with its talk of hundreds of thousands of deaths from millions of infections.

Yet Imperial College has a history of forecasting disaster scenarios, none of which came true. From the economic disaster predicted by leaving the EU to the doom and gloom that accompanied previous epidemics like SARS and Bird Flu, they all turned out to be twaddle.

Coronavirus is obviously very catching and more than a little dangerous to health but every year Britain is hit by seasonal winter flu. Around about fifteen thousand folk turn their toes up with this, but the overwhelming majority of those who die have a severe pre-existing condition which grievously weakens the constitution. It seems the same is applying to coronavirus.

How many of the dead and the infected had or have an already damaged health system and what are the percentages? These are the figures we should be getting but we only hear about those few who died without having a pre-existing condition – and they are a very, very tiny minority.

Even with my limited knowledge of health matters, it seems clear that many of those who are in sound health have already had a dose of coronabug and recovered without fuss. But how many? We are not being told. Yet back in Parliament and seemingly fit as a fiddle is Nadine Dorries who was laid low for a few days and quickly got over it. Matt Hancock was pontificating last evening and Prince Charles is back at work. It seems that those who recover from the bug then achieve immunity and can return to work with no risk to themselves or others. If that is the case, why are so many still being isolated like the not-so-far-affected?

Every day we are shown pictures of desperately gasping unfortunates on hospital beds. Why not show people beaming away and raising a thumb or slurping a glass of plonk in triumph? Silly question I suppose. Good news doesn’t sell newspapers.

Meanwhile, out of Oxford comes a scenario based on intensive research which contradicts the Imperial College model. According to the Oxford research it would have been better to isolate those with pre-existing conditions immediately but let the hale-and-hearties carry on. A minority would have had a bad dose, but the majority would have shrugged off a mild dose as we all do with winter’s annual flu.

Apparently, there is now a fast and simple testing kit which can be self-administered at home or in a brief visit to outpatients which will – I hope – be made available to everyone. If that works, we will know how many have already had a mild dose, recovered and with their new immunity could face the world again and be a danger to nobody. The new kit – if we get it – could tell us that in minutes.

So did a panicky government accept the most luridly violent prognosis from Imperial College of a national holocaust and on that basis destroy the economy as well as many lives? We shall certainly know that when life eventually gets back to normal..

So what if two million people eventually catch the bug and thirty thousand die? That would be fifteen thousand more than the annual winter flu toll – tragic but not a national crisis. And fifteen thousand as a percentage of the national population of sixty-seven million is a small fraction of one percent.

Am I being too optimistic I wonder? Perhaps so but if Oxford is right and Imperial College wrong, government figures are up the creek and we are all being misled.

Let’s face it, during the foot-and-mouth epidemic farmers were told to slaughter six million beasts in the national herd – and did. Later it was confirmed not one of them need have died. It was all a load of official rubbish but again it wrecked a lot of lives.

So yes, things are serious but without the media, we would all get on with our lives and a few more people would die than usual, but the rest would end up hale and hearty – as well as being immune to the coronabug.

At least I have enjoyed more time than usual to read, write and listen to music.

Well, it seems that the Royal Biscuit is only an ordinary biscuit from tomorrow. He and his tame Yank have left Canada and flown – by private jet of course – to Los Angeles where they will be closer to their Hollywood friends.

As soon as they arrived in America, Donald Trump announced that the American government would not be responsible for the cost of their security and I can’t blame him for that.

After all, the Markle snubbed Mr Trump when he came to the UK for a state visit – and a snub it was, whatever was said about her being excused royal duties as she was on maternity leave.

Although the Biscuit did deign to meet Trump, he appeared lukewarm about it. He missed a state dinner at Buckingham Palace for the president and earlier the same day, during a visit to the Royal Picture Gallery, he noticeably hung back from being photographed with the president, chatting instead with his daughter Ivanka.

At the time, Trump brushed aside their differences – although he made clear he knew all too well that the duchess had attacked him. “She was nasty to me,” he said in an interview, “and that’s OK for her to be nasty, it’s not good for me to be nasty to her and I wasn’t.

‘She’s doing a good job, I hope she enjoys her life… I think she’s very nice.” It sounded like a generous, high-minded response which anyone who knew anything about Trump didn’t believe for a second was sincere.

But I must admit, I feel a bit sorry for Donald Trump. He is an oaf with the bombast and arrogance of a street thug but he does seem to get things done. He was legally elected by people who were fed up with the venality and underhand dealings of the Clintons and their democrats. Yet for all the good he has done – and he has – Trump is consistently under vitriolic attack, not only from the Democrats, but also from the American – and to an extent the British – media.

In fact, the situation was summed up in a joke sent to me yesterday. It is not terribly funny but seemed pretty apt.

‘President Trump invited Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, for lunch on his mega yacht one day. She accepted and during lunch, a gust of wind blew her Maj’s beautiful hat into the water.

The hat floated off about fifty feet, then the wind died down and it just floated in place. The crew and all the queen’s entourage were scrambling to launch a boat to get it, when Trump waved them off, saying “Never mind, boys, I’ll get it.”

Then Donald climbed over the side of the yacht, walked on the water to the hat, picked it up, walked back on the water, climbed onto the yacht, and handed queen Elizabeth her hat.

Everyone on the yacht was speechless.

No one knew what to say, not even the queen.

But that afternoon, the BBC, Sky News, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, CNN all knew how to cover the story. Their banner headlines read:

“TRUMP CAN’T SWIM”

As my great friend Mfanasibili (Two Boy) Nkosi would put it, ‘Nuff said.’

There can be little doubt that the current coronabug crisis started in China and nobody who reads these pages can have any doubt of my feelings on that country. Yet now China has been proclaiming its own generosity in helping the rest of the world deal with what President Trump with undeniable accuracy if not much tact calls ‘the Wuhan virus.’

Beijing has made much of the supplies of masks and testing equipment which its manufacturers have been delivering at pace and at a reasonable price to countries such as Spain and the Netherlands. What Beijing does not tell us is that when the virus took hold of Wuhan, Chinese companies were ordered to buy up vast quantities of thermometers, surgical masks, hand sanitisers and antibacterial wipes from countries such as Turkey, Canada and Australia.

Somehow I feel that China has got the better of this exchange.

The Spanish newspaper El Pais has reported that the virus-testing equipment arriving from China had been shown in Spanish laboratories to have an accuracy rate of thirty per cent rather than the eighty per cent advertised. The paper quoted a Spanish doctor as saying that such a failure rate meant the tests were useless.

Similarly, a newspaper in the Netherlands has revealed that a batch of six hundred thousand face masks, delivered to its health service from China, was unusable: ‘They have membranes that do not function properly, so do not block particles of the virus,’ a spokesman was quoted as saying.

Of course this means that the masks are not only useless but downright dangerous. A health worker would think that they were being protected when the pathway to their lungs was actually being exposed to the virus.

So how I wonder will this affect Bunter Johnson’s government decision to award the contract to deliver the next generation of smartphone technology, 5G, to the Chinese company Huawei.

Leaving aside the argument forcibly put forward by the U.S. government that it is folly to allow a company intimately connected with a Communist dictatorship into the heart of our data-based national infrastructure, is Huawei actually capable of delivering equipment of the necessary reliability?

I doubt that anything will be cancelled now, although the pressure on Bunter J from Conservative MPs, still adamantly opposed to the Huawei deal will mount – and it is probably to mollify them that Downing Street has been talking about ‘doing less trade with China in future.’

I will believe that when I see it! It is already too late as far as recent steel and nuclear deals are concerned. And Bunter remains firmly committed to the speedy rolling-out of super fast broadband – which only Huawei can deliver in the time frame he wants.

In other words, the Government’s apparently outraged comments to journalists that everything about our trading relationship with China is now to be reconsidered are little more than empty rhetoric.

Let’s face it, if this is what the Government really intends to do, it’s pretty stupid to allow such threats to leak out before it is ready to take action.

Once again, I fear that we will be kow towing to the Chinese and that makes me cross.

I received an email from a friend yesterday asking whether I was alright as I haven’t ranted in nearly a week. His concern is much appreciated and one of the nicer aspects of the current coronacrisis but in truth, the said crisis has caused me so much uncertainty and confusion over the past few days that my brain has been too scrambled for scribbling.

I am still at ‘my’ mansion in leafy Gloucestershire but should have been going home today when the owners were due to return from Australia.

Huh! Earlier in the week, the told me that their flight had been cancelled and they would be coming back four days earlier than intended. That flight was then cancelled as well because they weren’t allowed to stop for refuelling in Hong Kong so when asked, I told them I could probably manage another three weeks here if absolutely necessary.

Then I was told that they wouldn’t need me after all as their son Olly who is a lawyer in London would come out on Sunday (today) to relieve me. I spoke with Olly on the phone and he seemed to be looking forward to it, but the next day that fell through too, due apparently to some problem at his work.

So now I am back to the extra three weeks unless stranded tourists in Australia are to be airlifted home. I am far better off than most people in this lockdown. I am in a comfortable home, surrounded by five acres of privately owned field and nestled in one of the most beautiful valleys imaginable. I can walk to my hearts content and enjoy the peaceful ambience of the Cotswold countryside.

But I was looking forward to going home to bleak Princetown and the Moor today so I face the next three weeks with a heavy heart and a big lump of disappointment at not going home.

But I am unlikely to catch the bug in this idyllic spot so my real sympathies lie with the little people in the cities – particularly London where my daughter and granddaughter are holed up. NHS staff in general are quite rightly, being heaped with the praises of a grateful nation. Imagine, though the feelings of the lowly folk – the hospital cleaners or the lads working on a building site. They have no choice but to commute to work, squeezing themselves onto crowded tube trains where any notion of maintaining social distance is for the birds. 

The idiotic decision to reduce services was the perfect illustration of middle-class bureaucrats failing to consider what life is really like for those less fortunate. And when the little people get to work, there is even more stress and anxiety. 

With so many people off sick, I would imagine that most offices or places of work are not pleasant places to be. Everyone has to work harder, bosses are at the end of their tether and normal courtesies are suspended. 

Eventually, exhausted, the workers have to face the crowded tube again with even more people coughing and sneezing. And the next day these unfortunates find themselves being sneered at on social media and in many newspapers by those more fortunate than themselves. 

And what about the young people? Teenage boys tend to prefer hanging out with friends to helping out with a spot of gardening or assisting around the house but now that option is closed. And there are no real choices for poor kids in tower blocks. Just a screen and endless acres of boredom. Their mothers aren’t the ones stripping supermarket shelves and hoarding food. So they rely on the corner shop – more unpredictable and more expensive. They probably have to buy much less than their usual. 

The Government may have acted swiftly to protect most incomes, but there will be many who slip through the net or are defeated by bureaucracy. There always are. And they’re almost always the poorest. We must hope that the current mood of national solidarity lasts long enough to see us through this crisis and beyond. 

With all the new restrictions, the authorities and police risk being seen as too dictatorial I’m afraid. Should careful dog walkers in isolated places like the Peak District or the Moors be treated as enemies of the state? It really does seem somewhat overboard but that is what is happening.

Let’s take an extreme case from the week just past. The good old Metropolitan Constabulary fined a bakery boss £80 for criminal damage after she put temporary lines outside her shop to keep her customers safe from coronavirus.

The extraordinary incident took place outside the Grodzinski bakery in Edgware, north-west London, this morning, when police spotted the owner using a can of non-permanent spray chalk to help maintain social distancing of two metres. 

The officer (a sergeant so he should have known better) told the flabbergasted woman that she had graffitied the pavement and if police failed to punish crimes like these there would be anarchy adding, “I can’t help the law. We’re also fining people for congregating – is that wrong too?”

The unfortunate woman stood up to the sergeant and told him: “’This is not graffiti, it’s chalk, it washes off. So you would rather all my customers don’t stand two metres apart? I’m doing it for people’s safety – to stop the spread of coronavirus,” to which the pompous twonk replied, “It doesn’t matter. It’s criminal damage. It’s the law.”

A bystander filmed the incident and I do so hope that the lady’s fine is rescinded and the prat concerned is told to use his common sense in future but somehow I doubt if that will happen. I know there are people flouting the rules for self-isolation but if the police are going to act in such a heavy-handed manner, a great number of law abiding people will be tempted to do the same.

Yes, this would appear to be a crisis, but crises are survived through clear thinking and common sense not by over-zealous application of petty rules and regulations however well-intentioned they might be.

For me, it is a question of pushing myself through the next three weeks in my comfortable corner of Paradise and once I have read all the books in the house, not being too bored. It might even mean starting another book.

Prof. Jihad Bishara, the director of the Infectious Disease Unit at Beilinson Hospital in Israel, said that some of the steps being taken to combat the coronabug around the world were very important, but the virus is not airborne, most people who are infected will recover without even knowing they were sick, the at-risk groups are known, and the global panic is unnecessary and exaggerated.

“I’ve been in this business for thirty years,” Bishara said. “I’ve been through MERS, SARS, Ebola, the first Gulf war and the second, and I don’t recall anything like this. There’s unnecessary, exaggerated panic. World leaders have to calm their people down.

 ‘So many are thinking that this virus is in the air, it’s going to attack every one of us, and whoever is attacked is going to die.” He said.

“That’s not the way it is at all. It’s not in the air. Not everyone who is infected dies; most of them will get better and won’t even know they were sick or will have a bit of extra mucus.

‘But in Israel and around the world, everybody is whipping everybody else up into panic – the leaders via the media and the wider public – who then in turn start to stress out the leaders. We’ve entered some kind of vicious cycle.”

Oh well said Sir. I have stopped watching the television news because every bulletin is the same but with different solemn-faced ‘experts’ on show. Yes, it is a bad epidemic but the world has been through such things before. The Spanish flu pandemic in the early part of the last century killed off about eighteen million people but the world survived. This one is pretty minor by comparison.

Mind you, I did like the way President Crocodile Mnangagwa calmed the people of Zimbabwe. He glibly announced that Zim would beat the virus because they have built a new crematorium.

I am sure that most Zimbabweans were comforted by those soothing words!

Yet another group of ‘experts’ have claimed that the happiest people around are those who tend allotments.

Really?

Possibly the best known tender of an allotment in this country is the self-acclaimed leek grower Mr Jeremy Corbyn, still the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition. I don’t think I have ever seen this particular pratwinkle with a smile on his face! Somehow I don’t think his leeks are making him happy.

Some good has already come from the government’s coronabug restrictions. Only five people including the priest are now allowed at weddings. Because of this, can it be possible that television viewers will not be subjected to the nuptials of Princess Beatrice with Pompous Andrew giving her away and Fergie simpering and making daft pronouncements for Hello magazine.

Or is that too much to hope for?

On a pleasanter note, the sun is shining today and my little Cotswold Valley is beginning to dry out. Daffodils and primroses are out in force and I have five glorious acres of field to wander with ‘my’ dogs. The local pub is closed but all in all, it feels good to be alive now that winter is hopefully behind us.

Well it feels good until I listen to news bulletins!

No we are not, no matter how many forecasts of doom are being thrown at us. As I am still house sitting in the Cotswolds, it is incumbent on me to buy my own groceries. This morning I took a ride through the lanes and visited the huge Tesco store in Cirencester. It was an education into the ridiculous venality of human beings in the twenty-first century. Yes, I know the weekend is coming up and everyone has been advised to stay at home, but the store was packed with shoppers despite the early hour and out of interest, I trailed behind one young woman who was loading up a large trolley.

Every time she passed a shelf containing tins, she swept the majority of them into her trolley. It didn’t seem to matter what they contained – meat, fish, fruit or vegetables. Yes, she could have been feeding a very, very large family or she could have been shopping for a dozen or so elderly neighbours, but the determined look on her face made me doubtful that she was doing anything but stocking up at the expense of others to prepare for a lengthy siege.

Other people were also filling trollies with frantic haste and I think I was probably the only person in the store who was carrying just a basket. In the midst of this shopping madness, I can only wonder what it is that I’m missing because I simply don’t understand it, I’m afraid.

Like most people I followed with interest what happened recently when a cruise liner docked off the coast of California. Let’s face it, these liners cram thousands of people in together and provide the perfect environment for the dreaded virus to have its deadly way. I fully expected to see hundreds of body-bags being removed for careful disposal, a long way away from crowds of terrified onlookers. But not a bit of it; as far as I know, while many passengers were infected, only two people – both over eighty – died. If this is what happens on a cruise-ship I reckon most of us have a pretty god chance of surviving.

Normal statistics should place this hysteria in perspective, but it looks as though few people are paying any attention. The University of Hamburg reports that worldwide, in the first two months of this year, there were two thousand, three hundred and sixty deaths from the Coronabug and sixty-nine thousand, six hundred and two from the common cold. The Centre for Disease Control reports that twenty-two thousand Americans have died from seasonal flu, which kills between three hundred thousand and six hundred and fifty thousand people around the world every year.

From what I have read over the past weeks the coronabug is relatively easy to treat and the risks of death are very low unless a person has ‘underlying health issues.’  So am I irresponsible in not panicking about the bug? Am I totally insensitive and putting my head in the sand over this veritable apocalypse that is enveloping the world? Perhaps I am but I don’t trust politicians and don’t really accept many of the gloomy pronouncements we hear from the powerful, unelected bureaucrats who run money making quangos like the World Health Organisation.

Let’s face it, not long ago we were warned by these same people that AIDS was going to wipe out most of the African population and decimate the heterosexual community of the world; then there was Mad Cow disease, Zika, Ebola and SARS which had everyone racing for facemasks. We received apocalyptic warnings about all Now we have Covid-19 or whatever they want to call it, with similarly dubious credentials when it comes to its ability to spread and its lethality. Somehow this one has received far more publicity and caused far more panic than the others which have preceded it. However, the crass stupidity of the masses is surely a factor. When Corona beer takes a dramatic drop in sales because people believe it carries the virus, then you just know there are a lot of idiots out there, who believe anything, no matter how preposterous. This hysterical idiocy is manna from heaven to the media who love to preach gloom and doom no matter what.

For me the situation was put in context by a letter printed in the Telegraph last week. This came from a retired doctor from Shipton Moyne here in darkest Gloucestershire. Dr Birdwood qualified in 1953 and with apologies to him, I am quoting his letter verbatim.

He wrote, ‘I have been reflecting on how we would have reacted to a coronavirus epidemic in those days. The answer is not at all, for three main reasons. The Covid-19 virus could not have been identified rapidly enough, if at all. Most cases would have been too mild to attract attention in this season of coughs and sneezes and the small proportion of deaths among elderly people with chronic respiratory disease would have remained much as usual for the time of year.

It follows that there would have been no alarm or counter-measures. International trade and travel would have carried on as usual. World stock markets would not have collapsed. And governments would not have needed to get involved.

As it is today, we know too much about the coronavirus for our own good, but almost nothing about treating its victims or preventing its spread. Sometimes a little knowledge really can be a dangerous thing.

I’m not advocating complacency, but I do worry what we’re seeing right now is well-intentioned over-reaction.’

If I do go down with the coronabug, it might well kill me, but I am damned if I am going to work myself into a panic worrying about it. Surely it is time for a bit of general common sense – or is that too much to ask in the twenty-first century?

And so it goes on. Coronavirus is gathering strength and making life difficult for all of us, even though it would seem that a few politicians and all the usual gloom and doom merchants are revelling in it. Bunter Johnson continually uses the word war and looks grimly serious for once, even though I am sure most of us would prefer his normal ‘bumbling clot but ruddy good chap’ persona. Perhaps he sees himself as his hero Winston Churchill in a time of crisis.

And time of crisis it would appear to be. My only complaint about the measures being taken – after all, this is an unprecedented situation – is why on earth I should be locked up for the next twelve weeks simply because of my age. Where on earth is the evidence that says being over seventy is more likely to result in death or hospitalisation? So far out of all the deaths we have heard about, the sufferers had one thing in common – health problems. 

 

Surely it is better to lock down everybody of any age with underlying health problems – as well as the very elderly – and leave the rest of us to get on with life? 

The Government wants what it describes as ‘herd immunity’ (whatever that may mean) but under this policy, we will be without any immunity at all when the wretched virus strikes again as the experts tell us it probably will.

Then what? Another three months of isolation for those of us who despite our age are still fit and strong? 

I understand that retired doctors and nurses are being asked to return for the duration of the crisis. Where is the logic in that? With a general retirement age of sixty six, many of them must be over seventy too. Shouldn’t they too be locked away?

I know that whenever any policy is introduced there has to be an arbitrary line somewhere but what is the sense in indiscriminately lumping together those who were in their sixties yesterday with those who will be ninety next week? Many people in their seventies still work so quite apart from the impact on their own finances, how does it help to take them out of the economy?

As for being told how to run my life by the likes of Gavin Williamson, Matt Hancock and Grant Shapps – second rate politicians with all the worldly know how and charisma of peanut salesmen – the only reaction to this gang of Dad’s Army characters must be one of incredulity. What do they know about anything damnit?!

I am more inclined to listen to the apparently calm Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England, who says the people who should ‘minimise social contact’ are over seventy, pregnant women and those eligible for a flu vaccination because of other health issues.

Minimise social contact by all means. That is common sense, but loneliness also kills off the elderly so why lock us all away.

Besides, there’s no evidence that my generation are more likely to spread this disease than twenty-somethings who eat out more and have a more active social life. Condemning healthy old toppies who have staved off mental and physical degeneration by choosing a fulfilling life, seems unnecessary and cruel. Most of us are well balanced and sensible and quite capable of looking after ourselves. After all, I completed walking over three thousand kilometres of the wild Zambezi Valley (read In Livingstone’s Footsteps) just three months before my seventieth birthday. Had this edict come out then, I think I would have marched on Downing Street myself and challenged the incumbent of Number Ten – I think it was Crafty Cameron then – to match my physical prowess.

And now the new Chancellor Rishi Sunak is spending money like water on his ‘war effort’ only days after promising the earth in his budget speech. Where will this money come from, I wonder?

I have never been complimentary about Theresa Maybe but I did admire her for sounding a warning note about the budget splurge last week.

 Not just because what she was saying made sense. It was more that after being Prime Minister, she did her duty and returned to the backbenches to serve her constituents and the public after being in high office. 

Unlike David Cameron and George Osborne, who thought something so mundane was beneath them – and swanned off to make millions writing books and editing newspapers instead.

Unfortunately Mother Maybe is the exception rather than the rule in this regard. The rest of them are too busy feeding off the public purse. 

I turned on the idiot box on Monday morning because I hadn’t watched the news over the weekend. Quite by chance, it was on the ITV channel and I found myself watching Good Morning Britain, hosted by Piers Morgan.

The entire set up appalled me. Contributors – of course the programme was all about the coronabug – shouted over each other and Morgan shouted over them all. Appalled but strangely fascinated by the argumentative chaos, I watched again on Tuesday and it was if possible, even worse. Although Morgan’s co presenter from the Monday edition is apparently in quarantine, she was replaced by an even ruder and noisier harridan while Morgan himself pontificated as though he was George Washington.

I have read and sometimes agreed with this man’s somewhat controversial views in various media outlets but what a horrible piece of work he is in the flesh – at least on television. He was rude, bumptious and appallingly egotistical. I don’t know how many people watch this chaotic daily programme but if it is a sizeable portion of the population then it is no wonder Britain is in a mess. Needless to say the television in my adopted mansion will remain firmly off in the mornings – and probably the evenings as well – from now on. A shame really as the screen is five times as large as the one we have at home.

Well I am back in Gloucestershire, house sitting one of ‘my’ mansions for a couple of weeks and marvelling at the inanities of the modern world.

Take coronavirus for example. I suppose I am having my own quarantine at the moment, but isolated though I am, I take three dogs for a long walk along the roads every morning. I go early so seldom meet anyone, but I don’t suppose that is one hundred percent certain to protect me from this bug.

It would seem that as I am well over seventy, I am more likely than most to turn my toes up should I get the bug, but should I panic? I don’t really think so but I watch the media and read the newspapers and it seems that I am in a minority. People seem to be running around like headless chickens, even to the extent of ripping hand sanitiser dispensers from hospital walls. Why can’t they use soap I wonder? Britons have always been proud of their stoicism and I hear a great deal about the ‘blitz spirit’ but see little signs of this.

The problem is that nobody really knows what the coronabug is or how best to avoid it. Bunter J’s government are doing their best to make plans to combat the virus, but they seem to be as confused as everyone else. They tell us that their plans are based on scientific advice from the health ‘experts’ and we must accept that. The politicians are not clinicians and can only follow advice and that applies to us all.

Yet the government are being castigated by the ‘celebrity experts’ such as that bumptious clown Piers Morgan who is ranting at me as I write. According to Morgan, we are all in desperate danger and the government – because they won’t come on to his programme – are deliberately endangering us all. I know it is Morgan’s job to be contentious but he is stoking up ever more panic among the great unwashed out there.

It is surely time that everyone calmed down and did what they could to stay healthy and avoid infecting anyone else. Where is the British stiff upper lip for Pete’s sake?

In the meantime, the world keeps spinning with all its attendant madness. For instance, a former British spy who murdered a child has been awarded sixty thousand pounds by blaming his horrific crime on having contracted post traumatic stress disorder caused by working for the intelligence services. The man who cannot be named for security reasons alleges that MI5 and SIS chief allowed him to carry out dangerous missions in Egypt and Afghanistan despite knowing he was suffering from PTSD.

Believed to be in his forties this man claims to have infiltrated al Qaeda and to have been tortured as he shared company with Taliban insurgents.

His career ended in disgrace when he was convicted of murdering the child and in 2015 he launched a legal bid to sue the Home Office for compensation. The child killer won twenty thousand pounds for his alleged PTSD and was also awarded forty thousand pounds which he argued was money, owed to him by the government.

Surely this is ruddy outrageous? The idea of a child killer receiving this sort of compensation for a ‘disease’ that cannot be reliably diagnosed is abhorrent to me. No matter what service you give to the government or what effects are suffered, there can be no excuse for a grown man killing a child.

I have an Instagram account on which I occasionally post photographs of the Moor but I don’t follow the magical world of SussexRoyal which is apparently a little like Disneyland with less gritty realism.

This of course is the Instagram site of the Royal Biscuit – should that be prefaced with former perhaps? – and is their main conduit for communicating good deeds – usually their own – to the world.

These days they are accompanied by their own film crew and photographers so only the most polished and flattering images are sent out to their fans. In SussexRoyal-Land Harry’s bald patch is as elusive as the ruddy unicorn — it is simply never seen!

Meanwhile, every little film clip finds adoring crowds hanging on Meghan’s every word and laughing uproariously at her jokes. This really is Hollywood at its best.

This Instagram account is followed by 11.3 million people, who surely must be wondering if anything bad ever happens in this funny little Never Never land. 

There is no mention of hoax phone calls, royal rifts, sister-in-law Kate’s thunderous face at Westminster Abbey, private jet travel or secret lives of luxury. In this land of make believe, the Sussexes are forces for inclusivity and change, just like they told the fake Greta Thunberg. What absolute claptrap!

Talking about the worthy Greta and that phone call, why on earth did the Biscuit give the Russian pranksters his email address without being suspicious when they talked about the island of Chunga Changa? ‘I know a man in the North Pole’ was one of his responses. Most of us do Harry – he visits us every December.

This prince or possibly ex prince obviously sees himself as a misunderstood maverick but really, he is thick as two short planks.

According to a statement issued by a hundred health professionals and led by King’s College, London, we should stop calling people fat or lazy because it does not help combat obesity. Oh, for pete’s sake! What do we call them? Trying to pretend someone is not fat is hardly likely to help them.

Ultimately we are all responsible for our own actions and that applies to obesity as much as to alcoholism, gambling, smoking and drug addiction. Save in some rare medical conditions and in some people with mental health problems, the causes of serious obesity are simple – gluttony and idleness. 

The fat eat too much and exercise too little. That is surely pretty obvious to anyone apart from the political correctness brigade. Fat is fat; thin is thin and trying to disguise either condition with fancy expressions just to be politically correct doesn’t help anyone at all.

It merely justifies excuses and in any case, how can we possibly take these supposedly well-qualified idiots seriously? As far as I can see, woke ‘experts’ are like spoiled five year olds who keep screaming until mommy buys them a sweetie. Then when the sweetie is finished, they start screaming again and stamp their petulant little feet until we all give up in disgust and accept what they say as the gospel truth they tell us it is.

I don’t think I know anyone who is genuinely fat, but if I did, I am not sure how I could describe them apart from being fat.

This crazy modern world is very difficult to follow at times.

As coronapanic envelops the country, it turns out that a health minister, Nadine Dorries has developed the disease. This makes parliament itself a potentially hazardous place so it will be interesting to see how many MPs appear to hear the new chancellor’s budget speech this afternoon. Budget presentations usually attract a very full house with parliamentarians packed in like overfed sardines.

Will they be sensible today and listen to their own government advice about staying away from crowds or will they be too interested in making headlines by praising or criticising what measures Chancellor Sunak proposes for the economic future?

It will be interesting to see but really, every single one of our politicians and their staff should now be put into quarantine for two weeks. Let the clowns run the country. In most cases, they already do so it won’t make much difference.