The corona curtain-twitchers are watching

Welcome, then, to a country in which the police send drones to humiliate people taking a walk and dried pasta has replaced the pound as the national currency. ‘Gimme that pappardelle, mofo.’ ‘Not until you prise it from my cold dead hands, punk.’ A week is a long time in politics, but also a long time in pestilence. And the next time someone uses the phrase ‘the new normal’, I may well break my social distancing regimen and chin him.

The lockdown has come as a great boon to the police, who seem to be enjoying it immensely, and indeed to Britain’s vibrant community of curtain-twitching, onanistic, meddlesome ratbags. Police forces up and down the country have been inundated with calls from these people dobbing in their neighbours for having taken the dog for a walk twice, or returning from the shops carrying only a packet of fags instead of the mandatory 12 tons of lavatory paper and a six-pack of canned tomatoes. There is a certain tranche of the population which yearns for its fellow citizens to be chastised, punished and, if possible, banged up.

The police, meanwhile, freed from the onerous duty of differentiating between criminals and the rest of us, have adopted a fairly gung-ho approach, tweeting their astonishment that people are out and about at all and encouraging the meddlesome ratbags to make more calls. In our rural areas, from the Highlands of Scotland down to Cornwall, residents — and the various authorities — are screeching that these are local areas for local people and everybody else must stay away. They do not wish to die of coronavirus in these parts. They would much prefer to die in the usual manner, from weird diseases occasioned by a greatly restricted gene pool.