There’s nothing equal about this virus

Filthy germ-laden townsfolk were out and about on the footpaths near my home on Easter Sunday, dragging with them their awful, mewling children. I got the dog to harass them and occasionally shouted out: ‘These are local paths for local people. Clear off.’ One youngish father — lightly bearded, self-satisfied smirk, probably a sticker on his car window saying ‘-Refugees welcome here’ — even had the nerve to ask me for directions to the nearest train station so that he might return to his squalid Remainer tenement. I directed him and his family through a field which was fecund with manure and full of restive bullocks. The child — four or five years old and already gobby and full of itself — was wearing a bright red T-shirt. Time to test that age-old myth about bulls, then.

Some of the day-trippers were wearing masks. ‘You don’t need those here,’ I felt like saying, ‘the people who live around here are disease-free.’ A popular footpath goes right past my front door and my wife heard a couple jabbering about how loud the birdsong was, as a yellowhammer in a nearby hedgerow plaintively recorded its bitter disappointment with its latest click-and-collect delivery: a little bit of bread and no cheese whatsoever.

A familiar observation from townies these past few weeks — how the birds seem to be singing louder during lockdown. They are not singing louder. They are singing just like they always do, except now Londoners can hear them because they’ve been forced to put on hold their own interminable cacophony of self-importance. Hell, if this goes on long enough Londoners might even be able to hear the rest of the country. But in truth yellowhammers are as alien to them as a shortage of dried black limes in Waitrose.