OUT TO LUNCH
Last weekend we attended a family wedding on a wine farm in Franschhoek. It was originally planned for last December but COVID scuppered those plans so it was rescheduled for this December and COVID almost scuppered those plans yet again because the bride and groom are now resident in the UK and many of their invited friends also live in the UK.
These, incidentally, are all extremely intelligent young South Africans who have been driven away by the ANC’s disastrous affirmative action policies. They are the very people that we desperately need in this country if we are to stand any chance of getting ourselves out of the economic morass in which we currently find ourselves.
Since that is never likely to happen the smart ones clearly saw the writing on the wall and transferred their considerable skills to more welcoming markets.
When you’ve distinguished yourself academically and you’re told by your employer that there is no future for you in the company because your skin is too pale then it’s a pretty easy decision to make.
The number of guests able to attend this year was considerably less than those originally invited but it was still a party of note and a wedding to remember. The only problem is that a couple of days after the bride and groom arrived in SA Boris’s lot changed the rules yet again.
So instead of jetting off to a honeymoon on some exotic island the newly weds had to rush off for a PCR test the day after the wedding in readiness for their flight back to the UK on Monday.
Then they have the dubious pleasure of spending 10 days in a hotel in Milton Keynes at their own expense in what they have stoically described as their “quarantineymoon”.
Hopefully it isn’t the same shitty hotel described in a Daily Maverick piece where the usual room rate is £66 but is £338 a day for quarantine victims. This includes inedible food, fleas in the room, tatty curtains and a chair so filthy that it looks as though somebody had a bad dose of diarrhoea while sitting in it.
To add insult to injury the hotel is called The Delta Hotel which probably should have sounded alarm bells. Unfortunately the choice of quarantine hotels is fairly limited and since most of the existing ones in the vicinity of London’s main airports are already 100% occupied passengers are now being transported to quarantine hotels miles away from their destination.
Apparently requests to the British authorities for your usual suite at Claridges are likely to fall on deaf ears.
Nothing in the world would induce me to get on an aircraft either now or within the foreseeable future. The long queues, the last minute cancellations, the bureaucratic hassle of all the double jab and booster documentation, the PCR tests and the prospect of sitting with a mask on in a crowded aircraft for ten hours (having been illogically forced to socially distance in the airport queue) holds no attraction for anyone who has happy memories of the days when air travel was a relatively hassle free activity. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
And it’s not much better down the sharp end. Apart from the return fares now being absurdly expensive (R110 000+ business class return from London to Cape Town) you now have to accept a substantially reduced level of service.
The only thing that hasn’t changed is the size of the seat but a friend who flew recently on British Airways described the lounge at Heathrow as disastrous and said the food on board was appalling and the available wines were forgettable.
If your mask happens to slip off while you’re trying to catch some sleep expect a prod in the chest and a sharp rebuke from power crazed cabin staff. The business class ticket no longer buys civility it seems.
How long this nonsense will continue is anybody’s guess but it’s becoming quite clear that a sort of mob madness is developing among many of the vaccinated. They’ve tried all sorts of tactics to shame those who are reluctant to have the jab labelling them ‘anti-vaxxers, science deniers, conspiracy theorists and COVIDiots’.
They have invented the nonsensical notion that this is a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ and they are hugely in favour of vaccine mandates and the removal of all human rights from those who aren’t yet convinced the vaccine has passed the legal test of being ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Some have even recommended ‘internment camps’ with forced vaccinations.
But we must show some compassion and try to understand why so many of the vaccinated are so cranky. The problem is that they bought into this whole myth that getting the jab would change everything for them. But nothing has changed.
On the contrary, they were told they would have to have more jabs to boost the earlier jabs and maybe even more after that. Even after having the jab they are vulnerable (some people might ask, ‘so what’s the point’?).
Poor old word blind John Maytham was off air last week suffering from COVID and he is one of our most evangelical of vaccine zealots.
They still have to wear masks in public, they still have to observe any lockdown conditions that apply and, as already mentioned, travel is a nightmare for them. Small wonder then that the only way they feel it will have all been vaguely worthwhile is if they can derive some vicarious satisfaction from scapegoating the unvaxxed and banning them from as many activities and places as possible.
Sadly, this is one of a human being’s less admirable qualities as we saw in the run up to WW2 in Germany. An individual may think it absolutely abhorrent that Jews, homosexuals, blacks or the unvaxxed should be singled out for victimisation and violent treatment. That same individual in a crowd and egged on by media propaganda behaves entirely differently though.
This is why the guillotine was such a popular public event. If you had asked someone whether he had a strong desire to see someone’s head chopped off the likelihood is that the answer would have been no. But as part of the mob and with all the anonymity and freedom of guilt that offers then that same person would be baying for blood, even if he hadn’t the slightest idea of whose head was being removed and why.
Much of the anger of the vaxxed though can surely be explained by the fact that they have now realised that they might have been duped all along and that there is no going back. They can’t be unvaccinated and are now vulnerable to any side effects that may manifest a couple of years down the line.
Maybe they should have thought a little bit more about the sweet deals that big Pharma have cut which state that they cannot be held legally liable for anything to do with the COVID vaccine. That’s a bit like buying a brand new car with no 5 year warranty and no motor-plan and nobody would be dumb enough to do that.
Being told that the vaccine is perfectly safe (albeit not as effective as initially portrayed) shortly after it has been administered sounds very reassuring but will the ‘experts’ still be saying that in two years time?
Rather than blindly trusting the science as we are urged to do by the media shills perhaps it might be wiser to question the science. That is, after all, what scientists are supposed to do (when and if the government allows).
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New Zealand is introducing legislation which will make it illegal to sell cigarettes to anybody under the age of 14 from 2027. That sounds eminently sensible and one would obviously question whether such legislation isn’t already in place and if not, why not?
But the difference with the new plan is that this will be a lifetime ban and in 2073 a person aged 60 would be prohibited by law from buying cigarettes while a 61 year old would be allowed to do so.
This crazy piece of nanny state social engineering by the lefty Jacinda Ardern is designed to further curb the people’s freedom of choice but it’s obviously for their own good. The aim is to prevent five thousand preventable deaths a year in a country with a population of just over five million.
The immediate solution is to obviously ask someone older to buy your cigarettes and one can but wonder how the New Zealand government proposes to enforce this ban to stop the elderly from buying smokes for the not so elderly.
However, this does open a considerable business opportunity for the illicit tobacco industry and I have no doubt that our South African skills will come to the fore in New Zealand in the coming years.
What so many thick politicians just don’t get is that banning things like alcohol and tobacco makes them more tempting, drives the business underground, deprives the government of tax revenue and makes criminal syndicates incredibly rich.
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The Out to Lunch column takes a short holiday now and will return on January 11th. My best wishes to you all over the holiday season, however and whatever you celebrate at this time of year.
