Giles Brown
IF you read my column in the previous issue of the Olive Press, you will remember, probably with a shudder, that in my (admittedly peculiar case) one of the side effects of the coronavirus outbreak has been the fact that I can’t get cheesy pop songs out of my head.
At the beginning of the outbreak it was ‘My Corona’ sung to the tune of My Sharona by The Knack.
And since the announcement of the lockdown, the line ‘got the city on lockdown’ from the song Fly By by noughties boy band Blue has been bouncing around my head.
To be honest, the lockdown hasn’t had that much of an effect on my lifestyle.
True, the number of press lunches may have plummeted, but apart from that I’m carrying on fairly much like before.
Living in splendid isolation in a cottage by the lake, with the nearest neighbour about half a mile away, a generator for power and a large water deposit tank, I was all prepared for the breakdown of society.
Although, to be honest, I sort of hoped it would be the zombie apocalypse.
I’m not entirely sure what I am going to do with the chainsaw/flamethrower hybrid that I constructed, though it could be useful to jump the queue at the supermarkets.
Being the 50-something male that I am, I’m not a huge fan of big shopping trips, preferring to get life’s essentials – coffee, cat food, agua con gas – from the smaller stores.
So I looked on in bewilderment at the panic buying images that swamped social media.
“Why does anyone need that amount of toilet roll?” I asked myself, “surely half a dozen pot noodles, baked beans and a family size pack of dry Whiskers will suffice?”
But in the current uncertainty, who knows what will work against the virus? And it’s for this reason that I’m writing this particular column from the safety of my vast and impregnable fortress of loo roll!
