Do we want pills to cure all ills..?

Can you hear the desperate fingers across keyboards, pattering like a heavy rainstorm sweeping in from the East? The great novel lies only 120,000 words away. The announcements of future award ceremonies ring in the authors’ ears "And the award for the best Lockdown novel is … " their fingers blur across their laptops to recapture Lockdown with Booker prize winning pretentious experimental backwards prose, perhaps from the POV of Covid itself. The task of recapturing Lockdown is akin to hunting down a historical hangover; why would you want to voluntarily revisit such times? 

Well, apparently Philip Henser has, but unless you’re interested in sourdough bread baking in Islington by someone who follows rules as closely as he does recipes then it’s as boring as Lockdowns were once the novelty wore off. He predictably takes ‘the government should have done more’ route of the so-called intelligentsia. Done more how exactly? Soldered our doors shut? Chained us to our beds? Shot us in the streets? The State already prioritised the concept of Living over Life with the sort of orthodoxy that the audience would be denouncing were it a film. 

It’s a predictable angle from contemporary metropolitan writers. Punch-drunk on the Guardian they promote caution and view governmental obedience as a moral obligation. These incoming novels will doubtlessly shoe-horn in musings on how the Labour party would have inflicted harder and longer lockdowns despite the evidence now clearly showing that they did little beyond utterly destroy the fabric of society that lefties proclaim to value. The past few years has shown how easily they throw private business, health, education, relationships and social visits to the elderly on the pyre of their own virtue promotion. "But we had to save lives" they bleat, well, ‘saving lives’ was in effect only extending generally frail and unfulfilled lifetimes by another six months or so of (thanks to lockdowns) living hell. 

Yet even now people defend the government by suggesting they did not know what they were dealing with. Although actually we all did had we been paying attention. Remember the Diamond Princess cruise ship? It might sound like a Disney Frozen theme ship with Let it go on a buffet-dining-loop, but was in fact a giant floating petri dish in which it was possible to monitor EXACTLY the lethality of Covid. 

The ship was carrying 3,711 people, whom could be harboring a potentially fatal disease to which no one had immunity. As the global governments in unison prepared to pull planes from the sky, close schools and even demand their populations close their front doors to friends and family, a total of 712 people were infected with COVID-19 on the cruise ship – 567 passengers and 145 crew members. Nine died. The ship's average age was 58, and 33 percent were 70 or older. All nine deaths were of passengers aged 70 or older. So, we had an indiscriminate virus that was actually very discriminate indeed - as we know, the average age of a covid death was 82.5 - and posed as much threat to children up to 15 as being struck by lightning. It begs the question why don't children don’t wear precautionary lighting conducting hats to ‘save the NHS’? Besides, isn't the NHS supposed to save us? For most people Covid restrictions were similar to disallowing anyone to pass beneath a 6foot bridge when in fact it was only those taller who needed to duck. 

Then we were told that unless we take a ‘vaccine’ the UK would remain locked down. And it would appear that more people than it’s wise to consider actually respond to being treated like children. It’s in keeping with the modern preoccupation with pharmaceuticals. They rule supreme - a pill for everything is the goal. They can be useful, but surely the key to our existence is spiritual? We’ve become pill popping supplicants to the State sponsored drug pushers, as our every ill is delegated to the all-ruling State, as big pharma and the state skip hand-in-hand encouraging our unquestioning dependence.  

We have even had the head of the Church of England admitting to taking anti-depressants. I mean what a great advert for pharmaceuticals over God. Yes, this is the same ABC who closed churches during Lockdown because health is more important than spirituality. Well, coming from an NHS Delivery Manager that might be understandable, but from the church? Perhaps it’s understandable he’s depressed when he’s facing a performance appraisal from the big man upstairs - You closed the churches? You abandoned your sheep when they most needed you? (I’m sure God would have his tongue in his cheek at that point. 

Anti-depressants can be useful in severe catatonic states and in times of stress, I once compared them to match officials wrestling a gone-rogue football mascot to the ground, but so too can this be applied to spiritual attunement. As the saying goes, before you diagnose someone with depression ensure they are not surrounded by arseholes, but what if symptoms should be attended to and listened to on par with the enthusiasm of treating them? What if anxiety and depression have purpose to lead us, but that the solution is too hard, too disruptive to even consider? The appeal of suppressing the itch rather than shifting position is understandably attractive, at least in the short term, but you’ve still taken the thorn with you. 

Mind you, the ABC looks like the sort of person who would post a selfie of himself in a face mask on his dating profile, and whom thinks Matt Haig and his shallow self-help fairy platitudes is an insightful theorist of life. Matt Haig is the sort of writer who would rather starve to death in a cave while recounting tales of how he never once misgendered someone than confront the sabre-tooth lurking outside. Haig is the poster boy for plant-based victimhood, where the challenge of personal responsibility are eschewed in favour of turbo-vanity displacement, guilt and cowardice. He and his zealots were the ones leaping into hedges to avoid passers-by and demanding that the world be blunted because they find it too sharp. It’s easy to believe that a ‘I’ve been vaccinated’ sticker comes free with every Haig book. His house is doubtlessly draped in so many BLM, rainbow, NHS and Ukraine flags that the houseplants have died from lack of light. We can look forward to his Lockdown novel with, well, let’s say fathomless patience.