REFLECTIONS FROM SCOTLAND

Just back from a quick trip to explore the Scottish Highlands, (to which I feel such an intuitive attraction that I must surely have lived there in a previous life.) Good to have got in there before Wee Jimmie Krankie/ Nicola Sturgeon imposes another draconian lockdown.

Sadly, it’s prone to some insultingly farcical mask rules; on entering a hotel restaurant you must have a mask on, (though not in a regular restaurant.) It’s OK to take it off the minute you sit at your table, but you have to put it on again if you get up to go to toilet. Apparently the virus has been growing its intelligence exponentially, and now knows the difference. Only one person in the toilets at a time, mind. The minute a second person appears, the “virus” will be straight in there and kill them both.

The experience brought home to me just how pointlessly wasteful the “coronavirus” measures really are. Every hotel, pub, restaurant, shop or cafe proudly crows about how “we’re doing all we can to tackle the virus” and about all the “extra safety measures” they have in place. Pubs and restaurants that are still offering paper menus, (most are coercing you into scanning a barcode with your Smartphone so the menu appears on your screen,) are binning them after every use, (because the pesky virus just loves living on paper, apparently.)

Many are only issuing plastic cutlery, which is thrown away after one use. Hotels aren’t offering tea and coffee in the rooms, instead giving them pre-packaged in sealed bags at reception, leading to more wasteful packaging. Hand sanitiser is everywhere, leading to millions more discarded plastic bottles than ever used to be the case, (and also helping to deplete peoples’ natural immune systems, which need germs to work on in order to remain in tip-top condition.) The worst thing is that some hotels are proudly boasting that they’re replacing the shower curtain with each new guest, so now millions of plastic curtains are getting dashed, in spite of the national, celebrity-endorsed campaigns that have been going on to reduce the amount of plastic in circulation!!

Furthermore, a great many public toilets are now closed. How many people do we think are being forced to piss and shit in bushes with no other options available? And yet the government mantras about maintaining "good hygeine" continue.

And that’s BEFORE we even get into the mandatory mask wearing, with official advice being that you should not wear the same disposable mask for more than four hours. This is resulting in many, many millions of masks being casually discarded in bins or on the floor. Funny how there are no “special measures” in place to adequately dispose of all of these IF there were a chance they could contain deadly “virus” spores.

Isn’t it ironic that these same measures, which will be having a devastating effect on the environment, come from the same Establishment institutions that only a few months ago were endorsing Greta Thunberg and 'Climate Change,' and warning of the dire peril humanity will find itself in very soon if we don’t clean up our pollution of the eco-system with plastic bags and all the rest of it? Just remind me in what way having billions of masks and plastic knives and forks discarded every day assist in that “urgent” process?