My 1800th Post

Thou Shalt Not Covid Thy Neighbour’s Life

My 1800th Post

My mate survived corona virus and all I got was this dry, persistent cough.

Well, that’s not true actually but it would make a great t-shirt.

So here we are, 10.3 years into my blog and on my 1800th Blog post. I usually do something to celebrate each 100 posts but I figured I really don’t have anything that special to say because we are, most of us, still currently in the midst of our cora-nora virus pseudo lock down. So I figured I might as well say a few words about that here now since, when else am I going to get the chance? After all, it will all be over by the time I hit the next 100, won’t it?

I mean, the current UK government seem to be doing such a good job that I’m sure we’ll all be safe and ‘out of it’ soon. Or, you know, the absolute opposite.

I’ve always been pretty much a political atheist throughout my life... don’t care who is in power because they’re all as bad as each other and they all seem to be corrupt as hell and lie to the public while doing a bad job. I’m not sure what the viable alternative to governments is, by the way... I’m not suggesting a solution, just looking at the basic truth as I see it.

That being said, looking at what the current government have been doing in the face of the cora-nora blues, I’d have to say that they seemed to have screwed up way worse than I could imagine anybody in power screwing up right now (unless, as I can’t help but thinking, they’re trying to thin out the population deliberately so they don’t have to pay out of the pension pot). I mean... I get it... it’s been a while since we’ve had something as threatening as the great plague was to this country back in times of old and people have forgotten how to cope or are just unprepared for it but... honestly... I wake up on a daily basis now not even bothering to check out what the news is because it’s just one life threatening ‘peoples lives vs the economy’ shambles of a bad decision after another. The economy is more important it would seem, to those in power, so can you all just die now please? Oh wait, if you all die we don’t have an economy. Let’s all just take pot luck then. It’s enough to make you get in a taxi and head out for Barnard Castle because, well, my local optician still hasn’t opened their doors again and I’m definitely due a check up.

So, yeah, at the moment I am, like a number of people in the country, working from home and trying to stay indoors. And that’s where I’m staying for a while I suspect because, let’s face it, I don’t want to risk going back to a prematurely opening cinema and kill myself and the people I am shielding. This is just madness.

But let’s look at the cinemas for a minute because... well... this is, after all, mostly a film blog (with some book and TV reviews too, as you’ll know if you’ve ever scrolled down my long and unwieldy index). So... I know the cinemas, like everybody else in the UK, are in danger of going under. However, people, for the most part (those who don’t go to pubs and crowded beaches or hop on a riot bandwagon because they’re bored of lock down), have got more sense than going out while this virus hasn’t even nearly gotten properly started yet. I mean, I hope I’m wrong about that but something tells me that, I’m possibly not... we’ll probably get a second wave, it may be much more deadly than the first wave and... I suspect the government won’t mandate any proper lock downs any time soon. So let’s look at what could happen to cinemas if we’re not careful (to pick on just one sector).

If a cinema opens now, regardless of the fact as to whether they’ve got anything new to show (they don’t appear to have, to be honest), they’ve got to pay for heating the building and whatever other overheads they have when said buildings are open... so they’re paying out way more money than if they were closed during the ‘night of the living covid’... and they’ve got to put in some kind of social distancing measures which, if they do it properly, will reduce the number of seats available for each performance to somewhere between a half and a third of what their normal take for a movie screening would be... plus turn off a good deal of the audience who might have risked it but don’t want to bother with all that social distancing malarkey. So, surely, with no covid vaccine and the rate of deaths and infection not really subsiding all that much and, possibly, going up (from what I can tell... it seems to be doing lots of things I was told was bad at the start of lock down but which now the government seems to be saying is perfectly acceptable)... it’s surely going to be more cost effective, as the lesser of two evils, to keep your gateways to our celluloid dreams...um... doors... shut for a fair while longer. If, of course, the government can come up with a way out of this mess.

And this already seems to be true, from what I can understand, of some comic book shops in the country. They can all open their doors now according to the powers that be... so they did and some of them have gone under because they’re getting less physical customers walking into their shop a day than you can count on one hand. People are staying away in droves and this is a niche market, don’t forget, of passionate comic book collectors and readers who care about this stuff a lot. It’s all a bit hard at the moment and I think we’re going to see a fair number of businesses start going under very soon. It will be a changed world.

So, yeah, cinemas probably shouldn’t open but I’m hoping that doesn’t mean certain movie companies will start releasing stuff digitally. Frankly, if a movie is limited to digital download then there are enough ‘ahem, free’ sites where you might as well watch it like that. If you’re not being provided with a proper cinematic or even Blu Ray experience... what’s the point in paying out for it? We can all just go and do our lock down jigsaw puzzles for much cheaper than the price of a subscription streaming fee. Actually, I’m not going to get started on the evils of non-physical media on here now and get myself all worked up. If you don’t understand why physical media is the only option in a post-cinema world then maybe you’ve not been thinking things through or observed what’s been going on with people who rely on streaming services. Let’s not go there now.

So anyway, lets all be keeping our fingers crossed not just for the survival of cinema but also, actually, the survival of governments. Much as I hate governments.

And I say that because I can’t believe some people are all that surprised but the sudden appearance of this virus (in an overpopulated world where usually a big war has helped cull the unwieldy population by now so, hey ho, nature needs to come up with its own solutions quick... nature finds a way, right?). Scientists have been warning us for... what... ten to fifteen years? Antibiotics have lost their usefulness and they have been telling us that a whole batch of super viruses will be coming for us soon and then we will be in big trouble as a species. And I suppose this Covid 19 is the first one of those and... yeah... if this is just the opening salvo then goodness knows how the various governments will cope when we’ve got three or four (or more) of these loose at the same time exhibiting different behaviours. So... yeah... I think the world leaders and the clever people of this world really need to start thinking out of the box sometime soon because all the response so far means the economy is crippled by the survival measures so... we need to stop relying on a bartering system to live together. I don’t know what that alternative is or if it’s even possible but... time to think on alternative ways of living and surviving on this planet methinks. Because if we don’t...

Let’s just say that I hope you’re the kind of movie lover who likes post-apocalyptic films like The Omega Man or Waterworld or Mad Max 2 or The New Barbarians because, if we’re not careful, this time ten years from now we’ll all be hunting in packs trying to fend off the people riding motorcycles in chain mail who are out to kill us for a flask of precious water.

And if you’re still with me at the end of what I thought was only going to be a couple of paragraphs... may I just say thank you so much for reading and spending some time on this blog. I do appreciate it and am always humbled by the blog statistics. Cheers. Normal review service will resume in a couple of days.