You can ignore reality, but it won’t ignore you

We may have wasted two years tilting at coronavirus-shaped windmills, but the facts of the world are still very much at play.

By the end of January, at least nineteen gazillion Britons will be infected with the Omegatron variant.

This, or at least something like this, is what I keep reading. Tales of exponential spread of the virus (today 100,000 cases, a million by tomorrow tea time) slathered with the mandatory schtick about Protecting Our NHS.

Such statements usually are accompanied by a peppering of other, much abused words, repeatedly roped into the linguistic effort of cowing the populace:  ‘mutant’ (preferably ‘super-mutant’), surge, overwhelm, flood, inundate, et cetera.

Anyway, these crazed numbers are being spread courtesy of Nadhim Zahawi MP, who obligingly did the rounds trying to scare the British populace into feebly accepting a further predictable round of lockdowns, but this time with the extra spice of vaccine passports.

I am sceptical about the figures. Then again, I am sceptical about most things Mr Zahawi says: he was, after all, the same man who categorically denied that vaccine passports would ever be introduced. And yet here we are.

Even if the numbers do turn out to be true (eleventy squintillion by the time you’ve finished reading this paragraph), perhaps it’s not such a bad thing. Being milder, we should take the opportunity to get natural immunity levels up. It could be a blessing in disguise.

This is the stance taken by many whose job isn’t dedicated to becoming as hysterical as possible the moment anyone comes down with a sore throat or head ache in the British Isles, including the South African doctor who first identified the new variant and the baddy-cum-speaker-of-common-sense Vladimir Putin.

Talking about Putin, there are rumblings around Ukraine, with Western media outlets currently making as much as possible out of the fact that Russian troops are being moved around inside Russia. But still, something to keep an eye on, not that the corrupt government of Kiev is worth a single British fusilier’s life.

The point is that, despite the perpetual viral onanism of the media and our ruling elites, the world is still spinning. We may have wasted two years tilting at coronavirus-shaped windmills, but the facts of the world are still very much at play, many now turbo-charged. Geopolitics, our utterly insane levels of government spending, the degradation of education standards; having spent a couple of years with our heads firmly in the sand, when we dare retract them for a moment, we realise that the crises around us have only grown wildly, like some frenzied unkempt weed.

You can try and ignore reality, but it won’t ignore you. Let’s use this chance of a mild variant to get back to dealing with things other than a rapidly spreading case of the sniffles. Because once we finally decide to ween ourselves off the mind-dulling narcotic that is Covid hysteria, we’ll be confronted with the world’s mightiest mess. Best to get round to it sooner rather than later.

That said, common sense sadly went out the window a long time ago, so don’t expect it to make a reappearance any time soon.