Reading. Redding, they pronounce it. Red bricks. Red blood.
The English bleed. Over 125,000 deaths and counting, many avoidable. Failure – or worse, opportunities seized for blatant corruption – on practically every aspect of the pandemic response. The single thing that has actually gone reasonably well, the vaccination programme, becomes a basis to gaslight their population, successfully, into forgetting how far it was political blundering, not the COVID-19 virus itself, that caused them a year and a half of abject suffering.
They are eager to get ‘back to normal’, so one hears. Back to the neo-feudal normal of a country that feeds on its poor and its different, hurling aside the tethers of truth and care as they follow a clutch of crypto-fascist killer clowns to a promised land of eternal abuse in a cloak of hollow vanity, fairytale history and woke-bashing for sport.
They had a choice, the English. A chance to look at their country in the mirror of this virus and change its course before it was too late. Perhaps one day they will look back, and wonder if this was when they crossed the point of no return.
| A return: Henley-on-Thames, after more than a year’s absence. |
It was my hope to continue this expedition once COVID-19 had been defeated. However, with the English administration’s failure to take it seriously or mount any coherent broad strategy to suppress it (in which they are far from alone, to be fair), it is quite clear they have gifted the virus a permanent place in this land.
