My song today is ‘The Road to Hell’ which Chris Rea recorded and released in an album of the same name in October 1989. I have posted this song before, but there have been so many private requests for me to repeat it, that I do so today, especially as it is somewhat appropriate to the time of the country’s lockdown.
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From everything I have experienced over the past year, Covid-19 reminds me more than anything else of Chris Rea’s recorded song, 'The Road to Hell'. Our lives have been turned upside during the past year of 2020, and although we are not out of the woods yet, rays of sunlight can be glimpsed through the trees providing our country with the more hopeful prospect of having three approved vaccines to beat this Covid-19 pernicious virus which has wreaked so much fear, ill-health, death, economic collapse, job loss, and all manner of social disruption since its commencement one year ago.
Good behaviourists offer both the carrot and stick when seeking to modify human behaviour, and that was essentially the essence of the Government’s pre-Christmas 2020 official message. We were told that while it was permissible for families to meet up beneath the same roof during Christmas week 2020, it was not advisable that they did so unless they were prepared to pay the possible penalty of burying a loved one in the New Year. Put bluntly, it sounded very much like ‘Give granny or granddad a Christmas hug, if you must, but be prepared to bury them before the spring of 2021’.
Unfortunately, it looks as though this has come to pass in some measure as the daily death rate in the last two days (ascribed as Covid-19 deaths) was almost 1400 people each day. Bear in mind that all current daily released figures reflect people who were positively tested with Covid-19 three weeks ago.
Having promised the nation a Christmas window of five full days in December 2020, the Government effectively placed itself in a double bind. It found itself falling down a deep political hole it had dug, and from which there seemed to be no way out with any honour as the Christmas week approached and a national surge in the increase of Covid-19 started to fill up NHS beds. Whatever one’s political colours, the Government could not do right for doing wrong. On one side, Prime Minister, Boris, could have played Scrooge, and completely shut down Christmas 2020. Had he dared to have changed his mind again, after initially ignoring the medical and scientific advice to cancel Christmas the first time around, he would have most certainly have abandoned all hope of ever entering Christmas 2021 as the Prime Minister of Great Britain. Instead, Boris decided to wear the Emperor’s clothes as he boldly marched ahead on the road he had previously mapped out, however high the New Year cost.
Recognising that he had never been as unpopular in the poll of ‘political leaders’ since he first assumed the Office of Prime Minister of Great Britain on 24 July 2019, Boris preferred to take up the cudgels of being the saviour of Christmas as opposed to the Scrooge who had sabotaged it. So, as ‘Leader of the Band’, he decided to lead a large proportion of the British electorate down the most popular road they seemed determined to travel during Christmas anyway, whatever direction the Government secretly preferred. Having allowed the bulk of the population to call the Christmas tune, Boris had no other alternative but to keep in step with his electorate and play from the same hymn sheet. He proudly played the premier role of Pied Piper, as he led his followers, ‘The British Lemming Party’ towards a mass suicidal Christmas cliff edge!
As he plodded on, Boris kept receiving scientific warnings about what inevitably lay ahead, unless he changed course. After giving the flashing red-light signals a second thought, and with both arms being twisted behind his back by opposing Conservative strategists, economists, scientific advisors, and medical officers, Boris did what Boris does best; he changed his mind again at the eleventh hour, after ten million ten-kilo fresh-family turkeys had been ordered.
Like the former quizmaster of television’s ‘University Challenge’(Bamber Gascoigne) Boris had started, so he decided he’d finish! Having promised that Christmas would not be cancelled, he allowed Christmas Day to go ahead, making sure that every Christmas traditionalist in the land would not be able to brand him a party pooper. But Boris does not wear a blonde bird’s nest on top of his head for nothing, if not to conceal from the electorate what plan he is hatching beneath. Only Boris knows how to have ‘an oven-ready deal’ that never needs cooking!
So, in his traditional flamboyant style (a cross between Paddington Bear and Winnie the Pooh) Boris issued his Christmas-cracker instructions, along with a free plate of the best mince pies from Waitrose, and a hot glass of punch to wash it down for every family in the land. The Christmas message coming from Number 10 could not have been clearer. Boris was telling us all, “Merry Christmas everyone. Eat, drink and be merry, but don’t blame me if you throw up afterwards! “He must be the only host ever who sent our invitations for a Christmas party, at which there was no fun to be had and the guests left with no ‘goody bags’. Beneath the Prime Minister’s Christmas message of good cheer lay the obligatory political ‘get out clause’ when things inevitably went wrong in the New Year. Taken at face value, one might be forgiven for having thought that Boris had wished us all a Merry Christmas, but beneath the surface reverberated the subliminal message of the grim reaper: “You can give granny and granddad a hug for Christmas but be prepared to attend their funeral early in the New Year!”
For many who were unprepared to change or modify their Christmas plans regarding having family visitors to their homes and ‘bursting all bubbles’ to meet up with a few friends over the Christmas period, unfortunately, a cliff-edge disaster proved unavoidable. Don’t get me wrong, as my comments are in no way politically coloured. I genuinely believe that whichever complexion of government took the country through 2020 (in any country in the world) they would have probably erred at every turn and could not do right for doing wrong in the eyes of half its populace.
I am equally as sure that whichever road the government chooses to take us down during the first six months of 2021, there will be signposts missed, opportunities squandered, wrong turnings made; and yet, I truly believe it will prove more hopeful a road to travel than last year was. The NHS is currently as close to collapse as it can possibly get without going under. It has increased bed occupation greater than it has ever been, and at the very same time, it is having to cope with an ever-increasing workload with fewer required staff to service patient needs as its nurses and doctors also succumb to illness, extreme fatigue and inevitable burn out. I would ask all Covid-19 deniers to be in no doubt that there is a neck-and-neck race between the virus and the vaccine reaching the whole population first. Let us hope that we get to the 18th hole first and are in the clubhouse celebrating with a well-earned glass of our favourite tipple as Covid-19 finds itself mired in a bunker and unable to progress.
Meanwhile, as the country heads towards the green of spring, with all the mixed confidence and doubt of a single-club golfer, let us hope that we are able to meet the stated government target and vaccinate fifteen millions of our most vulnerable citizens before mid-February 2021. Unfortunately, for some, 2021 shall sadly remain ‘The Road to Hell’. Whatever your trials during 2020, please God that 2021 is a better year for us all.
Love and peace
Bill xxx