It seems, people are paying £2500 for a dodgy ticket, for the possibility of sitting cheek by jowl with somebody with swine flu, in a temperature of 33° C, their heads going from side to side, and they call this ‘pleasure’.
It was predictable, that we would be in the mess we are when they invited Mandelson to take over the government. It looks as though we’re losing at least one of our railway lines, to my knowledge we have had about four U-turns in the last fortnight, and about six new initiatives in one week, most of the latter are something we wanted and were writing about a least three years ago. When this swine flu epidemic was initially broached, I was under the impression, because I was amazed at the cost, that we had something like 360 million doses of anti-flu, sitting on the shelves around the country. Obviously I was wrong in my interpretation of what the PM and the ministers were telling us, because in fact we are not going to get them until Christmas. How could people be allowed to enter this country on a direct flight from Mexico, and other hot-spots, and not be required to have voluntary isolation in their own homes? The information is all there, but then I forgot, the government databases are totally unreliable. It could be a little worrying when I say that my immediate family numbers almost 15 and that I am told that five of us are on a three to one risk. I can’t understand why it was necessary to broadcast figures like that, it achieves nothing, except disturbing the people who are naturally nervous, and in consequence have them worrying whether they should go shopping at eight o’clock in the morning, go on holiday, and so on, with the effect that these decisions would make to us commercially, and on the wider horizon with respect to the travel industry. It seems that the only thing we hear from the front benchers are the words ‘election’, ‘U-turn’, and ‘fresh initiative’ for something which had already been proposed and rejected.
It is definitely cloud cuckoo land