Quarter Past Curfew - Lockdown

Good morning citizens, and welcome to quarter past curfew – news, sport, opinion, and other meaningless social constructs. 

Today is of course the first day of the lockdown initiative launched by our glorious leader– praised be his name, hallowed be his memory – and we are of course not allowed to leave our houses. I, for one, welcome the changes. It’ll be nice to have a bit of time around the house. I can finally get around to a bit of DIY.. filling in that hole in the wall that the glorious regime left when they took my wife.  And the larger hole they left, when they returned her.

I have a couple of press releases on my desk. But let’s get started with the headlines. The mood of the day is sombre, the soup of the day is tomato, and the fear of the day is irrelevance. And remember – you can expect your rations to arrive some time between 9am and the setting of the cold, indifferent sun.

Erm, so, erm, I’ve got some press releases here.

The first one says remain calm. In all capitals. Underlined five times. It’s very important that we all just remember to keep breathing. Breathe in. Breathe out. Don’t sort of think about the ramifications of what’s happening …. It’s very important not to confront your own mortality …  just keep forcing television into your eyes like grain down the gullet of a foix gras duck.

Press release number two: we’ve got some economic news: it turns out the entire system is just based on numbers drawn on bits of paper. It’s all made up. Who saw that coming? Not me. And there’s absolutely no reason to take me to a secure government facility. Praise the glorious leader, hallowed be his name, hallowed be his memory,

And finally – as of last night, all public buildings are closed until further notice. This includes all libraries, museums, and galleries – so I know that a lot of us were looking forward to the museum of accurately labelled art (where you can see the painting of the bored lady with the dog, and those watercolours of blurry gardens) but that’ll just have to wait.

And that brings us to the end of today’s update. Hope you’re keeping …well. And sort of managing to tamp down the feeling that we’re standing on the edge of history, a sort of vast lake, and watching a wave approach and in a couple of hundred years this’ll all be a question on a GCSE they’ll be watching all the daytime television hosts talking about how to make your own eggless pasta and shouting at each other across the studio like it’s a Chris Morris sketch.

 But I guess we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.