Day 50: Big Brother is watching

I don’t know about you but I find that I can no longer watch the gloom of the BBC 6pm news and the Corona daily bulletin preceding it. For weeks it has been a catalogue of unremitting bad news. No wonder the country is in the grip of hysteria. The national news is followed by the local news with even more Corona gloom and despondence, albeit right on my doorstep. Very comforting!!

However, after yesterday’s briefing by Matt Hancock I believe there appears to be a light at the end of the tunnel. Well a glimmer possibly. I must say I am intrigued by his continuous use of the ‘pink tie’ - is he trying to set a trend or am I missing some important symbolism here? I would also like to know why Matt’s hair and that of Michael Gove are so well quiffed? Are their wives hairdressers or have they got a clandestine arrangement with Nikki Clarke? Trump clearly hasn’t as his roots get worse each day and Boris’ hair looks a bit like someone who’s holding a Van de Graaff machine!

But I digress….back to the glimmer of hope. The NHS have come up with a virus tracker that we are going to be advised to download to our smart phones. This is of course assuming that you have a smart phone and know how to use it if you’re over 70. Then again maybe that’s the reason we are being given these horrendous rumours about the over 70s being locked up indefinitely and not being allowed to roam the streets. No need for a tracker for us!!

However as usual we have invented our own totally unique tracker so much so that it isn’t compatible with any others in the world - why oh why do we always have to be so different to everyone else? We have rejected the technology on offer by the actual tech companies like Google and Facebook and invented our own no doubt far more complicated version. Which means while we may be able to leave our homes, we will be confined to the British Isles as we can’t be ‘tracked’. There go the summer holiday plans we’ve all been dreaming of. Unless of course you class the Isle of Wight and the Isle of Man as being island getaways. They never have before and I certainly can’t see it happening now.  Although I must check if they work in the British overseas territories? Turks and Caicos here I come!

The Isle of Wight of course is the place where the first trials are taking place. Now I definitely don’t want to throw a dampener on proceedings but my neighbour hails from “the island” and she assures me that there would be no point in tracking and tracing anyone there as everyone is related to everyone, they all know each other’s business and that a combination of gossip, WhatsApp and CCTV could probably do the job just as well.

Although Matt Hancock did manage to extinguish the glimmer by concluding, as ever, that everyone must ‘stay at home’. I have been reading about all the privacy issues and am really quite concerned by what the Government plans to do with all the data tracking my movements around the house. What if they see how often I walk past my dirty windows without stopping? Will they cancel my roaming privileges?