By Isle of Wight Observer
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and according to the costly Covid inquiry, 23,000 lives were lost because Boris failed to order a lockdown a week earlier. The arguably pointless enquiry cost us around £208 million – but they didn’t find time to ask where the hateful virus came from. Spoiler alert: it was that Wuhan laboratory. Most people seem to agree that we could have been better prepared, but did it ever cross your mind that something like that could happen?
Do you remember worrying about a nuclear threat? When we heard the air attack warning, they urged us to barricade the windows and doors with anything to hand. Ideally, we should get into the cupboard under the stairs and stay there. With six siblings, a German Shepherd dog, a cat, mum and stepfather, I wondered how we’d all fit. My mother and stepfather worked at Ealing Police Station, which they claimed was built to withstand a nuclear war, as was Paddington Green. The 70’s terrorist hijacker, Leila Khaled, was held at Ealing – notorious IRA terrorists were usually held at Paddington. If by happenstance you’re near either one when the 3-minute warning comes, head over there. Obviously, I can’t guarantee they’ll let you in, because, like most police stations, the front desks are probably unmanned now. No wonder the government scrapped those useless police and crime commissioners. Ours constantly boasts of reopening Island police stations, but there’s rarely anyone inside.
In the 70’s, the grown-ups often bickered in our house, and Mum’s bullish husband insisted he wouldn’t allow any kids to join them inside our home bunker if they hadn’t been home at the time of the strike. Mum couldn’t envisage not allowing us in. The stepfather took the view that if they so much as shifted a mattress, and we wriggled in, everyone would die of radiation sickness.
I’m a father myself now, and I’d definitely let any of mine in, but he did have a point. Those scary holocaust ads never explained how long we’d need to stay under the stairs, nor how we’d use the loo. The ads encouraged us to panic-buy tins of beans, candles, battery-powered radios, and spare batteries, so we could hear news of the unfolding horror outside. One can only imagine what it really would have been like. Thankfully!
Public information films were all the rage in years gone by. Remember, voice-over artist–actor Patrick Allen, did the nukes. A clip of his authoritative nuclear preparedness voice was used in ‘Frankie’s’ Radio 1 banned 80’s hit, ‘Relax.’ Later, John Hurt did the AIDS campaign voiceover. I was 25 when the AIDS/HIV Ads were broadcast on TV. At the cinema, they put me off holding hands, and my foyer hot dog and Kia Ora orange. The government believed millions of us could become infected, so every home got an AIDS leaflet. The apocalyptic campaign depicted a giant tombstone to scare us into keeping our trousers on. Luckily, I had a steady partner by then, but if I hadn’t, the power of advertising would have kept me celibate.
I was working in the funeral industry in London in those days, and we soon began seeing men in their 20s and 30s who’d died of AIDS. Initially, we were told not to touch their bodies without wearing masks, coveralls and two pairs of gloves. The poor, unfortunate souls came from public morgues, double wrapped in body bags; that’s how scared and ignorant the authorities were.
Just like Covid, the government terrified us to the point where some people still wear masks and WFH.
I don’t think Boris was responsible for any Covid deaths. The Chinese government caused them, and worryingly, there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them from doing it all again.