Dr Kristopher Lovell

10th May, 2020 – The Prime Minister’s Speech on Easing the Lockdown
I thought I was very lucky. I’d been unable to find a job before the lockdown, and with my classes all going online, I decided it was best to move back in with my parents, who have a nice house with a big garden, so I’ve really been trying to keep from complaining. Until today. Boris Johnson has just talked about easing the lockdown measures in England so that more workers (read: minimum-wage workers) can go back to work, even though we’re clearly not even slightly out of the woods. With this in mind, the summer job I applied to do at my university will probably want me to come in to the office and work from there. The problem is that my student house currently has a suspected COVID-19 case in. I can’t go back. I feel selfish for being scared; there are other people in much worse situations than me, people starving, people running out of money, people in abusive situations. But still, I feel like I’m in the incinerator from Toy Story 3, trying desperately to run from a massive fiery hole, and someone’s at the controls, and everyone’s screaming for them to do something and they’re just singing Vera Bloody Lynn as though if we were all a little more gung-ho and Blitz Spirited about this then we’d all be muddling along nicely. I hate that our country is nearly the laughing stock of the world. I hate the idea that smug people are going to be blaming us for Boris Johnson. I just want to scream and scream as loud as I can, and when I stop, everyone will just do the actual right thing, and the virus will be gone, and we’ll all agree that we can never let it get this bad again, and we’ll mean it.