Part II, P.J. O’Rourke Lives Again (at The Spectator)

 

I think I have never enjoyed a more pleasant time [than during the COVID lockdown]. The weather was beautiful, and out in the Kent countryside, where I then lived, one could enjoy it to its full. Wildlife was less shy than usual, perhaps a consequence of the state-imposed quietude. Occasionally city dwellers would infest our country lanes and I had great pleasure in yelling at them to return to their filthy tenements, taking their vile diseases with them.

 

There was a pleasure, too, in the Ballardian scenes at the local supermarket, as the chavs wheeled out their thousands of loo rolls and sacks of pasta. And at the local farm shop, a couple of assistants wore plastic bags over their shoes because of a theory then prevalent that the virus was heavy, fell to the floor with a kind of awkward clunking sound and then got picked up inadvertently by the nearest pair of Nikes. It was, I would concede, a time of government-enforced mass idiocy and I enjoyed it immensely.

 

From: Rod Liddle, ‘Who gets to decide what is “harmful”?’ The Spectator (13 May 2023, 9:00 AM), <https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/wrong-but-not-harmful/>;

 

Seth Barrett Tillman, Part II, P.J. O’Rourke Lives Again (at The Spectator), New Reform Club (May 21, 2023, 8:29 AM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2023/05/part-ii-pj-orourke-lives-again-at.html>;