I’ll get the coffee

I’ll get the coffee – yours still espresso?

No Americano, it lasts longer. Didn’t you get coffee last time?

Dunno – my memory doesn’t do pre-lockdown very well. Doesn’t matter anyway – gives me a chance to wear my virus mask.

You don’t believe all that crap do you? It is all junk science and hand-waving you know, the virus only affects oldies, hardly anyone else.

I know but I want to wear my mask – haven’t worn it yet and I made it by following a YouTube video. Took me ages so it’d be a waste not to wear it. Anyway we’re oldies if you think about it.

I’m not an oldie – it’s a mental thing… like your mask… mental.

Piss off – it looks cool and I’m off to get the coffee because there’s a mirror over there. I may be gone for some time because I haven’t worked out what those arrows on the floor are yet and my glasses are steaming up.

That’s the mask.

Bloody hell I can’t see a thing – wish me luck I’m going in…

…

You managed it then?

Shields everywhere and that social distancing malarkey but yes I managed it – well obviously I did because here’s the coffee and hardly anyone else is sitting inside anyway.

Thanks… You’ll need to take the mask off to drink that coffee by the way. It’s all bollocks anyway if you ask me.

What wearing masks?

All of it – all the lockdown crap.

Why is it? Not that I’m disagreeing with you but why is it all crap? My mask’s all damp inside now – maybe we aren’t supposed to breathe in them.

It’s just crap. Social media and so on – in fact the whole internet – it’s like a pub where you are always earwigging somebody else’s conversation.

You do – I don’t.

Really?

Okay – I do a bit but so what?

Well just like a pub… Look at it like this - even if you don’t know the people you’re earwigging you know if they are talking rubbish or not. You can tell – tone of voice, false emphasis, selling instead of discussing. You can tell –

Okay - maybe.

Well the whole internet is like that – Facebook, Twitter and so on it’s all like that and you can tell when people are selling crap ideas or don’t know what they are talking about anyway. You can tell.

You can just tell?

Yes you can – just like in the pub. That's what people don’t realise when they talk down to us and try to sell us rubbish ideas. We can tell they are doing it – loads of people can tell so they mostly ignore it. With newspapers and TV it wasn’t nearly so obvious – we couldn’t tell as easily but now we can. The whole social media and internet thing – it’s tuned us in as we were never tuned in before. We’ve wised up and they haven’t realised that yet.