FAZE FREE

Congratulations reader (if you are in Scotland), you’ve made it to phase three. If you weren’t aware, phase two was FACTS: Face coverings, Avoid, Clean, Two metres, Self isolate. It is a real indication of how poorly planned the response has been when it took 15 weeks before we got an acronym. If like me you’ve never made it past the first phase of anything, phase three is an exciting but also daunting and confusing prospect . This confusion is in no way helped when you read that from Monday, children and young people will be allowed to play organised outdoor contact sports and you don’t know what that is but you can only imagine children cage fighting in a skip, all be it a very tidy skip. Are all contact sports not organised in someway? Surely, a contact sport that is not organised is just a rammy.

Thankfully there will be more than cage fighting children to entertain us from Monday as non-essential shops inside shopping centres will be able to reopen. It’s not clear what that means for people who hang around the back of shopping centres selling lighters and wrapping paper. But who is the boss of them anyway?

If shops and brawling children aren’t enough to keep you occupied, or you’ve got too close when spectating at the skip, dentists will now be able to see patients for some routine treatments. I don’t know about you but I don’t want to be the first person a dentist uses a drill on after three months of just baking banana bread and playing Fortnite. At least check with them if they’ve been doing Joe Wicks every morning and if they are aware of any personal upper body strength gains.

If you want to watch the skip action from a safe distance, optometrists are now beginning to scale up work. Does that mean they’ll be starting from the bottom row instead of the top? There is no question that things have changed and we are all starting to wonder what the world will look like in the future, with or without glasses. However, when the optometrist says is it better or worse? They probably mean the wee picture rather than society as a whole.

If you are going to be on a bus or a train or in a shop you’ll need to wear a mask. If you’re in a shop on a train I’m guessing that’s two masks. Like some of the rides at M&Ds, you don’t have to wear a mask if you are a child under 5 or you have certain medical conditions. The rest of us are obliged to ride that tornado.

Other than saying, please wear a mask, I don’t know how we can convince everyone to wear masks. But the answer might lie with parents that can get a child to wear a coat. I hope we see the government starting to use the same tactics: You don’t have to wear one but everyone else is. Your nose will fall off, is that what you want? Fine, don’t wear it but people will think that I don’t love you. The problem is that when people are told to do something they tend to do the opposite. For instance, when they started putting posters on the trains about not putting your feet on the seats, it seemed like more people were putting their feet on the seats. So, can we get some posters made that say you are allowed to put your feet on the seats if you are not wearing a mask?

THE PUBS ARE OPEN for the first time in 15 weeks and it’s like when you were wee at primary school and you were desperate to have a birthday party. When you were eventually allowed you could only have six people, and they had to be picked up after two hours, and some clown ruined the whole thing for everyone.

I am glad pubs and restaurants are reopening, there have been knock on effects that you might not have thought of. In France there is a surplus of wine. I know. So they are having to free up space in cellars by taking vintage wine and champagne and turning it into hand gel. I’m pretty sure they have been selling champagne hand gel in Waitrose for some time but someone should do a Buckfast hand gel for washing your hands of all responsibility.

Whatever you feel about the new rules and procedures in pubs at least there’s now a great reason not to share your crisps.

If you were thinking of going on holiday, it turns out what happens in Benidorm, doesn’t stay in Benidorm. What happens in Benidorm stays in its room for a fortnight when it comes home. My biggest concern with traveling is bringing the virus back, because if you are on a Ryanair flight do you have to pay extra baggage? And, can someone advise if we can we still send the rain to Spain?

In other news, someone who named their child after a wind direction is considering running for President of the US. That’s Kanye West btw. People have become so fed up and bored with 2020 they’re throwing in a celebrity to get people back on board, like when they put Keith Duffy in Coronation Street. Look, maybe he can do it, maybe he knows what people like. They said he couldn’t do Glastonbury but he did it, he came and performed inside a giant toastie machine and everyone loved it because everyone loves toasties. However, when asked about a coronavirus vaccine he said, “they want to put chips inside of us, they want to do all kinds of things, to make it where we can’t cross the gates of heaven.” My pal has this dog flap and a dog can only get in if it has the right chip in it and that’s great but nobody ever told me that’s how religion worked.

Friends, as we ease out of lockdown and into our outdoor trousers lets slip out politely like we are squeezing out of a tiny fringe venue ten minutes into a show that’s really not for us.

Stay friendly x