Cassandra, remember her, a soothsayer who actually told the sooth? The only trouble was, no one listened to her, because she was a Greek - no, wait till the end of the sentence - a Greek priestess cursed by Apollo the Sun-god. (Those sun gods, eh?) So nobody ever paid any attention to Cassandra's prophecies even though they all came true eventually. She was a sybil who was never faulty.
Right at the beginning of our modern pandemic there were warning voices cautioning us against putting our faith in politicians rather than medical or scientific evidence. Jus
t like Cassandra, the stethoscope-wallahs were on the right track, but the panicky politicians were reluctant to follow their advice, for reasons of their own.
I say reasons but I mean votes. And temporary popularity. And continuing in positions of authority. Holding on to power by looking like they were doing something. They were faced with a riddle worthy of the Sphinx. They wanted to be viewed as heroes, saviours of the people and the economy, just not in that order.
To this end, they came up with premature easing of restrictions and hasty re-openings rather than measured reactions to analytical and statistical prognostications. I'm starting to sound like a haruspex (sorry) myself. I try to learn a new word every day.
The politicians ought to have listened more closely to our modern Cassandras and noted how often their prophecies came true. But just when they should have started seeing things in proper perspective, their egos rendered them blinkered, purblind to the plight of others. Thousands suffered because of their intellectual myopia.
There is an old schoolteachers' joke - I'm an old schoolteacher, of English as a foreign language (which English was, more or less, when I grew up in Dundee) - that goes as follows: "The past, the present and the future walk into a bar. It's a tense evening." Feeble, but never before have yesterday, today and tomorrow seemed to have rushed together at such an alarming rate, coalescing into one long nightmare of lockdown. Apparently inside a tunnel, the light at the end of which could have been an oncoming train, until the Vaccine Express arrived. Let's hope it's not derailed.
I was once briefly a trainee tax inspector, before I became disgruntled with the whole idea of personal taxation on my first pay day, but I still remember PCRT stood for professional conduct in relation to taxation. (Legal tax-dodging.)
I now believe this should be supplanted by a new acronym, the Post Corona Responsibility Tribunal, which would investigate such things as who-knew-what-when-and-the-action-they-took-with-what-result? (Probably too long for its own acronym.) The judges could be drawn from the National Health Service, the General Medical Council, and the grieving relatives.
I have very little hope that such a thing will ever be set up, of course, I am a realist after all. People sometimes claim nothing is impossible, to which I retort that most days I manage to do nothing. That teaches them.
