CoronaRambles Part 1 and 2: Coronarambles, #1

By Moulin A. Paroles

This book contains NO Medical or technical advice relating to virus outbreaks. This is a short diary written by a mildly disabled English woman living in France during the lockdown in 2020 and looking at the situation in England from the view of the whole spectrum of the UK media. The book gives some views that are quite blunt due to the author's past and autism. The book is one of many lockdown diaries, each one unique, everyone has a story to tell. The books looks at the author's feelings, beliefs, way of life with and without church, work and how it is affected, changes to daily routines, including good changes such as growing vegetables and toutine exercises, which the author was going to get around to anyway, English television and news in France, the differences between UK and French lockdowns, and much more. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Moulin A. Paroles
• Release date: Apr 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393845577

Book preview

CoronaRamble Part 1.

Introduction and Critical Reviews. 

'Rambling, incoherent and most disagreeable' - the opinion of the press and public on this particular blogger.

'She's barking mad - 'Anonymous'.

'We warn people to ignore her in case we are exposed' - The Church of England.

'We blame her solely for the Current Situation, the evidence points that way' - The Metro

'She is the ringleader, no doubt about it' - Conspiracy Theorists International

'Insufferable, no other description will do' -Angry Anonymous.  

Lockdown is a time of reflection, unless you haven't got a mirror, and I am a reflective person, I reflect in profusion. Past, Present and Future. I want you to do the same, someone’s got to turn out something more sensible than this book.

This short book/blog/series has no intention of making light of the virus situation or mocking anyone or anything apart from those turning out dreadful headlines, it is simply my account of living with the crisis and watching the crisis and the thoughts and lifestyle changes that come about as a result of lockdown, while some things remain eerily the same, and I have Asperger Syndome, so if I think the UK press are a bunch of hysterical morons, I may actually say it out loud. Don't laugh, John, I am entitled to an opinion the same as you and your friends are, and the press have a thick skin. Armadillos.

Myself, I am a writer, a caretaker and garden and grounds worker, British Citizen and Jewess living in France, I grew up in England, Wales and the Channel Islands in Hebrew speaking Jewish and Evangelical cult conditions as well as a gypsy traveller lifestyle, eclectic but true, and the Evangelical cult life continued for parts of my adult life but my background is far from as simple as just religion. I am a conditionally baptised Catholic as an adult and I worship with the Catholic and Evangelical Free Churches, I am no religious nut and I'm not an evangelist, but my faith-based musings weave in and out of many of my works, including this one, and although this isn't a faith-based work, the current crisis does give rise to theological questions and musings. 

My background also weaves through the present as lockdown gives me time to think. My story was once described as 'The worst outside of war zones' by a social worker who knew some of the story of high profile abusers in my case as he was from my home area. I called him a prat in return, and he is. But my background leaves me disabled and of course being already disabled could make the current crisis worse if I let it, and it does add extra challenges to the lives of the already vulnerable, poor and struggling. Life is already at breaking point for too many people, especially in the UK, but in France as well. Surprisingly my background gives me endurance and humour and an ability to look at things from outside the mainstream.

Corona Ramble. The Story of an Englishwoman in France during the Coronavirus lockdown.

It is March 2020, and when the papers first tried to make yet another winter virus into a big thing in February, I groaned and thought ‘Here we go again’. It is the beginning of the decade, and at the beginning of the last two decades, there were months of press hysteria and damage to society and the economy over viruses, first Foot and Mouth, which drove me from the agricultural industry into gardening, then Swine Flu a decade later. There was no Swine Flu where I lived, so our lives continued relatively normally although when I flew to the UK for training we were given the ridiculous advice that anyone with Swine Flu was to be quarantined in the cold tiled shower block. To me, leaving an ill person in a cold damp building would be akin to killing them. And why? Over a mild virus that wasn't a killer? Homicide. I remember how hard the media pushed and pushed for Swine Flu to be a terrible killer, I think they had enjoyed feasting like vultures on the Foot and Mouth crisis that slaughtered most farmers and their families, and wanted to do the same again. It took me a long time to understand how dangerous the press are, even with my family's terrible experience of them when I was young. 

Yes, I remember the concerted effort that was made to force deaths from Swine Flu and to terrorise people from it. And what were the symptoms? A terrible headache and cold/flu/respiratory symptoms. I hadn’t been diagnosed with asthma at the time but it had been suggested, but even so I was pretty sure that Swine Flu, if it existed, wasn’t going to do me serious harm. It is very easy to mass diagnose people who have a headache and respiratory problems with a scare flu as they are doing now, after all, those symptoms are common symptoms of a cold or winter virus. I watched the hysterical press and media try to stampede and terrify people over Swine Flu and push deaths up until they got piles from the effort, in some areas they were successful in making streets deserted and businesses closed. A few people died, they died of the so-called Swine Flu or the normal circulating viruses causing additional complications to existing illnesses. The same is happening now.

The mass hysteria of the mild if it existed, Swine Flu, which should have simply been accepted as a normal virus circulation, died out without a murmur about the hysteria and the damage done by the vulture press and media or anyone who lied about the illness and incited panic. No investigations were carried out.

A decade later, and this Coronavirus that was only in China, where pollution causes many respiratory diseases with similar symptoms, started to be slipped into the UK national press as well as international press, and I saw it and thought ‘Here we go again’, it was the aggressive way that this winter virus, with the same symptoms of Swine Flu, was being pushed by the papers when this disease was affecting a small percentage of the Chinese Population. But the press and media, presumably dismayed by the failure of Swine Flu as an Armageddon bubonic plague, had to push and push this one, much harder than Swine Flu, so by the time they could report on any cold or winter virus being diagnosed as this disease elsewhere, the hysteria had already begun.

Life had been difficult enough, it had rained almost solidly for six months in the UK and Northern France, a winter without snow or cold, just rain and strong winds, and myself and people I knew had been through all sorts of bad luck, my car had been robbed and trashed, I had ended up without a working printer or computer, and finally the rain was easing so that I could go out and do gardening, which is one of my trades. Life was turning around but then we were hit by hysteria, or ‘Coronavirus’. 

I remember, although other people’s memories seem short, that when ‘Swine Flu’ was ridiculed as a name and hampered the hysteria, they renamed it a click-name to encourage people to think that they were part of it ‘H1N1’. They did the same when ‘Coronavirus’ wasn’t spreading and causing hysteria as rapidly as the press and media wanted. Without the press and media, I don’t think there would be a pandemic. They tried to rename ‘Coronavirus’ as ‘Covid-19’ to make the sheeple feel academic and part of it all. The sheep and pipers game with the press and media and the people being made to dance horrifies me, and it reminded me of when I was a young papergirl, delivering daily papers that spent more time attacking Princess Diana than producing news, and when Princess Diana was killed, the press put on a beautiful weepy show for months even though their persistent harassment may have driven the woman to death and certainly harmed her mental health immeasurably (sadly I really know what the press can be like, as I and my family have been on the receiving end) and when it died down, my dad said 'But they will find something else to do this about, you watch'. And he was right, that is how the press and media work, they lead the sheeple into hysteria and clicks. It has been to the great dismay of the press that in the modern era, that blogs and social media criticise and condemn their work and refute it, they call the people who think and dispute their work 'conspiracy theorists' to try and get the sheeple to ignore them. They couldn't call the Leveson Inquiry a conspiracy theory but sadly they did have enough newspaper owners in power to stop the next phase of the Leveson Inquiry.

The press was full of scare stories from February, there wasn't