If you’re not well, mask up and don’t be a selfish idiot

The bug sucker-punched me on Hogmanay. I’m feeling lousy but fit enough to walk around and work. How in all good conscience can I not wear a mask when I can go out? I can’t cough and sneeze over innocent punters on the bus or in the shops. What do I want to do, kill someone’s granny? Send some pregnant woman to hospital? Do I want to be one of the thoughtless, stupid people who put extra burden on our ruined NHS?

I’ll cope with some wee bug just fine, but others might not, and if they don’t then it’s a hospital that will have to look after them. But how can hospitals look after them now? They can’t. So if I don’t wear a mask, in the back of my mind I’m thinking about hurting someone or putting another bullet into the NHS.

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Full disclosure: I hate wearing masks. It makes me fidgety, claustrophobic. Breathing in your own breath, and feeling your skin dirty up under cloth, is gross. I don’t like being unable to see the expression on someone’s face, it undermines what makes us essentially human: our sociability. So this isn’t a fun experience. I’m not happy to put a mask on. But it’s better than killing someone, and at the risk of sounding like Bobby the Boy Scout: sometimes being a decent citizen isn’t fun.

Nor am I saying that we should bring back mandatory mask-wearing – yet. What I’m saying is that for me, personally, the risk of making someone ill or overburdening the NHS means I’m sticking one of these damn things on my face in the hope that it’s for the greater good.

Evidently I’m not alone. The professor is back … not that he ever went away. Jason Leitch says if you’ve got any bug get a mask on your gob when you’re out in the big bad world, and don’t go to work either. The UK Health Security Agency says much the same. Keep kids off school if they’re unwell, wash your damn hands, mask up. Basically, don’t be a selfish stupid trash-bag.

Presenter and columnist Julia Hartley-Brewer (Image: BBC)

Of course, the usual moronic culture warriors have gone demented. The Daily Wail is deeply triggered, blubbing about "let’s not return to face mask madness". The Rothermere family’s personal gazette even rolled out Tory MP Sir Desmond Swayne to have a pop at masks. That’s the same Swayne once accused of peddling misinformation about Covid. He told an anti-lockdown group statistics on coronavirus “appear to have been manipulated”, and risks to the NHS were “manageable”. Then Home Secretary Priti Patel – not someone I thought I’d ever quote positively, but then times are strange indeed – said his remarks were “thoroughly wrong” and he should retract them.

The increasingly weird shock-jock Julia Hartley-Brewer is gnashing her gums too. “IT’S NEVER GOING TO END,” she screamed in capital letters on social media. When someone hits the caps lock then they’ve clearly lost it. “They know masks don’t work … they’re lying to us AGAIN.”

It’s best to ignore Hartley the Hare-Brained. Recently she was cheerleading the online misogynist Andrew Tate for mocking Greta Thunberg. Tate was later detained in Romania as part of a human-trafficking and rape investigation. Hartley-Brewer even stooped low enough to use Thunberg’s autism against her.

So really, when dear Julia says X make sure you do Y. If this snowflake is crying about masks then get one on your face toot sweet.

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Do we really need to rehash evidence that masks work? Of course there will be lunatics gurgling about articles like this, claiming masks are some plot by Bill Gates and Hillary Clinton’s baby-eating orgy-cult, but, you know, those people are off their heads. They should be locked up in hospitals – if there were any beds left, of course.

If you don’t think masks work, then please go back to your bleach and Ivermectin cocktails. But if you’re unwell and you go out unmasked then you’re the lowest of the low. As ever, it’s the blitz-spirit types who denounce masks. You know, the ones who get turned on by Union Jacks and say we need to be like our forebears during the Second World War. The ones so big and strong that putting a mask on their stupid faces reduces them to hysterics. Can you imagine that lot during the war? Throwing children behind them as they race for the bomb shelters.

Back during pandemic, I exhausted myself researching and quoting medics to prove masks work. Not any more. If people are so mentally dysfunctional that they think the sun goes around the Earth I’m not going to rehearse Copernicus and Galileo for them. Masks reduce transmission, that’s the bottom line. Masks mean my risk of infecting others is greatly diminished.

You can just hear the nutters though shouting "but I’ve done my research". I’m afraid googling "masks" and watching some headcase talk about the Illuminati on Youtube isn’t "research". Talk to a doctor, or do one.

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The abject misery of all this is that masks themselves have become a pathogen of the culture wars. An object which should be seen for what it is – a means of protecting others from a virus I’m carrying, and slowing the harm done to the NHS – is now a vector for the worst aspects of modern life: conspiracy theories, junk science, empathy-death, selfish right-wing snowflakes triggered by anyone trying to act decently, the insanity of Twitter and Facebook, and the failure of Britain’s media to do its job properly.

If you’re not well, just mask up and don’t be a bloody idiot.