How do Oriental people ask to be furloughed? It’s like they invented a word (didn’t exist before March 18th, 2020) which was inherently and totally prejudiced against Far Easterners. Some things just can’t be done. The words just don’t fit, won’t come out, can’t be formed by your tongue. It’s like you asking for directions in Xhosa.

Meanwhile, as the world ‘opens up again’ and ‘economic recovery’ beckons, this is what the Embankment looked like in the ‘rush hour’. That’s the Victoria Embankment, part of the cultural and business heart of London, not like, some other embankment on some far away little stream in Gloucestershire where three fishermen represents a ‘crowd’.

And this is my world. The City of London is a thing of the (quite recent) past, now relegated to tumbleweed rolling down empty streets filled with vacated offices. Feels almost post-apocalyptic. Quite horrible.

So what a surprise yesterday morning, as I ambled my way to work, to see a massive crowd outside the High Courts. I mean, massive, sprawling, climbing over each other in their efforts at social distancing. This was the press pack, I discovered much later, waiting for Jonny Depp. And Amber Heard. Not they they were against each other, but they were both there because Jonny is suing the Sun newspaper for defamation. Which stated that he was a ‘wife-beater’. And a drunk and a drug addict at times, but he’s not worried about those. They’re just badges of glory. It’s the wife-beating allegations which apparently ‘damage his reputation’. And he wouldn’t want that delicate image, cultivated over decades, of being a wild, crazy, lunatic, violent, unpredictable, insane, dangerous head case, being damaged by accusations by our gutter press of being an abuser.

He should have taken the Sun to court in Saudi Arabia. Where wife-beating is not so much ‘not a crime’ as, more, on a par with buying a loaf of bread. And just as criminalised. But he chose the London courts instead. Probably due to the Sun being British. Like Punch & Judy.

Onwards and upwards

A xxxx