This is my new look. It’s a bit like my old look but with a fucking great ‘thing’ stuck across my face. Hiding some of the beauty. All of the beard. Steaming up my glasses. Making me hot and sweaty, in a re-breathy kind of way. And from a back-to-work perspective, it also removes 90% of non-verbal facial expressions and 40% of verbal expression due to mufflage effects (Mumble, Muffle and Mmmmmm, 1974).

I use the mask primarily as a neck-warmer, at which its really effective. Certainly more effective than the government led us to believe it was as a protection from virus. So it lingers round my neck and then, when I go on the tube, I DEPLOY!!! Pull it up over nose and mouth. Turn into the urban terrorist look currently so big in riots in America.

Last week I pulled it into position when boarding at East Finchley. Opened my kindle, relaxed reading… by the time I arrived at Highgate (1st stop) I’d unconsciously dragged it off and it was back round my neck. How’d that happen? Who did that??? I tried again and same thing happened.

But now its ‘LAW’. Well, its compulsory from next week; masks on the tube. They’ve suddenly become very effective, according to health experts… who work for the government.

But the urban terror thing is big in America. Holy shit, its big. The murder (because there’s simply no other way to see it) of George Floyd was horrendous. No question about it. The reaction was predictable, the looting unfortunately diminishing the otherwise immense effect and simply nurturing existing stereotypes even further.

Yet the protest has now started, not a ‘new dialogue’ exactly, because we get it every time the police murder a black man in custody, which is tragically, fairly often. But it has elevated that dialogue of racism to a new high. Maybe because a majority of ‘African Americans’ are working class people and thus are suffering disproportionately from the Coronavirus economic effects. And possibly because they’re also suffering a disproportionately higher death rate than whites. Whatever the cause, America needs to address its massively inherent racism issues. In the police, in the South and in their society in general.

And who better to steer them through such a dialogue than Donald Trump. Who better to unite a nation than an idiotic, blinkered, quasi-racist, shoot-em-up dickhead? He’s perfectly suited to such a monumental task. And he is, because he doesn’t see ‘racism’. Not when its his race which isn’t suffering. So he won’t address it. He’ll only concern himself with the secondary effects. The demonstrations, the riots, the unrest. And like Gandhi before him, and George Washington and other such statesmen, he wants to call in the army and tell ‘em to bring their guns!

All we can hope is that between the Coronavirus denial debacle, the plummeting economy and this current shit storm, Trump’s standing has dropped sufficiently that he won’t win this year’s election. Which is itself dependant on a majority of Americans NOT being racist. And to be honest, I’m not sure how that will play out.

God Bless America!!!

A xxxx