So the logic of the latest lockdown is frying my goddamn mind. On a list of conundrums I can’t solve, ‘If a woman sits alone on a bench can she transmit a virus she probably doesn’t have?’ is now up there with, ‘If a tree falls in the middle of a forest, and there’s no one around, does it still make a sound?’.
Given three police officers were filmed arresting a woman in Bournemouth for sitting on a bench alone, they clearly thought they knew the answer. On initial inspection, there appeared to be two ways to interpret the footage. Either they had her bang to rights for a lockdown violation, or they were violating her human rights.
However, since then, heroic feats of journalism have been performed — ‘Woman, 50, “arrested for sitting on bench” is Covid conspiracy theorist’. It turns out she hadn’t just been sitting on a bench; she’d walked along the beach with her elderly father picking sea shells, and (according to an ‘ex-friend’) ‘she was going around telling everyone that coronavirus was no worse than getting the sniffles and that it was an attempt to control us all’.
Read more: It is a journalist’s duty to question lockdown
