I have tried to ignore twitter and be with my family more over Christmas so maybe it’s just my immune system is weakened or my instruments need centering but Jesus the deliberate misrepresentation and disgusting smear content is surely higher than usual, no?

I am speaking of course about JHB, and Covid deaths. You can agree or disagree with whatever conclusions one might draw from the figures Hartley-Brewer quoted, but the idea that she thinks some lives don't *matter* is just hateful. Seriously. How can you live with yourselves?

The question is not, are old people and various unfortunates who have been silly enough to get themselves entangled with “pre-existing conditions” - eg my parents, obvs - worth throwing under the bus, so that they rest of us can get back down the pub in time for new years?

It is, would we not be able to better manage the manifold and highly variable risks to society by profiling and targeting those more at risk and creating tiers *within* communities, rather than imposing them on what seems a pretty blunt instrument, a crude geographical basis.

You know this. Everyone knows this. And the determination to present anyone who thinks it worth asking, as something lower than a serial killer – a serial killer who does it to sustain profile, and a hollow reputation as a provocateur – is obnoxious and dishonest. I despise it.

I watched It’s a Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve. Like many of us I expect I’ve seen it so many times now that familiar emotions get triggered earlier and earlier each time. Just seeing Bailey's embossed on the big leather suitcase now, is enough to start me off.

Several aspects of the movie are not plausible. It is not in my view plausible that anyone as gorgeous and full of life as Donna Reed would have ended up as an “old maid” without George, let alone that his presence alone stopped Bedford Falls turning into Weimar Berlin.

But one thing that isn’t remotely implausible is that a man facing financial ruin and social disgrace – let alone one who thinks his life insurance might be all he has left to offer his family – might choose to take his own life.

What such a man *won’t* get in real life, is a guardian angel jumping in ahead of him, and then patiently showing him around an alternative universe which illustrates just how valued he is, with or without the ability to feed his kids.

Such people still exist. And as much as the ages old principles of liberty and personal choice, these are the lives we have to try and bear in mind when making decisions about how best to protect everything that we have of value in this society.

Losing a business you have poured everything into for decades is not “just money”, it’s not “economics”, and to act as though it is, is as callous and inhumane as to pretend that anyone anxious about it, doesn’t care about Granny.

My father lost his job, his career, when he was 55 – the age I am now – through no fault of his own, nor of global pandemic, but simply through a cruel confluence of economic circumstances that in 1985 rendered him obsolete. He never worked again.

I don’t know if that is going to happen to me. But I do know that millions like me, and older, and younger, fear that - and in their hearts, fear it more than they fear that an aged relative, already half lost in many important ways, may be taken this winter rather than the next.

And I despise anyone who tells them, and tells me, that they are being cruel and selfish, and that they would as soon throw those loved ones into the back of a garbage truck as endure another Saturday night without a bellyful of beer and footie in the local.

None of which is to accept the legitimacy of such a trade off. Only that one set of criteria are being judged as absolutes, and the other as optional extras, and that is not the way the world works, or ever has, nor any great philosophy ever counselled.

And that is to say nothing of those who fear what we have already done to our young, let alone what smouldering wasteland they are going to emerge into when the on-line simulacrum of their school days flickers off and the next stage of the programme is powered up.

A lot of ad hom attacked are issued to people like JHB who it is assumed say things they don’t really think for clicks. I don’t believe it’s true in this case but I certainly think it can happen and one should always be wary of professional opinion havers, I agree.

So I would like to address some of the people who write “more in sorrow that in anger” for many of the nation’s best-selling newspapers, patiently reassuring us that Lockdown really is all for the best.

Because all that a lot of these people have had to endure is to file copy from their agreeable North London home, miss the odd office party, and delay skiing this winter. Very few of them have seen everything they've worked for being snuffed out, and their future fade to black.

Imagine wealthy middle class journalists were caught scolding poor black victims of some natural disaster, for not understanding that the complete devastation of their way of life that had been subsequently imposed on them without their right of appeal, were for their own good.

That it had been necessary for their own good, to protect them from further calamity, that to complain or to demand they be allowed to choose a different course were irresponsible and selfish? They would quite reasonably be told to get back in their lanes.

I don’t know who is right or who is wrong and we will likely never know whether we took the right course, whether other options were politically thinkable or practically manageable or whether as usual we royally fucked up.

Most of us will as ever come to those conclusions as we do most things, at a visceral level and in accord with our pre-existing beliefs, because it is painful to admit we were wrong, let alone that our tribal affiliation has let us down.

But that doesn't matter. The purpose of Twitter as much as anything, as I believe CS Lewis said of reading, is to know that we are not alone. It is vitally important – my God, if you do not know this, are you even human? – it is vitally important, that we are able to do this.

If a million and a half people filing past Parliament cannot prevent a war, do you really think a mid-ranking talk show host is going to divert public policy at this stage? Sage, Ferguson and his ilk have the Govt by the balls, God knows how or why but they do.

I would love to be able to challenge policy and regularly relieve this crew of steering duties, as I am sure we all would, but all most of us really demand is the right to howl at the moon and plead, however impotently, that we are not alone, and that God help us, we are not mad

Who knows? Maybe the vaccine will start to help us turn the corner and we just need a bit more patience, to get us over the line. But I think there may be many bumps still ahead, and with God knows what already baked in.

But I will not be told that it is "irresponsible" to question the Govt policy on this -let alone by a bunch of people who spent the last four years trying to undermine and prevent the last thing people had voted for - back when this was still, for better or worse, a free country.