Have you seen what people are allowed to say on the Internet? Practically anything -that’s what! People seem to think that any old rubbish they spout should be instantly posted on line for an incredulous World to see… So I’m having some of that!

From now on all my maturer thoughts are going global – it’s time somebody with a cool head was listened too. I am sure my good sense and forthright ideas will be universally acknowledged for the saving grace of mankind I have always thought them to be.

Of course I learned to type at the Woman’s Institute after the Falklands War, but operating Mitzi’s laptop is quite a learning curve. On the downside there are lots of functions to learn and no reassuring bell ringing at the end of another successful line of thought. On the plus side I don’t need pots of Tippex and the keys don’t keep getting stuck. I’m sure I will get the hang og it sooxxxx9we45555.

Just a little joke there…. I know where the back button is!

Ginger Bork was on the blower this morning. It turns out Pomeroy’s are now doing take-away gargle blaster, so I put my best foot forward pretty sharply…

When I arrive there’s a queue! It’s worse than a Lord’s Test Match bar during a rain-break. And everyone is standing 6 feet apart to avoid breathing in the blight. It’s all quite civilised really. I’ve stopped counting the number of times I’ve been in a line at the cricket and some over-indulged spectator has thrown up on my shoes… No chance of that here and after 20 minutes having a pleasant shouting match with my ‘neighbours’ on the pavement, I’m through the door and old Norman of blessed service is beaming up at me like a vicar during the second coming.

The whole thing goes off without a hitch, 12 bottles of firewater and a dozen more of vino collapeso, and a small bottle of tonic – which he will even arrange to deliver – until I mention he could have some sort of queue jumping scheme for his regulars to shorten the waiting time. He ripostes with a comment about me settling my outstanding bill, so I call it quits and we bid each other good-day. Settling my affairs indeed? Doesn’t he know we are in the grip of unprescendented emergency? He didn’t have any lemons either…. Strange times indeed!

Can you absolutely credit it? Here we are in the middle of the worst crisis since Noah said I think it’s going to rain; the stock market is lower than a Ginger Tom’s morals, the plagued are walking the earth, the shops are running out of all the essentials – especially mother’s favourite tipple – and what does our glorious leader do? Goes and gets himself infected with bat flu! And he’s not the only one! That oaf Hancock – who they’ve put in charge of the medicine cabinet – has got it too… and others no doubt. What have they been doing? Holding a pox party?

What is the point of being in power if you can’t avoid picking up the blight from Jo Public? What kind of example does that set to the masses – both foreign and domestic? If we can’t keep our cognoscenti free of it, what hope is there for the rest of us? I am depressed. I have several large ones to recover from the gripe this has brought on – which further depletes my stock of fire-water.

Mitzi has been out in search of reinforcements, but so far has only come up with some dubious looking cocktail mixers and a fruit juice. Fruit at a time like this! It gets my goat. I am now seriously considering taking to the bath-tub and mixing my own. All I need is some paraffin, berries and a bit of nerve and I could be drowning in the stuff by Easter.

However on further investigation it appears the whole homemade spirit enterprise may be a lot more complicated than I first thought. What exactly is a still?

For reference Mitzi points me in the direction of the Internet. They’ve got everything in there! It’s a mine of information… Who knew? I very quickly discover more than I ever want to read about the electric gargle making business and I decide it should be left to the experts. Although why they charge such an enormous amount for a stiff one is still not fully explained…

I can’t help feeling somewhere on the web the cure to all our current ills lies waiting. As soon as I’ve figured out how to use Google properly I’m sure I will track it down.

The news from the front is grim. The number of people falling foul of this deadly plague is increasing rapidly. I am depressed. I had hoped this would all be over by the Guineas race card, but that is clearly not going to be the case… The situation is worse than anything I could imagine, and my prep school teacher – Mrs Cobb – said I had a very vivid imagination for my age (11 I think) when she caught me behind the bike sheds with a well thumbed copy of Razzle magazine…

It’s like being stuck indoors with measles – except everyone is stuck indoors. At prep school when the curse struck we were given board games to while away the hours once the Razzle was confiscated. I fish out my old childhood stock and attempt to introduce Mitzi to some early British culture. But the Cluedo has most of it’s cards missing so it’s always Miss Scarlett in the library with a lead pipe. The Monopoly has very little Chance, half the properties are gone and the money is well short – too much like real life for my liking… and Mousetrap has no mouse and my 1/32nd scale model of a Seaforth Highlander won’t fit in the cage…

So we abandon Waddington’s finest and deplete my Gin stock further while Mitzi tells me about her young life overseas…

Normally I wouldn’t be interested, but the current cultural wilderness needs a bit of bolstering. It turns out she is not from Eastern Europe at all, but Greece! It just goes to show racial stereotyping is not all it’s cracked up to be! It also turns out she hasn’t had sex with anyone else for years. She just shows some cleavage on the Interweb for a few bob to supplement her meager salary as a chat-line hostess… She earns her money talking about it and showing it but not actually doing it! What a fascinating modern World we live in. Virtual sex!

When I Inquire as to why she told me she couldn’t earn money with social distancing in place, she explains (rather patronizingly I thought) that the chat line call center was closed and they couldn’t work from home because of the Data Protection Act. I pretend to understand but I haven’t got a clue what’s she is talking about. Surely all she needs is a phone?

I have discovered the internet… or rediscovered it I should say… I did use it some years ago, but the adult entertainment was slow and of dubious quality – it was quicker to get my porn from the local newsagents… It turns out Mitzi wasn’t in the spare room finishing a jigsaw. She was using a small camera on her laptop to display her feminine wares to the internet public and they are paying her automatically for the dubious pleasure.

I make a very funny joke about ‘laptop dancing’ but as English is not her first language Mitzi doesn’t laugh….

I am amazed that a sex worker can indeed carry on working from (my) home and maintain social distancing… what a fascinating modern world we live in.

I am slightly concerned that if the rozzers get wind of it I maybe charged with running a disorderly house and living off immoral earnings – I wouldn’t want to go through that again, but I suspect Mr Plod will be much too busy dispersing gypsy barbecues to hunt down socially necessary service providers such as myself…

I check the small print, but as a self-employed sex worker it appears Mitzi won’t be expecting a Government hand-out anytime soon. This gives rise to thoughts of my own precarious financial situation. With my meager retireage at the mercy of a stock market deflating faster than Uncle Willy’s balloon, my usual fall-back – the evening meeting at Haydock Park – a non-runner and no unsuspecting friends I can touch up for a few quid owing to the social distancing regulations, things are looking pretty bleak…

Having been excused Credit Cards a few years ago, my options are limited… On the other hand, the recent crack-down on fun means I won’t have to settle numerous bar tabs for a while – so it’s not all bad.

Mitzi wants to know what is for breakfast… This is apparently a meal before lunch that I usually sleep through, so I’m not sure. There is some suspicious looking left-over take-away in the fridge but it needs chemical analysis to confirm it is fit for human consumption…

Her inquiry does open the wider question of what we are going to eat henceforth, as my usual pie and a pint from a local hostilery is now extinct. In desperation and taking the last of my folding, Mitzi sets off for the town supermarket. She soon returns with several back copies of Woman’s Realm, 40 Rothmans and a couple of moth eaten cabbages. I suspect this is not going to keep the Wolf from the door….

Cabin Fever! I’m never usually up before noon, owing to an over-indulgence of electric soup from the night before… but drinking from my own cellar has slowed me down a bit. In consequence I am up before the sun is over the yard arm, pacing the floor of my bedroom like an expectant father…. but what it is I’m waiting for – I have no idea?

Sometime later I hear a ringing in my trousers only to discover my phone, with Mitzi the mad hooker on the other end once I push the green button… To my horror I can actually see her leering down at me from a distorted angle and it put’s the wind up me I can tell you… The flotsam and jetsam that forms the background to her ghoulish visage looks vaguely familiar….

‘Where are you?’ I enunciate carefully as English is not even her fifth language…

‘Downstairs’ she says, matter of factly, stubbing a gasper out on my finest Ercol table…Oh bloody hell – The mad bitch is in the house….

I go to the top of my stairs and yell down at her….

‘Go away you insane woman, we’re not allowed to get within 6 feet of each other!

’It’s OK – you stay up there, I stay down here….

No it’s not OK… apart from anything else all the booze is in my mother’s G-plan sideboard not to mention several bottles of vin ordinaire in the fridge…

‘You’ll have to leave….’ I repeat.

‘No I don’t. Nowhere else to go….

’But you may have the virus! What would happen then? I yell desperately…

‘You die, I get house….’

I couldn’t fault her logic. I imagined myself dying by inches in bed, while Mitzi sat downstairs smoking and endlessly watching aspirational telly. After I was dead she would leave my body to rot upstairs while she resumed her normal life… I would just be a smell in the bedroom neighbours would complain about when the wind was in the wrong direction…

I was sobering up fast and had to act…

‘Look… just eff off!’

‘I no go… I will be homeless and no money. It hard to be a sex worker when you have to keep 6 feet from client….’

I could see her point. In the end my thirst broke the deadlock…

We sat on opposite ends of my DFS Winter Sale sofa. I eyed her suspiciously over a restorative whiskey and ginger….

‘Are you sure you haven’t got the plague?’ I asked suspiciously…

Mitzi shrugged ‘Sure why not? I have everything else!’

She turned on the telly by accidentally stamping on the remote… A pasty faced BBC type informed us that the Olympics had been cancelled. In a sea of misery, it didn’t seem such a big deal… There were no decent odds to be had laying the family silver on any athletics event for a sporting chap like me. Too many bloody favourites.

It was the Derby I was really going to miss…

Stuck indoors with only my virtual non-practicing sex worker ‘Mitzi’ for company….

I awaken from my early evening slump to see Boris Bunter – Owl of the Political Remove – looking like a cornered rat on the telly, telling everyone to stop touching each other and take their misery indoors.  It’s like that dream I had years ago when all the pubs in the high street were open, but none of them would let me in… I felt so helpless and desperate… Actually I’m not sure whether I imagined that or not. Maybe I was drunk. But the point is, No women, no whisky, no bloody fun. So now here we are…

I stab myself with a fork to make sure it is real and not some Gin soaked nightmare. Turns out it is real and while I am stemming the flow of crimson with the Sunday supplement, our chief prefect bangs on about turning off the lights and setting the Rozzers on us if we so much as venture out for a fresh Lemon.

I am appalled. Bunter sounds like a 30 shilling Churchill with his stunted delivery, oak encrusted furniture and limp Union Jack at half-mast. Would the great Leader of blessed memory herself have called the troops out and closed Dorothy Perkins? Would she rhyming slang. She would have told us to buck up, take our medicine (mine would have been a large one and hold the tonic), stop whining and get on with it. But then her brand of politics always allowed for collateral damage. Not like nowadays where you can get sued for mentioning that some people need better manners than to call an old soldier ‘a racist, sexist idiot!’ I ask you… I’m not an idiot!

Where was I? Oh yes, Bunter closing the curtains… Anyway it is a tragedy I suppose, especially if gentlemen of a certain age and liver condition are currently ripe for plucking by the grim reaper. I don’t want to die of some Chinese bat-flu, gasping for breath in the car park of a National Health museum… I want to go down fighting, bar stool in hand, gin-soaked and protecting my honour from some stick thin craft beer types, who won’t accept that George Best was the finest sportsman ever to grace a field of play. Can Lino Messy down 6 bottles of Pomeroy’s finest and still go on the pitch and make opposition defenders weep? I think not. Or that other one O’Ronald. He doesn’t look like he could stand more than the sniff of a barmaids apron….

Except I can’t go down to the local hostileries and draw my last breath of course… everything is closed. The country is now shut and who knows when I can once again stand in an English Pub, under an English heaven, talking b—–ks to anyone unlucky enough to be in aural range. God I miss the old days. Even if it was just last Sunday…