Sick and tired of being sick and tired

 

The wonderful thing about being grossly tired, of feeling the bags under your eyes resting on your cheeks, is that you can fully embrace the inner rage. It’s just gone 7am and I’ve managed to shout at both kids, admonish the wife and give the dogs a withering look. My expression won’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed being grumpy but I have a sense of pride that the rabbits will be cowering outside and on their very best behaviour.

But I’m still tired.

I’m tired of public health advocates who don’t care about the public, who pursue agendas for monetary and/or fundamentalist reasons. I’m tired of hearing from individuals who wilfully distort the truth and spread outright lies in order to further their puritanical and dictatorial agendas.

I’m tired of seeing their smug, complacent faces on web pages. I’m weary of their expressions of superiority, their lack of engagement, their bleating about being personally attacked and their bogus conspiracy theories.

They are tinny. Their words, the noise they make, is the irritating background noise of a small radio – the sound produced by a couple of teenage ne’er-do-wells with a mobile phone on public transport.

They don’t support your right to make informed choices, they don’t believe you ought to have the ability to make decisions about what you do to or place into your body. McKee would remove all vaping products from the world if he were placed in charge, saving you from the almost negligible evils of nicotine. He would then celebrate with more pies, fine claret and whatever else contributes to his corpulence.

I’m tired of their hypocrisy.

Even the name ‘McKee‘ has an annoying tinny quality to it. Speaking it aloud is akin to having one of those noise-emitting balloons in the room squealing about. McKeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…

Farsalinos, on the other hand, is woody. You can speak his name and add a rich baritone to the final syllable. Brian Blessed could announce him and it would come across as a call to arms.

Reassuringly humorous words like “logorrhea” pepper his responses to these professorial mosquitos. I could never tire of a medical expert who engages with the general public and explains his findings in layman’s terms.

Yes, I’m tired but mainly in a Monty Python way. As the late, great Graham Chapman once said: “I think all right-thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary, decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired.”