Never forget. We weren’t as bad here in New Zealand I think, at least in our Police having the sort of attitude shown here, but with people being told not to go to the beach under pain of arrest, we weren’t far off it.

American humourist, James Lileks, in his website The Bleat, wrote of a typical day of lockdown in America, but also referred the above Tweet by the Bedfordshire Police:

If you sneak off into the woods for a picnic, you could be killing people and crippling the NHS, so shadowy peelers should manifest themselves and issue tickets.

They didn’t like even a little teasing.

Lilek’s response was blunt:

Utter nonsense. Huge stonking heaps of bollocks. Walking to the dunes for a picnic, or heading to the field off Potter’s Lane to enjoy the sun, is absolutely harmless, and everyone knows it, and it’s corrupting the trust people would normally grant the authorities. As I once wrote about small-minded public officials: “I don’t make the laws, sir, I just enforce them with a great deal of enthusiasm.”

I don’t suppose that such a thing will ever happen again in my lifetime, although given that the pace of life is faster than ever, with ever-increasing global connections, it may happen sooner than the century long gap back to the Spanish Flu pandemic