The sun is shining; the lockdown restrictions are easing; all should be well with the world.  So why am I feeling so annoyed?

I think it was the pictures of Bournemouth Beach that did it for me.  Crowded with selfish sun-seekers; mindless to social distancing in the egotistical belief that it is someone else’s responsibility to observe.  Worse still was the mess of litter that these Covidiots left behind them.  What is wrong with people?

And it was not just Bournemouth.  Similar scenes of overcrowding and littering were replicated across the country.  On Primrose Hill; at Durdle Door; in Great Yarmouth.  Seemingly wherever there is a pleasant open space, then close behind there is a marauding herd of imbecilic humanity.

It is as though people have emerged from lockdown and decided that all the rules of common human decency and community have gone to pot––or gone to nitrous oxide, judging by the litter of discarded canisters, which blight my local park.  We appear to have all emerged from our months of enforced restriction into a post-Brexit dystopia of unlimited freedom and conservative self-interest.

Except this is no vision of freedom.  All I see when I look at the aerial photographs of the mob of burnt bodies disported across Bournemouth Beach is a virus; a plague of pestilence, despoiling our natural world; a tide of irritating, insignificant microbes.

From the perspectives of Gaia and the global ecosystem of planet Earth there is another way of looking at the coronavirus pandemic, which stands our traditional view on its head.  There, it is we human beings that are the disease, and COVID-19 is the cure.

© Simon Turner-Tree

Simon Turner-Tree doesn’t know whether he is part of the problem, or part of the solution.