A Lockdown Tale

The bus driver

I did not speak of this then. I did not want to add to the division being deliberately fostered, or to scare others who might dare show their faces into mute compliance.

It was cold. The wind seemed to blow through me like I was a fading memory of a different time. Faceless wraiths haunted the streets in their half lives.

The new calendar year had begun but it was the end of much that had preceded it. A particularly concerted two years of mental puppeteering, coercion, and herd manipulation was ending with punctured shoulders and illusions. Mandates had taken the jobs or the physical inviolability of care home workers, and walls and needles were closing in on NHS workers in a long set booby trap, piercing wills and arms.

I walked from Manchester Piccadilly to Manchester Victoria railway station passing a portentous poster that said "winter is coming." It felt like it had been winter for eighteen months.

I moved briskly through the sparse Sunday pedestrian traffic. Masks, stickers and road markings made alien the once familiar features of these conquered territories.

My old life had gone. It had been built on foundations not deep enough to withstand the enemy within, the enmity of my peers who had engineered my eviction from the art studios in Oxford where I had rented the space where I worked and taught. Some friends had suggested visiting Hebden Bridge with a view to starting again. They told me it was full of artists and lesbians. Neither held much appeal for me, but it was something, a place I had never been and so a novelty with new possibilities.

My head was heavy. It had been nearly two years of conflict, loss, and stupefying horror. Seeing the queues for the vaccine had opened a hole in my stomach. After two years of refusing to be ill, as a conscientious objector in a psychological war, I was now staying with family where as a child I had been told to toughen up and not to cry. When I arrived I had come down with a cold and what tears I had passed through my nose.

I was early for the rail replacement bus that would take me to Rochdale for a connection to Hebden Bridge, so I walked around to keep warm. When the bus came the doors opened and a young man boarded first. I followed him, looking forward to a relaxing journey and a departure from the norm. I knew the drill with replacement buses as I had made a similar journey to Yorkshire a couple of weeks earlier. The drivers were generally uninterested and didn't check tickets but I had mine ready just in case. We passed the driver and made our way down the bus. The driver hadn't been looking at us but he suddenly snapped his head around and demanded, "Where are your masks?" The young guy in front of me tried to speak but the driver barked, "you're not getting on this bus without a mask on." The young man nudged past me as he disembarked to find a mask. Already part way down the bus I turned and said, "I'm exempt."

Although much of the witchcraft worked on most of the people most of the time, this time these magic words did not have the desired effect. "This bus is not going anywhere until you put a mask on."

"But I'm exempt, I don't have to wear one."

"This bus is going nowhere unless everyone is wearing a mask." The unmasked driver waved the keys at me and made as if to get off the bus.

"Well I'm not wearing one. I'm exempt." I said and sat down.

Some people had boarded the bus behind me and they sat close to the front like teacher's pets. I was about three quarters of the way down the bus on the left as you face the front, a disruptive influence on the obedient and accepting. These people turned and shouted at me, telling me to get off and complaining that I was holding them up, like an unmasked highwayman. I pointed out that the driver wasn't wearing a mask and he suddenly remembered to don the accessory for his part in the charade. Rail staff boarded. I was a problem that needed removing. One female rail official urged me to get the next bus as this driver didn’t want to take me. That was the easiest thing to do. It didn’t occur to her that it could happen on the next bus or what precedent that would set. Another woman official demanded to see proof of my medical exemption. I tried to explain to her that this was not necessary and that it was illegal for her to demand my private medical information. I had started filming the farce but was aware that I had forgotten to charge my phone and its battery was low. The woman insisted that she required proof. I told her she didn’t, that I could show her the law, and asked how it was possible that two years in, they still did not know it. Had they not come across an exempt passenger before?

Later it struck me that such was the compliance, perhaps they hadn't.

A helpful young fella at the front shouted, "Get the fuck off the coach." Of my exemption he demanded, "Where's your certificate?" I told him I didn't need one, to which he shouted, "Yes you fucking do. I work for the NHS, you dipshit." From his compassion for someone with an unseen medical condition I could well believe that he worked in healthcare.

The second official woman, accompanied by a male asian rail worker in a neon lanyard, persisted in requesting proof of my exemption. I asked her name and she was temporarily silenced, obviously not wanting to be held responsible for the harassment that she then started up again. The driver was sharing invective with the passengers at the front for my benefit, telling anyone in earshot that he had been in the armed forces and that he would throw me off the bus himself. "If he touches me I'll knock him out on my own," he said. Referring to me filming, "They're all very brave with a phone in their hand aren't they?" He demanded I stop filming and told me he would "take the phone off me in a minute." The noise of an empty vessel.

As at the Cape of Good Hope two oceans were colliding, and we were as sailors on a roiling sea, against dangerous undercurrents of lies and cresting waves of truth. This was January 2022. The roll-out of the poison injections had begun in December 2020. Liars had told the gullible that injections provided inoculation from the threat posed by the faces and breath of other healthy people. Fourteen months of supposed protection later, was it the fear or the charade that continued?

The military trained, order-following, fat, ageing bus driver knew, at some level at least, that there was absolutely no danger, which was why he was not wearing a mask when passengers- supposedly lethal carriers of disease -began boarding the bus. That death didn't await him on his bus was why the driver had reported to work. That the air was not contaminated was why he was not wearing a hazmat suit or an old fashioned diver's outfit with a goldfish bowl helmet.

We were players in a stage performance of the Emporer's New Virus and I had taken on the role of the uninhibited child whose unfettered mouth exhaled the truth.

The problem was that I was not a child. I was a grown and healthy looking man and did not pass as sufficiently innocent, fearful, apologetic, or mentally or physically disadvantaged, to excuse my non-compliance. On the level on which the truth is known, the driver, the rail staff, and the passengers all knew I could wear a mask if I felt like it.

They also knew, as I would in their position, that to throw a healthy adult male off the bus would be problematic. None of them were going to do it, especially if they were scared of my breath.

The government guidance that posed as law stated that people could declare themselves exempt if wearing a face covering caused them "severe distress." Exemption was also granted, "to avoid harm or injury." Knowing the whole scamdemic to be nothing but a pack of lies designed to inflict harm, I was disinclined to comply. Merely seeing others in masks and watching the whole sinister, lethal, theatrical performance unfold caused distress. Taking part was unthinkable.

There are football fans who shirk at the notion of wearing the colours of a rival team. I could not wear the colours of the enemy and have my face used as a billboard of fear to promote a genocide.

I like to believe that on some level we all know the truth, or at least we can sense it. Parents look hard at their children, and state firmly, "tell me the truth." Lovers make similar demands of each other. Often we know intuitively when these demands are met, by the manner of the response and whether the words align with what we feel to be true. In some way truth is a sensation that has its own recognisable feeling.

The people on the bus felt that, in their perception of the pantomime, I did not have a disability that might excuse me from wearing a mask. My inability was in knowingly engaging with such nonsense. There were many like me. We all endured similar moments and we all like to think that having established our line in the sand we would stick to it to the very end. It's hard to say how many of us would break after a few missed meals, or the application of the torturer's first chinese burn, or tickled foot, but for now we are attached to our vanities. The non compliant allowed themselves the conceit of portraying themselves as lions in fields of sheep preyed upon by wolves.

Yet on the bus I was cast in the uncomfortable role of hapless lamb at the mercy of the herd. Where the bus driver could threaten me, and fellow passengers could shout abuse, any response from me in kind would have provoked a draconian reaction and revealed the cover of my lamb's clothing. Their stance and thus their behaviour was sanctioned by the state. Essentially their gang was bigger than mine. Behind the pretence of civility, lay intimidation and force. I had to stay in character.

We were divided by a fiction. Their pretence required them to be scared of my face and my exemption required me to be a lamb. We were in an acting competition, both affecting distress. Deceit had pervaded society to the point that simple every day actions like boarding a bus were infected.

The reason I wasn't wearing a mask was because I would not take part in the charade. The reason they wanted me to wear a mask was because they required me to validate it.

And so, as a meek lamb I pleaded with them. I tried to reach that part of them that could still reason. I hated the sound of my voice doing so. I spoke in the tone we adopt when civility restricts us from open hostility. That tone of last resort beyond which lies aggression and force. The tone before disguise is dispensed with and teeth are bared. I was pleading like life depended on it, but I could not be sure if it was theirs or mine. Perhaps it was both. If society sanctioned the exclusion of those who would preserve their bodily autonomy all was lost. The fight for people like me would become physical. The search for as few as ten good people to prevent the destruction of society, found none on that bus.

Perhaps I hated speaking that way because in doing so I was party to the whole tiresome deceit. A retired lady GP of a dry unemotional manner (who I was friendly with as she attended my classes) once diagnosed me as being contemptuous. I acknowledged that she was correct. Growing up, my brothers and I endured each other with the casual contempt of those who suffer the existence of fools. We would occasionally mock each other for thinking, "oh yeah, everyone’s an idiot except you." Later I made a conscious effort to be less contemptuous and more understanding of people, but as with the "humble man who has a lot to be humble about, " I was a contemptuous man who was continually being given more to be contemptuous about. As a significant minority found in 2020 and onwards, it felt like we were surrounded by idiots. A small mercy was that their masks made them easier to identify.

I wondered whether I should have provided the bus driver and my fellow passengers with some snacks so that their journey might have been made safe from my healthy (but supposedly noxious) breath, by them sitting down eating, as we were told worked in restaurants and pubs. The situations and confrontations we found ourselves in were not just beneath the contempt of the non-compliant, but beneath everyone involved. How we were degraded.

Is it possible that the officials, passengers and driver thought their behaviour was an appropriate way to interact with somebody with a hidden medical condition like autism or childhood trauma? The general public had not been providing much evidence of an intuition for truth.

The passengers left the bus and stood outside in the rain because they were worried about catching a cold. The driver joined them outside telling them that I had been aggressive and coughed and spat at him. Obviously this was a lie. When lies infect a society, deceit becomes endemic. Apart from the moment I passed the driver when boarding before any confrontation began, I hadn't been anywhere near him. I was still sitting three quarters of the way down the bus. Even so, everyone who had boarded had by now breathed the same air as me, just as they would have smelled it if I had been smoking. The driver was now citing by-laws that permitted him to refuse to carry any passenger at his own discretion, as with the authority a pilot has for a plane. He was choosing to apply this law to me explaining, "Nothing to do with covid, I just don't wish to transport you." How odd. I wonder why I was being singled out.

I was repeatedly told the police were coming. "Good," I said, hoping that after two years they would understand the situation and put an end to this nonsense. From previous lockdown encounters in Oxford I had learned that police on a video guaranteed a high number of views. I hoped they would come quickly and that my phone battery would last. Interestingly they never came. I wonder if they were ever called.

I sat there on the bus in the stupid stand-off in which I had become embroiled, watching the passengers through the rainy window muttering about the antisocial anti-masker who had disrupted their travel. Eventually they were put on another coach behind me. As I watched it pull out and pass the bus I sat on, a couple of the passengers swore and gesticulated through the drizzly windows. The caring NHS worker mockingly gave me the V sign.

Often when thinking of lockdown and its related restrictions I have wondered how it would have been handled in an age where people were armed, less restrained, and less restricted by consequence and CCTV, in a time when we are given to believe that lives were cheaper. At which one of the incursions into our liberty would our forefathers have resorted to violence? Ostracisation? Loss of livelihood? Separation of families? Harm to their children? Masking? Coerced poisoning under the guise of medication?

Put in my position would our forefathers have drawn their swords and walked down the bus hacking and chopping?

It was quieter now and with less of an audience the bus driver who refused to drive the coach because he was so scared of the plague I didn't have, approached me. He had his phone out and stopped where I was sitting to photograph me. "That will look good on Facebook," he said, telling me that I was, "making a rod for my own back." He added, "I'll drive you to the yard. There are sixty men there and then we'll see how brave you are." It hadn't occurred to him that this sort of prattle spoke more of his level of bravery than of mine. Why did he need sixty men? Why was he discussing bravery again?

I asked him if this was an appropriate way to talk to someone with a medical exemption.

He was presumably talking about bravery because that was what the situation provoked in his mind. He didn't question me about anything because on some level the answers were known. He told himself and his passengers that he would physically manhandle me but for the possibility of my dying phone recording him. On the unspoken level it was clear this was not true. I didn't need to tell him that he was a bloviating nincompoop because on that same unspoken level he knew what I thought of him and he knew that it was true. Only a prize ninny would hover about another man taking their picture and issuing veiled threats about how the big boys at the yard would sort them out in retribution for the crime of being bare-faced and the exaggerated threat of a cold. He told me I was, "very inadequate," and waddled to the front of the bus.

In all the confrontational situations I experienced throughout the scamdemic, although people would occasionally tell me otherwise, I was never brave. I never had to summon any courage in the way people do when delivering a speech, or singing or performing publicly, or fighting someone. My actions were a simple rational response to circumstances like the choice between drinking poison and not. Many of us just said no. No thank you. What's the other option?

Uniformed transport officials started appearing on the bus at intervals, coming in pairs. Two young men tried to persuade me to leave the bus and discuss things with them outside. I told them I was not trying to be awkward but we could talk on the bus. They told me, "You are being awkward though," because my face was stopping the driver from driving.

They assured me that if I got off they would put me on the next bus to Rochdale."What happens if the next driver refuses to take me?" I asked. They assured me that wouldn't happen. I had already checked the timetable on line. There was only one service each hour. From all the ways we know the truth I knew that one of them was deceiving me. They wanted me off this bus so the intransigent bus driver would drive it to Rochdale. I would then be left waiting. I caught the trickster in his trick and saw it confirmed as they exchanged glances. This was the next bus to Rochdale.

"You see, you're not telling the truth," I said.

Eventually another pair of officials came on. One told me that I had been accused of being aggressive and coughing and spitting at people. He asked my side of the story and acknowledged I hadn't been aggressive with him. He recognised I was telling the truth, that the bus driver should drive me but was refusing to do so. He agreed to be recorded promising me that he would put me on another bus that would take me to Rochdale. I asked him what would happen if the next bus driver refused to take me. He promised me that would not happen.

So we left the bus and as we did so another member of the rail staff berated me. Ignoring him, we walked to the coach in front. Predictably, the female bus driver closed the doors as we approached. The reasonable rail official looked embarrassed. We walked to the next coach and again the driver, this time a man, shut the doors. As we walked back to a group of yellow lanyarded rail officials, the original bus driver smirked, enjoying the victory he had achieved for public health, or was it for road traffic by-laws? He felt better about himself anyway. Maybe he was trying to eke out a little more drama and enjoyment from the situation, but his scenes were done and he was no longer of consequence. It’s hard to rile the contemptuous.

The huddle of hi-vis rail officials discussed alternative travel arrangements. Can we get him on the tram? What's to stop the same thing happening there? The tram doesn't connect to where he's going. Some of these men had boarded the bus earlier in an effort to remove me from it and had been curt and confrontational. Now as they recognised what was going on, they apologised to me, with straightforward grace.

Although the rail company had contracted the bus firm to replace trains the rail workers had no direct authority over the drivers. I told them that I had already been delayed for more than an hour and they should order a taxi for me not to Rochdale but to Hebden Bridge. A kindly man who was the supervisor arranged this and as we waited for the taxi we talked about the situation and the effects of lockdown on his daughter’s studies. I was driven to my destination.

Later I was encouraged to complain to the rail company which I did. They apologised, agreed that the staff should not have advised me that a certificate was necessary for a mask exemption, and informed me that the driver would "be investigated and dealt with as per the bus companies (sic) policy and procedures," but that this process was confidential. They offered me £10.70, the price of my ticket to Hebden Bridge, as a gesture of goodwill for being delayed, abused, and threatened. I never accepted it.

This was just one incident but during the lockdowns and their aftermath there were many such incidents that others and I were subjected to. The threat of such confrontations hung over every public encounter. Coercion was commonplace. Fake medical impositions were accepted and enforced. For a while it seemed that such arrangements were to become permanent social norms. Now it seems that there are more people who recognise the dangers inherent in the injections and the coercion that led to them. These people might now understand the stance taken by the non-compliant. For those who are not yet aware but who may now be shaking off the irrationality of hypnosis and fear, it is important to recognise how close we came to the abyss. The threat still hangs over us.

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