The Snoopers Forum

Friday, 10th April, 2020

“Police urge Brits to spill the beans on their neighbours suspected of breaching coronavirus lockdown: Telephone ‘hotline’ and ‘snoopers’ forum set up as scores of people still break rules after five days of isolation”

First of all, apologies: I have been drawn back to the Daily Mail Online website like a moth attracted to a flame. An unforeseen by-product of the pandemic is that I will need to be weaned off it like a junkie being given methadone.

Anyway, the quotation above is the Daily Mail title headline to an article published on 28^th March 2020. I believe it’s worth picking apart for several reasons. But mostly because I read it and thought, WTF!

I like my neighbours on both sides and, as there are only 10 houses on our little road, I smile and nod and chat with all of them (with one notable exception but that would need a whole blog post of its own). We are currently doing bits of shopping for our elderly neighbours on one side whose family are all up north. We chat to our new neighbours on the other side, a young family with two kids, when their heads pop up over our fence while they are playing on the climbing frame with their oldest son, maintaining our distance but keeping in touch.

But if I should see Malcolm, in his 70s and with heart problems, further than the end of his drive, I’m gonna be totally ‘urged’ by the police to grass him up and hopefully send him down for a nice long stretch. And I can console myself with the thought that at least he’ll be safe locked up because there is definitely not a problem with social distancing, self-isolation and transmission rates of Covid-19 in prisons, is there?

I’m watching you, Malcolm. Just so you know. You may be throwing the tennis balls back that are arriving over your fence with obscene frequency as teenager 2 cracks another (forbidden) 6 over the very short ‘off’ boundary with an inelegant swing of his arms, but I have the “snoopers” forum open in my web browser with the online reporting form half-filled in, just in case. So, go ahead, motherfucker, make my day…

Actually, I lied. A quick search of the phrase ‘snoopers’ forum reveals no links to any police forces’ websites and just links back to the Daily Mail article itself. Hold on a minute, I think they may be sensationalising things for the sake of attracting readers and also, stirring up the righteous indignation that is the Mail readership’s ‘oven ready’ response to the world. A world that just won’t settle down. A world that refuses to bend back into the shape of a nice pleasant 1950s idyll, the vicar making tea in the cricket pavilion, the picaninnies still in the Caribbean, and the lovely young Queen a model of domestic simplicity.

People spying on their neighbours and reporting them to the authorities; what does that remind you of? East Germany under Communist rule; the Stasi, that’s bloody what! So, Malcolm gets it first. Then my eyes turn the other way. Rob has just built himself a lovely big house on that side but I wouldn’t be surprised if in one of his spare bedrooms, there are ‘scores’ of illegal refugees, eating Pot Noodles and hunched over their mobile phones watching Mrs Brown’s Boys in an ill-fated attempt to get to grips with UK culture.

It’s only a suspicion of mine, and it has no basis in fact, but I’ve just got a hunch that they’re all huddled in there. The happy family routine Rob is acting out is just a front. It has to be.

When he’s banged up with Malcolm, I shall of course, in true East Germany circa 1963 style, turn my attention to my own family. My wife has walked our dog twice on some days, morning and afternoon. I know ‘cos I was with her (but only for the purposes of monitoring her behaviour, of course). So, she can go and spend some of her ‘free’ time in HMP Holloway and think about what she has done and why she felt the need, in these times of darkness and plague, to flagrantly ‘breach’ the lockdown rules. Naughty, naughty Amanda!

After her, I’ll go after Zombie Teenager 1. He went to the shops yesterday and came back with a bottle of gin. Now, I wouldn’t call that an ‘essential’ purchase which makes it a non-essential journey and therefore a crime. It doesn’t matter that I sent him and will drink the gin. It was a test, and he failed. End of. So let’s see how he fares on borstal ‘bin juice’ gin (fermented ketchup and urine) with his floppy fringe and his fondness for smashed avocado. He should make friends easily because he’s also a ‘pretty boy.’

That’ll leave the hardest nut to crack: Zombie Teenager 2. ‘Flouting’ and ‘breaching’ are not his forte. In fact, he would prefer a stricter lockdown whereby he isn’t allowed to leave his room and only has to speak to his parents via his mobile device: ‘Hngry gimme food.’ Some entrapment would have to be enacted to catch this fish. To be honest, it is probably going to have to be me and Photoshop, taking his head off a holiday snap and attaching it to the photo I surreptitiously took yesterday of the bong-smoking boyfriend in the little park where I walk my dog (Bong-boy sat there in full view of everyone with his girlfriend, getting very stoned and very angry at the same time, working himself up into a real lather over some perceived slight to his manliness. I felt like confiscating his bong and telling him it was a waste of his time, his super-skunk clearly not able to ‘breach’ his violent and vitriolic nature but in the end, I decided one black eye was enough).

Anyway, with teenager 2 carted off to join teenager 1 in borstal, that would leave me and the dog. I love the dog but she has been a bit ‘breachy’ and a bit ‘flouty’, on some days sneaking as many as three walks into her packed schedule. As she moves at the pace of a Galapagos turtle, these days, there is clearly no need for her to be nipping out so often. If I act now and call the veterinary police to come and take her away, I will also save her from ever having to meet the new puppy so, you know, I am doing her a favour really.

Lastly, I will be forced to look in the mirror and come to the conclusion that, in this new, hyper-vigilant, everyone’s-guilty-until-proven-dead-in-their-own-homes, police surveillance state, I am a flagrant and repeat offender of lockdown. I have gone out for such frivolous reasons as paddle-boarding (‘Just trying to catch some fish for my parents, officer’), playing tennis (‘We climbed through the hole in the fence to get some social distance, officer’), driving onto the South Downs for a dog walk (‘She’s allergic to tarmac, officer: we can’t walk on ordinary pavements or she comes out in a rash’), and wanting to get away from the teenagers (‘Please arrest me, officer; I just can’t feed them any more…’).

So thanks, Daily Mail. Without you raising my awareness, I might have blundered on as I was, buying shopping for my neighbours, staying fit through exercising in local parks, and not snitching on anyone because of some pre-pandemic belief that strong community ties are vital when a serial killer is on the loose.

Latest data for the UK (as of 11pm):

Infected: 73,758

Deaths: 8,958

Celebrity Deaths: 2

People I know who are infected: 1 (one teaching assistant)

Song of the Day: ‘Spy in the House of Love’ – Was Not Was