Corona Diaries: Facemasks? It’s all about me

I don’t go out too often at the moment, not just because of COVID but because my back injury makes standing up for any length of time rather painful.

But I’ve decided to start wearing a mask. You might think I’m doing so to follow the examples of my prime minister, Boris Johnson, and that of Donald Trump, the most powerful person on earth.

Not so, much as I respect and admire them. I’m doing it to protect myself, because I have an innate ability to make other people laugh. And cough, and splutter with glee.

It happens when I swing a golf club, sending the ball 45 degrees through a chain-link fence into the backside of a grazing donkey. Or when I send three successive tee shots from an elevated tee flying into a river upon a group of canoeists, who are surprised to find that they’ve strayed into an artillery range. And when I and another person, whose combined weight is that of a silverback gorilla, fail to ascend a steep path in a golf cart and almost end up going over a cliff.

It also happens on the rare occasions when I’m allowed to go foraging in our local supermarket. When I waddle up to the check-out with a basket full of radishes, broccoli and spring onions. Or when I return home with my haul and make dubious claims about the health-bringing properties of pork pies.

It happens when I try to tell a joke and, as usual, fluff the punchline. When I try to charm British Airways into giving me a refund. When I lose my cool with a call centre agent who tells me to switch off my Sky box or broadband router to get them working again.

It happens when I try and assemble an IKEA flatpack in front of an audience. Or when I order langue de boeuf in a French restaurant, expecting a beef casserole, and the waiter brings a large tongue ripped out of an unfortunate animal sitting alone on a plate. The tongue, not the animal, by the way.

It happens when I start ranting about Brexit, and express the opinion that sooner or later we’ll be begging to rejoin the European Union. When I hold forth with my favourite conspiracy theories, such as the one about a cabal of powerful people trying to enslave us all by inventing the social media. Or when I start on the one about how the government, by facilitating repeated waves of COVID, is planning to reduce the national life expectancy by ten years, thereby saving a fortune in old-age pensions, social care and medical costs.

There are so many reasons why I provoke hilarity among family, friends and my adoring public that I can no longer afford to expose my handsome features other than behind a mask. I’m not so much a super-spreader, more of a super-magnet, attracting clouds of airborne particles violently expelled by people who can’t keep a straight face in my presence.

Wearing a mask will also be a good way of concealing my planned programme of cosmetic surgery, from which I will emerge looking like Brad Pitt. Although I fear that I shall never be able to reveal the results without sparking off fresh outbreaks of COVID wherever I go, self-love doesn’t require the admiration of others, so I’m going ahead anyway.

I can’t say, as Donald Trump claims about himself, that I look good in a mask. But we do share the same motive.

To hell with everybody else. It’s all about me.