Extracts from the plague diary of Mark ne-Francois-Pepys

May 25th

Up, and after visiting Barnard Castle to headbutt the virus, back down the A1 to White Hall with my petition to introduce childcare to London, that ne’er again must poor Duke Cummings feel bound to convey

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a coach full of corona beyond its 260 mile radius to Durham, and there find none withal.
The Johnson, among other things too visible of late, new decrees that parental instinct exceeds his own rules, and that his aides are begun to act with impunity,

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I fear we may be witnessing a coup d’tot. And yet, the Fathers4Justice CEO blusters that incoherent and illogical messaging is the pandemic’s kryptonite, and that it is only human lives at stake and not his crown, he remains steady. There parted, and to speaking with

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constituents troubled that their brayve self-sacrifice in remaining apart of kin toiling against grayve illness, or in the agonising final weeks of life, or e’en buried alone, be for naught, and I am begun to have a dad feeling about this; that these examples which in all

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concerns are more than our own, be as nothing to the whims of self-appointed non-entities. It is a strange thing; and I confess to be reminded that ‘quarantine’ stems from the medieval isolating of plague carriers for quaranta giorni, forty days, and if the populist

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coughing dodger Cummings cannot best our archaic ancestors even in this, then I fear for our subjects, that resistance is become feudal.
Home, and in amongst the crooks and nannies, I think as all the world do else that Johnson has a great desire to be like Churchill,

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and in the solemn respect of deaths beneath his charge he certainly follows our lord, but in all others beside it is a cause of great lamenting to us, that he is gross, but no cigar.