Dave – the editor

Unquestioningly obey blanket restrictions and do not, under any circumstances, use your common sense…

That seems to be the order of the day in the weird, increasingly dystopian times of COVID-19, lockdown and the ‘new normal’. The image above is the London bound platform at Pitsea and was taken around 10.45am on a weekday morning. As you can see, it’s empty. It’s empty not just because the ‘rush hour’ is over but because so many people have followed government advice and that of the railway operators to only make essential journeys, passenger numbers have collapsed to a fraction of what they were.

Now, if I was a railway operator (I always wanted my own, real life train set), having seen my passenger numbers shrink to an unsustainable fraction of what they used to be, I would be going out of my way to ensure that the travelling experience for the remaining commuters was as pleasant as it could be under the circumstances. Not so with c2c and I suspect, pretty much most other train operators. They’re acting as though all of us passengers are complete idiots who need to be constantly nagged, cajoled and threatened to ensure we’re doing the ‘right thing’.

The ‘right thing’ being to obey blanket restrictions regardless of whether they make any sense or not. Being obliged to wear a mask on an empty platform makes no sense at all. If you think masks are effective, on boarding a crowded railway carriage, wearing one would make sense. Even though lockdown/’new normal’ fatigue is setting in, most people still use their common sense and do what they think will help other passengers in a difficult situation. Even if they think mask wearing is bollocks, they’ll wear one to reassure those passengers who think they’re effective.

But that’s not good enough for c2c, the government and all the other players who seem to have an interest in keeping the fear level up until the magic (and very profitable for some) ‘vaccine’ is found. Go into pretty much any c2c station and you’re bombarded with signage everywhere and frequent announcements to ‘wear a face mask’. The announcements you hear while waiting on the platform, while annoying, are reasonably polite in tone. Once you board a train, it’s a very different matter. c2c have a new recorded announcement which sounds like it was recorded by someone perpetually disappointed they weren’t born and raised in a full on totalitarian regime. Listening to it, I can’t help wondering if the jumped up f**ker doing it was wearing an Eastern Bloc police uniform just to get into the part!

Way to go c2c if you want to carry on shedding passengers. Apart from the two days a week when I have to use the train to get to and from work, I’m staying the f**k away from c2c until some kind of common sense prevails again. There’s no way I’m going to subject myself to that kind of constant gaslighting if I can possibly avoid it. Suffice to say, I feel for the poor sods who have to commute to and from London five days a week with no escape from this:(