A Different View with Dave O’Connell

The guy behind the counter of the souvenir shop in Liverpool didn’t look happy to see me, but to be honest he didn’t seem all that thrilled about seeing anyone else either.

Maybe it was the fact that this was Sunday morning and, around the corner, Mathew Street – the city’s party street, home to the famous Cavern Club, and like Quay Street on steroids – was all clean after a frantic Saturday night that made Race Week look like a teddy bears’ picnic.

But then he softened, like everyone else in Liverpool, on hearing an Irish accent, even if his next line wasn’t the standard inquiry as to what part of the island you were from.

“How’re ye getting on over there after all that s***e?” he enquired although the question was largely rhetorical.

Thinking this was the safe ground of Brexit, I said we had adjusted now, but equally it shouldn’t be forgotten that it didn’t make much sense to impose such sanctions in the first place.

Turns out it wasn’t Brexit but Covid that he was talking about – and our man’s face brightened like the clouds had parted over the sunshine because he thought he’d found a fellow traveller.

I realised this when he came out with the classic: ‘I’ve a friend who’s an epidemiologist’, which frankly was as likely as me replying ‘and my uncle was an astronaut’ – but by then he had hit his stride on his favourite topic of the grand conspiracy.

And you know the drill; Covid wasn’t a thing at all – it was all made-up; more people die from the flu; it was a ruse to get us all off the streets; it was a dastardly plan to wreck the economy which was helped by the naivety of every Government in the world, and so on.

Granted, it must have been hard if you were running a souvenir shop in a city that needs tourists to buy Beatles tee-shirts and football jerseys, but this wasn’t just a bitterness at spending a year and a half without customers.