Is it today or tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow ...? As life on Planet Auckland creeps in its petty alert level 3 pace, talk is of what life might be like on the other side, in a vaccinated, post-lockdown world.
For those grown weary of listening to experts who know what they are talking about, some apparitions from days of yore have trotted in to save us. Or, possibly, the National Party.
Cue great excitement from the media. John Key managed to get the same reckons published by multiple newspapers, as if it was the Queen's Christmas message. The AM Show's normally cantankerous Ryan Bridge went for some sort of record for purring the words "Sir John".
Key doesn't seem to think much of his fellow citizens, a trembling proletariat ruled by inexplicable failure to be as relaxed as he is about a virus that has killed one in every 500 Americans, surpassing the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic. "The health officials want to peddle fear," he said. Though Key wasn't above a bit of peddling himself, painting a picture in his opinion piece of the nation as a "smug hermit kingdom" closely resembling North Korea. Yikes.
His piece launches itself with Apollo 13. "Suddenly, with diminished oxygen supplies, a frantic process began to try to return the three astronauts to Earth in their damaged spacecraft." As a metaphor for what Aotearoa faced, successfully by global standards, when Covid exploded like a ruptured oxygen tank on a spacecraft, that's not bad. But apparently, we're not "creative" and "inventive" enough here in North Korea south. Never mind. He has a plan.