People. There's no accounting for them. As if 2021 isn't daft enough – we seem to have stocked up on crazy along with the excess toilet rolls - a man jumped three fences and interposed himself between a field of charging horses and the finish line at Trentham Racecourse.
In another tale of dicing with disaster, there was what Newshub characterised as a "high-risk romantic rendezvous" between a staff member and guest at an Auckland Covid-19 managed isolation hotel. Apparently notes were passed. "I think one was written on the back of a face mask," said Chris Hipkins, struggling to maintain an impassive demeanour in the face of such galloping irony. "A bottle of wine was involved."
No laughing matter, though Newshub's 6pm report gave unintentional comedy a stab. See Samantha Hayes standing sternly at the studio screen gesturing towards a graphic of a face mask with, "Do you like me?" written on it, the box for "yes" marked with an enthusiastic tick. There was a reconstruction, in case we didn't know what the torso of a man entering a hotel room with a bottle of wine looks like.
Dear oh dear. Both incidents ended up, it seems, with no one harmed. Talk about dumb luck. But as metaphors for the potentially lethal effects on yourself and others of demanding your individual right to be an idiot, they were striking.
Where there is a crisis there are cranks. See news reports at testing sites with banner-waving protesters intent on adding Covid to the list of other meticulously documented inconvenient truths – the Holocaust, Aids, the US election, climate change - about which some reserve the right to be "sceptical".