Thessaloniki 26th November 2021
A headline in a newspaper the other day claimed: “Matters are getting out of hand”. A customer, denied access to a café because he did not have a Covid certificate, bit the proprietor on the cheek. The full story is here: https://www.iefimerida.gr/ellada/andras-naoysa-dagkose-idioktiti-kafe-magoylo
Even more surreally (the apt word), a young actor totally screwed up the production of a play by declaring he wasn’t going to play before a ‘segregated’ audience. He wanted to play in front of a mixed audience of vaccinated and unvaccinated. Which begs the question: what planet is this fucker from? It wasn’t as if the theatre had excluded non-Greeks, people of colour or AIDS sufferers. The prick’s name is Aris Servetalis, and he used a word so unusual for segregation that if you google ντάνιασμα, it will lead you directly to related articles. The more common word is διαχωρισμός. A senior medical official responded with, “For some time now we’ve had 500 to 600 people ‘segregated’ in ICUs all over the country.” Of course, Servetalis has become a hero to Greece’s anti-vaxxers. Personally, while I accept people’s right to be wary of the various Covid vaccines, I cannot understand why they refuse to accept any consequences for the decisions they make. Servetalis wanted the vaccinated to mix with the unvaccinated in a closed environment in the full knowledge that Covid is spread by droplets in the air. Even more hilariously, the play he pulled out of was Ionesco’s surrealist Rhinoceros. As the right-wing Daily Mail columnist, Richard Littlejohn, likes to say: “You couldn’t make it up.”
29th November. I went to the Dubliner yesterday evening to see Tir Fada. They were really on form. A professional level performance. The football crowd also arrived later in the evening. Chelsea v Man Utd was on the TV as well as the local derby PAOK v Aris. PAOK lost 0-1. Flares, smoke bombs, a mini pitch invasion at the death and an actual death. A 45-year-old PAOK fan had a heart attack outside the stadium after the match.
Today’s news. The 38-year-old daughter of a former PASOK MP is in intensive care in a local hospital. It seems she didn’t get vaccinated because she was pregnant. The baby was delivered by Caesarean. Also, locally, another woman has been murdered, bringing the total number of femicides to 14 (15 according to the radio) so far this year.
So, it’s been a mad week or so but, in fairness, not only in Greece. Surrealism also struck Germany if the following headline is to be believed. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/german-euthanasia-clinics-refusing-unvaccinated-customers