the outer limits

A battered strangely characterful motor car roars up a police checkpoint just outside Dublin.
A stern looking police officer approaches.
They're getting younger and younger.
What next?
Baby cops?
The officer taps on my side window which I lower.
"Where are you going?"
"Dublin."
"What is your business there?"
"Ogling women and feeding ducks."
"Is you journey necessary?"
"Have you seen the women in County Kildare?"
He waves me through the checkpoint.
The Republic of Ireland, a country with only the barest hold on sanity to begin with, has now gone stark, staring mad over the Corona Virus.
Yesterday in church I reached out to shake hands with a venerable old dowager during the Sign Of Peace, and she recoiled as though I was trying to kill her.
The spoor is going through the herd.
I don't know about the Corona Virus but these people definitely have something.
There's a run on toilet rolls in the supermarkets.
I kid you not.
Well if nothing else, the more suggestible proles will have cleaner bums.
They may starve.
And they'll certainly eventually die of something.
But cleaner bums are not to be sneezed at.
Watching a thrilling episode of the Ryan Turbridy Show last night (it's the one where Tubridy dies) the screen suddenly went blank.
At first I didn't notice the difference between Ryan Tubridy and a blank screen.
Then a stentoran voice emanated from the set.
"This is the voice of the Corona Virus. Do not adjust your television. We are controlling it. Nyah, ha, ha, Gee Force. Sorry I lost it there for a moment. Where was I? Oh yes. We can control the vertical and the horizontal. We can send your leaders and clinicians into a blind panic. We can paralyse your businesses. We can alienate you from each other. We can incept fascism in formerly democratic countries. We are your masters now."
Come back the Mysterons.
All is forgiven.
Sigh.
Everywhere the boundaries of reality are shifting.
Caretaker Prime Minister Leo Varadkar with 35 seats in a parliament of 160 seats, has enjoyed a last hurrah, declaring a state of emergency, closing schools and colleges and churches, and ordering people not to sit within three feet of each other in any cafe they can find open.
With everything shutting down people are going to die of boredom before the Corona Virus gets them.
After hearing at the weekend that the Italians had soldiers and police patrolling the streets telling people not to stand within three feet of each other, I'd wondered how long such latent fascism, always so appealing to Italians, would take to get here.
It took three days.
Here is the news.
Latent fascism is travelling faster than the Corona Virus.
And you can justify an awful lot of fascism in the name of public health.
As we'r about to find out.
Flooboon.
Ho hum.
During one of Father Baines sermons when the churches were still open, he'd read out a letter from the Health Services Executive advising against receiving Communion on the tongue or shaking hands during the Sign Of Peace.
This is the same Health Services Executive that promotes the murder of unborn children, sex changes for five year olds with the mutilating operations carried out when they reach 15, and orgies for teenagers which the Health Board has been infamously promoting on their Spun Out website.
Now they're telling the Padres how to conduct church services presumably to reach the refined standards of cleanliness and hygiene that they insist on for teenage orgies.
If we can't shake hands, I was wondering what we were supposed to do at the Sign Of Peace.
The Health Service Executive advice is that we turn to each other, smile and bow slightly.
I tried.
Around the church I could see other people trying it.
The visual effect was most quaint.
The congregation looked like characters from the 1980s' video for the song King In A Catholic Style by a British music combo styled China Crisis.
The more enlightened of my gentle readers will remember characters in the original video wearing Bishops' mitre hats and bobbing about like particularly groovy Hebrews at the Wailing Wall, facing each other one moment, bowing, then facing away, bowing again, then facing forward, bowing, bobbing and occasionally bopping, repeat and rinse.
I'd always rather liked the song while considering the video eye catching but lacking in decorum.
Now I saw it coming true.
The China Crisis combo were not cheap shot druggy Brits but prophets thirty years ahead of their time.
Their prophecy which I had dismissed at 20 years of age as the work of simpletons jeering, finally came to pass as I watched at 54 years of age our nouveau groovy Health Board sanctioned attempts in a Catholic Church to make the Sign Of Peace to each other.
People turn to each other, bow, bob and smile, turn to the other side,bow,  bob and smile, turn to the pew behind, bow, bob and smile.
What was the lyric again.
"Wake up, wake up,
You're a king in a Catholic style."
It would have been perfect if the choir had sung it right that moment.
Very cute.
Maybe we should make it the national anthem.
The final straw came this evening when Farmer Jones rang me to ask me not to drop in to see him.
"Why not?" I growled dangerously.
"This virus people are talking about," quoth he.
"It's the ****ing flu," explodeth I.
"Just wait until it all blows over," quoth he.
"Do you want to live forever?" quoth me.
"For another few weeks anyway," sez he.
"Et tu Jonesy," sez I, "then fall Heelers."
On a lighter note gentle travellers of the internet, I've just heard on the radio that the actor Tom Hanks has caught the virus.
So there's light at the end of the tunnel.