Dark Times—Light Relief

Zoë Sharp

As the UK hunkers down into what are still the early stages of the coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic, there’s a surreal quality to life. For most of us, the seriousness of what’s happening has not yet quite sunk in. Not to the extent that many experts are telling us it will—and soon.

Many people around me are getting used to this strange thing called Working From Home. Or, as authors call it Welcome To My World. Even so, working alone because you want to is one thing. Doing it because you have no choice is quite another matter.

It looks like we’re in this for the long haul.

At such time I find that humour is a boost to the morale. My sense of humour is on the low-brow side but I try to stay away from things that are a bit too close to the bone.

Therefore, I’ve been trawling through the jokes, images, and memes online so you don’t have to. Here’s my selection of a little light relief in dark times.

From Fatherly.com

Let me tell you this coronavirus joke…

We have to wait two weeks to see if you got it.

I ran out of toilet paper and had to start using old newspapers.
The Times are rough.

Finland just closed its borders.

You know what that means—no-one will be crossing the Finnish line.

In my day, you would cough to cover up a fart.

Now you fart to cover up a cough.

No toilet paper left in stores.

Stocks have been wiped out.

From BoredPanda.com

From SAPeople.com

 From Fiz-X.com

And finally, a couple of my own:

This week’s Word of the Weekis quarantine, which comes from the Latin quadraginta and the Italian quaranta, meaning forty. Its first known use was during the Black Death of the 14^thCentury, when the port of Ragusa—now Dubrovnik in Croatia but at that time controlled by Venice—introduced a law requiring the isolation, for a period of thirty days, all ships arriving from plague-affected areas. This was known as trentino. The practice caught on and was then extended to forty days, becoming quarantine.