Patience is a virtue.

I’m not a patient person.

I never have been. Waiting is not my forte. If I want something, I want it now. At this time of year, it can be an infuriating trait. My partner has often heard me express needs and wants in the months leading up to Christmas and made a mental note how exciting it would be for me to find that item in my Christmas stocking. His disappointed irritation is quite understandable when he finds that two or three days later, the aforementioned object of desire arrives from Amazon. I just couldn’t wait for it.

One quality that would stand all of us in good stead at the moment is patience. I heard a wonderful saying yesterday that seemed so apt on a day when the government once again played with our lives, as though we were of no worth. The phrase was “I haven’t come this faronly to come this far.”

I’ve had no support from the government, and I am grateful that I am not in a position to be desperate for it, but that’s only because I have been lucky enough to continue to involve myself in a great deal of paid work. Next week should see four days of studio shooting for a virtual conference and the week after that should see me assume the role of actor again with a couple of day’s work on a new film for BBC.

So it was my upcoming work that caused my immense annoyance and irritation when the leaked information about the impending lockdown circulated on Friday evening. The current rumour is that the leak came from Matt Hancock or Twat Handjob, as I have dis-affectionately christened him. I suspect he hasn’t got the balls to do that. He’s mastered that hangdog air of the unsuitable boyfriend with a shit car that your younger sister might turn up with. I am sure that his place in Cabinet is being held only so that when people demand an investigation into the almighty cock up that the government’s Covid strategy has been, we can hold him up on a plate as the cause of it. He has to answer for the care home calamity earlier in the year, but one look at him tells you he’s had no real say in deciding. This is a man who’s bought at least six pink ties. And at this point I would just like to tell him that, if that is to curry favour with the LGBT community, we don’t want him.

I don’t think any of us thought when we locked down in March, just a week before the clocks went forward, that we would find ourselves in October, a week after the clocks have gone back, preparing for lockdown yet again.

Except of course as it’s revealed itself, at least one hour 50 minutes late on a Saturday evening, this second attempt at lockdown seems to be anything but. It’s the kind of half arsed ineffective skid mark of a plan that Boris excels at. So, we can’t go to work, unless we need to, and for the people who really need to go to work, we’ll shut down their workplaces. We won’t shut down schools, even though most schools have just been closed for at least one week giving an opportunity to have had a better timed circuit break, and even worse, we won’t shut down universities, which since September have revealed themselves to be a petri dish for Covid.

Given the amount of lectures most students will have attended, they are prime targets for online learning. I suspect many others who need to get out and about this week may well claim that we are at the University of life.

They have imposed these four weeks on us with the promise that if we are all good and do what we’re told, we will get a Christmas — which anybody looking at the figures can tell you, is bollocks.

By Christmas, we’ll all be in tiers again. Spell it how you want. And understandably so. Remember Boris, 17th of July 2020, setting out his plan for a “significant return to normality by Christmas.” He was wrong, and we should have known that. Perhaps patience is sufferance. As in suffering fools, something I have never done gladly or otherwise.

So yes, I haven’t come this far only to come this far. I’m not giving up, but neither am I rolling over and playing dog. Let’s not only get Hancock as a sacrificial lamb, but let’s get the whole disease infused flock of Boris’s sheep. Raab, Patel, Dowden, Sunak and Gove, a leak on legs if ever I saw one.

And then, let’s get the big one. The indecisive, incompetent, ill-equipped shepherd they have put us in the care of. Let’s beat him with his crook — and there are many to choose from.

But let’s still be there, when the time calls for people to answer. And if waiting for that takes patience, then I’ll find it somewhere.

I haven’t come this far, only to come this far.

Patience on a monument