The mask era can be deadly

Apart from the unbelievable explosion in Beirut and the images which depicted what looked like a mini nuclear blast (but wasn't), the other story I found deeply disturbing was a report coming out of Paris. A man in his 40s enters a laundromat wearing a mask and sees a man standing there without a mask. He asks him to put on his mask to conform with the rules. The maskless man goes out outside and calls in three mates carrying baseball bats and they proceed to beat up the poor defenceless masked wearer, wielding their bats and striking his head and body. The vctim spends a week in hospital with a traumatised brain and bruises all over his body. Do I dare say it, this is the world we now live in? My experience: walking along a narrow pavement in a country village at the weekend with my oldest son, a couple up ahead walking towards us on the other side of the parked cars in the road. He is shortish, shaved head, tough-looking, she looks perfectly nice. As they pass, we smile and say hello, but once they are a few yards on from us, he turns round and shouts: "I hope you get Covid and f..... die." Clearly we should have said thank you very much for keeping apart by walking in the road. But he took it as an example of f.....middle class w.....s snootily ignoring him. Really alarmingly unpleasant. So this IS the new world. I have stepped off the pavement a million times since the pandemic arrived and a smile or not is fine. But beware the angry man, and beware the man without a mask who wants to make a statement. There are a lot of people around for whom the mask has become a symbol of hate and rebellion.