Andy

12 months ago my brother Andy stayed here in room2 in Chiswick. I visited the other day to see what it was like. It looks like a modern, well equipped hotel with a small park round the corner, fairly close to the centre of Chiswick. Andy was here to renew his passport, since he couldn't do it through the post because he didn't have an address in the UK. 

I live less than 10 miles away but Andy didn't tell me he was visiting. In fact I met up with my other brother Simon down the road in Battersea whilst Andy was here. Maybe if we'd seen him then, we may have realised he needed some help. It might have helped him just to see his family since we hadn't seen him in person since before the pandemic had started.

He'd been in various foreign countries, locked down initially like the rest of us, then moving around to countries with the fewest Covid restrictions. He was into conspiracy theories about Covid, the vaccines and the Great Reset. I hadn't talked to him for months because all he wanted to talk about was his latest theories on the tyranny that was being inflicted on us and would continue to be inflicted on us. 

Andy was no fool. Of the four brothers, he was the cleverest and most successful professionally. He studied at St Andrews and Cambridge, worked for IBM, Microsoft and Sony. He did so well out of his Microsoft share options that he'd been retired for several years. I think he was first drawn into conspiracy theories with 9/11. Something was suspicious about the way the buildings collapsed, Building 7 shouldn't have collapsed at all. We discussed it and we agreed to disagree. 

I always thought the 9/11 stuff was harmless fun. But if you think about the number of people who would have to be involved in the conspiracy then someone who is prepared to believe in it is much more likely to be sucked into other convoluted conspiracies. I now think all conspiracy theories are harmful and we should confront all of them (even the flat earthers and faked moon landing afficionados). Admittedly I'm not entirely clear how to fight against them, but I'm fairly sure it's better to start early before people have fallen too far into the rabbit hole.

Andy was more certain about his theories around Covid. His initial argument was that Covid was no worse than the flu so should be treated in the same way we deal with the flu. This had been my initial thought when I first heard of this new disease so I could sympathise with it. And in fact, that is pretty much how we are dealing with Covid now, with booster shots for vulnerable people and the rest of the population living with it. 

But we didn't deal with it in this way initially because Covid was a very different proposition when no-one had any immunity to it. Letting it rip would mean huge numbers of people getting infected at the same time and quite a few ending up in hospitals that would quickly be unable to cope. People would die from Covid and other diseases purely because hospitals would be unable to treat them in time. That was considered an unacceptable outcome. 

I think that if you never move beyond thinking this disease is just like the flu, then all of the other stuff naturally follows. The governments of the world must be choosing to treat this disease as a serious threat for some nefarious purpose. So it's the Great Reset or we are all being forced to take the vaccine to kill us. And as time progresses and none of these things happen, we get into even more ridiculous theories about some minor traffic management plans leading to 15 minute cities where we'll never be able to go anywhere more than 15 minutes away from our homes.

Andy's trip to Chiswick was the last time he was in the UK. He flew out to Budapest then moved onto Subotica in Serbia. He got a letter from HMRC asking about unpaid tax on share dividends. Although he'd been out of the country for most of the last few years, he was liable for some tax in a few years. We will never know for sure but my theory is a head full of conspiracies and two years of relative isolation had led to a fragile mental state and the HMRC letter pushed him over the edge. He killed himself on 19th June 2022.