ANNE MARIE SIRJU

IT'S BEEN a challenging, gruelling, unimaginably difficult 2021 for so many of us.

Compounding covid19, individuals faced lay-offs, financial burdens, relationship dilemmas, static routines, confusing and conflicting pronouncements, horribly depressing news, variants and stresses, in addition to the adjustments to ever-changing protocols during this pernicious pandemic.

To say nothing of the worrying scare every time one ventured forth, returned and wondered if they had been exposed and wold soon no longer be able to breathe properly, wold need oxygen, require a ventilator and die alone, ostracised and forlorn, with no funeral to really talk of.

Goodness knows we have been through the wringer.

But good grief, did we really have to endure yet another Old Year's Night of senseless, noisy fireworks and bamboo-busting?

This in addition to me recycling water from my kitchen sink to the toilet and plants. WASA was not very kind to me last year and I suppose I was very good. What with my griping and complaining, grinching and griping, maybe I do not deserve water from a pipe.

Girl, stand in the rain and bathe, yuh hear. Do not flush your toilet until the stench reaches your bedroom. Yes, yes, I have been doing this - I flush my toilet once a day unless I have diarrhoea.

So there is noise, dead baby kangaroos in the zoo, animals, babies, old people, the sick and helpless who dread the bamboo, scratch bombs and fireworks with a pulsating fear that very few comprehend. Oh, but it is just for a while, you know, a few hours. What can be so wrong?

Unless you have witnessed something in real, perpetuated distress, hour after hour, you have no clue.

AG, please disregard the fireworks importers and sellers (5,000 people max?) and save one million people and animals who can bear it no longer. Our health, our well-being, depend on this law.

You have to be able to implement this and you can save foreign exchange by simply prohibiting fireworks and scratch bomb imports. After this we will address the bamboo bursting - the police can monitor this.

Note to self: Ensure you write to the AG, compose a compelling piece with well-researched facts and figures about the dangers of fireworks, get signatures, do everything you can to ensure the elimination of the 27 or so sources of noise (just in my small community) which plague these events and go on for hours and hours while my dogs and I go stark raving mad, relegated to Dante's Hell while my erstwhile neighbours burst bamboo till the wee hours of January 1. No, January 2. Oops, January 3 - some still have unburst bamboo to detonate on my fading eardrums. Animals continue to suffer.

So, Divali and Old Year's 'celebratory noises,' the lack of a reliable water supply - all grinches.

My number one grinch, though, has to be the apathy, inefficiency, absolute lack of communication from the National Insurance Board and National Insurance Appeals Tribunal. A