To think many fell for the Captain Tom scam

[Binjob118]

I never understood all the fuss about Captain Tom. A rich old man walked around his garden and was lauded as a hero. Family then go on freebie holiday to Barbados whilst rest of us were locked down for Christmas. Then it turns out he was part of family scam to pay the family from book proceeds. No wonder so many people in this country are targeted by scammers, we are a gullible lot.

@EmmaEmerald I remember you from Covid times, and you and I had similar treatment from HQ. Some people had a terrible time directly as a result of lockdown, not because of Covid, and were not allowed to say so.

@Runnerinthenight There is nothing self-congratulatory or back-slapping about this. At the time, a small minority of people openly opposed lockdown. When we tried to say why on MN, we were suspended and our threads were deleted for being "not in the spirit". In other words "not conforming to group-think".

I strongly object to being regarded now as a know-all revisionist. I am simply saying what I said at the time. Or tried to say, but wasn't allowed to.

The only reason I didn't take my own life during lockdown was that it would have been too awful for my children. That was the sole thing that stopped me from doing it.

Nobody gave a single shit about the people who suffered because of lockdown, and they still don't.

I think it was partly because older people felt left out.

My friend and I weren't even 70, and early on his DD started telling us we shouldn't go to the shops. Very early on, some idiot in gvt or on the telly mentioned over 70s going into lockdown. This didn't happen, but it seemed to sow a seed that should never have grown. We were late 60s, and fairly fit for our age

Covid (may have) meant DM, 90 at start of lockdown, has skeletal problems that she probably wouldn't have had if she had been able to continue with her walking group. She does still meet up with them in London, but not for walking. Her attitude to Covid was that of someone who had spent their early teens in S London hearing the doodlebugs go over every night...you endure it as best you can, and to her it was nothing as there wasn't the aspect of abject fear involved, and she had lived a lot longer by then...

I was so pleased when I got my first Covid jab - at last, there was something I could do, something that would make a difference. Many in the queue felt the same, I think.

I never got the whole Captain Tom thing. I thought him walking around his garden was tragic on a number of levels.

I remember explaining to people at the time that the money was never going to frontline NHS services because that's not how it works. But people just saw "NHS" and assumed they were donating to nurses salaries.

But then covid was very odd from start to finish. From the eye-testing drive to Barnard Cstle to the frankly bizarre 10pm pub rule in England and the vertical drinking rule in Scotland - as if covid were some sort of slightly time-challenged gremlin with an excessive fear of heights.

And around 2mths of clapping for the NHS only for their payrises to be later blocked by tories with short memories and no sense of irony.

Anyway, it is deeply unsurprising that the family has skimmed. it felt off, even at the time.
But people never think to do "due diligence" on these things - especially when it's a old white ex-forces officer. And people will fall for it all again, sadly.

Well, I did. And I am by no means the only one.

Probably

still can't forgive them though.

all of this

i had a nervous breakdown this year and I initially thought it was about caring for mum

but increasingly I find more bits of me that broke off in lockdown, and despite my rants on here, there isn't enough ranting in the world that would have any therapeutic effect.

Honestly, I'm still not sure it can be said without being banned from the site.

I wish I had known you and your colleagues. Like minded people would have made that period of time so different.

I didn't get the captain Tom or the pot banging either but I'm getting a bit sick of people rewriting history and claiming that Covid was just a kind of bad cold and we were all duped and those who took precautions were just sheep etc. I mean I worked all through (retail at the time as all my work dried up) but it was real, the symptoms were horrendous (I had it twice and was hospitalised the first time) and more importantly it was a novel virus.

It's really easy to be cavalier after the fact but these attitudes really stick in my throat.

I don't suppose Tom truly realised how much traction it would generate and I'm of the opinion that as he's dead now, he probably has very little say in what goes on. His shady daughter and son in law are a different matter and deserve to be investigated.

I wish I had known you and your colleagues. Like minded people would have made that period of time so different

Wouldn't they just.

See, now I am going to seemingly contradict myself.
I think personalities are made, not born.

Every family is weird to grow up in. So the DCs greed may well have been shaped by their upbringing. Captain Tom was no saint - nobody is. Just take a look at yourself the AIBU and Relationship Boards

It has just randomly occurred to me that the resonance with Major Tom, as in the Bowie song, may have played a part in the rise of Captain Tom.,

@CandyLeBonBon It was bad enough to be silenced at the time, but it really, really pisses me off for people now to say that we are "rewriting history" and being "cavalier after the fact".

We said this right from the start, but people didn't want to hear it because the depressing fact is that most people are unable to think for themselves.

Nobody is silencing you. But accusing people of not being able to think is just another sneering way of calling people sheep.

I didn't get the fuss over him but what's it got to do with lockdown?🙄

@EmmaEmerald Spot on. In my ordinary life, I try to forget about it all because it would be bad for me to dwell on it. But sometimes MN threads bring it all back, and I then realise how furious I still am - with the people who made the rules, but (arguably even more so) with the people who not only followed them (fine - if you want to wash your shopping bags, be my guest) but were happy to inflict them on other people in different situations.

It wasn't quite unintentional on his part......his daughter and her husband, who run their own consultancy firm, went to a PR agency, that's how it was publicised! Capt. Tom could've said no. But he didn't. Obviously he underestimated his daughter's cunning and true colours......at least I hope he did!

No, at the moment nobody is silencing me. But they certainly were in 2000 and 2021.

And you can call it what you like: to my mind, blindly following arbitrary rules and - worse - policing other people's adherence to these arbitrary rules suggests a lack of intelligence and/or critical thinking.

How did you know from the start that his family were shady and what's it got to do with people thinking for themselves?

No one is silencing you. No one silenced you then. You can say what you want. There were significant protests in London with hideously bad songs throughout 2021 (or whatever fucking year it was) regarding Covid/lockdown/access to modern medicine.

We just don’t agree with you. And I was no lockdown lover either. But I thought the anti-crowd were as idiotic as the people clapping and banging pans and baking banana bread and telling everyone how they loved the slower pace of life in between washing their shopping and quarantining their post. BUT I guess that is what happens when not very clever people are forced into a situation that is completely beyond them.

Anyway, I disgress! Tom was a grifting old cunt and his daughter even worse.

No, we didn’t know. I sometimes find myself remembering things like the distanced queues snaking around supermarket car parks and waving to friends whilst crossing the road to avoid them, and wondering how it all came to that. The reason was not collective madness, it was that before the vaccines, we were in fear for our lives and those of our loved ones. It was really scary, and you didn’t know how transmissible the disease was.

Yes, I also remember reading that.

Here it is in the Daily Mail. The article contains excerpts from his book about his first marriage. All rather odd.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8675347/CAPTAIN-TOM-MOORE-reveals-sexless-marriage-fight-wed-love-life-new-memoir.html

@Allthatwegotisthispalebluedot ! Tom was a grifting old cunt

How do you know this?

Interesting point about thinking about the things like the supermarket queues etc. For work I visit a school weekly which still makes me confirm I haven’t been to a country which doesn’t have an ‘travel corridor’ with the UK and that i don’t have a high temperature or a cough, every single time I sign in. It makes me feel like im going back in time! It’s the strangest feeling.

I’ve got eyes. We lived through it together. He was clearly an attention seeking old wanker from the very start. Awful.

"We" weren't all brainwashed.

The reason was not collective madness, it was that before the vaccines, we were in fear for our lives and those of our loved ones

You might have been, but I wasn't. I didn't worry for one single second about Covid. Neither, fortunately, did any of my family, otherwise I would have lost the plot completely.

@Allthatwegotisthispalebluedot You are misremembering. I am talking specifically about MN when I say that my anti-lockdown threads were deleted, as were any comments I made which weren't entirely supportive. Yes I bloody well was silenced, as were many other MNers whose views weren't those of the establishment or those scared into thinking that they had something to be scared of.

Agree that this doesn't have much to do with Captain Tom and his grabby daughter, though.