I asked how things had been for his business during the pandemic and he said they'd been fine, thank you very much - and then, out of nowhere, he observed that New Zealand was currently experiencing, as he put it, 35 per cent excess mortality.
"News to me," I said.
He nodded knowingly, by now having pulled on a pair of underpants that I wouldn't have chosen for myself.
I asked if there had been an unusually severe flu season. He shook his head. He looked around, confirmed there was no one else in the changing room, and he mimed the act of administering a hypodermic injection. As he did so he mouthed the words 'the jab' and he seemed to come close to winking. Then he studied me to see how I'd react.
"The Covid vaccine?" I said.
"Ah-ha," he said, nodding.
"It's killing people?"
"Ah ha," he said, "and not just old people. It's killing 18 to 49 year olds."
I am not by nature confrontational, but I have my limits.
"Bullshit," I said, though I like to think I came as close as one can come to saying it affably.
"It's happening all over the world," he said, as if I hadn't spoken. "Governments have hushed it up."
"No they haven't," I said. "They couldn't keep something like that secret. It would be all over the papers."
"You don't believe what you read in the paper, do you?" And then it all poured out. The Covid vaccine was untried science that had backfired. There was actually a perfectly good cure for Covid called Ivermectin, but there was no money in that for Big Pharma. The medical profession was in on it. He'd never go to a doctor again. And so on.
Mug that I am, I briefly argued. I pointed out - oh, what does it matter what I pointed out? I was firing peas at a great stone wall of, well, of what? Stupidity?
No, the man wasn't stupid. Credulity, I suppose. The common human tendency to prefer the excitingly false over the plainly true. And the pleasure of feeling in-the-know, on the inside, one-up on the dupes and gulls. The same instinct has given birth to all cults, all religions (the difference between a cult and a religion being only size.)
There have always been conspiracy theories and people willing to believe them. But the internet has enabled them as nothing else has done before. Unlike other media, the internet has no editor, no gatekeeper, no arbiter of truth and falsehood. Anyone can lie on it, and anyone does.
And unlike traditional sources of conspiracy theory, the internet has unlimited reach. It's in everyone's pocket.
But what I don't know is who tells these lies and who gains from them. Who came up with the lie that the Covid vaccine is harmful and then chose to spread it? And for what purpose?
Is it merely the work of agents of misrule, people who delight in disruption? Such people do exist, as Shakespeare knew. Iago in Othello is just mean-spiritedness made flesh; unmotivated malice. I've taught a couple of kids like that.
Or is the source more sinister?
Could it be, as I have read, that there are rogue states out there - Russia, Iran, North Korea - that sow falsehoods on purpose, that seed the ether with corrosive lies, so as to destroy faith in a common truth and a common good, and thus destabilise societies with a view to defeating them?
Or is that just a conspiracy theory?
I don't know.
