Stockpiling? Just keep Spam and carry on

ArE you panic buying yet? I was tempted to stick another nine-pack of loo rolls in my supermarket trolley yesterday but resisted the impulse. Why? Because I want to be British about this. I want to be sensible and responsible. I want to do the right thing by society. I’m not vulnerable, I don’t have dependants or pets and I believe in the Gloria Gaynor mantra that when it comes to not bulk buying dry goods — I will survive.

Obviously, I want to have my cake and eat it, but in an orderly, controlled fashion.

Yes, I want my tins of just-in-case baked beans, I want my siege-proof couscous. But mostly I want to not behave like a lunatic on the eve of Armageddon.

And if that’s the case, I hope I will be spending my last hours uncorking the best champagne and telling the people I love how much I really love them.

Not bulldozing down aisle six in my emergency wellies and surgical mask, elbowing frail pensioners out of the way to get at the last tub of Pot Noodle.

We have been here before, with the panic buying due to the Big Freeze in February 2018, followed by the panic buying of Weetabix and Elastoplast due to the fear of blocked ports and a no-deal Brexit in December last year. Yet we have learned nothing.

The problem with panic buying is that it only creates the shortages that everyone is so worried about in the first place. We all know this. We are not stupid. Yet out there, in the frenetic wilds of the tinned goods section and the bottled water gondolas, all reason is cast to the wind. It is every man and woman for themselves.

At the huge Tesco superstore in West London on Thursday morning, I note that the shelves have already been stripped bare of hand sanitiser and that there has been a run on dried pasta and long-life milk.

STAFF are continually restocking the loo roll and paper tissue sections, while several customers doggedly cram multipacks of Kleenex and Cushelle Ultra Quilted into their trollies. Please! Isn’t the time for sensible rationing now, not later?

A shop assistant tells me that there is another delivery tonight of what polite society calls toilet tissue and then, after that, stocks are exhausted for the immediate future. It is squeaky bum time for West London, in more ways than one.

Despite the tragic death of one person in Britain from coronavirus yesterday, we are very far from crisis point in this country. However — and very sadly — more deaths will almost certainly come. We must not underestimate that a great number of the elderly and those with underlying health issues feel vulnerable and are terribly worried about the situation. They deserve our support and understanding.

That is one reason why I am so furious with chortling Prince William this week, chuntering on during his official visit to Ireland about how the threat of coronavirus contamination was exaggerated, hur hur.

Obviously, it is fine for William and Kate, swaddled in privilege behind the antiseptic ramparts of their big houses and inherited wealth. In the real world, for the old and the vulnerable huddled on public transport and dependent on visits to surgeries and hospitals, the threat seems very real.

Meanwhile, my 85-year- old mother has a freezer full of enough soup and stews and chopped vegetables to withstand a siege, but she is still worried that coronavirus is coming for her and her friends.

However, her generation don’t seem to be the ones clearing supermarket shelves like locusts or forming daybreak queues outside branches of Boots to stock up on emergency wet wipes and zinc pastilles. That is because Mum could feed a family of five on a lamb bone and a turnip for four days, and indeed did exactly that for much of my childhood.

Her World War II generation knew how to survive by making the best of a bad situation — but those days have long gone. Whatever happened to being stoic, to make do and mend, to going without, to bucking up and knuckling down?

In the year 2020, in the land of plenty, should there really be frantic supermarket queues for six-packs of bottled water? Why, if only households in the

UK had ready access to a supply of free, fresh, clean water then surely we would be fine? Pray for this miracle, won’t you?

Things are so bad that Boris Johnson went on This Morning with Phil and Holly this week, making a point of shaking their hands to prove such contact was not a health problem. Idiot! We will be fine, said the PM, channelling the giggling Prince William, so long as everyone washes their hands.

BUT that is the entire problem — they don’t. I am always appalled at the number of women who don’t wash their hands in public toilets and nothing dissuades me that men are not exactly the same.

It’s the sad truth that we cannot rely on our selfish fellow citizens to maintain the hygiene standards we might hold for ourselves, so forget about collective responsibility in the supermarket or elsewhere. That is why we are in this situation in the first place.

When it comes to public spirit, a plague such as coronavirus brings out the best in people and also the worst. One of my colleagues has bought four tins of Spam (£2.20 each), never having bought the stuff before in her entire life. I know.

She is in for a pork shock. Meanwhile, a chum who lives alone has just spent £500 on a stockpile shop in a wanton act of self-comfort. Panic buying helps people feel that they are in control of a bad situation but, ultimately, it makes it worse for everyone else.

I’d like to say let’s all pull together, let’s keep Spam and carry one — but fear it is too late already. Far too late.