The front line doesn’t finish the health service’s front door

Ihad a day off work this week so I got dressed and went to buy some groceries.

Normally I wouldn’t expect anyone to still be reading after a set-up as mundane as that. but no one needs reminding these are far from normal times and it took a perfectly ordinary, yet oddly disorientating trip to Morrison’s to underline how much has changed in such a short space.

For the last fortnight, The Courier has been planned, written and edited at shaky tables in spare rooms across Tayside and Fife as newsroom colleagues have heeded the guidance on social distancing and scattered to the far corners of our circulation area. And while I’ve spent a hefty chunk of each day reading, writing and worrying about the spread of the coronavirus pandemic – brought home this week by the tributes to comedian Eddie Large and community stalwart Sheila French of Broughty Ferry, one of the first local victims – I’ve also felt dislocated from it here among the blue skies and birdsong of a Perthshire spring.

City-dwellers may have observed the lockdown in real time in every shuttered café, shop and museum, but if like me, you live in a sleepy wee village or the suburbs of a larger town, where none of those things were there to close in the first place, this might have felt like someone else’s nightmare. Yes, there are a few more cars parked outside people’s doors and a few less passing through, a few more crayon rainbows in the windows, but the atmosphere hasn’t felt so different from the school holidays when life shifts to a glacial gear anyway.

Beyond the 30mph sign on my first foray out in 10 days, it all felt very different, from the traffic on the main road – a smattering of lorries, delivery vans and buses and very few private cars – to city streets so empty that the act of driving down them felt transgressive, and into the sparsely occupied supermarket car park, where a girl in a face mask was handing out disinfectant wipes along with the trolleys.

Inside, there was none of the pandemonium of my last visit to the shops, when panic-buying was at its peak. The painted lines at the checkouts, designating a 2m space between trolleys, were reassuring and the woman who rang my items through was chatty and cheerful – but as we exchanged our “stay safes” at the end, it occurred to me that for one of us, this was going to be easier said than done.

A number of themes have emerged in the messages we’ve received at The Courier as the Covid-19 crisis has taken hold. Two weeks ago, there was a sense of a country powering down, every other email informing us of a venue or service closing, or an event being cancelled.

That’s still going on – in recent days we crossed Wimbledon, the Edinburgh Festival and the Dundee Flower and Food Festival off the barren summer calendar. Last week was about community, as neighbourhood networks rallied round the needy, gin distillers switched to hand sanitiser manufacturers and a legion of costumed superheroes pounded the streets to cheer up little ones.

This week, as we’ve reported on confirmed cases at the Amazon distribution centre in Dunfermline and the Bosch Rexroth engineering factory in Glenrothes, and the strain on public services as large numbers of employees go off sick or self-isolate, we’ve been struck by a growing sense of unease among workers questioning whether their role is as essential as their bosses insist and members of the public asking why certain premises are staying open. Driving home, with enough provisions to see me through another fortnight, I understood. For every person sheltering indoors, grumbling about the inconvenience of remote working

or what to make from all the dried gluten-free pasta they stockpiled last month, there’s another who’s still getting up every morning, donning a uniform and going out to keep the cogs turning, potentially exposing themselves and their families to the virus as they do.

Without the shop workers manning checkout tills, the delivery drivers and posties bringing household essentials, the council workers emptying bins and visiting elderly relatives who haven’t had another soul across their door since the lockdown began, the rest of us couldn’t take the necessary steps to stay indoors, avoid catching and spreading the virus and overburdening the NHS.

It’s these so-called low skilled jobs – the sort that weren’t deserving of a visa back when Brexit was still filling the news – that are proving of monumental value in this crisis and I hope when it is over they’ll be held in higher esteem.

We took to our doorsteps again on Thursday to applaud the carers on the frontline of the NHS.

It was heartwarming and humbling and they should be cheered on the hour every hour of every day, even after this battle is won.

But we should also throw in an extra clap or two for the essential workers, whose jobs cannot be done in a dressing gown by video link and who are also putting themselves in harm’s way daily so the rest of us can stay safe.

Pictures: Gareth Jennings, Kim Cessford and Steve Brown. With so many places closed due to lockdown, it can be easy to take for granted the safety of working from home – but let’s not forget to applaud the key workers who keep the cogs turning by showing up to work and putting themselves and their loved ones at risk.