Go west, life is Cheaper there... and Maggie may sea a gem!
Eleven weeks into isolating and I finally encounter the new normal
ON Thursday, I’ll be 11 weeks in self-isolation. I thought it was 12 until I did a countback, and realised I had added a week, but that’s par for the course at the moment – time seems somehow pliable, rather than fixed.
It is, one way or the other, time to start relaxing my own rules a little. I’m in a high-risk category with my diabetes, but not in very high risk, so I never was compelled to cocoon. I decided to do so anyway as the virus began to spread, and I have been reliant ever since on my local supermarket and kind-hearted neighbours to keep me fed and watered by doing my shopping for me.
On Sunday night, I decided to nip to the bottle bank to get rid of a few empties and stuck a few plastic bags in the car as well, just in case it looked like Brooks supermarket in Riverchapel wasn’t busy. When I passed, the car park was empty so I decided to go in. They have it well set up – there are two hot-water taps outside, and paper towel on a roll.
Inside, all was instantly familiar and yet unfamiliar.
I actually have had virtually no experience of what daily life is like during a pandemic. I haven’t strayed farther than five kilometres from the house, and I haven’t had to queue for the shops or observe social distancing, simply because I haven’t really been close enough to anyone bar the postman and delivery drivers to have any cause to do so.
It was odd to see the stickers on the floor indicating what two metres actually looks like, and odd too to see how the tills are set up behind Perspex, with the floor again marked out to keep shoppers apart and they line up to pay.
The really nice thing was just being able to browse. Over the past three months, I’ve had to make lists and I’ve always forgotten something. Shopping is so much easier when you can look at every shelf, and I came back with lots of herbs and spices, a paint roller, sanding paper, masking tape, and a packet of ginger nuts, as well as the staples I needed.
It was a small foray, and while I was in the shop, I encountered only four others, so I never felt jittery at all – and, to be honest, it was lovely. It made me feel normal and human again, and I relished all of what can’t have been any more than ten minutes indoors somewhere other than my own home. It was a baby step, but an important one – it made me feel my life is getting back on track.
ON the way to the bottle bank, I actually had to stop the car and look up. My home is on a busy flight path between Europe and the United States and the sky usually is filled with contrails, in the morning when the flights arrive in from the US, and in the afternoon when they head in the opposite direction.
I haven’t seen one for months and suddenly there it was, a lone aircraft I later learned was a Lufthansa cargo flight en route from Frankfurt to JFK in New York.
Another thing that is small in the overall scheme of things but also another sign that slowly, surely, we’re all taking the same baby steps. Heaven knows when I’ll be on a plane again (unless there are no new cases during a brief window before a second wave hits, I don’t think it will be before there’s a vaccine), but it was nice to imagine myself up there again, looking down on our changed and, I think, slightly more caring world.