A strange, unsatisfactory trip to the chemist

KATY HARRINGTON

IHAVE always loved shopping at the chemist. I’d prefer to be garrotted than spend the day shopping for clothes, but the chemist I adore. What’s not to love? Aisles stocked with vitamins with no clinically proven benefits! Bath salts! Moisturiser made from French thermal water! Eye drops (God, I love eye drops), Carmex, tubes of things!

Sadly, due to Covid-19 our local chemist is now operating an odd system where you can’t go in but you can ring a little bell like you are checking into Fawlty Towers and then request what you need by whispering to the lady at the door. She scurries off and brings you back not quite what you were looking for, but this is Ireland, so you say thank you and pay for it anyway.

I watch a YouTube tutorial about cutting your own hair and decide to attempt this daredevil act. First, I need supplies from the pharmacy

— a sharp scissors — and then there is the small matter of the whiskers appearing on the edges of my upper lip. As I am a lady, I also require “lady things” for when it is what my father would call “that time of the month”

— a very delicate way to describe a slow monthly torture (if there was any God, periods would be annual at most or only bestowed on people who litter or are mean to dogs). Finally, one member of the family (who shall remain anonymous but really it’s only me, my mum and dad here and it wasn’t me, I swear) requests an electric nose hair trimmer.

And so off I trot with my debit card, a cloth bag and my little list of embarrassments only to return 20 minutes later with only a children’s craft scissors and pathetic comb — which I guess I might need to groom my moustache if this goes on.