Lockdown Diary: Week 7
Sweet sweet freedom! For one hour…
I said last week that things were starting to edge open, and so it proved this week. On Wednesday every apartment in our compound was issued with a card to show at the gate, with which you were allowed to…leave the compound. The rule was that only one person per apartment could leave, for a maximum of three hours, only once per day. Hardly throwing all the doors open and letting everyone make a run for it, but it did mean that Thursday morning I slightly nervously waved my card, and walked…out into the world.
It was, to be honest, much as I remembered it. I unlocked one of the readily-available public bikes gathering dust by the side of the road, and cycled away. We are lucky that we live close to a river, and I went down the riverside in the sunshine with hardly anyone about, feeling on the whole better than I had done for a while.
As I went around I saw that the streets remained deserted. Clearly not many compounds had reached the same stage as ours — I spoke to some pretty fed up friends who had not had a case in their own compound for over month, but were still restricted to their apartments. It seemed the rules remained arbitrary.
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It was all a bit 28 Days Later as I went round the silent streets. Silent that was, except for the nearby supermarket. There were a few things I wanted to pick up, but when I arrived I saw that’s where all the people had gone. Given that entrance to the shop was restricted by numbers to avoid a crowd, there was a snaking queue of people all around the block. No way I was going to get back within 3 hours if I went for it & not wishing to be shut outside overnight, I returned home.
As I returned home, the other thing I saw was people having their haircut in the street. With all the hairdressers’ shops closed, but I guess with the employees short of money without any salary, they had moved their services al fresco. To be honest after best part of two months inside, everyone was looking pretty shaggy by now and the hairdressers seemed to be doing decent business.
I had not made it into the supermarket but to be fair there was plenty of food at home anyway. The bulk buying was still going on, meaning we had more food than normal. Every time you wanted to get something to eat you had to play a game of Fridge Tetris, moving around all the different bags, boxes, and packages to get to whatever you wanted, that had of course been placed right at the back of the fridge under everything else. Then when you had what you wanted, you had to put it all back in again and make sure it fitted. Which it never did first time.
Rumours now abound that the start of June will be the time that the opening accelerates and things return to as close as they can to normal. We will see. For now, I’m off to find some chocolate from the back of the fridge; wish me luck.
