In our small town, the streets were very quiet for a Saturday. I had no problem topping up my well used porridge pack with another one, though that has now changed. I couldn’t find tomato passata, nor any of the milk we use. So I took a tube of tomato paste’ and as for the milk, I decided to wait and see if there were any deliveries over the next day or two. There weren’t any deliveries so we bought some other kind of milk.
I do understand people who live out in the wilds where no stores exist doing their regular weekly or fortnightly basket fill-up for themselves. Their shopping habits have never left shelves empty. I have no understanding of others who live a stone’s throw away from food stores stuffing their trolleys sky high, like the gluttony of Christmas was never going to return. That though, is what I have seen.
Carers with their clients’ shopping lists are having a hard time finding things. Time being a factor in the carer’s task, means they either don’t complete the shopping needs and continue to give their clients their amount of face-to-face-time and fewer food supplies, or they spend time searching other stores and greatly reduce the support time they spend in the client’s home.
And in a pharmacy, I met a man who was determined to stand in my space, however much I backed away. He was loudly pronouncing that ‘the whole pandemic viral thing was a nonsense; it was ‘stirred up’; he didn’t believe it. Compared to annual deaths from flu’ it was nothing’ and he added, ‘it’ wouldn’t come up here!
This vast area I am in, taken as a whole, is the size of Belgium. It has had one case of Covid 19 confirmed in a busy town. Our locally very deprived hospital does not possess any ventilators. We are a very long way from any major services. So far, fortunately, in our sector of this vast county, we have no confirmd cases of Covid-19. Some American students I heard on a radio news programme, who were based in a major city, have decided not to go back home. They decided instead, to hide away from people in the relatively safer more isolated areas of Scotland.
RANDOM THOUGHTS 