Round here, it’s become customary to start every conversation with people with a sort of pause and a shrug of disbelief and mutual bafflement - and laugh nervously when someone asks how you are.
Our rear-end of a panto-horse Prime Minister refuses to announce closures - or say definitely they aren’t happening. At the moment, with suggestions that these things may at some point happen, every day feels like the last, so people feel they can never be ready enough. That’s why everyone is stockpiling. The sense of impending doom is hugely exacrbated by uncertainty and the profusion of negative possibilities. The crackle in the air in the food shops is unbearable.
Yesterday I felt tremendous sympathy for the cashiers in Tesco - they are really on the frontlines. It struck me that whether it’s nurses, or supermarket cashiers, or transport workers, or gig economy delivery drivers or retail and hotel workers - the people who are losing out are the working classes as usual. God only knows what people are going to do when they get laid off. Owen Jones shared a letter that had been sent to a hotel worker that simply told them their ‘services are no longer required.’ It said that any holiday they had taken beyond the accrued would be reclaimed from their wage packet, and that they had to move out of their hotel accommodtion immediately. Homeless, penniless, in a pandemic. How can we accept this? We voted for this, over and over and over.
The cashier in Tesco seemed so exhausted, and when someone asked her 'Why is everyone doing this?’ she said 'Because people are bleedin' animals, that’s why' and carried on scanning. The woman before us ran off without paying.
Meanwhile at Catford Food and Wine, a horrible little man with a face like a walnut is selling hand sanitiser for £8.99 for a small bottle with a sign that says 'Coronvirus Killer'. When a woman politely questioned it, he shouted ‘If people don’t like it they can fucking get out.' I’ve always thought romanticising small local businesses was complete cack. They are often the scummiest of all - no PR to worry about, after all. And at this stage, they know they are the final failsafe before the pasta - yes, even the Happy Shopper seven years out of date spaghetti - is gone.
In the grocer further up Rushey Green yesterday, a gentleman was standing behind the meat counter and then roaming the shop tidying shelves, with a racking, gut-wrenching persistent dry cough. He was covering his mouth with a dirty hankie which looked filthy even for the best of times. This was in-between shuffling packets. It’ll be a toss-up between cholera and Coronavirus at this rate.
Politically, as with the last economic crisis, quantitative easing is going into the banks' shareholders' pockets to shore up flagging profits. And the money to businesses is being used to offset their losses while they shed staff anyway. Is it willful and determinedly cruel - as in, Tories genuinely do only care about hedge funds and bankers? Or negligent? Or total stupidity? Or perhaps that strange confluence of all three called ideology?
Meanwhile it’s confronting for all of us, I’m sure, to discover the psychological nature of imprisonment. (And it hasn't even started in this country.) Exactly the same situation and location feels completely different when you are told you can't leave. A hotel room in a five star hotel, your wonderful home you've spent years making - if you are there because you have to be, the ants start crawling under your skin.
One thing I do know: looking at the trolleys full of cake, noodles, pasta, and bog roll, the next epidemics are going to be scurvy and chapped arses.
Some people are just scum, plain and simple.