"It's Life, Jim, but not as we know it."

It’s Saturday 21^st March 2020 and Day 1 of being without my part-time job. All schools are closed until further notice. (Nobody worked out how a school transport driver could work from home!) My wife also lost her job as a Doctor’s Receptionist following reorganisation of the Practice surgeries to deal with Covid-19, resulting in our local surgery operating without a receptionist.

Now we have to learn to how fill our weekdays constructively, and live without the benefit of the wages that supplemented our Pensions. But we are fortunate. There are many who are much worse off, so to complain would be both unreasonable and churlish; and if we have to self-isolate we have the benefit of a garden. I feel sorry for the poor souls who live in apartment blocks.

So - schools closed, pubs, clubs, cafes, restaurants, gyms, theatres, and cinemas closed. Britain is closed. We have cancelled theatre trips and holidays. 2020 will be a year unlike any other we have experienced.

These are strange times. When did my wife ever go shopping at 7 a.m.? The answer is, today. She was entitled to take advantage of special opening hours for people who have the dubious privilege of being over 70. Yesterday I called at our local Pharmacy (no hand sanitizer and no thermometers by the way) and found a shivering queue of people outside the door on which there was a notice permitting only one person inside at any time. Outside, the queue was spaced out, not in the sense of being on magic mushrooms, but physically spaced out. Social Distancing. When I got inside to pick up my prescriptions, I found a shopping trolley and two chairs placed in front of the counter to prevent close contact with the pharmacist.

There have to be some positive aspects. Perhaps there are. We are having to re-evaluate what is important and what isn’t. People are learning (re-learning?) how to co-operate, how to help each other, how to be unselfish. Some people are not, however. There are those who still persist in trying to buy up the entire contents of supermarkets as if they are about to be consigned to a desert island, and the lady seen in our local supermarket this morning picking up a pack of “Wonky” Carrots at a discounted price and rejecting them in favour of a perfect cauliflower. If you need to eat, does it matter if your carrots aren’t straight? And why is there a kind of mass hysteria over toilet rolls?! Supermarkets really need to be more rigorous in their rationing system.

On the negative side, there the people who are totally amoral (one of them is running the USA), happy to operate scams, sell magic potions to ‘cure’ the virus infection, engage in blatant over-pricing, or steal food from food banks; and the young people who think they are immortal, joking about ignoring all the current advice concerning “social distancing”.

Party Politics is changing .. and it needs to! There are positive signs that parliamentarians who normally spend their time tearing lumps out of each other in our highly adversarial system are ‘morphing’ into beings prepared to countenance more reasonable discourse with each other, co-operating in the face of an invisible enemy. I strongly feel that if we can move to a position where we recognise there is more in life that unites us than divides us, then Covid-19 will have taught us something useful. Whether we are Socialist, Conservative, Liberal, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Atheist, ‘Brexiteer’ or ‘Remainer’ (sorry to bring that up again), or none of the above, we don’t exclusively hold all the keys to wisdom, knowledge, vision, or political ideas.

It’s going to be a weird 2020. Learn to appreciate new values. Stay strong. Stay well.