Journal of the Plague Year Issue 3
Bunnings must be wondering what they are doing right, because the carpark yesterday was almost full and the queue to enter the warehouse, under current social distancing guidelines, was a hundred yards long.
This isn’t my picture, I hasten to say, but it was very much what it looked like. We turned the car around and skedaddled, wondering what on earth would motivate all these types to line up like that. It as completely impossible to make the queue risk free, so there must have ben something urgent going on. As people were coming out with tools and timber products, it was clear that the closure of schools was at last having an effect. Isolation rooms for noisy teenagers whose zooming was disturbing their work-from-home parents. The cells for the recalcitrant kids who have been a teacher’s nightmare all these years and at last have inflicted themselves on their previous ignorant parents. Little boxes for the Primary kids who have lost all of their childish attraction after two weeks of lockdown. Clearly, there are no end to the home projects that parents can fill their leisure time with!
Of course, it’s all in Defoe (it must be forty years since I read it, during a uni break when I had pretensions of something or other):
“And here I must observe again, that this necessity of going out of our houses to buy provisions was in a great measure the ruin of the whole city; for the people catched the distemper, on these occasions, one of another;”
Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year
Much more sensible to adopt a proper spacing…
But, one must never lose sight of a moment of gratitude: I thought I would hate church on FaceBook video; but, no, I found it strangely moving, along with the other hundred households who joined in. Well done, OLF Peakhurst. I think Holy Thursday at Christ Church St Laurence could be a thing after all.
