Tony Evans brought us the priceless story of the emergency package that arrived on his doorstep from China. Now he explains how he's filling in time during the great lockdown ...
Like something out of Tolkien, unfathomed danger awaits every step and a dark and implacable evil lurks over the next horizon.
A trip to the supermarket becomes a shivery expedition to Mordor where touching the wrong thing or getting too close to someone else leads to inevitable destruction.
Personally, I’m using this coronavirus time to catch up with my reading. I have a Folio edition of eight volumes of Gibbon’s The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire on my shelves, which I have been meaning to do something about for 20 years.
Now at last I’ve picked it up and I’ve nearly finished the first volume. Seven more to go…
One of the bad things about this self-isolating is that I automatically gravitate to the computer, ostensibly to read mail. But when the mail is read, I somehow find myself deep in a series of MahJong games, to the annoyance of my life partner, who is herself busy cooking up gorgeous dishes in the kitchen. “You could do SOMEthing to help” she moans, and of course she is right. Exit stout party, suitably cowed.
After we got our facemasks from Hong Kong, we made an expedition to Lidl.
Amazingly, we just walked straight in, and more or less everything we wanted was on the shelves, including bottles of Crabbe’s alcoholic ginger ale, which I love. But there was one burly bloke who kept encroaching on my two metres without looking at me or offering any apology and I became really worried about it. Hadn’t he heard all the propaganda about the required separation between people?
Fortunately he then shouldered past me to the till and was gone. So maybe he inflicted no lasting damage. We paid at the till ourselves, and walked out, to find a queue of at least 50 people waiting to be allowed in. As Tina said, we had timed it just right.
The weather has suddenly remembered its manners, and provided a balmy, breezy day which makes it pleasant to be outdoors. Tina is busy doing horticultural things in the garden and I, having looked at the lawn and decided it doesn’t need cutting yet, am sitting on the terrace and enjoying peace and a cup of coffee. Can’t be bad. Maybe we’ll survive after all…
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