Diary of a self Isolator – week 1

Diary of a self – isolator. A lighthearted look at the situation

Monday 16/03/2020. Day1.

So, today officially starts my self-isolation time, yes, sadly I am one of those poor sods who come under the veil of ‘underlying problems’ and so with the help and understanding of my brilliant employers  I am now on my own little lockdown,  in all fairness it’s not too bad considering I am virtually a prisoner in my own home. The point is do I risk going out shopping etc, I have already had to cancel my next charity quiz, anyway Boris and his health sidekicks are saying limit all contact with other human beings, so I think not.

The first problem is that with my ‘underlying problems’ if I did manage to catch this miserable virus then my days would surely be numbered. Second problem is that I am not ill, I am as they say; ‘As fit as a butcher’s dog’, so how am I going to keep myself occupied, how am I going to stop myself climbing the walls?

Well, for a start I cut my lawns for the first time today, got halfway through the edging and thought – hang on a minute, what am I going to do tomorrow? – so I went back indoors to get under the feet of my darling wife and get back on my computer, seven hours later and it’s time for bed, it really isn’t all that bad – this self -isolation thing, quite looking forward to tomorrow.

Tuesday 17/03/2020. Day 2.

Well today I should have been at work for 8.30 am, but as I said the bosses at Screwfix as always are one step ahead and have approved my stay of abstinence,  Abstinence is a self-enforced restraint from indulging in bodily activities that are widely experienced as giving pleasure. Most frequently, the term refers to work abstinence, or abstinence from alcohol, drugs, or food. As I am not on drugs apart from those that keep this old heart ticking – then all these things apply to me – with the exclusion of the food of course!

So, as there was no work, what should I do to fill my day, there was always the lawn edging to finish – no, can’t be bothered – but the front drive has looked like no-one lives here since last Summer, after getting dressed (advisable) I went to the shed and collected my trusty garden vac which blinked as it hasn’t seen daylight for 6 months, then out to the front drive to suck up all those stalwart leaves that have been too stubborn to rot down since last November, I wouldn’t mind but they’re not my leaves, they belong to the council trees opposite, the ones that they have decided to spare as this council are known tree haters.

Decided to dig over the borders while I was there, stood by the wall by the pavement in my own little world when someone decides to pass the time of day, I don’t mind but he had no mask on!  So I’m keeping a fair distance from him yet still being polite, thankfully my wife called him in for a cup of tea – I really must stop my son visiting!

By 2.00pm it was job done so it was back inside for a bit of quality time on the old laptop, it was then I decided to try online shopping, I have no idea why but I went on to Iceland’s very organised site, 30 minutes later with the help of the wife we had proudly ordered everything that was available – whether we liked it or not – and went to book a slot, everything was booked up until next Tuesday, after banging a few buttons thinking my computer was broke I decided to wait until later, after all it must change to next day at 9.00pm because that was the last slot, 9.00pm came, I waited with bated breath to hit that ‘enter’ button, but to no avail! In fact nothing happened at all, just a long list of ‘Sorry this slot is fully booked’, then I thought, of course it wouldn’t change until midnight, bleary eyed at 11.00pm I carried the trusty laptop up to bed, almost in dread of touching the wrong button and losing the page, drifting in and out of consciousness I waited – finger at the ready, then 11.59, suddenly 12,00am came I hit the button so hard it woke the wife, I sat there flabbergasted as I read the message for Wednesday 19^th March – ‘Sorry this slot is fully booked’, I am sat there thinking, how can that be possible? No-one has access to this day until midnight! I lay there for the next hour fuming, I finally drifted off to sleep with visions of Iceland staff taking backhanders from people desperate for a slot.

Wednesday 18/03/20.  Day 3.

Had to drag this old body out of bed this morning after my late night, anyway, by 5.30am I am downstairs at the breakfast bar (the only place er indoors will let me put my computer  without bringing out the spray, the bleach and bacterial wipes) I switch on my laptop and the first thing that greeted me was that damn Iceland order! I then discover that good old Iceland are allowing the over 70’s and those with underlying problems access to the store for the first two hours this very morning! I am thinking that it is very decent of them, then I thought again, I am self-isolating, do I really want to get into a queue with a load of people with zimmer frames, do I really want my ankles hacked by someone in a mobility scooter? Surely it would be just like those rummage sales from my past, when large ladies would line up outside the doors in an orderly fashion waiting to pay their threepence entrance, then the doors opened and all hell broke loose, otherwise sane women fighting for someone’s old dress or even – dare I say it – knickers and underwear, ugh! I wipe the idea out of my mind completely and decide to take my life in my hands and ask the wife to pop down there.

Happy in the fact that I’m not going to starve I continue to scroll down and discover that Sainsbury’s are also offering the first hour on a Thursday for the same group of people, Mrs H, where are you, get the car out, more good news.

Further down the page there’s someone called Mrs Hinch asking all her ‘Hinch Army’ to donate unwanted and unused cleaning products to the needy, the first vision entering my head goes back to my childhood, remember in the sixties at Harvest time, the teacher would be on your case to bring in something for the harvest festival, your mother would go into the deepest recesses of the pantry – where only the spiders and mice live – looking for that elusive tin she bought by mistake last year, you would proudly carry it to school, the rust rubbing off onto your uniform and it would be  placed among the other rusting and damaged tins, and the vegetables which had obviously seen better days. The second image in my head was half finished bottles of bleach, Mr Muscle, Grandads old Steradent tablets from the fifties and well used cleaning cloths that were obviously once someone’s underpants and are so thin they are falling into holes. Thanks for the thought Mrs Hinch but I think I’ll pass.

At around 11.00am I decided to get dressed, Mrs H (Harvey not Hinch) was on her second cup of coffee and I was on my umpteenth cup of tea, I decided to have a lazy day and do sweet Fanny Adams, which, believe it or not , I am excellent at doing. I wander around aimlessly thinking about jobs I could be doing over the next few months of imprisonment, and suddenly it’s 5.00pm, time for Boris’s daily update, I swiftly switch on the black plate of glass in the corner and am immediately greeted by the poison dwarf from the north, Nicola Sturgeon is stood at the podium proudly announcing that SHE is closing down all the schools on HER side of Hadrians wall or for all you Latin lovers Vallum Hadriani, now I am not naïve enough to think that this is the border between the English and the Scottish but will use it for the sake of argument, So, Mrs Sturgeon is making her announcement sound so grand and so powerful, like she is the only one in the world who knows what she is talking about,  but in the real world she knows that in less than thirty minutes Boris will announce the same thing in his bulletin.

Now, you can believe this or not believe this, but a majority of the schoolchildren really don’t want this to happen, what are they going to do all day? They can’t stay or even visit Grandparents for fear of seeing them off, a lot of them have important exams looming (kids not Grandparents) so really cannot afford to be losing time from school. Yet good old Boris always ready with an answer assures them that most will be waved through, therefore in ten years time we will have a generation of children running the country who didn’t actually sit any exams – isn’t it funny that even in a crisis nothing much changes.

Oh, almost forgot the most important news of the day, they have stopped filming Eastenders and Casualty and Holby city, Suddenly, life doesn’t seem too bad after all!

Thursday 19/03/2020.  Day 4

I live on a main road and the most uncanny thing about this coronavirus to date is the eerie silence outside, like most people of my generation I don’t need much sleep, five or six hours will normally do, so I am awake between five and five thirty, you’d be surprised how busy our road used to be at that hour, but now it is six thirtyish before the heavy traffic is heard.

Anyway, a councillor posted on my site yesterday that a chemist had charged someone £4.99 for a pack of 30 paracetamol tablets, within an hour the poor chap/ lady had been hung drawn and quartered and their offspring banished to a leper colony far away, but we should remember that most of the ingredients that make up this medication come from China, and China ain’t letting anyone have these ingredients, so we have to source from elsewhere, this would be a place that – knowing the situation – will charge extortionate prices for the basic ingredients, this is of course passed on to the chemist and then on to us, it’s how the world turns in crisis, during WW2 there were racketeers and unscrupulous people out to make a buck or two, todays crisis is no different, so let’s give the poor chemist and his kids a break eh?

I am reading today that 20.000 troops have been mobilised to help in the crisis if necessary, Up to 20,000 service personnel will be put on standby to help combat the coronavirus, with troops gearing up to drive oxygen tankers, support the police and boost hospital capacity. That’s fine if that is all it is but it certainly doesn’t re-enforce the Governments ‘Stay Calm’ strategy, with most people it will have the opposite effect. Still, it’ll give all the doom and gloom merchants something to talk about.

I don’t even find it boring to stay inside all day …but I don’t understand why in one box of Rice Krispies there are 2453 pieces, and in the other one 2467!

Of course the big story of the day is that Iceland and Sainsbury’s are to open their doors an hour earlier for old gits like me, as you know I have ‘underlying problems’ so it is out of bounds for me anyway, but my God, what a lucky escape! Later pictures showed a long queue of grey -haired folk trolleys at the ready – and it was only 6.30am! They all looked nice and calm until some idiot opened the door, then apparently, all hell broke loose, old grannies, that would normally spend the afternoon knitting with a cat on their lap, went berserk! They knocked young lads a quarter of their age, out of the way and fought in the aisles with their contemporaries in the bread aisle, French sticks used as weapons, meantime in the baked bean aisle the hubbies were a little more restrained and preferred the old gentleman’s  art of stamping heavily on the opponents foot.

Joking aside, it was a bit dire seeing all those aged rate payers huddled so close together before the grand opening, what happened to keeping a space between each other? Just thankful I changed my mind about sending Mrs H down there for my Buttermints!

Watched Boris and his mates at 5.15 but it was just a mish-mash of what had already gone in the days before, quite boring really.

Friday 20/03/2020 – Day 5

Pictures today reveal lots of people triumphantly running from shops clutching loaves of bread and cartons of milk, it seems that either ignorant hoarders have run out of steam or their freezers are full, anyway, the situation seems to be easing albeit temporarily,  meanwhile myself and Mrs H have re-discovered uncut bread, it seems that the greedy sods can’t even be arsed to cut their bread, but what a treat! I’d forgotten just how good jam tasted between two doorsteps of fresh baked bread.

Then the lovely Roisin turned up with more bread and milk, passed precariously through the window as she and Mrs H chatted and I froze, but it is gestures like this and people like Roisin Murrihy that make the world a nicer place to live in.

The kids have all completed their last day at school, gone are the party’s, the special school proms and the long goodbyes, I should imagine there are going to be some great re-union party’s when this crisis is over though.

The biggest news came at 5.15, Boris and his mates had been dropping hints all week about the couldn’t give a toss youngsters gathering in pubs and venues around London, they had been basically ignoring him – so he closed all the pubs, restaurants, leisure centres and Gyms from that night! Now you know I live on a main road, and you know how I said it had been quiet most of the week, well, within 10 minutes of Boris’s devastating announcement the road was full of cars, white vans and even motorcycles heading off to the supermarkets to drain the shelves of anything barely drinkable. The Klondyke gold rush had nothing on this lot! Alcoholics Anonymous immediately booked extra time in bigger halls for the duration. Tim Weatherspoon defiantly announced that he would stay open a further 2 days – but he wasn’t being belligerent, he explained that it was to give people who had gone to the toilet time to return to the bar.

Well it’s now evening time, Mrs H is as happy as a pig in the proverbial because Gardner’s World has returned, I am semi-happy because Friday Night Dinner returns next week! It doesn’t take much in our house. I am sat here thinking that I am going to turn into a fat slob of a couch potato, with Guinness dribbling down my chin as I ate bars of chocolate which were some of the last few articles on the supermarket shelves – then Mrs H woke me and said it was bedtime.

Saturday 21/03/2020 – Day 6

Well it’s day six and once more I am up and awake at 5.30, I am sat here typing this thinking what can I say at this time of the morning, Then I remembered something I meant to say early in the week but it’s mostly for the gents who are reading this epic daily dose of incidentals.  Ladies turn away. Now then lads, remember before this plague – sorry virus – hit us, when you did a job around the house like actually applying gloss on the undercoat you had put on three years earlier, well, back in those not so far away days, we got brownie points for said tasks, it might have been something like a night out with the lads (single ones)down the pub, or a bit of extra allowance for say Sky sports, or even being able to watch said channel for a whole afternoon without disruption (okay, I made that one up, but hey). Anyway, my point is that we got some sort of reward, but let me tell you lads, this week so far through boredom – I have painted anything that doesn’t move, removed the handrail from the stairs and stripped it for the umpteenth time back to its original condition (don’t ask, it’s a long story), I have straightened up all the kitchen cupboards, ( a job that I’ve been meaning to do for months), and the list goes on and on, all this done because to be honest I’m bored stiff. Now my point is – where are all my brownie points – even if I could store them like a little squirrel stores its nuts for a later date. To be honest Mrs H can’t really award me anything if there is nothing to reward me with! The pubs are shut, there’s no sport – well you get the general idea, So, this is just a heads up lads, at the end of the day it’s up to you, fat couch potato or slim jobsworth?

Okay ladies you can carry on reading now. I suppose a bit of a brownie point is that Mrs H has stopped grinding her teeth when I put on my personal collection of sixties classics, I really can’t see what her problem is, I thought Ken Dodd, Des o Connor and Max Bygraves had really good voices.

Sunday 22/03/2020 – Day 7

My daily revelations continue today with the most exciting news of the week, myself and Mrs H are expecting our first delivery! No, not that, we are expecting our first online delivery from Sainsbury’s.

We are both a little apprehensive about what exactly we will actually receive of what we ordered,  I mean a dozen loaves and 120 toilet rolls should be ok shouldn’t it, we did have to spend a minimum of £40 after all.

Just joking, we have been very frugal in our needs as we always think of others, It reminds me of the excitement at home at Christmas time in the fifties, Mum always had one of those Hampers at around a couple of bob a week, it  was great pulling all those goods from the straw-like packaging, a bit like those lucky dip barrels in the shops or at the school fete, of course there was always a couple of useless items left at the end of the festivities, stuff like the dates, I came from a large family and absolutely no-one would eat those dates, not even for a bet! Then there was the Fray Bentos pie in a round tin, in truth it only remained safe because there wasn’t a tool in the world invented at that time capable of opening it,

Anyway, I digress, back to the reality of today, the problem being will we actually get the beans, bread, toilet rolls and hand cleanser we’ve ordered? It remains to be seen! Another thing that’s come to my attention from the media is the reluctance of teenagers to self- isolate and practise social distancing, excuse my ignorance but don’t they do that every time they go on a games consul or each time they pick up their phone!

One Wyre Forest publican complained bitterly about having to close his doors on Friday evening, what would happen to the vast amount of stock he had left? I’m sorry for this publican but we have all had to make sacrifices one way or another, I would think that every publican in Wyre Forest would have been expecting it, admittingly, I think Boris could have given them the weekend to at least get rid of surplus stocks, but how many would have fallen victim to the virus in those two days? And now it seems that the very same publican threw a bit of a do last night!

I don’t think the risk was worth it, the problem is that most youngsters think they are immune because they are young, they see TV news reports saying that the vast numbers of deaths are  over 50’s, but they don’t seem to comprehend that they would be carriers, would they like to be responsible for carrying the virus back to their elderly Grandparents – I think not!

On that sobering note I will leave you, and I’ll try to keep it shorter next time, but can’t promise.

Eric Harvey – feeling sorry for others and not myself.

Until next week……………………………………………