Will we feel different about taking that first trip out when UK lock down ends?
27 Apr 2020
Dear LPG,
I am not sure when or if LPG will be able to print the message that is uppermost in my mind today.
Perhaps I should start by saying that I am writing this on April the 10th, which means that we all appear to have been officially self-isolating for about three weeks. The term started to be heard during the third week of March but the rules back then were all very hazy. At the beginning we were only supposed to do this if we considered ourselves old or with vulnerable health, or if we felt that we had been affected in some way and for 7 days, but then it became 14 days. Then there was the shutting of schools and churches and the new but necessary ways of shopping, and now we are all supposed to stay at home, which makes perfect sense.
I am still pretty self-sufficient and, before all this, I remember the mornings when I had committed to attend a club or get to the doctor or dentist appointments. I think getting older has made me a bit lazy over the past few years, so when lock-down became the way forward, I thought it would be quite novel to not have to get up and out in the mornings for a bit, but that got boring a lot more quickly than I thought it would somehow. In the light of all the news that being stuck at home has forced me to see, and the things that I have learnt from my friends have allowed me to hear, I have somehow found that I feel really safe and detached from anyone or anything that could possibly bring this virus to me, as long as someone else delivers my shopping to my door and leaves it there before I collect it, and I don’t have to go further than the dustbin beyond my front door.
I understand that the government is playing it by ear when it comes to the official day that we can all leave home safely again and I heard somewhere that a day during the last week in May is likely to be designated as the day we all unlock our doors and talk face to face again but, whenever the day is, I wonder if I will really feel safe out there again?
I just wonder if any other readers feel the same…
AY, Brockley
