Dear LPG,

I took this picture last mother’s day which went by the board a bit while people were much more interested in working out how they were going to continue to eat.   Perhaps this was the day that reality kicked in.  It was the day that churches closed their doors and schools were not going to open for the following day in a bid to keep Coronavirus at bay. 

Most pensioners will be hard-pushed to remember a day when there was not an open church in the country by order of the government, and at the time there were so many rumours about what we should and should not do that it was really hard to understand what was going on. 

I thought that I had got to the shops in good time to get those things that everyone thought they were going to need once we got the full idea of ‘self-Isolation’ but, though very orderly, the sheer length of the queue gave a whole new meaning to shopping.  On the one hand I felt like I was at the back of one of those queues you find yourself in at a theme park, as the queue chats to itself in preparation for the big moment when the participants actually get in.  It was not until we reached the entrance and realised that we did all that to get an extra packet of toilet roll that the reality took hold.

The other thing that startled me is that when I finally got to the front of the queue there were police marshalling the shoppers in and out of the shop and there was even a police dog handling crew present.  It was then that I heard about shoppers fighting to get in and out the day before.

I wrote all this down last mother’s day when we knew so little about the whole thing.  Now that a year has passed, and I have no doubt that there will be a lot said in hindsight, I wonder what LPG readers will make of how I saw things then? 

SP, Lee