Dear LPG,

I started to write this about a month ago with the intention of sending it to LPG, but it got lost for a couple of weeks and I have just found it again.  But even though shopping is getting back to a sort of normality now, I wonder if anyone else felt like this when trying to do their shopping at the start of the self-isolating experience?

I suppose that it was really a little something for each of our consciences when the supermarkets started offering to allow pensioners to avoid standing outside the shops and let them bypass those long spaced out shopping queues.

I thought that I had been good about lockdown, but we all had and still have to get some shopping from time to time. So I have ventured out once a week with my mask on to get the essentials.  I was in one of those really long queues the other day and I found myself quite near the front for quite some time because, over the past few weeks I have learned that, getting to the shop and joining that queue about half an hour in advance of the opening time, is the best way to minimise my wait.  The doors opened a little early which was thoughtful of the staff in my estimation and the initial few customers were ushered in but, although it had actually opened, I found my third place in the queue became relatively constant as people went up to the front with their justifications for being exempt from the queue.

There were a couple of key workers who turned up, showed their credentials and got in at the front, and there were a couple of older pensioners who would not have been able to stand in that queue for all that time, but there were also a few really young pensioners, in fact people who hardly looked old enough to be pensioners, who helped to keep me at that perpetual number three position in that queue for a good fifteen minutes in spite of the shoppers that were coming out of the shop.

I am not far off seventy but I suppose I don’t look it, so I feel it wrong to play the ‘jump the queue’ card and while I know that looks can be deceiving I wonder just how many of the people who find themselves at the front of these queues really need to be there. 

My number three position, the fact that I have not yet felt the effect of any apparent deafness, and the social distance that has to be maintained and provokes louder conversations, has its advantages.  I was able to hear some of the reasons why people thought they should be a ‘queue skipper’.  My favourite was the man (who could have been a young pensioner I suppose).  He announced that he only wanted one item and so felt that he should not have to wait in the queue.  I have to admit that it made me a little sorry for the shopping staff who have suddenly been charged with the responsibility of making instant decisions as to who can jump and who had to go to the back, because I am sure that they could see the faces of number one, number two, me and a few of the people behind as our expressions, even from behind our masks, showed an air of disapproval as we continued to wait.  

I think that what I am really trying to say is that I know that many people who are ill or frail don’t necessarily look that way but, the self-isolation queue is just one example.  I wonder if some pensioners use the ‘age excuse’ when it suits them while being happy to be mistaken for a much younger person when that is to their advantage.

JC, Rushey Green.