It was March 2020 when Boris Johnson appeared on television and announced that we were all going into lockdown. The next morning, I went for my usual run around the local woods. The roads were eerily quiet, and it felt as though something radical had changed. As I ran, I noticed droplets of water on the hedges and worried they might contain the dreaded COVID. We didn’t have enough food in the house, so for the first time, we queued at the local farm shop. Many others had the same idea, and the queue stretched back. However, we managed to buy what we needed, and from then on, life went on pretty much as usual.
The roads became quiet and shops closed. Pubs, cinemas and theatres closed. Sport was on hold. You were allowed to go out to exercise once a day, but on your own. Supermarkets become deserted with long queues of people waiting their turn to be let in. One great thing from my point of view was that the planes that used to fly over every few minutes stopped. I don’t know if it was coincidental but the weather became great.
I was already working from home, and the building projects I was involved with continued as normal. We kept trying to sell homes, and the pandemic seemed to have little effect. Every night, I’d listen to the news and hear the dreadful statistics of how many people had died, but it all felt distant. We heard of people that other people knew who had died and their horror stories. People we actually knew went down with COVID and got better. The media continued their doom mongering. It felt as it must have done in the 1939 phoney war great anxiety but no immediate impact.
We got a lot more paranoid about germs and went out even less than we had previously. Anti-bac in small bottles, once they were available, were used all of the time. Face masks had to be worn if one had to venture out. I never found a mask that didn’t cause my specs to mist up. When I met people on site we all self consciously tapped elbows together and I recoiled if they tried to shake hands.
On the work front, I decided to stop charging rent to some of my properties and was indulgent with rent on others. But overall the rental income did not diminish much. Again it was a case of doom expected but none materialised. The construction projects I was involved with carried on as usual, albeit with difficulty in getting the building materials and costs spiralled away. The people on site tried to keep apart from one another which was called social distancing but inevitably people went down with the disease and got better.
One major deal I was involved with was delayed by the pandemic. I was not at all happy about that and worked hard to make it happen which it eventually did. The pandemic did become a major excuse for inaction taking over from GDPR.
Remote working and working from home became the norm. Zoom, a video app, became a phenomenon. I started to have a virtual pint with people to have a chat. Shopping went pretty much online with Amazon booming. The delivery vans suddenly multiplied and they were delivering to every other house every other day.
The weather was great, and we spent more time in the garden. At the bottom of our garden, a neighbour had a basketball court, and for the first few weeks, a man played basketball there alone every day. It must have been incredibly monotonous.
The only significant change during those weeks was our shopping routine. We managed to secure collection slots with Tesco, and once a week, I’d drive through empty roads, pull into a parking slot, open the boot, and wait as a week’s worth of groceries was loaded in. It was, by far, the most convenient shopping method. It was disappointing when Tesco later decided to place goods in boxes for customers to wheel away and load into their cars. At that point, we switched to Tesco’s home delivery and stopped using the collection service.
As I write in October 2023 the pandemic seems a distant memory. The hurt and anguish and pain that some people feel clearly carries on into the future. However, for me, it’s become a distant memory. COVID is on the rise again this winter and we have all had our COVID jumps. I don’t think the country would stand in lockdown again. I simply hope that the pandemic stays in the past. I guess it’s almost worth saying that I really hope that the next pandemic isn’t any worse than this one