Mumsnet during the beginning of the Pandemic - please tell me your stories of the maddest comments you saw

I regret cancelling my single parent friend and her two kids coming for Christmas lunch with me and my two (also a single parent). This was the last minute lockdown. I have never forgiven myself for doing that but I was in the middle of breast cancer treatment and having chemo and I was basing everything on clinical advice. It was ridiculous with hindsight. I didn’t see my very elderly dad for nearly a year. A family member had the police at the door because she’d met with her sister after their mum had committed suicide and a fucking prick of a neighbour reported them despite being aware of the circs. I look back and think what the actual fuck. I work in a school and I can tell you that the impact on kids was massive. My son missed the whole of year 4. He’s ND and has never quite recovered. To this day the impact on those kids is clear. It makes me very angry.

People also used to wash groceries in the bath in bleached water

One of my neighbours put a message on the neighbourhood WA group listing the three or four houses (mine included) who hadn't done the clapping bollocks one Thursday night with a follow up message that "she expected to see us out there next week" in the same way my old PE teacher used to be if I needed a week off games. I doubt she even remembers it now whereas it still narks me to a certain degree 🤦.

No, it’s not this, it was moving footage of people being jerky, then carried away

One of the problems with the track and trace app was that it thought Covid could travel through walls and floors. DH and I got pinged with a supposed exposure for a day when we hadn’t even left the flat. We were very confused until our upstairs neighbour, who we hadn’t seen in person for more than a week, sent a text to say they’d tested positive. I posted about it on here and lots of people had had the same experience, but of course there were some insisting the technology was flawless and we were just trying to dodge isolating.

I never downloaded it. Could see that it was completely farcical.

You were judged if you didn’t go outside to clap (by mumsnetters and real life neighbours).

I used to go on a very long walk on Thursday evenings (yes my second of the day) to avoid hearing the pan beating and insane hollering.

Wish there was a shocked emoji for both of these. Disgusting.

There was a very large protest in London just before lockdown, October/November 2019, ex DP was there. Veterans protesting about Soldier F being prosecuted. Never happened at all according to the BBC, but if you google it the London Standard and others have articles on it.

Funny how this "impartial" corporation could just miss something like this. Perhaps they were all on a company picnic in Brighton that day.....

There's a barber near us still wears a mask and apron. He's a solo barber. Think he thinks it's protecting him?

There was a barbers shop in London which had a messy-haired cartoon of Boris, captioned "you can't control everything, your hair was put on your head to remind you of that". And another shop (now closed down) had this little shrine to the God who could protect us from the nasty virus.

The tiers system couldn't have happened in a less metrocentric, regionally divided country as England. If it had been London and the better heeled areas of the Home Counties with the higher rates in summer 2020 rather than more easily dismissed areas where important people don't live, you can bet they wouldn't have tried it. And I know there was Christmas Day, but that didn't cancel out the preceding 5 months.

I never understood the concept of the whole tier system.
The concept was so that the government could appear to be doing something, and also to avoid the word "lockdown". Tier 4 was basically lockdown, but by then, Saint Boris couldn't bear to say the word.

When spurring people on to take the vaccines, some politician or other said "so we can go down through the gears of tiers". 😩Ugh.

And I refused to download the app, as a matter of principle. There were times when I held my phone up and pretended to scan the codes. I attended the anti-lockdown protests, which the BBC described as "a couple of hundred conspiracy theorists on Speaker's Corner", if it reported on them at all. I saw with my own eyes that they were in excess of hundreds of thousands of people: a march about forty people wide going down Oxford street, extending literally more than a mile. More people were against lockdown than anyone might think, and certainly more than what the BBC implied.

I downloaded it. The only time I got pinged was after visiting my cousin. Before I visited he asked if I'd been in contact with anyone with covid as they have a CEV child. I said I hadn't.

A few days after visiting them I got pinged

Not to worry, as a Tier 3 person living like we were in Tier 2 as far as possible is exactly what lots of us did!

I remember some people in my friend group downloaded the track and trace app, and some didn't.

We had a big group meal one day and a couple of days later half the group were instructed by the app to isolate, and the other half were saying "thank God we didn't download it, otherwise we'd have to isolate".

The weirdest bit was that no one stopped to think which one made the most sense. Either you're scared of a deadly virus or you aren't. Very quickly it became more about following rules than actual fear of the virus

Some cunt told me that on a thread that I shouldn't be visiting my dad (the day after my mum dropped dead at the family home) due to not being part of his bubble.

I cannot express how disappointed I was in humanity at this point.

Did you see this from the time? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-52533718 It was a teenage boy dressed as a plague doctor walking around in a village near Norwich.

I thought it was hilarious.

The one way systems in shops was harebrained precisely because of what you’ve said. Rigidly sticking to the one way system meant spending longer in the shops in the process.

Speaking of Wales, it provided a very good example to underline the absurdity of the one way systems in shops. An Asda branch in South Wales was served a notice by the council for failure to comply with the Covid regs - customers were prevented from social distancing, so the council claimed. Why? “According to Bridgend council, customers entering on one side of the supermarket were having to cross paths with others to comply with a one-way system.“

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/asda-supermarket-bridgend-pyle-coronavirus-19118161

I’m surprised other supermarket branches didn’t suffer the same fate.

That going to a shop to buy milk or bread wasn't an essential trip.

I did stay on MN but I avoided my local Facebook group for months.

My mum was in a tier 3 area, and I was in a tier 2. According to the rules, because I was "bubbled" with my mum (fucking bubbles... remember them?), I was meant to live my life as a tier 3 person.

@MistressoftheDarkSide Oh I'm so sorry.💐

Ah, I will do it in his name for sure as sadly he is no longer corporeal. The plague mask will loudly beckon 😘

@MistressoftheDarkSide I'd have loved to have seen that in the supermarket 😂. God forbid but should we ever live through another pandemic then you have a civic duty to fellow shoppers to let your DP go full out there.