What we're the most bizarre/memorable moments of the pandemic for you?

[Jaggerdagger]

Just wondering what they are for you?

I'll start. One of mine was seeing a children's playground cordoned off with tape, including all the park benches.

@venusandmars that's so sad, your poor MIL
Did she have a nice 91st?

I worked as a senior healthcare practitioner in the community at the start of the pandemic, the young people with eating disorders who'd made significant progress deteriorated sharply from march 2020 due to not being "allowed" to have someone support them with their shopping, support workers and shop assistants behaving like little dictators refusing to go in shops with them and then having all their coping skills and activities taken away from them. Anorexia then kicked in again as it thrives in isolation. But that didn't matter obviously as public health was viewed solely through the lens of covid. Disgrace.

Travelling to hospital for my baby scan by myself, in a black cab, masked up, looking out of the window at a completely empty central London.

Going in to hospital on the first day of lockdown 1 to have my first ever child then coming out of hospital a week later to a completely different world.

@Chocaholic9

Flying to New Zealand in the middle of the pandemic... Driving down to Heathrow in a hire car and seeing Heathrow car parks completely empty. I'd never seen that before.

Also the weird experience of having a few people (staff) turn up to help me with my bags once I entered Heathrow...presumably because there wasn't much else to do there. It all felt really odd. I've travelled a great deal in the past and it was nothing like previous experiences.

How did

How did you manage to get into NZ?

The Welsh supermarket thing was bizarre. Was buying toothpaste really going to give you Covid.

Going for a walk over fields completely alone and being told later that i had potentially killed someone’s granny, but perfectly fine that I could go to their house to do a delivery when it was something they had ordered.

NZ closing off all exits out of the country and entry into it (unless you were famous) trying to stop a virus.

Not having any work in one field I work in since January because agents all asked for my vaccination status and I am medically exempt.

Everything about this pandemic has been bizarre. A lot of people definitely took leave of their senses.

Standing meters away from my neighbour outside having a quick chat and seeing the police coming and running inside.

Dh getting his shielding letter and not leaving the house for months then having to be forced out as he was developing agoraphobia.
He has not shielded since. The prevention was worse than the disease. He has never really recovered.

Leaving my ds nursery on the Tuesday before schools closed (he only did Mondays and Tuesdays at the time) and asking his key worker what she thought would happen and having a chat about it. He never went back to that building because by the time they would have him back the following September, he had aged out of that group.
Watching Boris's 8pm announcement where he announced the first full lockdown with DH and the 2 of us just being in absolute disbelief.
The first time we had to queue up to get into the supermarket. The queue was so long. Just standing in the queue felt so surreal.
My mum dropping off my ds present for his first birthday (we lived close to the supermarket they used so she did it in one trip to make it 'ok') and I made her come at the kids nap time so they wouldn't see her and get upset and I left the house and saw her at the end of the drive so her voice didn't wake the kids and upset them.
When lockdown first started to ease, around may 2020 and you could meet one other person outdoors and I met my sister in a park and she gave me a magazine and some chocolate to cheer me up (lockdown with a 1 and 2 year old and DH just coming off furlough and going back to work, I certainly needed cheering up)
Christ, it's insane looking back that we did that stuff.

A 3 year old flattening himself against a fence with a look of terror on his face as we came round a corner towards him.

Lying by candlelight and feeling oddly grateful with the kids having just done an online yoga / meditation class - and then DH comes storming in clapping as it was the first clap for carers.

Going all over town on mercy missions for gluten free pasta / calpol.

Tearing up the first time kids and I were walking and saw an ambulance gave them a big clap and they waved cheerily.

A heavenly day in hot sunshine messing about in a river near my parents house that we'd never explored before.

People being fined for sitting on park benches.
Toilet roll, hand wash, pasta and painkillers being impossible to find then shops putting a limit on the amount you could buy.
Being scared to even walk past someone in the street for months.
Some supermarkets having a person on the door telling people they weren’t allowed to enter as a couple…
Not wanting to order a takeaway and when we eventually did, feeling like I was definitely going to catch it from touching the box.

@WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll

It wasn't compulsory, I never did it.

Neither did we, but as seen in many areas, there's a big difference between 'entirely optional if you want to' and 'being publicly shamed for not doing something that others believe to be nigh-on compulsory'.

Yes, I didn't do it either but the pressure was there and I had to think forward to a time it wasn't the most important thing that people had to think about. Hopefully my neighbors aren't being a grudge that I didn't clap now There'sa bit more perspective.

Not being able to see my family, including the 3 year old nephew whose daddy’s funeral was 3 weeks before lockdown. We had to grieve by WhatsApp video call :(

Me and my dad wondering how the hell we could try and clear my grans very hoarded flat and stay 2m apart. This was 3 months into lockdown 1. 5 of us at said grans funeral. We’d already decided by that point that we were going to be a bubble so that we could all sit together.

Deciding to do Mother’s Day a week earlier because we had no idea when lockdown was coming. Shopping for my parents so we had an excuse to see each other through a window

My birthday a few days into lockdown. It was a beautiful sunny day and the only person I saw was someone who was delivering cakes from a local restaurant because they had so much they couldn’t sell. Then having a second lockdown birthday 🙄 but at least I could see people in the flesh second time around, even if it was just in the garden

WFH for 3 months with just email on my phone because there weren’t enough laptops to go around. Work telling us not to display our lanyards (NHS) when out and about in case we got mugged for them.

Doing lateral flow tests on my parents on Christmas Eve so that we could spend Christmas together

Tesco agreeing to open up an hour early on Sunday the stay home announcement was made so that NHS staff could get some food. Them keeping everyone queuing around the store because the till didn’t work before 10am

It’s been a truly awful two years :(

Saying goodbye to colleagues after producing my last ever show, knowing it would be the last time I saw them for ages, and the last time I would be going outside for the foreseeable (this was in mid March, I am CEV and was worried so began isolating early).

That last train ride home was so weird.

Leaving my tiny extremely premature daughter fighting for her life in NICU knowing I wouldn't see her later the same day (once you'd left the hospital you weren't allowed back in) or the next day either (it was her dad's turn to spend the day with her).

Previous to this we'd been staying in the parent's accommodation at the hospital close to NICU. A manager came to us one day and said we had to leave because they may need the parents rooms for a neonate who had covid and therefore needed to be in isolation. We stayed at a nearby (very basic) hotel where we swapped daily - one staying at the hotel alone and the other at the hospital with our daughter. Breakfast was supplied by the hotel, left in a paper bag outside the bedroom door. We were too scared to touch anything and were constantly washing our hands and using anti-bac wipes on anything non-fabric.

Looking back I am utterly speechless.

A police officer threatening to arrest me as he deemed my reason for being out non-essential - I was on my way to sort my horses out very early one morning when he pulled me over. He let me go in the end after I showed him the information on the Gov website, but made a big show of writing down my car reg and threatened to fine me if he saw me again.

Local police shoo-ing walkers/dog walkers off our massive, wide open beach so they all had to walk on the narrow pavements instead.

My dog was a pita to toilet train as a puppy and every time she did her business outside she’d get a big cheer, a round of applause and a huge fuss. Then, every clap for carers night she’d be out in the garden lapping up all the applause that she genuinely believed was for her. She absolutely loved every minute of it.

phew thanks SpeckledlyHen , I can imagine why people would think that in the madness of it all

Yes - thankfully, I was somewhat over-concerned; and yet, some of the responses that people had for seemingly trivial things - visits from the police etc. - do make you wonder. I think there was a grain of reality in my paranoia: the fact is that carrying a phone with you does mean that you can be tracked everywhere, and the authorities do sometimes exploit this - but usually only for public enemies who hack into MI5 computers and not for everyday folk popping down to Spar.

That was just it, though: all of a sudden, so many of the most ordinary, innocent, everyday parts of life had suddenly been restricted or banned and it came as a huge shock to those of us not used to anything like that in a western democracy.

We would hear of people being arrested for not saluting the 'Dear Leader' and being told they had to choose a hairstyle from a government list or face punishment, and we would shake our heads in disbelief, thanking our lucky stars that we didn't have to live like that in our country. Then, all of a sudden, we found that we were banned from having a coffee and chat with friends or hugging family (outside of our own household) - and could be fined/punished/prosecuted if we did so.

It didn't help, either, with all of the self-appointed covid police who suddenly appeared in most neighbourhoods, with their binoculars, notebooks and phones with the local police number on speed dial.

Also, the behaviour of some people appointing themselves the covid police and making up all sorts of their own crazy rules.

I remember seeing a post on Facebook from someone bitching about all their neighbours visitors. The neighbour spotted it and confirmed that the visitors were actually carers coming into care for her terminally ill mother.

A man took it upon himself to stand at a local junction and post photos on FB of all the cars he didn’t believe were out for essential reasons - how can you tell?

I wonder how they all get on with each other now? Neighbours tearing shreds off each other for not clapping for the NHS/going for 2 walks/buying wine in the co-op. A friend of mine told me that my daughter’s complete mental health breakdown was just one of those things, there was more important things to worry about - I still hate her for that.

Walking my dog and someone came walking towards me in the same side of the road. They walked straight into the road without looking to keep socially distanced. Would rather take their chances with the buses and other traffic in the main road than get within about 5 metres of me and the virus I might have and the minute chance I passed it on and made them sick.

@LethargeMarg

I found it really weird when they announced the soaps were stopping filming. I know in the grand scale of things it's really minor and I don't even really watch them but it was yet another normal thing that we took for granted stopping .

That was the moment that finally convinced my parents to stop going shopping every other day and let me do an online shop for them.

This is so petty but mine is queuing outside of Sainsbury's in Nine Elms😂

Stayed at my mums during the start of the pandemic and the queue outsude of the big Sainsbury's was actually a JOKE. It'd go all the way down the road and round the corner. Everytime we went shopping I literally dreaded the queue the most

Also seeing the birthday cards all taped up in tesco as they were "non essential". What a load of bullshit 😂

The post on here from a woman who was asking if she should report her dd's friend for having an 18th even if it meant that her dd would be arrested. Lots of posters saying they'd not let the dd back in the house if she went and yes she should report to police. That was my wtf moment, Gilead was on its way.

All sorts of memories spring to mind but this one especially.
I caught covid in May 2020 as a front line nhs worker (due to totally inadequate PPE). I remember local Facebook militants were agast that someone at the other end of my village was positive and how they'd put the community at risk so I was careful not let local people know.

Clap for carers seemed to be a big thing for my neighbours who complained that I wasn't on my front door clapping when I was in isolation.
They were supposed to be clapping for people like me!