COVID cringe memories (light hearted)

[Floogal]

Looking back at the pandemic, especially at its height in 2020, what made your toes curl?

1. "Imagine". Enough said.
2. The Marsh family.
3. On the local news, footage was shown of the Thursday clap (may or June). There was a parade of bhangra drummers and smarmy bratty kids doing the irritating floss dance. Was that point the 'applause' was seen as having had it's day.

I know some people may mention the dancing nurses, I only saw tiny clips on the news. Even that made me cringe.

One of my neighbours lost the plot. He used to stand in the street with a clipboard and aggressively challenge people out and ask where they were going. He used to keep a note of when they went out and when they got back and got really shirty when I pointed out to him that there was no 1 hour "rule" - that was just Michael Gove's opinion.

I'm 100% sure that the same neighbour reported me to the police multiple times for having more than 6 people in my garden - well yes, more than 6 people live here so there will be more than 6 in the bloody garden. They'd rock up, stand a the other end of the garden, ask "does everyone in your garden live in your house?" and then leave when they got the answer of "yes, just like last week".

Also the confusion on same neighbour's face when I demanded he stayed away from us. We were isolating very carefully because my youngest DD is very vulnerable (covid has put her in ICU three times so far) and he was, because of his busy-bodying, interacting with a shitload of people every day - lots of whom were angrily shouting at him - so he was actually putting my family in more danger than the walk he was objecting to would!

The clapping was insane we had neighbours outside banging saucepans with spoons think they looked bloody stupid stood out there banging and clapping
having to wear face masks they probably helped but working in retail i had to wear mine full time i spent ages wiping my specs as it steamed them up constantly felt sweaty so my glasses slipped down as well awful
all the crap going round folk putting a weeks worth of groceries in the bath to wash them wtf?

I remember almost falling into a river trying to avoid a group of people who were having a socially distanced conversation on the towpath. It was like We're Going on a Bear Hunt - trying to decide whether to go around them or through them😅

I also remember getting outraged at people who didn't walk in single file or give way on narrow paths. I joined in a fair few bun fights on here about the same thing😬

Oh the clapping. They came out on our street with their banners, clapping, banging saucepans.

Me - I sat inside with my glass of wine cursing. I worked at a GP surgery doing 60 hours a week with little to no NHS provided PPE. We had to rely on the partners to buy decent PPE and the kindness of patients to provide us with decent masks, etc. And Boris, out there clapping away - I actually threw something at the tv.

My friend who, by virtue of stupid county boundaries had a house in Tier 3a (for Tier 3 wasn't good enough for Nottinghamshire who got Tier 3 but bonus no booze rules)... but a shed in Tier 2 at the bottom of her garden. Covid apparently was going to rampage in her front garden but give her back garden a big swerve.

"Lockdown discos" - aka blast your music at a level that would normally piss off everyone but because you claimed it was lockdown morale boosting - it was suddenly OK and you weren't a steaming twat (with shit taste in music).

The fact that clapping was suddenly going to fix a chronically underfunded NHS and social care system and if Doris in number 37 didn't clap hard enough - the NHS would somehow know and all the nurses and angles would fuck off home leaving everyone to their doom because of Doris. Spoiler - it didn't fix the NHS and social care is more fucked than ever. Added in the ridiculousness of the clapping being televised by random cars driving up and down streets across the country and it being shown on BBC1 moving from Scunthorpe to London (Boris clapping like a floppy headed Etonian Dickhead Seal) to Weston super Mare and so on. So fucked up and Orwellian - it always felt to me like the Two Minute Hate from 1984.

Weeks of agonising over if a scotch egg counted as a substantial meal.

Barnard Castle eye tests.

The clap got fucking out of hand - with clap shaming if your street didn't clap hard enough, performative rainbow washing - we had people getting banners made to hang all over their houses, we had someone who decided the clap would benefit from a 20 minute vocal concert one week (not at all plugging her singing career - available for parties, weddings, pub bookings and all other functions)... it just got totally fucking bonkers and horrific.

I've no doubt the lockdown fans will be along to derail this one soon.

Oh God, SO much of it.

One way systems, especially when it meant you had to walk past people to get into an empty aisle.
THE SCIENCE, as if there was only one scientific opinion or model which was invariably wrong and only Covid science mattered. Not anything related to non-Covid physical health, or mental health, or education, or the economy, or child development, or the importance of normal life...nothing.

The Covid bullies. We haven't forgotten you, you know.
The rules that invented themselves - a comment (Michael Gove and his one hour exercise suggestion) became a guideline became a law, and suddenly it's a stick to beat people with. I know people who still feel bad because they "broke the law and went out for more than an hour".

Just the sheer mind-fuck of it all, really.

Not toe curling, or even lighthearted I'm sorry @Floogal but places deciding they could in fact do distance learning. But when my disabled dd was at uni and really hurt her back so she couldn't get into classes using her wheelchair, that it wasn't at all possible to do her class remotely. It's amazing how quickly it can be implemented when the majority need to do it.

I do wish I'd invested in perspex making companies in 2018 or so - cos they made fucking bank with the screens everywhere.

Oh and the greatest invention lockdown gave us - the Costa coffee drive thru bucket dispenser to lower the coffee down to your car window level for the short arses among us.

We had military tanks on our main shopping street and national police with rifles checking your groceries to make sure you weren't nipping out for something unimportant. (Not in the UK, before anyone comes for me)

Quickly learned that you could buy whatever you liked as long as you put a nice layer of tampons, sanitary pads and Vagisil on the top of the bag – those military men might be tough, but they're not tough enough to handle menstruation! 😂

So how did those individuals know that they would be the ones for whom it was mild? My cycling mad, super fit 36 year old friend drowned in his own lungs in ICU and left two small children behind. I’m sorry but, we had to work on the premise anyone could have been the unlucky one until we knew better.

And the death numbers even during restrictions were high enough. What do you think would have happened if no precautions had been taken?

What about all those cringe anti-vaxxers who believed they were being injected with microchips. Or the cringe people who couldn’t or wouldn’t understand that masks protected other people and not themselves. Or the cringe people who removed their dying relatives from oxygen equipment because the whole thing was ‘made up to control us.’ Or the cringe person round my area who put crap anti-vax stickers over every pedestrian crossing box so that you could see the green man to cross safely. Why? Because maybe cars and pedestrians were all made up by the government to control us too! Or the cringe MPs and Boris and their aides who all thought the temporary laws they’d put in place only applies to other people. Oh and a big shout out to all the cringe people on this cringe thread who are completely devoid of empathy.

Thanks to anyone who made even the smallest sacrifice to keep others safe.

And benches.

I remember taking my disabled mother out, at the time the doctors were keen for her to gradually increase her walking distance. I took her out to a national trust garden and every bench was removed or taped off. The cafe had their chairs chained up.

It was as if you might absorb COVID via the arse of your jeans!

...and here we go...

I liked the Marsh family and thought they were very talented so no cringe here!

Joe Wicks, didn't get the love tbh, he got massive amounts of attention for doing bog standard exercise routines, there were far better ones out there.

Oti Mabuse did some really fun dancy ones.

My main Covid cringe though has got to be the mumsnet "I'm afraid..." doomsayers. They drove me round the bend 😆😆

I was absolutely slaughtered on here for going for a walk with friends BEFORE lockdown & then having a cup of tea in the garden with them afterwards.
They brought their own mugs 😂
People still think they will catch it from touching things, years after its been proven that it's airborne.

Multiple people told her she couldn’t, it was against the rules, what if she had a car accident and needed an ambulance, why was she being so selfish? Completely nuts.

oh yes so many posts about what if you're in an accident, don't drive, don't jog, potential accident. The fact the majority of accidents happen at home seemed to fly over their heads!

I haven't read all 8 pages.... but the fact they never gave Chris Witty a clicker for his slides

#NextSlidePlease

@EbiRaisukaree

If you think clapping, arrow systems, whether a scotch egg was a substantial meal or not, even whether closing schools made a difference to the death rates, that is fine. I don't think much of it made any difference at all - that is my opinion - and you can see this based on countries that didn't have such harsh restrictions. Covid was going to covid, and the lockdowns were always about slowing the curve not stopping the curve. Some people are vulnerable to respiratory illnesses, it happens every year with flu. God forbid I may compare it to flu....but hindsight and all that wink

They've finally taken those stupid screens down in my local Tesco and as somebody with damaged hearing in one ear, I couldn't be more thrilled.

NEXT SLIDE PLEASE!!!

Boris spouting nonsense while Chris Whittey looked embarrassed.

Trump saying Americans need to be injecting disinfectant while all his science people looked horrified.

And on a personal level, stripping my brown hair colour off and dying my hair blue. It did NOT come out well.

To this day that phrase makes me itch. I think I'm allergic to the words "next slide please" and start twitching if anyone says it on one of those Teams calls where someone's in charge of the slide switch button and someone else is presenting.

The debate in some FB running groups. The one hour exercise I seem to remember was advisory. In one group we were just told to be sensible (ie no driving to the arse end of nowhere) and another, people took that to be the law.

Tiers. I remember something (England) about pubs shutting at 11pm.

The whole point of the lockdowns are restrictions wasn't to keep a fit 30yo safe, or a 10yo, it was to try to reduce the spread to stop old and vulnerable people catching it, or the NHS or other services breaking down due to too many staff offsick.
Those were valid concerns.
Some restrictions were unnecessary, but at the start they didn't know which restrictions were needed.

Some people on MN were OTT in making up rules or over-interpreting them. Some were very anti rules and thought they were pointless.

Most people just tried to get on with things as best they could using a level of common sense.

I remember going to the supermarket and getting flustered by the arrows, I accidently passed someone a bit too closely and they chased me through the shop to bollock me for it. Screeching that I was gonna give them covid (didn't stop them coming up to me to tell me off though, funny that)

I went home in tears and didn't leave the house for about 4 months.

I did see something funny on here, someone was worried as it was lockdown but the neighbours kids were blowing bubbles and they were worried that they were sending out essentially sacks of "covid breath"

Well said.

It's still with us and still killing people. of course you should test - why pass it on to someone vulnerable?

The cringest of all were those who refused to wear masks with no good reason. Stupidity was pandemic.