It's been five years since the pandemic and I have questions

[BaggyTrousing]

• will Paddington ever be investigated for his role in the departure of our dear old queen?
• was the woman who wrote "and the people stayed home" ever taken to task for her contribution to the awfulness?
• what about that nurse who was roaring about bread in a supermarket car park? Hopefully shunned and avoided at least
• how do you all feel now about protecting the NHS?

If I stay on the pavement and pass someone walking towards me and I don’t immediately launch myself on to the road, will I still be a super spreader and chastised on my local facebook group.

(I will never forget the post one lady made horrified that a runner had gone past her. “The sweat!!! The sweat will kill us all!”)

There was a point where you could meet outside, no more than 6 in the group, 2m apart. We arranged a friends meet up in the park. Then someone added a 7th person to the WhatsApp (hadn't been included because max was 6). Organiser hit the roof as we were now 7. Discussed whether we could sit in a circle of 6 and 7th could sit on the outside of the circle as if they're by themselves. Oh. My. God.

Having a woman with a loud hailer telling people they wasn't queuing up properly. Not following the arrows correctly in the supermarkets because the virus would know if you strayed away from the arrows and the stickers on the floor with your trolley
I do miss the sanitizer they had in bucket loads
You rarely see it now to wipe down the dirty trollies.

Isn't it scary how everyone became unthinking rule followers?
Normal intelligent people became obsessed with making sure rules were followed and wouldn't even consider any other point of view.

This was the most horrifying thing, except I wouldn’t call them “normally intelligent”.

Remember the tier system they introduced? Two people on the same street could have significantly different rules due to invisible council boundaries.

I lived metres away from the boundary and was in the highest tier but over the line was the lowest and had freedoms such as they were able to go out to the pub and go to watch football matches. If I bought football tickets they’d be cancelled, nothing was open.

We were apparently in the highest tier as we didn’t have a major hospital within the council boundaries, despite living 1 mile from a major hospital in the other council area.

People did become paranoid, but it was orchestrated that way to be fair.
Lots of folk were genuinely scared.

A restaurant near me still has a big sticker on the door boasting "We've been CHEMICALLY FOGGED". Yum!

I lost my mind for a while, sanitising everything...a particular low point was sitting on a bench with dgd and realising she'd touched the bench with bare legs so I rubbed her legs with sanitiser 😕

I can't imagine we'd ever blindly follow such rules again, but we figured the scientists knew best that we went along with it.

The footage from Italy ( which turned out to be something else I believe ? ) of all those coffins really spooked me at first. It was cleverly manipulated , although maybe it was the only way to make people do anything? It worked with me , but I certainly wouldn't do much of it again.

I particularly liked the queuing system outside some shops, which had stickers on the floor to make sure you are 2m apart but there wasn't much space so it was one of those folded up queues that doubled back on itself several times, so you ended up stood still and basically breathing in the face of whoever was a few places ahead / behind you in said queue. Genius.

Oh yes the joggers! All the claims that as they breathe heavily, they were super spreading with every step.

I still see a lot of people in masks at our supermarket and also on public transport. Definitely a handful or so each journey. I feel a bit sad for people persisting with masks as weren’t they proven to be utterly useless?

God bless the kind shop assistant in Eason's (stationery shop) who passed me a few cards so I could choose one to post to my cousin when her marriage ended. The cards were behind the tape with all the other non-essential stuff.

Remember the MN poster who was castigated because she wanted to drop off a box of chocolates at her friend's house (friend was going through a bad time). She wasn't proposing to see her or talk to her - simply drop off some chocolates at her door. But it was a non-essential journey so........

That was a personal favourite. I live in an area where we had enhanced restrictions, but varying by borough. Obviously, everyone just went to the pubs in the Tier 2 area when we were in Tier 3. Total waste of time and resources.

Learned my Dh is usually right. At the time he said the pot banging thing was weird and cringe and he flatly refused to join in. I remember being concerned he would be thought badly of in our street!

I'm still confused about whether its safer to leave my then 6yo at home alone while i went to the supermarket, or to keep my then 11yo with me at all times as she is obviously far too young to be left alone.

Or how many people I "killed" by taking her (and 8yo) to the supermarket with me to buy food.

DH and I got shouted at by a man outside Aldi because we'd stopped and talked to a friend, maintaining a 'safe distance' but we were too near the door for his liking. He clearly didn't want to walk past us in case we had the virus. He got someone from the store to come out and talk to us. It was a lovely fresh day, any germs would have been blown away. People's common sense seemed to desert them.

I seem to remember a lot of kerfuffle about Easter eggs. They were deemed non-essential, so you couldn’t take one off a shelf, even if you were already there in the supermarket standing right next to them.

I still giggle about DHs office though... they moved the desks 2m apart but shared one phone. And because of the distance between the desks they had to squeeze last each other.

Seriously, it was two men in a rather small room 5 days a week for 10+ hours. 2m between their desks wasn't going to stop anything (and 5 days as their one day off a week was different)

My funniest one was in a public loo in a church visited by tourists in Italy. They had those airport type barriers to manage the queue for the loo. I ignored the barriers and walked straight into the cubicle. An attendant screamed at me to walk around the queuing system. We were the only two people in the room. Insane.

Lol I remember the Covid signs ,I live in Bolton and at point we had the highest number of infection in the whole of the UK,,I'm sure I remember signs warning the Bolton residents of this.

At the time, I was in a job where I had 10 direct reports. They were all furloughed and we topped up their pay so they weren't out of pocket at all.
On their return in the September, one of them asked me if they could take the 5 days lieu that was owed them - apparently as they were 'off work because of furlough' they didn't benefit from the 5 bank holidays in that time so we owed them back. Wouldn't take no for an answer, so they took it to HR.

Grabby and greedy at best.

Those times sure did make people's true colours come out.

Just remembered - I posted about the above at the time but made the hideous crime of making it a reverse. Wow. Never again!

It was a completely bizarre time wasn't it?

I remember a manager at work asking a group of us if anyone had chatted to John recently? I said Yes, was chatting to him in the tea room yesterday. She told me to go straight home, not to Pass Go or collect £200. Or in other words, not to stop anywhere like a supermarket on the way.

John had phoned in sick with Coronavirus that morning. I walked out with a bit of a smirk on my face because I hadn't got physically close to him in the tea room, just exchanged a few words across the room but if they wanted to send me home to watch daytime TV for no real reason, I was happy to oblige.

I got alot of hate for having a child. Healthy Sixty somethings would fling themselves into the road and shoot daggers at dd2 then 11 for daring to exist. Really hacked me off

Well, not everyone. But the ones who did were taking up a disproportionate amount of space. Those of us who still continued to eg socialise our children, have our mum round for a birthday meal etc didn't make a fuss about it.