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

[mumofoneAlonebutokay]

Inspired by chat on another thread - one woman was told not to pop to the shop for milk but to put butter in her coffee instead 😄

I wasn't on mumsnet then but would love to know the maddest comments you saw?

I myself went mad during the pandemic 🙈 and refused to leave the house and judged anybody that did, I'll admit 😬😄 - I wish I'd been calmer

Please share 🥰

Edit - I know how awful the pandemic was for those who lost loved ones, and how serious those losses are - this is just about the unnecessary hysteria and comments stemming from that, not to poke fun at those who lost someone or became ill. 💕

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.

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.

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 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.....

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 🤦.

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

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.

I never saw that . I did see one iconic shot of a man in his 60s lying dead in the street in the way to hospital in Wuhan. I think that was probably real although I don't know if it was a case of dying of Covid or with it. That said there are cardiovascular risks with covid.

Seizures as far as I know aren't a symptom of covid, so I'm not convinced about the jerking being genuine footage at all. Not of Covid anyway.

I stood on the doorstep and clapped once. Then decided it was all a load of bollocks and didn’t do it again. I didn’t care what my neighbours thought.

Some self-appointed community chief round here instructed the locals via Facebook they were to a join a rousing singalong after the weekly clap. I forget now, whether for the Queen, or Captain Tom.
Lyrics were provided for something deemed to be inspirational and uplifting.
He was told in no uncertain terms, to bog off by many, many people.

And yet the Horizon post office scandal was well known about by Covid yet ppl still insist that computers and tech can never be wrong. My HA uses SAP and it has been a nightmare
Peoples unwavering belief that computers can never be wrong is sinister and dystopian

my once happy go lucky, calm smiley primary aged child at the time struggled so badly during lockdown and online learning. Their school was great at teaching online and they kept a structured day as much as possible for all the children, but they just couldn’t cope.

After numerous emotional breakdowns during their break they were crying so badly and as I hugged them, they said I just want to kill myself. It was like someone had stabbed me. However after contacting the school about this, they made provisions to allow them to return to school with the key workers children and I cannot tell you how grateful I was as this helped so much for them to get back to school with some of their friends and their teachers.

now they are a teenager who moans about secondary school and would probably welcome a lockdown 🙄

I also remember my children refusing to come out of the house for the weekly clapping and said they would do it by the back door as they didn’t want to see our neighbours. My neighbours commented every week that they should come out to the front as that was the ‘rules’ of the clapping. Although I continued with it, it made me so uncomfortable as I always had to give a reason as to why I was on my own. Looking back, I should have stopped too but was an idiot

you couldn’t ever just pop to the shops either. If I forgot something on the shopping list I had to wait for a whole week and put it on the next list

Gordon Bennett, I have just read the above post and am really upset for the poster's son or daughter, it must have been awful for her or him. I'm pretty sure, had I been a child during lockdownk I'd have done pretty well no school work online and would have hated going to a cold classroom. Poor kid and far from alone.

I never once went out to clap, always forgot about it, have no idea if neighbours did as I generally sat at the back of the house in the evening. I'm appalled at the very idea of neighbours having sicj a vested interest, nosy lot.

So many rules didn’t make sense. At one point in my home town tier shops were open and restaurants weren’t. But a neighbouring tier the restaurants were open.

i was allowed to go to the big indoor shopping centre in that tier but wasn’t allowed to eat. Made no sense to me at all that I could walk round in the same shops as people all day but not sit down for lunch for 40 mins. So we broke the rules and had lunch in Wagas 😁

Does anyonelse remember an article about a tiger in a zoo in America that had covid (there was then lots of talk about could domestic cats transmitt covid), and the keepers said they were maintaining a social distance from said tiger. Covid or no covid i think keeping at least 2m away from a tiger is advisable

I spent way too much time here back in the dark days of Covid.

A few of the nuttier posts include

• Suggesting that people be offered a 'financial incentive' for letting the police know if their neighbours had more than the 'permitted' number of guests over Christmas.
• Saying that you should load the car with 15 liters of milk and decant it into ice cubes to be individually defrosted and used for tea. Less 'selfish' than making multiple trips.
• Complaining about elderly people 'popping out' to the corner shop for the paper.
• The person who asked posters if it were OK to buy eye liner while waiting for her 'essential' prescription in Boots. The general consensus was that that was selfish behaviour.
• All the posts about how Britain was the 'laughing stock of the world' and everywhere else was full of civilised 'mask compliant' non selfish folks.

Dem were the days.

It was bemusing how many people thought the rest of the world had any fucks to spare for us.

@IcedPurple Your last point was how Boris Johnson was persuaded (by his own behavioural squad) to wear a mask, as he tried to resist this: he was shown a montage of world leaders, all wearing masks, then a picture of himself, not wearing one. “Look at all those civilised leaders in their masks!” his handlers said.

And that bloody Santa tracking app that showed Santa in a mask, and that Tesco ad that showed Santa waving a vaxpass. I’ve hardly shopped at Tesco since. I also complained about an advert showing children wearing masks while playing with toys, which had nothing to do with covid. There was no escape from the bloody mask moralising, and I still think it’s extremely questionable whether they were anything more than a placebo.

I didn't download the app for this reason and was told I was a monster 😀I was testing regularly for work, that apparently didn't matter....

I have two children who are disabled. One in particular has significant needs. I was called all sorts of hideous things for continuing to send my oldest child to school. I was told I'm a murderer and beyond selfish.

The reality was as a lone parent of two disabled children in a tiny two bed flat with no garden space, there was a very real risk we would not have made it through and that is exactly why schools kept the most vulnerable children in.