Although we are well on our way out of restrictions here in the UK the effects of the various actions taken to deal with the virus are still throwing up weird and sometimes funny side effects. Some of them practical, some of them the result of the mindset that develops when people have to live by (and enforce) arbitrary rules.
On Thursday I went to the National Archives at Kew, for the first time since this bloody business started. It’s just a bus ride away for me and a wonderful place for the historian, with a big research library and access to original records going back over a thousand years. As you might expect, there is good security, and a bag search is standard. I was surprised to see it wasn’t where it usually is just inside the lobby, so carried on in. It’s a spacious building, very open plan and never feels crowded, but it was exceptionally quiet. As I went through the area where the exhibition space and café are towards the library and reading rooms there was a nice young woman in a summer dress and wearing a staff pass standing in front of me.
She welcomed me and indicated the bag search, now off to the side. In front of the security chap at his table there was a temporary bank style queuing system of ropes and stanchions for busy times. As there was nobody waiting (in fact no one was within eight or ten yards of the three of us) and the way between me and the table was clear, I went to walk straight there. The young woman’s face creased with displeasure, and she waved her hand, saying I had to go through the switchback! I was more amused than annoyed and took the little stroll rather than argue with someone clearly immune to common sense. When I reached the security chap, I greeted him heartily and said what a nice scenic little walk it had been.
Yesterday I saw something else, something that really did make me laugh.
I was on my way to my Mum’s and I stopped off at a Tesco store to pick up some shopping for her and have something to eat, it being lunchtime. By British standards it’s a big store, two floors on well over an acre of ground and it has a wide variety of goods and services. Near the entrance I noticed a sign on the counter of the empty café of the otherwise busy store. I looked closer and just had to take a picture.
Yup, ignore the exclamation mark of jolly desperation, and the fact that 14:00 hrs has been given a redundant “pm”, the truly eye rolling fact is that the café was closed for lunch. Let that sink in, the CAFÉ was closed for LUNCH.
I have read before about restaurants and cafés sometimes being closed for mealtimes in communist eastern Europe and the USSR. In the mid ‘90s I went on holiday with a friend to Transylvania, in Romania. This was just a few years after the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu and (theoretically at least) his communist regime in 1989. I very much liked it (you just have to love a place where the vegetarian option is chicken!) but there were still plenty of communist era hangovers around to annoy and amuse. Near the top of Tâmpa Mountain, in the Carpathians, there was an inviting, rustic looking restaurant. As we approached, we could see a sign on the door, written in English, sure enough “Closed for Lunch”.
Back to Tesco, to be fair, the upstairs café in the store was open. The one downstairs was closed not due to some perverse management decision or an attitude that the customers get in the way of the smooth running if the store, but due to lack of staff. Many businesses are suffering staff shortages not so much from the CCP virus itself, but from what we’ve taken to calling the “Pingdemic”.
The NHS app on your phone (if you were fool enough to download it) tracks where you have been and “pings” you if you have been in close contact with someone who tests positive for the virus. Like many government things, all very well in theory, but it leads to many absurdities, especially as it can’t tell what’s in between you and the infected person. I know personally of three people who have been pinged and instructed to self-isolate because the person in the flat above or below them testing positive. Lack of staff in the supply chain has led to shortages in some places. No surprise then, that folk have started deleting the app in big numbers.
If only the mental and societal effects of the collectivist control freakery were so easy to delete.