COVID-19 UPDATE FROM SOLIHULL... (ANOTHER STRANGE WALK...)

Covid-19: Walking During The Distancing… 

(Wednesday 8th April 2020)

Wednesday arrived with good weather and so both cars were washed on the stone-covered driveway, well away from the pavement I must add. I wore flip-flops, now redundant as beach-wear due to the crisis but after seeing a couple of women sitting on chairs on their drive opposite a distancing chap the other day and drinking white wine, a thought passed my mind. Should I carry a couple of chairs outside and chobble Wagon Wheels whilst drinking from a flask of (Nespresso) Ristretto coffee, waving to the neighbour who strolled past to (necessarily) acquire his newspaper from the local store? Nah…

I needed to drop my repeat prescription into a letter-box outside the local surgery, so I tentatively made my way there, which is a five-minute walk from the house. However, as I approached the adjoining surgery and pharmacy, it was clear that the pedestrian pathway’s gate was blocked by a woman wearing a lanyard, a chap and a pair of teenage girls with a dog on a lead. They were talking. As I neared, they shuffled inside the gate, which was of no use to me at all, for I would have had little chance of avoiding close contact with them as I turned in. Thus, with shaking head and incredulous expression I walked up the drive used for vehicle access to the car-park. The group looked at me, moved back onto the pavement and simply carried on talking…

I posted my prescription form and retraced my steps for the little gathering was still formed but as I turned from the drive into the street, I looked across at them and shook my head again, muttering, “Really..?” as I threw my arms wide to illustrate my total disbelief at their ignorance… They paid me no further attention…

Then the actual exercise walk began and soon the council’s grass-cutting teams were visible, sitting and chatting close together in the sunlight on the newly mown areas, close by their parked vehicles. It was remarkable. On a little further and there was a grassy roundabout with a copse of trees in the middle, ideal for hide and seek, where more of the grass-cutting chaps were also lounging in the sun. In their bright orange high-visibility jackets on a roundabout, they were hardly hiding.

Quickly moving away and turning right at the ‘island’ a youth in glasses suddenly zoomed up behind us from the roundabout on an electric scooter… He was having a phone conversation with someone via headphones as he raced past us, after we had edged across the glass verge to distance ourselves. Words were needled at him but he managed a surly “Sorry…” Ill-meant too it seemed, then he steered onto the road itself to my astonishment, before u-turning at the next junction and racing back down the middle of the road and past us… Again we scowled at him, as his loud conversation disappeared towards the island.

Incredibly, after we turned right at the junction, he reappeared from the next side-road along, still talking, this time on the pavement… We took evasive action yet again and bellowed things which questioned his ownership of a brain, or whether he was suffering from some sort of mental abnormality… He scooted.

Finally, a chap drove past in his open-topped, flashy sports car, smoking a fag, his middle-aged perm flowing behind him in the breeze and clearly displaying a necessity to show off… And there was me thinking that like me, others were thinking about their health, worrying about the virus, lauding the NHS and only going out if it is, er, really necessary…

Wrong…