Everybody is an infant

The last two days at work have been crazy. When the Prime Minister announced on Wednesday “We might relax some of the restrictions next week” there were obviously lots of people who heard “Crisis over! Go out and do what you like!”

I’m not going to go on and on about it here because a) I do that too much, b) I don’t want to think about it anymore, and c) I have to remember that not everyone is blessed with a mind that works properly. I can’t assume that these people are deliberately flouting the laws when in fact they may have simply misunderstood them. I have been lucky enough to be blessed with a fair level of intelligence. Yes - I have studied hard and read lots and (to use a phrase that I hate) ‘improved myself’ but I also understand that I was only able to do that because I was born with the necessary tools to begin with. I do believe that Intelligence and the capacity for knowledge expansion are in your DNA. Some of us are simply built differently. If I had been born to a drug-addled single mum, raised in a problematic household and never allowed to attend primary school, then I would imagine that lockdown would be incredibly difficult to get my head around. I have a degree, I work for a big company that has lots of information direct from the government, and I listen to lots of debates and read lots of articles, and I still can’t grasp the complexities and scale of this outbreak. What chance for anyone with only one GCSE?

So I have, somehow, kept my irritation to a minimum and my anger under control, even when customers were trying to barge their way past each other to get into the paying area, which already had six people in it when we’ve limited it to three, as if Covid didn’t exist and the lockdown had never happened.  I took it with good grace when some bearded twat said “You gonna take these spit-screen downs now, then?” and I even managed to smile when we were approached by a family of five adults – FIVE! – who thought it was okay to come shopping together, fan out through the aisles, and ignore our much-lauded one-way system of shopping.

Sorry if this has been a bit of a strange post. Red wine was involved in its creation.

RC 8-5-20