Today
felt the least like being in lockdown.
My morning bike ride was 'open', in the sense that the paseo was fairly
sparsely populated, it was almost like a ‘normal’ ride, except for the number
of people sporting medical masks – though not by any means the majority.
The first part of my ride was into the
centre of town to post a delayed letter of condolence to the wife of an
ex-colleague of mine. As I had included
a card I was not sure of the weight/cost and so a trip to the post office was
necessary, and partly explains the delay.
The post office was only open until 2.30 so I was there early. Not early enough.
There were a couple of people outside and
a counter assistant was letting in people one by one. I was prepared to wait right up until I saw
the length of the queue on the other side of the building, it was stretched the
length of the street. I did not wait.
Previously I had used the Tabac to get
stamps and to deposit letters, so I decided to find out if you could still do
that. The stamps were not a problem and
the lady behind the counter seemed to be confident about the amount that was
necessary to send it off, the only odd point about the transaction was her
wielding a pritt stick to put the stamps on.
It was only after she had done it that I realized that no one nowadays
is going to lick stamps, not in the present circumstances. There are going to be all sorts of little
instinctive reactions that will now be potentially deadly!
For the first time for ten weeks we
actually used one of the motorways to go to a shop that sold fencing. The shop was open, though sections were
portioned off and each section had an assistant who took the name of each
person who went into the area. People
were keeping their distance as far as possible, though we were still too close
for comfort.
I met somebody that I knew from the
swimming pool in the shop and for the first time I bumped elbows by way of
greeting and had a muffled mask-wearing conversation. The New Normal indeed!
Lunch was patatas bravas with my attempt
at a salsa to go with them that Toni discovered on the Internet. There is a bewilderingly large number of ingredients
that you have to add to the mayonnaise up to and including orange juice and
zest. An interesting experiment, and
tasty too.
Johnson,
the sometime prime minister of the UK, has said that we should “move on” from
the fuss about the wrongdoing of Cummings.
We should not.
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