Greetings isolators!

IT’S FRIDAY!!! Quick, get out the party poppers and the party hats woooooo.

Put your hands up if you lost it to the Week 3 Wobble last week?

MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

The Week 3 Wobble was borne from the following factors:

•  By Week 3 I realised I’d completed most of the time-consuming activities I’d planned to keep myself busy (cleaned the blinds with a toothbrush, arranged my tinned food alphabetically, took all my books out of the bookcase, set aside one for the charity shop, put them all back in a slightly different order etc.)
• By Week 3 the last dribs and drabs of work had fallen away completely
• By Week 3 the novelty of having all this time and of being able to hear the birds and smell the flowers and see the sky bla bla bla had worn off
• I suddenly remembered why we’re in lockdown.

And all of these factors clicked into place at exactly the same time, setting off an uncontrolled snowballing of doomish truths: suddenly my friends and family seemed very far away and I realised I was utterly desperate for human contact of any form –

– the prospect of another evening in my tiny flat was suddenly grim; the pressure of relying solely on my own motivation to keep myself occupied became suddenly overwhelming, and the fear of this virus as the deaths ceaselessly climbed to eye-watering and devastating numbers became suddenly acute and terrifying, and all of the above exploded in the Week 3 Wobble that manifested itself in a brief but fairly intense meltdown on the floor of my flat.

But having spoken to several chums, it would appear that many of them also lost it to the Week 3 Wobble, as the adrenaline of the novelty of the first two weeks subsided and stored-up feelings of frustration, despair and fear managed to break through the sunshine and blue skies and remind us all that

THIS IS DEFINITELY NOT NORMAL.

And whilst I feel much better this week, this lockdown is definitely starting to take its toll.

For example, I appear to be losing my ability to communicate with real-life human beings in a face-to-face manner. A few days ago I approached Sainsbury’s, and there was no one queuing outside but it looked fairly busy inside, so I stood behind the queueing barrier like a responsible socially-distanced-aware citizen and waited to be admitted.

Whereupon a woman strode right past me and through the doors.

Now, in my head the words that subsequently came out of my mouth – ‘Excuse me, I’m queuing here’ – were supposed to be uttered in a polite and gentle tone, something that sounded like:

Instead, due perhaps to this strange and unpractised form of face-to-face communication with a human being who isn’t on the other end of Zoom or Skype or WhatsApp, the words ‘Excuse me, I’m queueing here’ actually came out in a tone that may as well have said:

I immediately felt AWFUL about my aggressive tone, made worse by the fact that the woman immediately and profusely and so incredibly politely apologised and hurried to stand behind me, and explained so apologetically that this was the first time she’d been out in four weeks and she didn’t know the rules of shopping and she was terribly sorry, and I felt SO bad at my unwarranted outburst that I spent the next five minutes orchestrating a desperately friendly conversation, and by the time I was admitted into the sanctuary of Sainsbury’s I knew where she’d met her husband, the middle names of her four children, and her bra size.

This was not the only queue-related momentary loss of civility I have had.

Is anyone else noticing that, whilst there are many examples of some first-class queues forming outside supermarkets, there are also plenty of examples of absolute queuing abominations?

An example, for your delectation: outside the post office earlier this week, there was a smattering of people loitering on the pavement in a manner that can only be described as willy-nilly.

This is a bird’s-eye demonstration of what they should have looked like:

This is a bird’s eye view of what they actually looked like:

It’s as though the social distancing measures are weakening the gravitational pull of the person in front, and queuers are going spinning off into the Deep Space of the pavement like wayward space badgers – and because this ‘queue’ looked so slapdash, shoddy and slipshod, I asked one of the dawdlers, ‘Excuse me, is this the queue?’

His response was an unfriendly ‘Well we’re not standing here for the fun of it.’

At which point I again forgot the fact that I am actually a very placid person, and drew my sword, drove it through his heart and screamed in his face:

Well, I didn’t actually slay him, but I did say most of those words in an extremely murderous tone, the ignorant queue-disrespecting dick.

Happily, I’m not the only one who has had instances of losing it in lockdown.

A very good friend of mine told me the heart-warming story of her pushing her baby through a park the other day when, and I quote, ‘an egg-faced ham of a man and his smug-nosed pierced twat of a daughter’ approached up the path behind her, encroaching on the sacred two-metre realm around my chum, and she was forced to move the buggy out of the way while they heinously brushed past her, causing her to experience a solid gold loss of all decorum and scream after them:

After which she burst into tears.

So I don’t feel so bad about my public outbursts, I’m sure we’ll all lose it during lockdown and say and do things we don’t mean at some point, won’t we? You snivelling bunch of toads.

 

Stay healthy, stay home and look after each other xx