Sanity restored

Partially, moving towards fully.

Gugs is my friend and colleague who I’ve previously mentioned is also marooned in Cambridge, finding herself in the office here at the most unlucky time. Today I walked to meet her at Hannah’s front door (without making contact with said front door) and helped her lug her baggage to Heidi’s house where she will isolate with me for the foreseeable. Being away from our homes we don’t really have other choices so had to navigate central Cambridge attracting side-eye from people who may have assumed we were being more frivolous with our movements. This weekend there has been lots of media chat about flouting the social distancing rules, although we are upholding them, and technically we now form a ‘household’.

Thanks to the better-than-expected weather and the company of Gugs, I felt like doing the same stance as this statue outside the Scott Polar Research Institute. Of course I couldn’t, as pausing outdoors to enjoy the sun is enough to warrant a fine, if a curtain-twitcher nearby is on the lookout. The statue was cast by Captain Scott’s widow and modelled by Lawrence of Arabia’s younger brother. Useful trivia for your next online pub quiz.

I felt bad in the evening when Gugs and I went to the shop in an attempt that her presence will spur me on from dinners of ice cream towards legitimate meals. A homeless person was resting underneath a sleeping bag outside the shop and a Tesco worker exited behind us to wake him on the premise that he couldn’t stay there and that a customer had complained. I was outraged and wish the customer had been there to receive the full force of my anger. I regret I did overstep the mark with the hapless worker who, instead of reasoning with the customer that Tesco would prefer not to heap further discomfort onto a suffering person during an unprecedented national crisis, actually upheld the complaint. At a time when homeless people will be receiving fewer donations, the idea that someone was offended by the sight of a homeless person next to the bin as they shopped for their essentials is so blinded by privilege that it incensed me. I may visit tomorrow and apologise if I see the same employee as it wasn’t exactly his fault, and a colleague of his had just been very helpful when we couldn’t find pasta. But deciding to satisfy customers’ uncharitable demands at this time needs to be called out because who gives one tiny crap if a narrow-minded customer spends their £10 on toilet roll at a rival supermarket. I told the shop assistant that Tesco isn’t going to collapse if a homeless person is allowed to stay in the place where they are most likely to get food, and that he should tell the customer to kindly p*ss off.