A Whole New World

First day of the new world order today - well, in England anyway. I get the fact that now we know the virus can be spread in aerosol form, not just droplets, we need to stop people breathing over each other in confined or crowded spaces. But I can’t help but think that this information has been around for a while now and the main sound you can hear today is a lot of stable doors slamming shut to the accompaniment of many horses bolting over the horizon!
Whatever, it’s here to stay for at least the next few months so best make the most of it. First problem to rear it’s head though was trying to activate my phone whilst wearing the mask. My phone works on face recognition and isn’t set up to deal with me wearing a mask. So the first problem in a shop was having to pull the mask down to activate the phone to access the loyalty card app!! First world problem I know, but just hadn’t occurred to me before.
Other problems were the anticipated fogging of glasses and getting hot whilst wearing it. After half an hour of trying to look at things through either fogged glasses or myopic eyes I decided the days of browsing high street shops are over for the time being. Online shopping is definitely the way forward.
Went for a coffee to calm down and confusion reigned. The sign said wear a mask until you’ve got your drink and only remove it when you sit down. But I was the only person in the queue wearing a mask! And I didn’t see anyone put on a mask to leave, so I didn’t bother either. But I should have done as, when I got outside, I found I’d left my mask behind and so had to go back in maskless and claim it just before the person clearing the table put it in the bin! Not a good start to mask wearing - only visited two shops and left it behind in the second one!
By and large though most people were donning masks to enter shops. Less good - from the Government’s point of view - was that after leaving the shop, the same mask was just pulled down below the chin, shoved in a pocket or clasped in an ungloved hand. And a lot of them were the supposed “one use only” disposable masks. Judging by how grubby some of them looked “one use” clearly means “use until disintegration”.
Let us hope that, notwithstanding the exceptions above, this measure does have a positive and measurable result, moving us closer to the eradication of the virus.