As we all know, the country is still in lockdown. All non-essential shops are closed. So, with that in mind, we went to a couple of garden centres. Garden centres are, of course, essential shops. Everyone needs plants, as well as garden furniture, books, fancy marmalades, compost and tropical fish. Presumably, that was why the car park at Parkers in Iron Acton was almost full.
The centre itself was pretty packed, too, the aquatic centre ridiculously so, to the extent that we abandoned our search for tropical fish for our tank as quickly as we’d started it. If you want to help spread the virus, here’s where to go
One of the main reasons I like going to garden centres – no, wait: the only reason – is because I am usually one of the youngest people in it and so it was today. But with age does not come wisdom. You would think that social distancing had never been invented.
Wherever we were, seniors acted as if things were normal, as if 150,000 people hadn’t died of the coronavirus. The ones that wore their masks correctly – a small majority – squeezed past you as if the two metre rule was a basis for negotiation. Behind me in the queue at the till, a silver-haired man stood perhaps a foot behind me. Unusually, not wishing to make a scene, I merely went to the front of my trolley and stood there. I was only slightly surprised that he didn’t climb into it.
More than anything, I found the experience bizarre. I am not allowed to even sit outside a pub (not that you’d want to today), I am not allowed to watch or play outdoor sport, I can’t go in a shopping centre with all the arrows and signs but I can go to a very busy indoor garden centre which sells, among other things, tat. I am no virologist but I cannot see how it is more dangerous to slice and hook my way around a golf course but it is fine to squeeze past a cackling group of pensioners as they debate which garden lights they’d like to acquire.
And I’m fed up with it. Boris Johnson says this will be the last lockdown, so that means it probably won’t be. If everything closes down again, I’ll probably do my best to interpret the rules as best I can to suit my life but I suspect others may not be so restrained.
