Diary of a Shopkeeper, 21st March
De tijd verstrijkt op Schiphol.
Sitting down to write just now, I realised this would be my 52nd entry in the shopkeeper’s diary. In other words, I started this column exactly a year ago. So I thought I’d look through some of those past diaries, to see what memories they brought back of a most extraordinary year.
The first column was written on 28th March 2020, a few days after the government announced its unprecedented lockdown. But it wasn’t the health of the nation that was on my mind, so much as my own:
“Exactly a week ago, refilling the wine shelves just as we opened, I started to feel a fuzziness in my throat, like I’d swallowed a Brillo pad. Then I coughed. I put down the box I’d been carrying and took a deep breath. Except it wasn’t very deep, as the top third of my lungs seemed to be filling up with warm, scratchy fog. I coughed again.”
The news had been full of the threat of Covid for weeks, so I immediately feared the worst, and within five minutes had closed the shop and sent the staff home. Whether I really had Covid I don’t know, because testing wasn’t available then. If I did, I was lucky, as my symptoms were mild and short-lived.
By the second column, I was already wondering when the pandemic would end. I thought my estimates were cautious, but as it turned out I was far too optimistic:
“When the crisis is past, bright spring days like this one will be long gone. Will we step out into warm summer sun? Or will we already be feeling the first chilly autumn winds?”
Chilly autumn came and went, as did freezing, snowy winter, and still we are living under significant restrictions. Nothing like the lockdown of a year ago, but still far more than we’d have imagined even 18 months ago.
Weather reports turns up surprisingly often, especially for the first couple of months. You’ll remember that from late March onwards there was a tremendous spell of warm, sunny weather, a great boon to the thousands of folk furloughed or working from home, as they could cheer themselves up with walking, cycling, gardening, and barbecuing. The fine weather broke in the first week of June, causing Willie Pickle to pat himself on the back in my 11th diary: he’d never submitted to a lockdown haircut and so was well-insulated against the cold.
Back in those days the government’s wage subsidy was still often referred to as “furlough”. The word was so novel it had to be flagged up with its own quotation marks, as if it had been imported from a foreign language. Now it’s all too familiar.
For Kirkness & Gorie, as for many food shops, lockdown led to an enormous increase in home deliveries. Rather than being something we did once or twice a week, it became a full-time occupation for two of us in the shop, and inspired several diary entries.
Deliveries took us all over the Mainland and connected isles, along every road, major and minor, and down dozens of farm tracks. It was a pleasure in those sunny days to head off with a vanful of wine, cheese, and pasta (remember the great pasta mania of April 2020?) seeing bits of the county we’d never usually visit, meeting grateful customers pleased to see a visitor, let alone a lump of Vacherousse, and pausing in a hilltop layby to listen to the birdsong, which seemed incredibly loud, with so little traffic to drown it out.
It was very cheering to see hundreds of brightly coloured posters, paintings and sometimes even sculptures of pebbles or pallets. Rainbows and hearts were everywhere, and messages thanking the NHS and other essential workers. There was a real sense that the entire population was uniting to do what was necessary, and finding much positivity despite the pandemic.
At the end of June restrictions loosened and the towns stirred into life. But it was far from an overnight return to the old normal:
“Reopening isn’t something that happens at 10am on a Monday morning and that’s it,” I wrote in Diary 14. “It’s not just non-essential shops that are opening. It’s peoples’ front doors. It’s car doors. Folk will be coming downtown for the first time in months. The whole town is opening, gradually, slowly, and – we hope – safely.”
It took a long time for the street to feel anything like normal. And by then it was autumn, which is never the busiest time anyway. A brief flurry of tourists in September and October helped many businesses, but the numbers were too small to make a huge difference.
But we did maintain our safety.
By winter I had long since given up predicting the future. The pandemic had lasted far longer than expected, the government had paid out more in furlough than anyone dreamt possible, and uncertainties about what lay ahead were as numerous and profound in December as they had been in March.
In one column I quoted a passage from Birsay writer Samantha Clark’s book The Clearing, about “the gloaming state of mind”:
“It’s a condition”, she says, “Of not quite being able to see the way ahead but carrying on anyway. You just go gloaming on through the fog, towards the next step, the next word, the next decision.”
And, I might add, the next diary.
Thank you for reading.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 21st March. Other diaries continue to appear weekly. I am posting them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.