This is the 260th entry in my weekly shopkeeper’s diary, meaning it’s exactly five years since the first one. I thought it might be interesting to look back and see what was concerning me in those first few hundred words. It was like stepping on board a time machine, back to a very strange and anxious time.

The column is dated Saturday 28th March 2020. What was happening that day? A milestone was reached in the number of deaths associated with Covid-19 in the UK: they topped 1,000. This marked a drastic acceleration, as just ten days before the total had been 100. It was chilling how quickly the toll mounted. The first official Covid-related death in the UK was recorded on 5th March. The evening news in the following days typically reported one or two more. But by the end of the month it was scores or even hundreds per day. Soon it would be in numbers so large they could only be grasped when presented in a rising graph as steep as the side of Ward Hill.

My first diary didn’t dwell on statistics. The Orcadian had asked me if I could write a weekly column about the ‘thoughts and concerns of a local business-person hit by the pandemic’ so I focused on the day-to-day experience of shop life. I’m glad I did, because anodyne government statements and bald NHS statistics are preserved online forever. But what it actually felt like to live through that extraordinary period is hard to recreate unless you can refer to notes taken at the time.

Here’s how I reported our decision to close the shop, on March 23rd: ‘Refilling the wine shelves just as we opened, I started to feel a fuzziness in my throat, like I’d swallowed a Brillo pad. 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 rather than clean, cool air. I coughed again. A single word popped into my head: coronavirus. Was this what it felt like? How had I caught it? What happened next?’

I had no idea what having the virus felt like. No one I knew did. Tests were not yet available. People were still moving around much as they always had done. But not for long: it was the same evening that the Prime Minister announced that, starting from the 26th, everyone must ‘stay at home.’ And we did. Well, the population as a whole did. But food shops were allowed to operate, so Lauren and I transformed Kirkness & Gorie into a full-time delivery business. Here’s how I described Orkney a couple of weeks later, as I crisscrossed the West Mainland with a van full of wine, pasta and other essential sustenance:

‘The town certainly is extraordinarily quiet, with almost all the traffic gone. The countryside too is silent, except for the occasional tractor – and the birdsong, which seems louder than ever before. There is space to be afraid – of illness, of families and friends separated, of financial disaster. But most folk have now made what Edwin Muir calls a covenant with the current way of things: we accept them, and we try to live within the new boundaries.’

Those boundaries dissolved after a year or two, but echoes of the pandemic continue to ripple through many aspects of our life, from the damaged economy, to fractious politics, to public distrust in authority – and much more. My diaries from the sunny spring of 2020 don’t speak of social tensions. Rather, they record a time of unity. Almost everyone cooperated to observe the new rules, to support our vulnerable neighbours, and to applaud the work of the NHS and other essential workers. For a while we were united. We worked together to face up to a crisis unprecedented in modern times. We did it, not because we knew our efforts would succeed, but because we had no other choice.

Humour made the anxiety more bearable: ‘Someone has dressed the John Rae statue at Stromness pierhead in a blue beanie and a surgical mask,’ I recorded in a diary in mid-April. ‘His eyes gaze out boldly above the flimsy face-covering. He’s unflinching as he marches forward, as if about to enter battle with some invisible foe just out of sight on the far side of the Holms.’ We were all battling invisible foes. ‘The deadliest of them,’ I wrote, ‘is the virus, and defeating it is more important than anything else. For businesses there’s also the invisible foe – just out of sight, a few weeks or months ahead – of economic disaster.’

Businesses always face challenges. We expect 40,00 fewer liner passengers this year than last, which in turn had 10,000 fewer than the year before. That will mean a significant drop in income for our shop and many others along the street. But it’s nothing compared to what we went through five years ago. We survived that, and nothing since has been anywhere near as scary. I hope nothing ever is.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 20th March 2025. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.

Diary of a Shopkeeper, 16th March