How Covid broke Britain

It was at about this time, five years ago, that the workers at my (then) local farm shop began wearing plastic bags on their feet, over their trainers. This was because of a report somewhere that said the Covid virus hung about on the ground and then leapt, with great agility and cunning, on to people’s shoes, from whence it swiftly decamped to your bloodstream and killed you.

We were still rubbing raw alcohol on to our hands wherever we went, if you recall, because whatever you touched harboured the virus. You couldn’t actually go in the farm shop but had to give your orders to the staff who manned a table out front, from which you were instructed to stand one metre back. People with short arms had difficulty reaching their groceries. In the supermarket we were instructed to queue up three yards distant from the person in front, but there was no similar injunction against standing alongside someone else, presumably because the virus did not understand how to travel from side to side but floundered, like a Dalek confronted with stairs. People in the queue who coughed were given the sort of looks of abhorrence which hitherto had been reserved for practitioners of the more extreme avenues of paedophilia. And then we went home with our potatoes, and stayed home.