I’m pretty certain that people would describe me as a confident person, but suddenly I felt frightened to go outside my own front door.

During the pandemic we were given some basic advice: wash your hands for at least 20 seconds, don’t touch your face and stay 2 metres away from each other. All seemed simple to understand so I followed them to the letter, even though I barely went out. As I live by myself I was in the lucky position that I didn’t have to worry about cleaning anything unless I had touched it, so I was in a relatively safe bubble.

I’m someone that has always planned for Armageddon and it’s normal for me to have a well stocked freezer/food cupboard. I start to use one item, whether it be toothpaste or tomato paste, then buy the next one to have it ready. I do that because if I did suddenly become ill and couldn’t go out, I wouldn’t have to worry. This, as it happened, was useful as I didn’t have to panic buy anything and was ok for a couple of weeks without shopping so that’s a habit I won’t be changing anytime soon.

Eventually I ventured out to the supermarket, only due to the fact there were no delivery slots for love nor money, so I had absolutely no choice but to go there. After being inside for quite a few weeks I felt weirdly nervous of gong to the supermarket, something that I didn’t even think about before.

The supermarket had put some changes in place such as disinfecting trolleys, one way system and asking people to stay 2 metres apart. The problem was that an awful lot of customers didn’t seem to understand what 2 metres apart was, or just simply didn’t care and as much as I appreciate the fact the staff were at work keeping stores open for us, they were not practicing social distancing either. I spent most of the time dodging people and the whole process ended up being very stressful. I’m ex armed forces and like concise, direct instructions that I can follow to stay safe and keep others safe, so I can’t comprehend why other people can’t do the same thing as none of the advice was rocket science.

Now the lockdown is being eased and we’re being encouraged to start shopping at non essential stores. After spending many weeks inside and only going out when it was absolutely necessary, for prescriptions and an odd bit of food shopping, that sounded a bit scary. For someone that used to love to go shopping that’s also really frustrating for me.

I thought I was being silly and couldn’t stay inside forever, so my first journey out (other than a supermarket or pharmacy) was because I needed new tyres for my car, I thought that might be a good place to start as garages tend to be big open spaces. I used a well known chain of garages, which I had used before. I have to say they had put a good system in place and I watched as they covered the car seat and steering wheel before touching the car, that didn’t stop me disinfecting everything when I got back in though! I at least ticked off one service as safe and I think that’s the system I’ll be using, a sort of test it out once, if I don’t feel uncomfortable I can try it again and hopefully I’ll end up with a list of shops and services that I can use.

On my way back from the garage I was feeling somewhat braver, so as I passed a local retail park I decided to test a couple of non essential shops. The shops are very big so I thought they’d be a good place to see how I felt. Again, they were ok, I didn’t feel at risk in either shop, they were also relatively quiet so no queuing to get in.. Queuing has always been an issue for me as I have no patience to do that, so I am going to have to time visits to make sure there’s no waiting outside the shop and therefore hopefully not too many people inside either.

It’s like learning to shop all over again as there are new rules. Thankfully I’m not the only one feeling confused as I’ve observed people trying to figure out the entrance and exit and whether they should wait outside shops or go straight in. I’ve giggled along with them when we all stood looking like we’d never been in a shop before in our lives, trying to figure out the new system.

After any visit to a shop I now sanitise myself like crazy and anything I bought gets the same treatment, or gets ‘quarantined’ in a corner until I feel it’s safe to touch it. This is all extremely strange, but it’s my new ‘normal’ which makes me feel safer and making ourselves feel as safe as possible seems to be the key to returning to using shops etc

I think what concerns me most of all in this situation is the lack of social distancing with some people. If all people would just stay 2 metres away from me I’d be much more at ease as I can control everything else. Now that we’re told we can reduce to one metre plus I feel even more concerned. Some people can’t seem to stay 2 metres away, it’s already more like one metre, so now changing the rules to one metre I can be sure they’ll be inches away from me. If this happens I may have to rethink going to some shops altogether.

As for bars, restaurants etc I’m afraid they’re not going to be for me for quite a long time to come, they are definitely things I’ll be letting others test out, they just seem too risky at the moment. I have got a hairdressers appointment as I feel confident that my hairdressers will do all they can to make me feel safe. I was offered an appointment early July or at the end, I decided that the end would be better so that they would have time to try out the new system and ensure it worked. Now my fingers are firmly crossed that I manage to get my grey haystack hair sorted out which will definitely make me feel a bit better!

I really feel for all the people that have jobs affected by the pandemic and realise that we have to try to get the economy going again. However, it doesn’t make me feel any happier about returning to the ‘outside World’, which is a very confusing thing at the moment and I’m sure many of us feel the same. I wonder after all this if we’ll ever take the simple things like shopping for granted again?

Angie Davidson

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