Hands up if you remember what you were doing three years ago today? At the risk of sounding like Paul Daniels, the answer is: “Not a lot!”
That’s because the first lockdown was announced on March 23, 2020, and the three key words were STAY AT HOME. Not that they applied to Catherine Calderwood, of course. Scotland’s former chief medical officer swanned off to her holiday home in the East Neuk of Fife not once, but TWICE.
The rest of us were basically ordered to only step outside for 15 minutes of exercise which, on a personal note, I’m happy to say wasn’t compulsory. This very column – originally called Tam Cowan’s Covid Chronicles – was launched three years ago, dear reader, to take a light-hearted look at the global pandemic.
Sifting through the archives earlier this week was an eye-popping experience. For example, 2020 will be remembered as the year the bins went out more than us. The most repeated question of 2020? “Alexa… what day is it?”
Stuck in the house and bored out of your nut, do you remember when the early drinking started? (Come on, be honest!) I tried to adopt a very disciplined approach with the booze and tried not to touch a drop between the hours of 2am and 9am...
To this day – and I’m ashamed to say this is 100 per cent true – I can’t look at a bottle of gin without hearing the theme tune to This Morning. Did I REALLY once ask our milkman: “You don’t sell tonic water, do you…?”
People were praying the pubs would re-open before they became alcoholics – and did anyone ever spot a glass bin with the lid fully shut? By the third week of lockdown, my purple bin contained more glass than the roof of St Enoch Centre in Glasgow.
When the pubs DID open their doors (and here’s a weird memory) they weren’t allowed to sell booze! That was like opening a public lavatory and telling folk they couldn’t nip in for a pee. Restaurants were forced to close at 6pm. Which begged the question: if you got an After Eight with your bill, was it legal to eat it…?
As we moved into a long, hot summer, remember the effort that went into booking a two-hour slot in your local beer garden? (Only for a no-show from my daft pal from Airdrie who explained he drank cider…) Some of the gags (unlike that last one) were pretty decent.
Did the virus REALLY start in China – or was it Vietnam that gave us Covid N-n-n-nineteen…? I popped into my local chemist and asked the woman behind the counter if she could suggest ANYTHING to get rid of Covid. “Ammonia cleaner,” she replied. “Sorry,” I said, “I thought you were the pharmacist…”
The following week, I went up to a checkout assistant in Morrisons and said: “Do you have ANY toilet paper?” She just shook her head and said: “I’m really sorry, we don’t have a single sheet left in the store.” And then I had to shuffle all the way back to the gents with my trousers and pants round my ankles…
I’ll never forget the TRUE story about the bloke in a Kilmarnock supermarket who, after being narrowly beaten to the last pack of Andrex by a fellow shopper, totally lost his temper and yelled: “Stick yer toilet paper up yer a*se!!!”
But it wasn’t just loo rolls that flew off the shelves – remember the panic-buyers also swiping every last packet of pasta? That can’t be great, I thought, for their carbonara footprint. After the first few crazy weeks of lockdown loads of folk – bored to tears – were trying their hand at something different. Some people baked their own bread, one of my pals learned how to play the bagpipes (the only musical instrument that, when you learn how to play them properly, sound EXACTLY the same as when you started). Me? I started getting dressed…
That’s when my doctor advised me to watch what I was drinking. So I started sitting in front of a mirror. He also suggested I try the ancient Chinese practice of feng shui – rearranging the furniture in a room – and I must say it worked a treat. I’d been down in the dumps for ages but one night when The Vicar Of Dibley was on, I turned my telly to face the wall and immediately felt much, much better.
Another daft memory? Dame Joan Collins refusing to wear a face mask in Ikea! I couldn’t get my head round that one. I mean, come on, how was that an an issue for a woman who’s worn about 28 wedding veils?
Strange, strange times indeed – culminating, on a personal note, in the summer of 2020 when I was wrongfully arrested. My own fault, I suppose. When you’re wearing a face-mask – and you’ve just bought a banana from the shop next-door – it’s probably not wise to walk into the bank…
PS. Three years after lockdown, reports this week suggest we could face more loo roll shortages. This is due to new EU rules banning products linked to global deforestation. Plus, of course, all the panic buying from Mr & Mrs Murrell…
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