While queuing outside Tesco, I thought that the tape marking the 2-metre social distancing spaces should be replaced with brass (a bit like the brass studs that mark the boundary of properties in shopping streets). They can then remain as a legacy after the COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.
Why? So that in 20 years’ time when our grandchildren ask what they are there for we can tell them about the great lockdown of 2020.
So, what other legacies might the crisis give us?
- We become a more friendly and tolerant society. Having been forced to slow down the pace of life we realise that we don’t have to constantly rush from one thing to the next. We remember the importance of family-time and prioritise this over other activities.
- More people work from home, having discovered that a lot of tasks don’t have to be done from the workplace. It becomes normal for all office workers to spend at least one day per week working from home. By staggering these days through the week, the amount of rush-hour traffic reduces by at least 10%.
- We know which of our neighbours are elderly and/or vulnerable and regularly check up on them.
- We appreciate the difference between necessities and luxuries.
- The habit of one period of exercise per day (whether we need it or not) continues after the isolation restrictions are lifted. A daily dose of exercise becomes the norm, rather than something only the ‘ultra-fit’ do
- ‘Furlough’ becomes the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year
- Television news programmes use fewer direct face-to-face interviews, replacing them with video links via social media. This saves the expense of bringing an interviewee to the broadcasting studio, or sending a camera crew to the interviewee.
- Internet Communications services such as WhatsApp, Skype, Teams, and Zoom (Zoom? Had anyone heard of Zoom before the isolation restrictions came in) introduce charges for calls involving more than two persons. Does this far-fetched? It’s been going on for years. As Tom Petty out it “the boys upstairs want to see how much you’ll pay for what you used t get or free”.
- We are a cleaner society where regular hand washing is practised. This has a beneficial effect on gastroenteritis illnesses, and the winter vomiting bug becomes a thing of the past.
- There are major changes to shopping practices. Online shopping takes a sharp upturn as people who have never used it before find how much more convenient it can be. There is a consequential downturn in High Street shopping. Stores compensate for this by reducing opening hours and/or closing on at least one day in the week. We might even return to something similar to the old Early Closing Day, when all shops in a town closed on a particular afternoon.
- There is a resurgence in small independent shops after people have discovered that the local butcher, baker and greengrocer are easier to get to and had shorter queues than the supermarkets.
- Cash all but disappears. Many shops accept card payments only and, having been unable to get to cash machines for so long, people begin to use internet banking transfers for all payments.
These are just a few of my ideas. Have you any other ideas on how the Covid-19 changes might permanently change the way we live?
All sounds good, but although now retired, I never did a job that could be done from home on a pc or similar. I was always handling items, driving to/from customers to physicaly either deliver or collect a physical item or items, or going somewhere to actually see/touch/record that item/s were where they were supposed to be.
I know that lots of these things are now no longer needed, but it seems to be so simple to just say work from home, when many, including now of course care and medical staff cannot.
Also, I will not trust Internet banking, nor Internet shopping.
We like to actually see and choose our own items, not bruised fruit or similar, the retailer wants to get rid of.
Rant over, but it’s never so simple as it’s made out to be.
Hi Martin,
Like you, I like to see and touch things before I buy them. Why do many women like doing cloth shopping in a shop? We need to touch and feel the fabric!
I still shop at Co-op but try not to linger too long. The supply is still ok, but no eggs. I missed those days when we still had 3 hens in the garden.
I know Bay Leaveas Larder on Hiltingbury Road still opens and has a good supply of food.
Working from home – it takes some time to adjust. With my work, I need to see clients face to face (via video), and if technology fails, we can leave people feeling stressed in this already very challenging time.
Let’s hope the lockdown is over soon, and “we’ll meet again’.
Keep safe and keep well. Are you still cycling around?
Hello Janet, thanks for the reply. No problem for us in going shopping. We do our weekly shop on Mondays, at Sainsbury at Badger Farm. Our Friday (weekend) items we have changed from Waitrise to the Co op.
My point in answering the original post was that not all jobs of work can be done on line. It seems that do many people assume that all work can be carried out via the Internet. How do they think that actual things they need arrive?
I remember seeing an ex chancellor if the exchequer (Nigel Lawson) stating on TV that retirement could be moved to 75, he was that age and able to carry on working. Okay at that age to sit behind a screen on the ,net, but he, like so many, disregarded the many more manual jobs that older people do.
I do not trust Internet banking, despite the bank staff saying its the same system that they use. The only difference, as I told them, was that if I use it and something goes wrong, then its down to me. If the bank staff do it and something goes wrong, they will fix it!
I’ve made my point re Internet shopping already, so will not repeat myself, but thank you for your support for our point of view.
Take care, and again, thank you.
To be fair Martin, I did say “More people” not “everyone”, “a lot of tasks” not “everything” and “office workers” not “all workers”. I (an office worker) have been working home for a lot of the past few weeks, but there are still some jobs that I have to go to the office to do. I rearrange my work schedule so I do only “office-based jobs” on an office day, and leave things I could do from home until I am at home.
Home working isn’t always ideal and doesn’t suit everyone. I wouldn’t want to do it all the time, but probably will continue to WFH once or twice a week when I can. See my recent post on working from home for some of the pros and cons.
This post was never intended to discuss the merits or otherwise of internet shopping or banking. What I will say, however, is that there are (different) risks with either and we take action to mitigate those risks.
What, no one yet telling me that I’m a luddite for not signing up for Internet banking, I’m surprised!
I use online shopping for one-off purchases, but not generally for groceries or clothes. With groceries, I like to decide what to do if my choice is not available – do I choose a substitute or go without. I also find that some shopping sites are not conducive for easy selection; it’s OK if you know exactly what you want, but not so easy to browse and see what’s available.
Having said that, if I do know what I want, internet shopping prevents the need to talk to people, or be ‘encouraged’ by a pushy sales assistant to buy something you don’t need.
So, I got engrossed in the first part of my reply that I missed replying to your question Janet.
I do still manage to get some cycling miles in. I ride on Wednesday and Sunday mornings still, my usual club riding days.
But, I only ride, alone, for about an hour, more locally.
However, yesterday, I gave myself an Easter treat by taking a longer ride part way up the lovely Test Valley lanes, which took me about 2 hours.
It revitalises one, giving mental and physical renewal, which we so badly need in these troubling times.
After the COVID-19 emergency we will find the surveillance society well established. Already there are 68 CCTV cameras per 1000 people in London, and with facial recognition technology, it will be possible to pick out strangers or known people.
China already has surveillance of the contents of drains. Why? It detects where drugs are coming from and it can be used to detect the coronavirus.
Now the new NHS app that will tell with whom you have been in contact over the last few days. OK for tracking an infection but other uses could be sinister.
Now we are going to a cashless society, it is known what you bought and where and when and who you paid.
You may argue that if you have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear. Try telling that to the sub-postmasters who were jailed because of a computer fault.
Sorry to be so sanguine about it, but life will be very different afterwards.
Mike, listen to last week’s episode of “It’s a Fair Cop” on Radio 4 – the one entitled Babysitter. Raises some interesting points on privacy and surveillance – and who owns all the facial images being taken.
My claim to Luddism is a refusal to have a smart phone, so the NHS tracking app won’t work for me!
Even when paying by cash you have to first get the cash – either from a bank or a cash machine – so your location is known at that point. When the news reports on people who have “been missing” for several weeks, I sometimes wonder how they managed to go unnoticed for so long.
And surveillance is nothing compared to how careless people are about what they record on social media. At least surveillance has some form of regulation behind it.
All very fair points Chippy, and I am maybe guilty of generalising on matters that I feel strongly about.
Thank you for your kind clarifications.
I sadly have to agree Mike.
Sadly because you are right I feel, about potential changes in our society which are not always beneficial to we individuals.
A contact of mine thinks this whole episode is a step towards the New World Order, which he fears we are entering. Shades of Orwell s 1984.!
A glance at the social media suggests that
1. the virus is helping to turn us into a nation of snitches. Oh sure, its all for the good, just use the number to inform the cops of Non Coms (non compliers) not observing government advice.
2. Turning us into a nation of obedient believers, who maintain that the authorities know best and that scientific claims are never wrong and eternally true. Remember, the experts with their predictions from Imperial College were the guys who advised the Government on dealing with the Foot and Mouth epidemic and then predicted nearly 200,000 human deaths from so called ‘Mad Cow Disease’, but fortunately they miscalculated and less than 150 people lost their lives.
Very true David Lamb. We are obliged to believe the “experts” for want of any other source of information. Whether what we are told is true fact or just opinion remains to be seen.
Is there an undisclosed agenda at work, we do not know, but several suspicions have already been raised.
Conspiricy theories abound of course, but a world wide take over by party or parties currently unknown remains the suspicion of some.
If the shut down across more and more countries continues for many months, then the suspicions become greater, not surprisingly.
We must pay more attention to resilience. Unfortunately, it does not appear on balance sheets and is absent from computations of ‘efficiency’.
Because we have not been affected by the six fearful F’s for so long, we have dropped our guard. They are:- Famine, Fire, Flood, Fighting, Fever and Fraud (in the form of cyber attack – and the Donald). We can barely deal with one at once let alone two striking together.
David – 200,000 cases of mad cow disease was at the upper limit of possibilities. Because the ‘experts’ and scientist and doctors learned about Prion diseases and because people changed their practices in hospitals, abattoirs and stockbreeders, we got on top of it. There were almost 200,000 cases of mad cow disease recorded in cows but only a few hundred in humans.
Work by the same scientists allowed us to eliminate other prion diseases such as Kuru and to limit Scrapie (affects sheep and deer) and standard Jakob Creutzfeldt disease.