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On we plough. We did risk leaving the house - our daughter is still at school, so any other precautions seem a bit pointless really, as schools will surely be the breeding ground of all this. We dropped her off and went to the gym and then on to Tescos. Lots of empty shelves and no toilet rolls (which we didn't need) or baby wipes (which we did). There's no real sign that the food supply chain or indeed the toilet roll supply chain is going to break down - there was loads of fruit and veg for example - so it's more than crazy that people are behaving in this way. But these are crazy times.
How many toilet rolls do people need. If you're getting through more than 2 a month each then you're doing some stirling shitting. Is there any reason people are buying so many other than the fact that other people are buying so many? Ian Andrex must be rubbing his hands with glee. Especially as he wipes his arse on puppies. (Trad arr)
Having interacted with loads of people we returned to isolation. We have ordered in loads of equipment to give you the best Twitch service that we can muster (don't forget to
follow or subscribe, especially if you're an Amazon Prime member and can do it for free).
A little mixing desk thing arrived with a tiny pack of Haribo. Was that just a nice thing the company did for all their customers or had they recognised my name and knew what I liked? To be fair they might have hated me and poisoned the sweets, but I ate them anyway. A Haribo is a Haribo. It is my fatal weakness.
I picked Phoebe up from school, with Ernie it tow. A teacher remarked that she'd never seen so many dads at pick up time (hey, I do it quite a bit!). For the moment most kids still seem to be going to school, but for how long. Not sure that the self-isolation will be the writing opportunity I hoped for if we also have to teach our kids to read. Will this be over in weeks or months? I was offered dates in June and July for the postponed gigs. Too optimistic? Or might we lick this (don't lick anything) in a couple of months?
There was a positive message about how most people won't be badly affected by the virus and many not even know they have it (which seems at odds with the advice about symptoms - so who knows who has had it?) Presumably if you've had it and it's gone then you're pretty safe to go back out to work (though I have heard about re-infections) so it'd be good if they were testing us all to find out who is self-isolating unnecessarily and just has a cold. But that would be expecting too much of our government. I have already accepted they are not going to do anything to help my community of comedians and performers and am looking into ways that I can get the rich and successful comics who are still working or have savings to chuck into a fund so the club comics who have no other revenue streams can feed their kids and pay their rent. Hard to organise and administrate, but I fear if we don't do it -and look after the smaller clubs and venues - our business will not recover from this.
It's right that we do what we are doing for the sake of the elderly and vulnerable, but it's also right that the sacrifices that we must all make don't break us. Good luck all. It's going to be a bumpy ride.
