Category - News

In an earlier post today, I said I wouldn’t mention any more about earnings just yet. The reason I said that was because I was hoping beyond hope that the few dim bulbs out there who are still ‘working normally’ would finally see sense and realise that COVID-19 is only going to get worse if they insist on giving lessons.

Boris Johnson has just declared that everyone must stay at home unless they are key workers. The actual wording is:

…except for shopping for basic necessities, daily exercise, any medical need and travelling to and from essential work.

It took less than two seconds for certain of the dim bulbs I mentioned to declare that they are still ‘going to work’ as driving instructors. A fair number of them, too.

How much f**king more has to be done to make you realise that you are making it worse. The spread of COVID-19 is far, far more serious than your bills. Really, it is.

If you made the effort, you’d be able to manage the financial situation. Christ, when I lost my job all those years ago I had over £30,000 of debts and initially a tiny, tiny income, but I dealt with them – or got someone to help me deal with them – and now I have none. If I can do it, you can do it. And you can if you get off your arse and try, so stop looking for what seems the easy way out.

You’re not doing yourself or your kids any favours whatsoever by going out mingling with people. More importantly, you’re not doing the rest of us any favours, either. You don’t know if the people you’re teaching are carrying – and quite frankly, if their desire to take lessons is as mercenary as your desire to give them, some of them wouldn’t bloody tell you if they had been near anyone who was ill. That is why this virtual lockdown has been applied.

You are not exempt unless your pupils are key workers, and no matter how hard you try, them stacking shelves in Tesco doesn’t come under that.

Stop giving lessons. For everyone’s sake.

Last week, I took the decision to do my weekly shopping online for the time being. I shop in Asda several times a week, and usually spend upwards of £150 there on groceries, and similar on fuel (I have a 2% cashback credit card with them, which is one of the drivers for that).

I placed my order last Wednesday, and the earliest delivery slot was Saturday. No problem. But when I came to do it this week, on Tuesday, the entire delivery calendar was booked out (it went as far as next Friday). Click & Collect goes further out, but that was fully booked out until April.

I went on to Morrisons’ website, and their delivery slots are booked out until mid-April. I since read that their site has crashed several times due to demand.

Then I tried Ocado, and was met with a page that said ‘you are no. 687 in a queue of 687. Approximate wait time is 10 minutes’. That was just to access the site! A family friend tried today, and was eight thousand and something out of eight thousand and something! I have since read that Ocado has stopped taking on new customers.

So our wonderful government has overlooked starvation (because you can’t buy anything online) vs infection (because you’re forced to go out) as an outcome of their poor handling of this situation to date. Should be fun if they impose a lockdown, so you can’t go out.

But I decided to go to Asda last night for some essentials. I shouldn’t have bothered. The shelves were nearly all completely empty – no fresh vegetables, virtually no fruit, no meat, no milk (except the kind that often goes off five minute after you open it), no tinned goods, no noodles or pasta of any kind, no bread of any kind, no frozen food except a few pizzas and Yorkshire puddings.

I did manage to get a few things, and when I arrived at the checkout there was a middle-aged couple there before me. They were that type you just want to shoot (and which I have mentioned before). For a start off, there didn’t need to be two of them there at all, but there was, and they did everything as a couple. Of course, they allowed everything to be checked through before even thinking about bagging it, and they bagged everything as a couple before even thinking about paying. Then he got his wallet out, took out a credit card, gave it to her, and she had to lean over the trolley to push it in the card machine and slowly enter the PIN because he was much closer to it to start with.

But what mostly caught my eye was what they had purchased. About twenty bags – and I mean somewhere around that number – of curly kale. I mean, curly kale? What the f—?

I immediately had my suspicions, so when I got home I did a quick Google and – surprise, surprise – some twat (a ‘wellbeing coach’, which explains perfectly) in Malaysia has claimed kale prevents you from catching Coronavirus! And that’s why they had bought the entire shelf stock of it.

The ironic thing is, too much kale is suspected of being bad for you, and the potential problems it can cause looked as if this couple might be susceptible in the first place. Idiots.

Today, I went into Morrisons and did manage to get a few bits. Only a few, though. It seems like every idiot out there has suddenly discovered Kidney Beans, Borlotti Beans, Chickpeas, and so on. I wanted some kidney beans because I’m making a chilli to freeze into portions – something I do regularly, as I do with homemade pasta sauce (there was none of that in Morrisons, either, I noticed). The shelves were empty. The thing is, no one usually touches these things.

Fortunately, the cash & carry wasn’t quite as bad (though it was still bad), and I managed to pick up a couple of catering cans of kidney beans and chopped tomatoes (though they’re not Napolina, but you can’t have everything, I suppose). Far more than I wanted because of the cans sizes, but it was that or nothing. I’ll just have to make more chilli than I intended.