Day 1–Tuesday 24 March 2020

On Monday 23rd March the UK was placed in quarantine in response to the global pandemic. Everyone was told to stay at home, apart from some basic rules for key workers and infrequent shopping trips for medical supplies and food necessities. This intervention was inevitable but probably earlier than expected. I do believe it was in direct response to many millions of people in the U.K. spending the weekend in parks and on the beaches for Mother’s Day and not taking the previous advice seriously enough.

Many people had already been isolating and taking all the previous advice seriously, but as is always true with human behaviour, many believed it didn’t apply to them. Actually probably many people are still not taking it seriously and I can share one small example in my own family!

Last night at around 8pm, my wife was called by her son, my stepson, asking to be collected from the countryside. He had cycled with his 2 friends into the countryside, about 10miles away to a quarry site, where unfortunately his bicycle encountered a puncture and of course he couldn’t cycle back.

So I went to collect him and his bike to take him back to his flat, he lives on his own. But he also needed some food, so I had to stop at the supermarket and buy a few things from there. Fortunately the supermarket was still open and I was able to get some essentials for him…