Never has a visit to the supermarket meant so much. My week was up, the confines of my house were breached and I ventured forth into the exciting roadways of Dalston and thence Carlisle. I queued in a stretched-out line, like a night club whose clientele brought trolleys instead of handbags and the dance floors empty of shoppers.
Inside I performed a silent flash mob with my fellow shoppers, pirouetting and slaloming amidst the tinned food like charged particles repelling each other from our 2m field. No more did shoppers plough blindly from aisle to shelf, no more were fellow browsers muscled out of our way. Now we take a wide arc around their unseen germs, in our unsounding dance to the tills.
Like the epicentre of a hurricane the shop is serene in its sparseness. The car park empty. Little flurries of urgency around the toilet roll, pasta and hand soap hint at the chaos swirling outside. Face masks tell of another reality, a silent threat hovering over our mundane lives.
In some ways I feel it more now, in the outside world. Home is still largely the same, except we are all always there. But here there are signs of crisis and disquiet, even in the very quietness of the usually bustling store. For the last week I felt trapped in my house, and yearned for the freedoms of the outside world. But now I have penetrated its walls, I find not freedom but more constraints. Each action must be justified. Our choices have become as sparse as the shop-floor – bound by the debt we owe to each other. Just as our personal space is shaped by the 2m distance of others, so our selfish choices must be moulded against the outline of others’ needs.