In defence of the lockdown

I realised things were getting back to normal when I threw away a third of a tin of chopped tomatoes last week. Back in March you couldn’t get them for love or money. I still remember the appalled look on a woman customer’s face at our local farm shop, in mid-April, when she was told that, while the store was out of tinned tomatoes, she could have real ones instead. ‘That’s not the same,’ she said, with a degree of rancour. ‘Um… if you chopped them up with a knife, I think they’d be pretty similar. You know?’ she was informed, but she wouldn’t have it and stomped off. There was always something a little spurious about those early shortages, with people panic-buying yeast when the shelves were stocked with loaves of bread. The run on hand sanitiser, as if it were like those nosegays of herbs with which people in the Middle Ages tried to ward off the plague, without success.