Social distancing in Dystopia. Part One. Croydon

The charging socket to our tablet has stopped working; three months at home without contact with our children and grandchildren?  This was an emergency but we are not supposed to be mingling on public transport, nor ruining the planet with the car, so out came the bicycle for a trip into Croydon.  There is an element of recklessness about some of the driving that is taking place in these apocalyptic times; fewer vehicles but more madly driven, so I choose the most traffic-free option, up the path by Beddington Church, emerging next to John Lewis to cross the A23, and then up the side roads by Croydon Parish Church to what until a few weeks ago was an arts centre behind Surrey Street market.  The prospect of leaving the bike, even if padlocked, in such a place is not tempting, so I cycle up the pedestrianized High Street and dismount to wheel it in to the Centrale shopping centre, where there are four customers and two staff but they still have a security man to tell me that bicycles are not allowed.  The Samsung shop has no waiting time (it’s an ill wind.....) and the nice young man there says plenty of folk wheel in their bikes in busier times, so just park it in his store.

This is not an entirely successful trip.  It costs more than half as much as a new Galaxy Eight to get a new socket fitted, and one feels like Mr Bean cringing in the corner to create the required social distancing while the young man sits at the counter and, bless him, pretends that the old man in front of him is not behaving in any way oddly.  He does not sell new tablets so I am going to have to go home and buy it safely off the internet anyway.  To add insult to injury my Strava catches the virus and fails to record half the mileage.  But I pass the butchers on the way home and the shop is empty (so no contagion except that to be had over the counter) and, glory be, the butcher has not only meat but eggs.  Remember eggs?  What is more, when I ask for half a dozen he encourages me to buy a dozen on a special offer.  Does he not know that a mile down the road in Sainsbury’s mad people are forming queues before seven in the morning for the privilege of kicking and trolleying each other out of the way to strip the shelves bare of eggs, smashing a few in the process?  I feel for the hens, laying on a double shift.

He has no toilet paper though.  Except, hopefully, for the use of the staff.

On balance, because of the impossibility of social distancing, Croydon had been a mistake.