Sunday 5th April 2020

Everything went well in Waitrose – or well enough. No queue and management of distant trolleys better. Wasn’t rammed this time as last Saturday by a man who said, ‘Chill out’ when remonstrated with. Got everything home and wet-wiped all the packets with anti-bac wipe. After conference with Anthony Mottram (in Prague, in bath) yesterday, I’m going to upgrade to washing all packets with hot water and soap from now on. Royston says it’s getting more and more dangerous. Anthony said I could also wash bananas in soap and water.

So easily 40 minutes unloading, quarantining and sanitising the shopping, then out again to the butcher. Just to get a chicken and some eggs. Well, the butcher licked the bag to get it open. I managed to get out of having the bag and just took the chicken in a paper wrapper into my own bag, with the egg box. Plan – to bleach wipe the paper wrapper, then get the chicken out and into a dish and the fridge. Throw away the wrapper. All going quite well, until I reached inside the bag, thinking the chicken was in a further plastic bag inside. But it wasn’t. There was just one of those useless sheets of plastic partly covering it. Guess what! I’d touched the chicken with en-bleached fingers. The only hope was to wash the raw bird in the sink, whereupon I was immediately plunged into a chicken-contamination nightmare on top of the corona. Salmonella leaping all over the place, onto the drainage area, the door knobs.  Very nearly ended up howling on the floor but somehow managed to keep going.

Yesterday was even worse. The baker had a mask but fiddled with it just before serving me. He put in a blue plastic glove to pick up the loaf but which hand? Likely to be the same hand, but who could be sure? Upon return, got the loaf onto the bread board, which happens to be made of stone, without the paper touching it. Huge risk that the bread would bounce on the floor – then what would I do? But it didn’t. I agonised for ten minutes as to the next steps: throw loaf away and get another? Wash it with soap and hot water? The battle was really between war-time parsimony and corona-threat. Plus we’re only supposed to go out shopping the barest min. And can I bear it when I do? The only real hope was to cut all the crust off much of which had to be done mid-air to avoid contamination by contact with crusts already cut off. When I think of all that You Must Eat Your Crusts insistence in childhood and the awfulness of cutting them off. It then took another 20 minutes to de-contaminate the bread area. Which I was determined to do before my afternoon rest.

As a final precaution I’m only having that bread as toast, although I did eat two slices dangerously raw yesterday. Toasting is an extra anti-viral zap.

So that’s another two weeks to wait for the consequences if any. Tomorrow is the two-week anniversary of when the same bakery (but not the same server) handled money then touched the pizza. But Merle Barr said he didn’t. We’ll know by 4pm tomorrow.

My Loaf after Anti-Viral Procedures