A year on from the first coronavirus lockdown, who is still hoarding tomatoes and toilet paper?
With the Andrex puppy nowhere to be seen, Will Gore recalls empty supermarket shelves with a shiver
Bog roll. True, there are other things too that spring to mind when I think back to the onset of the first lockdown a year ago. There was the genuine fear of catching coronavirus; the sense of loss at the prospect of not seeing friends and family; and there was the horror at the thought of extended home-schooling. If I’m brutally honest, there was also a little glimmer of exhilaration at the extraordinary nature of global events – a product of years spent in a newsroom, I expect.
Ultimately though, it is the anxiety over the chronic shortage of loo paper that nags away most clearly when I recall those strange early days of the pandemic. If you weren’t anxious about it, then you were probably the source of the problem.
I cannot, I confess, claim total innocence in the panic-buying stakes. I never went mad, but I certainly bought more tins of soup and chickpeas than I would have done in normal times; and it’s probably true that we didn’t need to maintain a perpetual, three-packet stash of red lentils. As for the random tin of peaches I picked up 12 months ago, well, at least it won’t go off any time soon.
Then, lo and behold, a couple of weeks after lockdown began, a trip to Tesco yielded gold: a nine-roll packet. Never mind that it was a brand I’d never heard off
Clearly though, the hoarding of toilet rolls got beyond a joke, even if they are intended for use by arseholes. A checkout supervisor in the local supermarket told me in November that a customer had popped in asking if he could return the vast reserves he’d stockpiled in the spring because he no longer needed such quantities. He must have had some cheek.
Last March, with the country sliding into lockdown and shelves emptying, I feared the worst. As luck would have it, I’d bought a packet of a dozen loo rolls shortly before that first wave of panic set in. But with the whole family at home, I wondered how long it would last.
We ordered the children to be conservative, and to follow the rule that had long been applied by our son’s infant school: two sheets for a wee; six for what my late grandad called a ‘big job’. When the kids asked us what would happen if we ran out, we pointed to their flannels and did our best not to gag at the prospect.
For the first time in my life, I cursed the French for their attachment to the bidet and their consequently sparkling derrières. I also thought back to my own school days and the astonishingly ineffectual lavatory paper we’d been forced to use: the crinkly kind which was fine if you wanted to trace your bottom, but which was fundamentally ill-suited for cleaning it. Still, when needs must... I wondered if baking paper might suffice.
Every time I went to the shops, I looked longingly for the soft eyes of the Andrex puppy, but his comforting glance was nowhere to be seen – no doubt shut away in darkness, along with bread flour and tinned tomatoes in some other blighter’s store cupboard or garage.
Then, lo and behold, a couple of weeks after lockdown began, a trip to Tesco yielded gold: a nine-roll packet. Never mind that it was a brand I’d never heard off, or that the paper looked as rough as a sanding block. I grabbed it while I could, paid at the automatic till, and dashed out into the street, breathing hard under my mask and feeling like I’d carried off the most outrageous heist.
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It wasn’t long afterwards, however, that supply-chain issues began to be ironed out and loo paper shortages eased. On my next weekly shop, the shelves were – if not exactly bursting – at least sufficiently full in the loo paper department to give some reassurance that the entire country was not about to go down the pan.
As a result, my emergency packet has remained squirrelled away for the next desperate times: a symbol of my inability to stand apart from the collective panic; and reminder of how peculiar the last 12 months have been. A year to flush from the memory if ever there was one…
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