The fuel crisis is almost enough to drive me back to drink

Trudy Tyler’s WFH sanity stroll is disturbed by angry motorists and a neighbour protecting her poultry. By Christine Manby

(Tom Ford)

Ten days into Sober October and I still haven’t given in to the siren call of the Sauvignon Blanc, though goodness knows life in BoJo’s Britain has been throwing up plenty of reasons to reach for a drink. There’s a febrile atmosphere in SW12 as the petrol crisis continues. Whenever there’s the slightest whiff of unleaded, the queue from the Sainsbury’s petrol station on Nightingale Lane stretches all the way back to Clapham South tube. To give you an idea of how long that is, it takes five minutes to cover on foot. That’s five minutes walking alongside a queue of angry drivers leaning on their horns and threatening murder to any hapless idiot who tries to turn across the queue to, I dunno, get into their own driveway or something selfish like that.

Never have I been so grateful that I can live without my car, though I have been getting in and turning on the engine every morning to check that no one has siphoned off my petrol overnight. There’s still half a tank, which is enough to get me to Mum’s in the event of the complete breakdown of society, though, to be fair, the apocalypse would probably start in her village, which split into two warring factions after the Great Garden Show Incident of 1984. There was a brief period of peace while they were all campaigning for Brexit.

It’s not just petrol that’s in short supply. On Tuesday, one of my new WFH days, I took my usual sanity stroll in the direction of Tooting Common and bumped into my neighbour Brenda. She was dragging two enormous wheelie cases.

“Been somewhere nice?” I asked.

“Waitrose has chicken,” she said, in what seemed like a non sequitur until she lay one of the cases down on the pavement and unzipped it to reveal six chickens and four poussin nestled between bags of ice.

“Gosh,” I said.

“Get it while you can. I don’t believe a word the government says about the logistics crisis being solved in time for Christmas. I’m stocking up now.”

“You must be expecting a lot of people for Christmas dinner.”

“No. Just my sister, like always.”

“Big chicken eater, is she?”

“I’ve bought this extra chicken so that when the cash machines go down – and with this government in charge, you can be sure that they will – I will have something to barter for other essentials.”

“Have you got a big enough freezer?”

“I’m having a new one delivered this afternoon. If I were you, Trudy, I’d get down to Waitrose right now. Winter is coming,” she added portentously.

I tried to laugh it off but Brenda had me rattled and on my way back from Tooting Common I did get some money out of the cashpoint and bought the last packet of skinless chicken fillets from Waitrose. I put them in my freezer next to the chicken fillets I’d scored at the beginning of Lockdown One. That’s Christmas sorted.

About an hour after I got home, the peaceful air of the street was rent asunder by much blasting of car horns. I thought for a moment that the queue for the Sainsbury’s petrol station must have been diverted down our side road. Peeping around my curtains, I was greeted by a mythical sight.

A HGV – an actual HGV complete with driver – was blocking traffic in both directions. Dismissive of the horn-blaring minions, (obviously he was thinking, “They’ll be clapping for people like me by Christmas”) the driver got down from his cab. Clipboard in hand, he knocked on Brenda’s door. He must be delivering her new freezer.

He was. The horn-blasting continued as the driver let down the ramp at the back of the lorry and rolled Brenda’s freezer to her front garden. It was enormous. It was the kind of freezer in which you could easily hide a dead family of three beneath six chickens and four poussins. How was he going to get it through Brenda’s door? The answer, which soon became obvious to every one of my neighbours who were secretly watching the situation unfold, was that he wasn’t even going to try.

No matter how much Brenda protested, the HGV driver was not going to take the freezer as far as her kitchen. Neither was he going to remove the old freezer the new one was replacing. Sauntering out of my front door on the pretext of putting out my recycling, I heard Brenda say, “But I paid extra for removal of the old one.”

“You’ll have to take that up with the shop,” the driver said. “I’ve got other drops to make. There’s medical equipment in here,” he added, jerking his thumb towards his vehicle. Brenda couldn’t argue with that.

The driver was soon on his way again. It took a while, as the cars that were queuing in front of him backed up to let him by. The petrol station queue made it difficult for them to back on to the main road. I joined Brenda in her front garden to see if there was anything I could do to help. I decided that even had we been able to move the freezer between us, it would not go through the door frame. Brenda had measured the gap in her kitchen. She had not considered the width of the hall. It was a problem made worse by the fact that Brenda had two large suitcases of fast-defrosting poultry to rehome.

I suggested that she put a message on the street WhatsApp group, asking our neighbours if they could each take a bird. Brenda did not like that idea. She quickly listed the number of people who still owed her for groceries picked up in Lockdown One. “I won’t see any of those chickens again.”

The solution, she decided, was to set up in the freezer in her front garden. She ran an extension cord out through the top of her living room window, which could be opened wide enough to let the cord out but not to let anybody in.

When I asked whether it would be safe to leave all that valuable meat outside, Brenda emerged from the depths of her house with a thick chain and padlock to keep the freezer shut. She added that she’d had CCTV installed and thus would catch any would-be thief on camera.

“I can see all the way to your front door,” she told me proudly.

I wasn’t quite sure what I thought about that, but at least it would save me checking my petrol hadn’t been pilfered every morning. Silver linings…