That’s how many they are letting into M&S and Waitrose. There are queues not vast, maybe 6 or 7 people, mostly keeping a safe distance, chevrons neatly laid out, I expect to see a braking distance message. At Morrison’s there are no queues and the shop had quite a few customers in it. Enough that we felt more uneasy than we should have done. Again most people seemed to be social distancing, but some were oblivious. What is wrong with these people? I could come up with many theories, but it depresses me to consider how selfish people can be. We managed to find potatoes and were out swiftly paying by card. Which brings me to something else, the use of cards. Everyone is paying by card, or at least significantly more than we’re previously. So, is this an accelerated death knell for cash. After this is over I could see more providers of goods and services switching over to being cashless. And the punters themselves will be in the habit of only paying by card. Maybe we are witnessing the demise of cash? So where does that leave the homeless? There are a lot in Brighton, the sun, sea, tourists, liberal attitude, drug culture. It all contributes to their presence, but if you beg you can’t accept plastic, you need cash. They must be suffering more than anyone else, because the streets are relatively empty, so there are even less people giving money, to top up their miserly government allowances and handouts. The frug dealers and addicts are still at it and they seem to be even more visible. Perhaps because they are some of the few people still on the streets. The seagulls are hungry, there are no tourists leaving copious amounts of detritus on the beach and streets, so the seagulls are finding it hard to scavenge. In East Street yesterday a seagull approached me and Nina demanding food, it reminded me of when my children were babies. We were the only people around and it was probably puzzled as to where its ready supply of food had gone. We left it unfed squawking a loud resentful call.
The Olympics are off, so are the Euros, Glastonbury, the Brighton festival and any other event you can name. I love football, but at the moment it seems trivial, even pointless. If somebody had suggested three months ago that the Euros would be postponed all hell would have broken loose. But now, nobody bats an eyelid, there is hardly a ripple in the pond of life. Football has become once again what it always was, a game, that’s it nothing more. It’s like tiddlywinks, or rounders, a game played by people to briefly enable us to escape from our lives. Perhaps when things are normalised the world of football will realise that it isn’t that important.
should be relatively easy for the polizei to identify and pick up the drug dealers if they are now the only ones on the street. There have been articles in the evening standard or was it the Guardian about the gradual move to a cashless society so all the beggars in London are having a hard time of it within no one with cash in their pockets these days.
I hear that Stevenage Town footballers are helping with deliveries to vulnerable people in the community. I wonder if the premier League footballers will only get 80% of their ridiculous salaries now that there is no turnstile income to the football clubs. Doubt that premier clubs will be forced into administration but smaller clubs might well get reduced income, just like employees on low wages, and self employed will only get 80% of their wages from the government. I hear that people are much more selfish about their freezers full of panic buying food and donating less to food banks. But then again its kind of symptomatic of this government having cut benefits so heavily that food banks had to exist in the first place.