Check-out queues are no more. But the downside…..

I did another of those Joe Wicks’ PE workouts yesterday morning.

The world is going to hell in a handcart, and there’s me doing bunny-hops in the living room in my nightie.

Joe Wicks is a young personal trainer who landed himself a job touring the UK’s schools offering PE lessons. But the lockdown scuppered his plans, so he’s decided to live-stream his PE classes for free instead. 

This engaging young man wants to enhance the lives of children of all ages by encouraging them to exercise while the schools are closed. So, I hear you ask, why was this particular middle-aged woman leaping about in her living room on her own, catching imaginary stars and pretending to be a kangaroo hopping around a creek? 

It turns out the classes have been attracting a much wider audience than Joe ever expected with hundreds of thousands of people worldwide tuning in every day. I even bonded about it with another middle-aged lady in the Waitrose queue yesterday when she told me that she and her husband were also taking part.

That was another first: the Waitrose queue. Not the queue for the checkout, but the queue to actually get into the store. It snaked around the car park and back via the lifts, everyone standing two metres away from one another while they waited patiently to be let in. 

There was a one-in, one-out system to avoid shoppers encroaching on each other’s space inside the store. We British do love a queue and the atmosphere was actually rather jolly. Shopping hopefuls shared their lockdown experiences: the man in front bemoaned the fact that despite having more free time on his hands, he was unable to indulge in his favourite pastime of watching the sport on TV. Everything has been cancelled due to COVID-19 – the football season, the Grand Prix and no doubt Wimbledon and the Olympics will follow suit.

We bonded for a while and when he was finally up next to enter the store, he beamed at me happily and announced: “I’m in pole position!” That poor guy really does need his sport.

No-one seemed to mind the wait. We’re all in lockdown, after all, so an hour spent standing outside in the sunshine and seeing new faces was actually a bit of a treat. And there was a huge sense of achievement when we finally did make it into the shop. Perhaps we were channelling our hunter-gatherer forefathers who were forced to wait patiently for the arrival of their prey before fending off competitors and killing and eating it.

While we weren’t exactly impaling mammoths with home-made spears and tearing them apart with our teeth, we probably experienced a similar adrenalin rush when hoovering up the odd avocado and triumphantly pouncing on that last pack of spaghetti.