Let me start this post by stressing that I am not anti-mask. I don’t feel very comfortable wearing one, but I understand the reasons and am quite happy to conform – in principle. But today I had a bit of a meltdown in Sainsbury’s.
I’ve been wearing a scarf over my nose and mouth for shopping since the rules came in (and I’m still avoiding going into shops as far as possible anyway). When my daughter came to stay, and we were going out more often, she gave me two fabric masks that she had spare. They’re both in horrible flowery printed fabric, which I hate, but that’s probably why they were the ones she didn’t want either.
A few days ago I read about a study which tested the different types of face covering, and found that properly made fabric ones are the best, better than just a folded scarf like the ones I’ve been using. So I took the less hateful of the two to Sainsbury’s this morning, and put it on before I went into the shop.
The problem I had was that I couldn’t get the elastic to stay behind my left ear – and also my glasses kept falling off. I remember I had the same problem (with the elastic) the first time I tried to put it on, when my daughter was here, and she helped me with it and got it to stay on. This morning I was on my own, and had no idea what subtle thing she’d done to it to make it work. It was bad enough walking around the shop, but when I got to the self checkout it all went horribly wrong – I think partly because I was looking down – it kept popping off, and my glasses kept falling off, and I was trying to hold it on with my left hand and scan and put the stuff in the bags with just my right hand – a couple of times it came off altogether, but what could I do?
Writing this now, it occurs to me that I often have problems with the self checkout, so you might ask, why don’t I go to the staffed checkout? But the answer to that is that if I’m going to make an idiot of myself I would rather not have someone watching me – I know that the self checkout doesn’t make me invisible, but at least I don’t have to acknowledge and interact with another human being when I’m f*cking up the simplest tasks and being that crazy old lady that nobody wants in their shop.
And this is the thing that will never go away. There isn’t any way round it, no solution to the problem of me being me. I can try to hide – and that’s easier now than it used to be, now I can just hunker down and avoid going out into the world of rational human beings and mature adults, the world where the normal people are.