Today an especially powerful vortex had captured two flimsy plastic gloves and was whisking them at speed past my nose then under my feet, time and again. I succeeded in catching them only when both got snagged by a low bush.
Plastic gloves are one of many unforeseen side effects of the new coronavirus, Covid-19.
Plastic gloves
Lightweight, transparent and single-use, these things are now issued at the entrance of every supermarket and you must wear them, along with your face mask. Some shops have already run out of plastic gloves and give you a plastic bag bearing a stencilled drawing of a hand. Whoever thought this was a good idea should try opening a plastic bag to put their tomatoes in while wearing a plastic bag on each hand.Worse, these gloves and bags regularly escape into the wider world. Treacherous little devils, they jump from supermarket disposal bins, slip from people’s grasp as they take them off, fly from municipal litter bins or simply wait to be thrown to the pavement. They’re an entirely new form of environmental pollution.
Beards
How the virus has achieved this I can’t imagine, but the fact is that male chins of all ages are breaking into blossom. They range from timid two-day stubble to full-blown, rebellious foliage. At a rough estimate the number of beards and moustaches walking around town has at least doubled, perhaps quadrupled.
Closely related to this effect is its exact opposite in which the upper skull is shaved down to a blue-tinted, shiny dome with intriguing knobbles at the back. This is easier to explain: when you’re faced with trimming your own hair because all hairdressers are in lockdown, shaving it all off is the most reliable technique.
Queues
Spanish culture tends to view queuing as a freewheeling concept that relies on knowing who arrived just before you did. You ask the most likely person if they are el ultimo (gentleman) or la ultima (lady). That has become far more challenging now that everyone is required to distance themselves from everyone else by at least two metres. Queues can snake backwards along the street towards the shimmering horizon. In more constricted spaces such as the covered market they disintegrate into random placements intermingled with all the others who are just hanging about, waiting for their wife, waiting for a table at the café, passing an hour or two in the (distant) company of others.
And what does two metres of distancing look like in the real world? Nobody’s very sure. Children were briefly seen waving long-handled brooms to poke the person in front, a rough measure, but parents seem to have decided this has too much fun potential and I haven’t seen any brooms lately.
Humiliation
The law dictates that café tables must be disinfected between every set of clients. This is fine and reassuring until it’s your turn to leave, when you look behind and see the waiter spraying your table and chairs to eliminate your personal contamination. Now we know how dogs feel when their owner stoops with a plastic bag to clean their deposits from the pavement.
Microsoft Windows
Suddenly it’s not giving trouble any more! Nobody calls you at home from Microsoft Support to tell you they’ve detected a problem with your computer, even if you’re not using Microsoft at all but Apple! The virus has convinced all those dedicated support teams in India that their welfare is more important than yours. If your computer is on the point of cracking up yet again, you’ll just have to sort it out for yourself.
Flu and colds
There aren’t any. We’re all so clinically sanitised, distanced, untouched and untouching that the bugs have nowhere to go.
Smoked herring
There isn’t any. We personally depend on smoked herring - kippers - for our government-recommended weekly dose of oily fish, but try finding it on Amazon these days. The world stock of canned kippers is now stacked on the shelves of private kitchens, emergency rations for when the virus wins and people have to barricade themselves into their houses against the wild-eyed hordes outside.
And many more…
Once you start to think about it there are endless side effects of this novel situation. One of them is plain old boredom, which means people have been desperately looking for new ways to occupy the kids or themselves. Like, for example, writing lists of unforeseen side effects of the virus.
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