Diary of a Shopkeeper, 28th March 2020
Saturday is always the busiest day in the shop. People crowd in to stock up for the week ahead, or choose special cheese and wine for a convivial night with friends. Laughter rings out. There’s excited talk about the good times soon to be enjoyed.
Not today. This Saturday the shop is dark and quiet. The only sound is the hum of the cheese fridge. No clinking of bottles. No ringing of tills. No customers and no shopkeeper.
Exactly a week ago, refilling the wine shelves just as we opened, I started to feel a fuzziness in my throat, like I’d swallowed a Brillo pad. Strange, I thought. Then I coughed. Was I getting a cold? I put down the box I’d been carrying and took a deep breath. Except it wasn’t very deep, as the top third of my lungs seemed to be filling up with warm, scratchy fog rather than clean, cool air. I coughed again.
A single word popped into my head: coronavirus. Was this what it felt like? How had I caught it? What happened next?
That last one was easy to answer. I called out to my assistant at the far end of the shop, ‘T., pull down the blinds, take in the signs. We’re closing. Right now.’
We’ve stayed shut for a week now. I’ve been self-isolating at home in Stenness. My symptoms remain but have got no worse. Every member of staff in our three shops is also self-isolating. I feel a certain guilt that out of the dozen staff in our business I was the first to show possible symptoms of the virus (without testing I’ll never know for sure.) I was responsible for the shut-down of my own business.
But I also know it was just a matter of luck. Working in a shop you come into contact with all kinds of customers all day long: locals, visitors, young, old, some hale and hearty, others shuffling and coughing. You get used to the fact that you pick up every bug going.
Usually you soldier on, washing your hands even more than usual, having a rest in the storeroom if you feel wabbit halfway through the afternoon, looking forward to a hot toddy and a restorative sleep. But this was different. This was serious. With Covid-19 stalking the land, an invisible but deadly threat, there was no option but to close.
This is particularly frustrating because, as a food shop, we could have been delivering essential supplies to folk stuck at home. As soon as we’re fit and well, and as long as we’re still allowed to by the authorities, that is what we’ll do. We’ll start delivering again, stepping up something we’ve always done to a new level at this time of need.
Until then, The Orcadian have asked if I would write a weekly column about the ‘thoughts and concerns of a local business-person hit by the pandemic.’ I’ll give it a go.
POST SCRIPT
After seven days in self-isolation, the symptoms had faded away. I was lucky: if I had had the virus, it was a very mild case. On the tenth day I went back to work. But not work as it ever had been before. The blinds remained pulled down, customers were told to stay away - and did.
From Friday 3rd, shop manger Lauren and I reinvented Kirkness & Gorie as a delivery-only business. Since then we’ve been extremely busy making up dozens of orders each day and delivering them around the county. We’re glad to be back at work, and reconnecting with our customers.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 2nd April, and others will appear weekly as long as the crisis goes on. I intend to post the diaries in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance.
Both Lauren and I, and all staff at The Longship and Kirkness & Gorie, remain well, and send you our best wishes.