The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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9:09am on Thursday, 26th March, 2020:
Anecdote
On this morning's constitutional I passed 2 lorries, 11 vans, 37 cars and 9 people (plus 3 people in the shop, where I intended to buy milk but they had none).
The SUVs weren't in evidence today, but BMS, Audis and Mercedes were out in force — 12 of them from when I started taking note of cars' make, which was about 10 cars into my journey (and I started taking note because I'd realised there seemed to be more of them than yesterday).
Two of the people I passed were inconsiderate. One was a man with a dog, who was standing on a piece of grass between the pavement and the road while speaking on the phone. There was no pavement on the other side of the road. A few steps away from him was a side road where he could have waited out of everyone's way, but no, he pretty well forced anyone getting close either to pass within 2 metres of him or to walk out into the middle of the road and hope a car didn't come. I did walk out into the middle of the road. A truck came. I had to retreat, whereupon he noticed my existence, snapped out of his phone-enamoured reverie, and started to walk towards me. It was only when I started walking backwards that something tickled his memory about social distancing and he stopped. I walked into the middle of the road again and got past.
The other inconsiderate person was a builder (he could have been one of the ones I saw yesterday), who was also on the phone. He wandered onto the pavement as I and another man were approaching, then proceeded to wander around in a random, unpredictable fashion such that his coronavirus collision box was much larger than two metres in radius. He was oblivious to anything but his phone. I walked out into the middle of the road and passed both the builder and the other man (who was older, slower and had a dog). After that, the other man walked out and overtook the builder. Fortunately, no vehicles came. The builder remained unaware of his surroundings and continued to pace around in an uncertain fashion reminiscent of Brownian motion.
More research is necessary.
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Copyright © 2020 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).