What’s Essential?

Monday 20th April

Trying to decide the other day whether it was safe to venture outside the house, without risking being impounded by the local filth, I found myself consulting government “guidelines” on what constitutes “essential shopping”. For some of us the phrase is, in any case, tautologous. Why would any sensible person want to go into a shop and be exposed, even at the best of times, to people padding around in their bedroom slippers or delinquent sales assistants, unless there were a definite need; but one recognises, of course, that for some people shopping is a pleasurable activity in itself, like masochistic sex, or torturing estate agents. For that reason, one sees what motivates these guidelines, though as soon as you start to read their content, you realise what a dreadful impertinence they represent on the Government’s part. I do not care how many COBRA meetings they convene, I cannot see that ministers, and definitely not their sociopathic and behaviourally-challenged scientific advisers, have any insight on what it is or is not essential for someone else to buy. For one person, it might be the most essential thing in the world to get your hands on a bottle of 20-year old single malt; for another half a dozen cannisters of air freshener or an electric whisk. What happens, of course, is that these people end up inserting their own prejudices into the selection of essential  items, so that our shopping baskets will, over time,  all end up looking like theirs, full of cat food, sanitary towels and bleach.

At first I thought it might be otherwise, since the first item I encountered in the guidance was baby powder. This struck me as unusual, but not necessarily unattractive. I have no idea what gruesome processes of mastication and industrial drying are involved in turning babies into baby powder, and personally I have always gone without. Then again, it would certainly spruce-up one’s self-isolation to sprinkle some of this concoction on your cornflakes or stir it into a banana daiquiri. But then my wife put me right and I find that my point is made. What use would I, a man in his fifties, have with baby powder? I still have my teeth and consider it extremely unlikely, even in this crisis, that anyone is going to deposit a mewling infant on my doorstep and insist that I offer it dinner.  Besides, surely wet-nurses are among the protected professions, allowed to travel through the plague.

I dare say that the official answer to this would be that I don’t have to buy baby powder and that guidelines are only guidelines.  The problem with government guidance, however, is that once it has worked its invidious way into our lives, our immunity to it becoming government dictat is breached. It can only be a matter of time before we are all forced into wearing nappies and chewing rubberised teats. For some men in their fifties, this may be an appealing proposition, but I am not of their number.