About 2 weeks ago, when the panic buying started in the UK, I decided to purchase some toilet rolls and a few other things from Asda stores online for a click and collect order. I thought probably by the time the date came round for collecting these items they would be out of stock. By my big surprise, I received an email on Sunday morning, telling me that the toilet rolls were in stock and ready to collect, but the other items, yellow split peas and a couple of other things were not.

Anyway, it meant I went out to collect those and there is a dedicated parking space, only two, for people that come to get their items through click and collect. But the one space that was left had people standing in it queuing for the store. This is what’s happening now, we have probably never seen this happen in this country. People queuing to get into grocery stores. So I had to signal them to say that I was needing to get into that space. Well the looks I got were quite incredible.

Once you are in your space, there are two ways of letting the staff know that you are there to collect your shopping, either call them or identify where you are on the app. Well I had never done this on the app previously so tried calling them and of course I got a message to say they weren’t able to connect me. So I tried the app and kept fingers crossed that they would come out with my shopping.

Next to me was another car, who had their boot open, so when the shop assistant came out with their shopping, they could just load it in, shut the boot and off they go. That was a good idea I though and got out of my car to open the boot, but by this time all the people in the queue were queuing up at the back of cars in the car park including my car. They were literally 10 cms away from my car. So I had to ask one chap to move on, so I could be 2 metres away from him whilst opening my boot. When I called out to him and called him, sir, he got quite a shock and said that nobody ever calls him sir unless it’s the police! Anyway opened the boot and waited. When the car next to me got their shopping loaded in their car, I called out to the assistant, gave him my name and asked if he could get my shopping.

This whole episode was ridiculous really, we’re all treating each other as zombies, walking on the planet with some deadly disease, which of course we could have. It was in that moment I realised life would never ever be the same again.

Michael de Groot