Lockdown diaries: I’m one of the lucky ones

I am one of the Covid-19 lockdown lucky ones. After enduring forced leave under house arrest, I am back at work – and I actually go to work in Industria, Johannesburg.

No disrespect to She Who Must Be Obeyed, but it’s a delight to be able to get out of the confines of our little house and small garden.

I can only watch so much TV or YouTube and even the drive to work is a welcome distraction.

And I don’t mind being stopped at the inevitable police roadblock where the N12 West becomes Main Reef Road. It gives me a chance to interact with other people and with one exception, the police officers have been courteous and diligent – and I have the required permit because the media is an essential service.

Hell, they even smile and tell me to stay safe. And I saw a slim female officer … she must be new.

Apart from the miserable sod who was alone in his police bakkie in the east of Joburg and who thought he was from the Spanish inquisition.

He made me jump through hoops and I expected at any minute to be thrown into the back of the van and put on the rack in some foreboding cop shop until I admitted I was a charlatan.

There are some cops who are self-isolating, but for all the wrong reasons.

They are the speed cops, easily identified by their white sedan parked at the side of road, a warning signal to those in the know that cameras are ahead.

Hello, it’s lockdown. There is a trickle of traffic. Are the Metro Police so broke they have to rely on speed traps?

I counted a dozen vehicles at most travelling in the same direction as me yesterday, compared to the scores I encountered before lockdown. Yet there they were.

I even saw speed cameras on the M2, near Wits University.

You’d think the cops could be more gainfully employed elsewhere … like busting Pakistani business owners who sell cigarettes. No, seriously, there must be something useful they can do.

But you have to laugh because humour is hard to come by these lockdown days.

I smiled yesterday when I came to work because there was a new guy taking our temperatures as we clocked in. He didn’t hold the digital scanner close enough and waved me though with a reading of 33oC. If that was my core temperature, I would be dead from hypothermia.

Perhaps I have a ghost writer?

Hugh Eley.

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