We’ve been continuing with our daily walks and feel very privileged we can be ‘let out of the cage’, so to speak, to get a bit of exercise. Chatting to people back in SA they say no one is allowed out to just go for a walk, that must be awful!
The local park is quite the place to walk and we often see people walking their dogs.
Dogs here are very much loved and nearly all of them live indoors, as part of the family. The other day we saw from a distance a dog jumping over a fence to fetch something.
I was hoping it wasn’t one of the ducks waddling round. As we got closer, I saw the dog was actually fetching a small stuffed bag and running to put it into kind of a cloth bag.
I was curious and struck up a conversation, from a safe distance, with the dog’s owner. He told me she was a Labrador, still very young, and being trained to be a gunner dog. I’ll be honest I still wasn’t too sure what that was. Would it be a dog who carried guns? Or a dog trained to sniff out guns?
Not being here very long I still have many horrid memories of guns in SA being used to kill and maim people.
Turns out it was something quite different. Her owner goes on pheasant shoots and she is being trained to fetch the shot pheasant and return it to the cloth bag, which will then be picked up by the “gunners” before leaving for home.
A little further along the park path another man was sitting on a bench watching the world go by and his bull terrier was lying on the grass.
“He’s been running and now needs to rest, he’ll lie like this for about half an hour before he gets up and pulls me up from the bench,” the man laughed.
Morning delivery
Another wonderful thing about the UK, you can have a milkman deliver milk in glass bottles to your doorstep, where it’ll sit until you come out and take it in. How cool is that?
My daughter’s milkman has a dairy farm, so you know your milk is fresh. He’ll also deliver fruit juice and eggs. Surprisingly none of your order disappears from the doorstep!
Mad dash shopping
I went shopping one morning this week, just made it for the 8am to 9am slot for the over 60s and NHS (National Health Service) workers. Taking a trolley was quite an experience and thank goodness I had a one pound coin on me.
The one pound coin needs to be slotted into a hole in the shopping trolley handle and low and behold your trolley becomes unhooked from the others.
First test passed and I joined the queue to enter the shop. One by one we were let in like cattle, obviously until the amount of shoppers allowed in store was reached, and then the doors were closed again to wait for shoppers to exit before more were let in.
Very strict measures and staff members walk around and check the shoppers are keeping the required two-metres apart.
In the dairy aisle, I wanted milk and yoghurt but there was an elderly man taking his time to find what he wanted. The poor guy, he’d probably been sent by his wife to do the shopping and couldn’t find what she wanted.
I waited patiently for my turn to get to where I needed to be and another shopper came from the other side of the aisle, also waiting for the man to make his choice and quite frankly buzz off on his way!
In the end he chose two types of yoghurt (bet he’ll be in trouble when he gets home) and the other shopper graciously said I could go first. Civilised shopping at its best! I could see she was in a hurry, but let me go first.
And so my shopping continued in the same fashion until I’d bought what we needed and then I joined a very long queue to pay. I was praying I wouldn’t be sent to the self-service checkout, how the heck would that work?
Thankfully I wasn’t and was called to the cashier to pay. All the items I’d purchased flew through the check-out at an alarming yet organised speed, and suddenly, as I stood staring into space, all my purchases had accumulated at the end of the cash-out counter and there was no one packing them for me!
I hurriedly chucked them into my trolley, paid and thank goodness found a packing shelf where shoppers can then pack their own shopping into their shopping bags.
Next time I’ll be better prepared and who knows, I may even solve the self-service check-out issue.
That’s it for this week. And at this point I guess I would say, shop till you drop – but I doubt this will be happening for quite a while, so instead I will say – stay safe, stay at home, and wash those hands!
Julie
VIEW GALLERY:
