For weeks now, the media have been predicting that London was about to be assigned to Tier 3 of Covid restrictions. They were wrong, of course. The news, when it was delivered on Saturday evening, was a lot worse. From Thursday night, London enters, if not a lockdown as previously experienced, something pretty close to it.

What this means for Tigger with regard to work, remains to be seen. What we do know, among other facts, is that “non-essential” shops will close completely and only food shops will be allowed to open. Pubs and restaurants must also close except for takeaway service.

From now until Wednesday, we continue under Tier 2, giving us a run at the new regime, so to speak.

This morning, we performed our usual weekly shopping run at Sainsbury’s. We arrived to find a long queue of waiting shoppers but even as we joined the queue, it started to move, quite fast, towards the entrance.

The shopping done, we dragged the shopping trolley home, passing by Jusaka. They were closed. They have been open so intermittently of late that we were not surprised. From Thursday, they will have to operate takeaway only, assuming they manage to open at all.

To cheer ourselves up, Tigger proposed that we go out for lunch, while we still can.

The Castle

The Castle in Pentonville Road serves food on Sundays and its menu includes a vegetable Wellington, suitable for vegetarians. As we had not reserved a table, we were unsure whether they accommodate us. They could; and gave us the corner table that we had last time we ate here, the very table I was hoping for.

A view from the table

By the time we arrived, the place was fairly full and every few minutes more people arrived, hoping for a table.

Vegetable Wellington

The food arrived quite quickly. There was a mixture of vegetables, including “wild mushrooms”, some enclosed in a crust which is the defining feature of a Wellington, with a small, crispy Yorkshire pudding on top.

This is the last time that we shall be able to eat out until the new lockdown ends. This has been set to last until the beginning of December, though it could be extended if the rate of increase of Covid infections has not been reduced sufficiently.

The imposition of lockdown is bad news for the retail sector and for business in general. Tigger is scheduled to go into work on Monday and Tuesday this week. She will presumably learn then what is to happen to her job in the next few weeks.

I wish I believed that the measures taken by the government will be effective and will break the back of the pandemic. Unfortunately, I have no such faith. As long as we practise a stop-go policy of lockdown followed by easing of restrictions, the disease will keep reasserting itself in waves. As with the UK, so with Europe and the rest of the world. Our only hope of beating the pandemic conclusively is the production of an effective vaccine but that seems as far away as it ever was and it is not at all certain that it is even possible to create one.

In the evenings, after supper, we often watch a film, courtesy of the Internet. It suddenly occurred to me that all of these films are in a sense “period dramas”, because they are all set in a pre-Covid world that no longer exists. Will the real world one day again come to resemble the world of those films? I somehow doubt it. Even if we manage to beat the disease down to manageable levels, it will always be there to haunt us and to threaten a resurgence, perhaps in a new form.