Dreaming of the ‘white ones’even during very black times

It has been a very strange few weeks for most of us and it’s quite natural to feel more than a tad uneasy when disease threatens and once again, we realise that the little thread keeping body and soul together is indeed very fragile.

Last Thursday evening as I popped into Dunnes Stores on the Headford to do a regular weekly shopping – it’s convenient and on the road home – there was a sense of not being in a comfort zone any more with crowded aisles and just a sense of impatience as trolleys edged into each other here and there.

It was as if the Beast from the East, the week before Christmas and a looming supermarket strike had all come together with staff frantically to replenish the shelves with stock. One employee summed it up quite succinctly: “We have plenty of stock but we just can’t get in on to the shelves fast enough.”

Strange shopping idiosyncrasies have also emerged over the past couple of weeks, the most notable of which has been a semi-psychotic desired to fill all empty portholes in dwellings with toilet rolls. I could do a bit of research into some deep-rooted psychological reason for this but there’s probably better ways to spend my time.

Having grown up in an era in rural Ireland where toilet paper wasn’t an issue simply because toilets were few and far between, it really does seem mind-boggling this infatuation with storing up hundreds of rolls of the white stuff. Some supermarket trolleys had enough toilet rolls to ensure ‘clean bottoms’ well into the 2020s!

One of our childhood rhymes of national school cast ridicule on people who ushered into the toilet paper era and went as follows: “When Adam was a boy, Before paper was invented, He wiped his ‘ass’ with a bit of grass, And walked away contented.”

That of course is one of the lighter asides to what’s going on in Ireland and across the world at present but mankind is no stranger to the spectre of plagues and diseases threatening whole swathes of our population.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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