Susan is sure the people in Number 25 are leaving their house for non-essential purposes. They went out twice yesterday without bringing back any groceries.
Altogether, lockdown has revealed Susan’s street to be harbouring more crims than an episode of Peaky Blinders. She sits by her front window, believing herself invisible behind her net curtains, with binoculars to hand and the local police station on speed dial. When the man next door puts his labrador in the car and drives away, her shrivelled heart swells: she will follow him and film him in the act of illicit canine leg-stretching. She tails him instead to the vet but she isn’t discouraged; she’ll get him next time.
When a visitor parks at Number 14 and goes inside, Susan expletes a barrage of tuts like a furious wren and grabs one of her pre-printed messages to attach to the windscreen: ‘People will die because of you. The police will know.’ Had she ever made the effort to befriend her neighbours she would know that the occupants of Number 14 are frail and rely on family members to deliver food and medication, while those in Number 25 are volunteering at the local hospice.
Susan never leaves home without her tape-measure, with which she accuses total strangers of breaching social distancing rules by two-thirds of an inch. In Tesco she reports a muddled old man for defying the one-way system and is most indignant that the manager lacks the statutory powers to clap the miscreant in irons.
The rest of Susan’s time is spent on Facebook telling everyone not to do things they would never have done anyway, being endowed with more brains than an egg sandwich. She hasn’t felt so righteous since she was appointed school monitor and took it upon herself to patrol the bike-sheds for smokers and snoggers. Back then it never occurred to her that life was jollier for those who join in rather than dob in. It still doesn’t, not when her neighbours wave and chat to each other from their doorsteps and back gardens, nor when she ghosts the street WhatsApp group where they exchange offers of help and loans of toys and tools. No, not even when she gets a call from the local police station regarding a complaint they’ve received about a non-essential journey she made, following her neighbour to the vet.
© C P Jenkinson 16/04/2020
For more Corona Caricatures follow the links below, or for a full list click the Archive at the top of this page.
To receive email notification of future posts please fill in the form on the Homepage. No marketing or spam, promise.
Thank you for reading and please share!
Corona Caricatures 