Maybe this is the blitz spirit

[oursin]

I'm not sure if this is actually true - some of the things going around have a touch of the urban legendary about them - but people policing other people's shopping baskets for 'non-essential' items?

I don't think this is so much going back to muttering about 'having dealings with spivs for black market goods' as 'entering into somewhat dodgy exchange of favours [we do not say what those favours are] with butcher/grocer/local farmer over rationed items'...

Also people dobbing other people in for being out and about when they shouldn't (if they are) - a bit like people getting very officious about other people's blackout and quite possibly working off longstanding grudges and feuds by grassing them up, with or without cause, to the ARP wardens...

Or muttering about people with large houses who somehow have not got any evacuees billetted on them...

Subset of #VeryBritishProblems, I fear.

Okay, there have been reports of the police being just a tad heavy-handed - Stephen Kinnock targeted by police for visiting father, Neil - but, on the other hand, if they have time on their hands for this sort of thing, we must suppose, I suppose? that they are not having to deal with actual rioting in the streets, looting of supermarkets and the entire breakdown of law'n'order that so many dystopian works have led us to anticipate?

Rather than people being so bored stuck isolating at home that they are sticking beans magnets up their noses?:

'Now, my dears, don't let baby fall out of window, don't play with the matches, and don't put beans up your noses.'

Though I find that is in Little Men rather than Little Women and thus possibly not as well known as if it was in the latter.

Comments

[cynthia1960]

Supposedly the magnets up the nose bit was somebody trying to invent something to stop touching your face.

Please assume Frankie Howerd voice here

[oursin]

So he shoved things up his nose ... riiiiight....

Re: Please assume Frankie Howerd voice here

[tree_and_leaf]

No, he more or less admitted he shoved them up his nose because he'd given up on his inventing and got bored. "(It's just like clipping pegs to your face," he explained).

[alithea]

I don't know about shopping policing but I've already left one of the local help groups because people are trying to police how many times their neighbours leave the house and asking if they should report the single mother who lives opposite to social services or the police for having her boyfriend round...

[oursin]

I think they have been prioritising
Is Your Journey Really Necessary?
over
Be Like Dad - Keep Mum
and
Careless Talk Costs Lives

[nineveh_uk]

Idiots, given the fact that IIRC the guidance says that a household can be located in more than one place.

I must sign up to my local group, though I won't be very useful for a while.

[legionseagle]

Yes, our head of family law has been all over the media explaining that point and basically saying that people shouldn't be using COVID-19 as an excuse to be arsey about custody.

[pameladean]

Little Men was the one book by Louisa May Alcott that I did not get from my mother when I was eight -- she had a lovely blue-covered set of hardbacks, but apparently had disliked that one and given it away to a friend. I didn't read LM until I was in my thirties. Oddly, I did read Jo's Boys, but it took me forever to realize there was a missing book. Anyway, despite this gap in my reading, "Don't put beans up your noses" was widespread in jocular admonitions in my childhood. I wonder if Alcott just used a common stricture rather than inventing it.

P.

[oursin]

I suspect it was a phrase in common usage.
Yet, even when similarly warned, they didn't drop baby out of the window or play with matches - or did they???

[kore]

My mother's little brother (she was born in like 1930, he was a few years younger) DID ACTUALLY put beans up his nose, and she got blamed for it and he had to be taken to the doctor. So this would have been around....1939? 1940? Maybe it was just irresistible to young bratty kids when hard beans were more of a staple in kitchens?

[rmc28]

Younger offspring put gravel up his nose a few years back: https://rmc28.dreamwidth.org/556354.html

[perennialanna]

Beans, peas, beads, Playmobil pieces, small Lego bricks, anything they can find. Normally they get over it by the time they get to school, though not always (we had to send a Reception child off to A&E for bead-extraction on her very first day this year).

[carbonel]

The song "Beans in my Ears" was part of my childhood (sung both by my mother and at summer camp), and I assumed it was one of those trad songs that had been around forever.

But it turns out it was actually written by Broadside editor Len Chandler. Date of creation isn't given in the Wikipedia entry, but it became a hit in 1964 when it was covered by the Serendipity Singers. I would have been eight years old then.

On the TV show 9-1-1, there was a recent episode with a call where a child has managed to get a toy car stuck up his nose. And then there's a follow-up call that evening where the father couldn't figure out how the boy could possibly get that up his nose, so he tried to see for himself, with the predictable result.

[legionseagle]

Our local facebook group has already had The One With The Dog Playing In The Communal Gardens When Everyone Knows Only Houses Not Flats Are Allowed Dogs and The One Where Someone Was Seen Handing Over Papers and Shaking Hands Across the Carpark. And there was a TAU crusing past the Coop a couple of days ago.

[oursin]

The people across the road were actually moving house this morning but we managed to control ourselves and not ring the hotline for informers. ('Is that sideboard keeping the removal men 6 ft apart or not?')

It sounds as though there'll be a right run on lace curtains when this is all over as the present ones will be seriously damaged by all that twitching.

[legionseagle]

The shaking hands one was particularly egregious because I gather it was some doctor having his papers certified so he could work here or something like that.

People policing other people's shopping baskets for 'non-essential' items

[kathmandu]

That kind of thing is sadly chronic in the USA. In more normal times it tends to be people shopping with food stamps (federal food-subsidy to the very poor) and having, say, a box of cake-mix in their basket, and bystanders who are sure that the very poor don't deserve to have birthdays or cakes, ever, and isn't this some kind of crime?

[twistedchick]

A friend in London told me that someone who lives in the next building to his was taken in by the police for a strong talk because he had been out of his home too often; the friend suggested that the police had been tracking the movement of cell phone IDs.

[davidgillon]

I'm immediately tempted to fasten my cellphone to the nearest cat....

[davidgillon]

A disabled friend was criticized online for noting that as someone who is extremely vulnerable* and therefore self-isolating for months, they had just received their first government food package and was surprised how healthy a mix there was in it. Someone else, who claims to be disabled, attacked them for 'accepting charity', and said they and their 92yo mother would accept no such thing. The 'blitz spirit' was invoked to imply they should be ashamed of themselves.

* Worth noting that of all my online wheelchair using and other disabled friends, they're the only one who managed to make it onto the extremely vulnerable list.

[oursin]

POINT THAHR, MISST
Sigh.
It is not a competition, srsly.

[bibliofile]

Especially considering the specific values of "win" in that context.

People. Geez.

[lilysea]

I think there is a meaningful difference between

muttering about people with large houses who somehow have not got any evacuees billetted on them...

[which is "I am suffering, so why aren't you also suffering?"]

versus

calling the Police or a hotline to say

"In order to prevent people dying, the law currently says no more than one visitor is permitted at a house at a time, and my neigbour is having a houseparty of 50 people"

I'm sure there are some people enjoying being busy-bodies about nothing

but in Australia we are desperately struggling to stop people having house parties and crowding together at crowded beaches

even as our COVID cases go up and up every day

and we've resorted to Police patrols and drones and on the spot fines

and I don't think people trying to report legitimate threats to social distancing are being unreasonable

the key word there being legitimate - you should only report events or behaviour that are obviously dangerous,

like someone who is supposed to be self-isolating for the mandatory 14 days after returning from overseas/interstate breaching quarantine to go to the shops [if you're self isolating, you're supposed to get deliveries, and if you can't organise it yourself, the government will organise it for you, because they REALLY want you to stay home for 14 days after you arrive in Australia or a new state in Australia]

or gatherings of >10 people.

The following are all cases where someone dobbing someone in potentially saved dozens of lives.

[The man who drove from Kardinya to Broome had travelled more than the entire length of Britain, and was going from a major city with more than 300 COVID cases to a remote town with few hospital beds and an extremely vulnerable Aboriginal population with very high levels of high blood pressure; diabetes and kidney disease and very low access to medical care.]

"From 1:30pm last Tuesday, anybody arriving in Western Australia has been required to self-isolate for two weeks under a border closure designed to combat the outbreak.

But police said a 73-year-old Geraldton man who arrived in the state on Thursday had failed to self-isolate, alleging he was seen outside his home.

Police said residents of the man's retirement village saw him talking to others in close proximity, travelling to the local shops and riding his push bike in the area.

A 26-year-old Kardinya man has also been charged with failing to comply with emergency requirements after entering the Broome town site as a non-essential traveller.

The man was allegedly denied entry to the Kimberley region on Friday before police found him in his vehicle the following evening.

A 61-year-old man from Carlisle was charged on Friday for failing to self-isolate after returning from overseas, with police allegedly catching the man on his way to the beach."

[choirwoman]

Do the UK regulations really say that you're only allowed to buy necessities? What about picking up some luxuries when you're in the shop anyway? Does anything non-essential have to go bad because people can't buy it, even if they want it and can afford it and are standing right next to it in the shop?

Anyway, small luxuries are necessary. When my cousin and I were living together in one room and had no money for anything, we made a point of having ONE luxury item every Sunday (a half-bottle of cheap wine, or 50 grams of ham, or a bar of chocolate, that kind of thing) in order not to go mad from unrelieved austerity.

[legionseagle]

What they say is:

Restrictions on movement

6.—(1) During the emergency period, no person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse.

(2) For the purposes of paragraph (1), a reasonable excuse includes the need—

(a)to obtain basic necessities, including food and medical supplies for those in the same household (including any pets or animals in the household) or for vulnerable persons and supplies for the essential upkeep, maintenance and functioning of the household, or the household of a vulnerable person, or to obtain money, including from any business listed in Part 3 of Schedule 2;

(b)to take exercise either alone or with other members of their household;

(c)to seek medical assistance, including to access any of the services referred to in paragraph 37 or 38 of Schedule 2;

(d)to provide care or assistance, including relevant personal care within the meaning of paragraph 7(3B) of Schedule 4 to the Safeguarding of Vulnerable Groups Act 2006(1), to a vulnerable person, or to provide emergency assistance;

(e)to donate blood;

(f)to travel for the purposes of work or to provide voluntary or charitable services, where it is not reasonably possible for that person to work, or to provide those services, from the place where they are living;

(g)to attend a funeral of—

(i)a member of the person’s household,

(ii)a close family member, or

(iii)if no-one within sub-paragraphs (i) or (ii) are attending, a friend;

(h)to fulfil a legal obligation, including attending court or satisfying bail conditions, or to participate in legal proceedings;

(i)to access critical public services, including—

(i)childcare or educational facilities (where these are still available to a child in relation to whom that person is the parent, or has parental responsibility for, or care of the child);

(ii)social services;

(iii)services provided by the Department of Work and Pensions;

(iv)services provided to victims (such as victims of crime);

(j)in relation to children who do not live in the same household as their parents, or one of their parents, to continue existing arrangements for access to, and contact between, parents and children, and for the purposes of this paragraph, “parent” includes a person who is not a parent of the child, but who has parental responsibility for, or who has care of, the child;

(k)in the case of a minister of religion or worship leader, to go to their place of worship;

(l)to move house where reasonably necessary;

(m)to avoid injury or illness or to escape a risk of harm.

(3) For the purposes of paragraph (1), the place where a person is living includes the premises where they live together with any garden, yard, passage, stair, garage, outhouse or other appurtenance of such premises.

(4) Paragraph (1) does not apply to any person who is homeless.

So you need to have a "reasonable excuse" for leaving the house and there's a non-exhaustive list of "reasonable excuses." But there isn't a bar on you buying non-necessities as well as necessities if that's why you're in the shop. Unfortunately, the Government guidance on this point is actually misleading.

See this article for clarity on the controversy

[silveradept]

It sounds like the same people who have been recording and spying and trying to otherwise make themselves the arbiters of everyone else's business are rather pleased to have an official excuse to do it and people to tell it to, instead of having to keep it to themselves.