Valerie King

All Right - Who Panic Bought the Quails Eggs, Then?

Oh what larks, Pip. There was very nearly community singing down our way last week. Admittedly it was I who suggested it and – true – it was a threat, but the atmos in the shops of Cirencester has been full of what I imagine to be Blitz-type spirit, although with no klaxons, diving for the nearest shelter or sticking of tape to windows it must be admitted.

It was relaxed queues, chatting to the person behind you and swapping hilarious stories about what the children called you when you explained that if school should be closed they would be simply working from home and might not consider themselves to be having an unexpected few days off...you wouldn't have thought theyd have known adjectives like that at their age...

I am referring, of course, to the Recent Petrol Shortage Unpleasantness.

We were lucky – we bought a new car last Sunday, since yet another of our luxury sheds had been turned into an attractive, briefcase-shaped piece of metal – and the first thing we had to do was take it to the nearest garage for a fill-up. It being a larger vehicle than we've had before, the look of shock on the face of my husband having paid for the thing was almost immediately superseded by both a rictus and a nervous tic when he had finished putting petrol into it. When he fell back, wan and boracic, into the driver's seat and told me how much he had just forked out for a tankful, the customers behind us were forced to wait while we stared disbelievingly at each other for a bit, before he applied foot to pedal and removed us from the sedate environs of Cheltenham at some miles an hour – "We need to go back next week to get the speedo needle fixed, by the way..." Since he has said this about every car we've ever bought and we haven't yet gone back to any purveyor of Kwality Kars to have them repaired, I am forced to conclude that Henrik employs some sort of speedo-needle removing gadget at the point of sale, on the basis that if we ever get stopped by the law he will be able to explain that he couldn't know how fast he was going and ergo he couldn't have been speeding. Well it's worked so far.

The point to note in the above paragraph, other than its qualification for inclusion in the Bernard Levin Sentence of the Year Competition, is that we bought some petrol. There was no queue, there was no rationing, and there was no instant price-hike on behalf of a greedy management.

We were therefore lulled into a sense of false security and set off for the capital, to lunch with friends in the West End and deliver a chocolate cake to mates in Hackney, some spotty and some not, Chicken Pox having recently broken out in East London by way of local entertainment.

The traffic was peculiarly light and in my charming innocence I opined that there must be some special sort of football match on, or something. Daft tart.

On the way home, catching the evening news on the radio, the lead item was about the refinery blockades and how people would be affected – and how quickly. I did little more than make a mental note to check my own car for fuel the next day and perhaps get a spare gallon for emergencies.

By 9am on Monday morning Cirencester was dry. We're not short on garages in this exquisite Cotswold market town and I can only assume the Exquisite Cotswold Marketeers had spent Sunday night creeping out in their nightgowns to fill up their cars, their spare cans and possibly their teapots with petrol. Since we both had fuel and I operate locally, I decided not to worry. I did decide to buy a few extra loo rolls, but that was about it.

By Monday afternoon, however, the news was full of people panic-buying everything they could lay their hands on – according to both radio and television people would be dropping like flies in the streets inside 24 hours and all medical facilities would self-destruct.

It didn't happen here. On Tuesday, with more refineries being picketed and no petrol going anywhere, I decided to go berserk and buy an extra bag of bread flour and two pints of semi-skimmed milk for the freezer. I risked a car journey to our largest supermarket and was astonished to see full shelves and a normal complement of shoppers buying regular trolley-loads of weekly shopping. On Wednesday there was plenty of milk and bread. On Thursday, having ascertained that Bristolian friends would still come for dinner at the weekend, they having been perspicacious enough to buy a diesel-operated car and therefore awash with fuel, I shopped early, to be on the safe side. No problem.

The friendly queues, by now, were full of dark mutterings about government spin doctors who were obviously trying to talk things up into national hysteria in an attempt to turn the populace against the picketers. I did happen to notice that a bank of freezers was empty but even as I spotted this, a metallic voice snapped over thetannoy "Everyone to the back door please – the freezer delivery has arrived." And a few seconds later "I meant all the staff. Would customers please return to their shopping, thank you."

The pictures on the news of empty bread shelves had manifestly been taken by reporters who had been instructed to wait until stocks had gone before moving in with the crew. They must have asked the storesmen to be kind enough not to re-stock the supplies until they'd finished filming, is all I can think, since at no time wasany local supermarket bereft of yeast products.

I'm afraid the rush on quail's eggs was my fault. I thought they'd make quite a nice nibble for our dinner party on Saturday.

So I warn any spin doctor thinking of having an Autumn break in the Cotswolds to avoid Cirencester like the plague. I have a frozen quart of semi-skimmed milk in my possession and I am not above using it to beat him or her around the head with, for having engineered a crisis where there manifestly wasn't one.

Disgraceful tactics – and completely transparent. Locals were forced to make sure they had petrol because public transport here is very thin on the ground and they probably didn't overly care for having to collect it at dead of night. Other than that there was no panic of any kind.

Incidentally...when I've finished with you (and it won't be for some time) perhaps you'd care to explain to a moody fifteen year old why school isn't out.

And the best of luck.

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