We left for Sheffield just after lunch and returned under cover of darkness. It wasn’t planned that way but there seemed little point in rushing about. There had been reports of South Yorkshire Police stopping people to see what they were doing but we only saw one police car on the whole journey. I think that in reality they have plenty of work on without stopping motorists to see if we are breaching advice on travel.

It was interesting that as we left there were a lot of unfamiliar cars parked down our street, which clearly indicated that some people were entertaining visitors. But there should be no visitors on 26th. You can however, it seems, stay in rented accommodation overnight on 24th and 25th as part of your journey plan. This means that travelling home on 26th is within the guidelines, so today’s journey was almost within the guidelines.

As we passed Sheffield the car parks at Meadowhall were crowded, with thousands of people travelling to shop and, I suspect, get closer than six feet. I know of at least one person who is planning to travel there to shop in the next week, so I’d like to know how officialdom would be able to justify telling me my journey was unacceptable but a trip to a toyshop is OK.

I offer this information not as an excuse for my breaking of the rules, but as an example of the actual situation when someone researches the Covid Pandemic in twenty years.

It’s not the first time I’ve broken the law. I have, in the past, driven too fast, accepted payment in cash (which I may have forgotten to note down properly) and sung drunken rugby songs in public. I am, like many other people, neither a shining light of moral rectitude or an habitual criminal. By the time this blog post is used as an historical document all these things may well have gone the same way as the dodo. I saw someone caught in a speed trap today (they are getting very efficient), cash is out of favour during the pandemic and rugby is under pressure from people worrying about concussion. Like coin clipping, recusancy and frame breaking these are all crimes that may be impossible 20 years from now.

That concludes my tales of Christmas Lockdown