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Post date: 09-May-2020 18:48:30
Poor Crystal was very shaken up by a bad experience that she had at the supermarket today. It was her day off - the first that she'd had for weeks - so she did the shopping while Eddie looked after the kids and tried to catch up on some work. As a healthcare worker, she's allowed to go to the front of the queue, so it's a lot quicker for her than it is for Eddie. A young man shouted at her that she was jumping the queue and then, after they were both inside he came right up to her and leaned over her to reach one of the shelves. She asked him to move back and observe the social-distancing rules, at which he gave her a mouthful of abuse and then followed her all round the shop, deliberately keeping only a couple of feet away at most. She didn't like to complain to the staff, so she just put up with it and got out as soon as she could.
When we told Lucy about this during our zoom meeting this evening, she said that they'd had trouble of the opposite kind. The four of them had gone to the supermarket together. The others waited outside - keeping the correct 2m distance from everyone else - while Lucy went round and did the shopping. She brought it out in a trolley and they all helped to carry it home. But one of the other shoppers shouted at them for being too close together. She wouldn't accept that they were all in the same household. She made such a fuss that one of the security people from the store came over and questioned them. Then the police turned up - presumably someone in the queue had rung 999! They got it all sorted out in the end, but it was a very unpleasant experience for them.
I can't help thinking that race may have been a factor in both incidents. If Crystal had been white or if Ibrahim and Marian hadn't been so clearly not blood relatives of Lucy and Dom, would their persecutors have acted in the same way?