Boris may have overestimated his electorate's intellect

I had today booked off as holiday, making this the final day of a four day weekend.  It was going to be another cold day, so my plan was to stay inside as much as possible.

I started the day by carrying on with the beeswax rendering process that I started yesterday. The four disks of wax were broken up and melted together in hot water. Then they were, again, poured through a sieve in to a container and left to cool.

The cooling would take a good few hours, so I joined 30% on an expedition to Redditch to pick up a few "essentials".  She headed in to the super market and it was agreed that I should visit the DIY store next door for compost ...

It all seemed to start reasonably well. The store had laid out a queuing area and were restricting numbers entering the store. I was initially confused as to where the queue started*,  but eventually located the entrance to the queueing lane.  It was as I waited that things started to go wrong ...

Another potential customer wandered up and took up position in the queue no more that a meter behind me.  He seemed oblivious to the fact that he had breached my personal two meter exclusion zone as he surveyed the fine vista that is B&Q's carpark.  Fortunately the queue had started to shorten and I was able to increase the distance between us.  This odd cat and mouse game continued for the five or ten minutes of queueing. On occasions he seemed to observe social distancing and at other times he seemed not to be aware of how close he was to me.

I was soon permitted to enter the store and was able to shake him off my tail. My shopping trip went reasonably well and I soon had a trolley loaded with compost ... and this is the point when matters went awry once more.  

The store manager had laid out a one-way system to the tills to enforce social distancing.  Unfortunately, the stupid fucking idiot, had deemed a 5' wide hardware aisle as the best point of entry to the tills.  As I turned in to the aforementioned aisle I was confronted with three elderly gentlemen wandering up and down enjoying the wide variety of screws, nails and other assorted fixings on display.  There was no way I could pass down this aisle until they moved on.

These elderly gents were totally oblivious to the fact that they were blocking the only access to the tills and a queue started to develop behind me as I waited and hoped in vain that they woud develop a modicum of social awareness.  Eventually a helpful assistant appeared, moved the old farts on and the log jam was removed.  She also asked me to do her a favour and respond to the "How have we done today" feedback request, by pointing out what an idiotic arrangement had been put in place.**

The Government's advice has now changed from "stay at home" to "stay alert".  Based on my experiences today,  I think a significant portion of the population have been intellectually defeated by the specific instruction to stay home. How the fuck does Boris expect them to handle the more nuanced "stay alert"?

Let's see how the R number responds.

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* or is that where the queue ended? This is a puzzle, one starts to queue at the queue's end, but finish queuing at the queue's beginning. So, do I join a queue at it's end or beginning?

** Her actual request was focussed on the mental capacity of the Store Manager and a lot funnier.