‘So sorry, I forgot to put my mask on!’

It finally happened, Trudy made the ultimate pandemic faux pas and forgot to take a mask with her when she left the house. By Christine Manby

(Illustration by Tom Ford)

It had to happen at some point. Almost a year after masks first became mandatory in shops in the UK, last Friday morning I accidentally went out without one.

The sun was shining as I set off for my daily sanity stroll around the Common. I was busy turning over in my mind how to rejuvenate the PR campaign for #Yne, the root-based non-alcoholic vegan beverage that makes you feel good until you drink it. By the time I was on the home straight, I thought I had nailed the first few lines of a new press release. I was making a note on my phone as I walked into Waitrose to pick up a pint of milk. It was only as I reached the dairy aisle that I felt suddenly, inexplicably “wrong”.

A young child, sitting in a trolley, was staring at me. I smiled and stuck my tongue out to make him laugh. His brow wrinkled in horror.

“Oh no,” I exclaimed as I realised my mistake and my hand flew to my bare chin just as the child’s mother turned from the milk cabinet and clocked me. It’s possible that the child’s stare had not been judgmental. The mother’s glare definitely was.

“Sorry, sorry,” I muttered. “Forgot to put my mask on. Little bit distracted this morning…”

I scrabbled in my bag, heart racing in my chest as I realised it was worse than my simply having forgotten to put the mask on. I turned that bag inside out on the tiled floor before I accepted that I didn’t have a mask with me at all.

Just a day earlier, that bag had been full of masks. I cursed the moment of zealous hygiene that had led me to throwing away the half dozen disposable face coverings I’d been carrying around, gathering dust, crumbs and fluff, for months on end. Now it contained only my wallet, my phone and – inexplicably, but typically – a sports bra. What peri-menopausal madness had led me to dump all those vital masks but leave a sports bra in the zip-up pocket?

As the mother, who was wearing a Boden issue mask to match her dirndl, continued to shoot lasers from her eyes, I clamped the sports bra to my mouth and made a dash for the supermarket door without the milk I’d come for.

I was red with shame as I burst back through the automatic doors into the fresh air and sunshine, but it wasn’t just the shame that came from having breached a societal norm. I was ashamed for having reacted so frantically. Why hadn’t I just told Mrs Boden that I was exempt, grabbed my milk and headed for the till? The guard on the supermarket door hadn’t bothered to stop me going in. Indeed, over the previous months, I had noticed a number of people in the store, mask-free and unmolested. Some wore lanyards explaining their exemption but most didn’t.

I hovered in the car park, wondering if I should just go back in and get the sodding semi-skimmed. I was double-vaccinated, had recently done a lateral flow test – negative – and used hand-sanitizer like it was going out of fashion.

But no. I couldn’t do it. I could not break a rule.

When I was at secondary school, in my first year of GCSEs, my group of friends went through a period of fairly hardcore shop-lifting. Rosie Barnett worked out that if you went to the Miss Selfridge concession in our local Debenhams in a big enough skirt, you could easily walk out with another new skirt underneath it with no fear of being caught. The assistants in the Miss Selfridge concession were fairly lax about the number of items you took into the changing room and never bothered to count them on the way out.

I was green with envy at the new wardrobes Rosie and my braver friends were soon amassing but when it came down to it, I just couldn’t join in their klepto-spree. I started hyper-ventilating at the very thought of stealing something. My cheeks went crimson. There was no way I would be able to stash a tube skirt under my regulation school A-line and walk out of the department store all nonchalant like Rosie. She looked angelic even when swigging from a bottle filled with vodka during double maths. “It’s water, Miss. I’ve got a tickly cough.”

To this day, I am the kind of person who starts sweating when they hear a police siren. I have no idea what broken part of my brain thinks I might have forgotten “that time I killed someone”, but I live in a state of chronic pre-emptive guilt.

Thus without a mask, I couldn’t even go into another shop to buy a mask. Instead, I carried on home and returned to the supermarket half an hour later wearing an old mask that I’d had to fish out of the bin. To make things worse, I’d carefully snipped the mask’s elastics before throwing it away (to protect wildlife), so I had to tie knots to make new loops. It made the loops very tight around my ears, which were pulled forward in a most unflattering way. Still, it seemed worth it to escape the judgement of another yummy mummy convinced I was out to kill her child with a deliberate sneeze.

Having picked up the milk, I went to Boots to buy a new pack of disposable masks and immediately stashed three in my bag’s zip-up pocket along with the sports bra, wondering as I did so when the day will come that it will be the people wearing masks who seem like the odd ones out again.