On Friday, the music was blaring from one of those handcarts offering CD’s for sale. The vendor had parked the contraption in the north eastern area of Regent and King streets and was offering what was a popular and in the circumstances, poignant Destiny’s Child’s ever popular Christmas tune… “Doesn’t it feel like Christmas?” Two policemen on foot had stopped close by and appeared to be readying themselves to urge him to ‘move on.’ However, somehow, it seemed that they sensed that, in the circumstances, the tune was making just the right kind of statement. This was Christmas and people simply have to find a way to put behind them the scourge of the pandemic. They opted to leave him on the corner. “Doesn’t it feel like Christmas?” … one of the more ‘catchy’ of the contemporary Christmas tunes, seemed altogether appropriate in the circumstances. It was as if it was seeking to infuse the ‘Christmas Spirit’ into people who were yet to make up their minds regarding the answer to that question. The atmosphere underscored the impact that the single most serious health-related malady of our time has created. In more ways than one, the coronavirus has been a turning point in our existence. It has closed schools, brought business to a shuddering halt, created a sense of paranoia about hygiene and sanitation, and compelled changes in myriad other ways. Christmas, however, is likely to be the acid test of the extent to which COVID-19 has dislocated our usual pattern of behaviour.
Last Friday was not a fair indicator. Setting aside the blare of ‘Doesn’t it seem like Christmas?’ the response of the people within earshot was hard to discern, the masked faces told you little or nothing. If anything, those masks concealed much that there is about Christmas… the animated expressions of Guyanese anticipating ‘the most wonderful time of the year’, the intensity of the shopping experience, the mixed-up expressions of the children being taken along for the ride, and the ‘bump and crush’ of competing for the limited pavement outside the stores to which everyone was seeking access. How to ‘do’ social distancing inside those crowded business houses in two weeks and a bit before Christmas is going to be a particular challenge for those concerned.
You could easily, at your own risk, have left COVID-19 outside if you had ventured into some Regent Street stores. The business owners, it seemed, were determined to press this year’s Christmas shopping into a kind of ‘make up’ for the coronavirus-related ‘up and down’ trading that has caused them to disperse less than essential staff and to close and open their doors to government edicts that still coincide with the ebb and flow of the virus’ casualties. Our intrepid business owners, however, have long proven that they are made of sterner stuff. Friday appeared to be a kind of all-out trial run. They had opened their stores, it seemed, in a manner that is perhaps best described as possessing a sense of resurrection. They were not about to be permanently interred by the pandemic. The shoppers monopolising the pavement on Regent Street, east of Orange Walk were seeking access to that stretch of small stores that offered everything from ceramic mugs and cheap decorations to items of furniture at prices which, when all is said and done, were considerably lower than the hire purchase arrangements that applied elsewhere – affording less immediate spending but greater cost in the longer term. Heading back towards downtown Georgetown, a brief walk through Bourda Market revealed an aisle of meat stalls, under-occupied by customers. It was as it ought to have been. It’s still too early to do the seasonal shopping for meat. Further west, however, a vendor displaying a small mountain of ginger was doing a brisk trade though one couldn’t really tell whether the animated group of buyers were shopping with ginger beer in mind or whether this was simply a continuation of the enormous increase in demand for ginger that had coincided with the local excursion into ‘home remedies’ used to combat COVID-19.
All along the Regent Street pavement, the jostling throngs, the stores rivalling each other for patronage, the music carts blaring Christmas tunes and the vendors, their voices seeking to have them rise above the shoppers bumping and boring as they went by, seemed to be aimed at one determined collective effort to summon the spirit of the season. The masked faces, however, gave little away. It was difficult to gauge the myriad expressions that lay behind them, though, if you looked hard enough you thought you saw a steely determination to hold on to ‘the most wonderful time of the year ‘whilst looking over shoulders in an effort to determine whether, creeping up on us was a pandemic that, for the better part of a year now has made its disposition unambiguously known… it is still not ready to go away.
Outside Bounty Supermarket on Regent Street, two women were tugging periodically at face masks that appeared to be blatant irritants whilst speculating to each other about the chances of there being another lengthening of the curfew hours before the season entered ‘full swing’. They were disagreeing – one contending assertively that “nothing can’t stop Christmas” and the other cautioning that such loose talk had to be balanced with the increasingly alarming official COVID-19 victim count and the seeming popular indifference to the statistics.
As we drifted away from the corner where a handful of taxi drivers had gradually eased themselves into the discourse between the two women, a pair of policemen engaged a young woman who had emerged from a taxi not wearing a facemask. We did not loiter to witness the repercussions.
