20th March 2020

Last night was strange. I had my hours at the pizza place I work at cut because of a drop in demand earlier in the week. On the way in, everyone on the virtually empty train sat two seats apart. As I arrived a friend texted me to say he saw Liam Gallagher lost and sad in a Waitrose full of empty shelves.

My eight-hour shift was cut down to five. Three of us delivery guys on. The night started quiet. So I settled down, cramped up against a cold wall, on a pile of pizza boxes in a drafty basement for five hours of minimum wage escapism via a Michael Moorcock fantasy novel.

But from about 6:30 the orders started coming in and didn’t stop. Out on the roads, there was no rush hour. The odd bus had two or three people on it but the vast majority were empty. After the empty busses the most frequent vehicles were ambulances, then police cars and vans. Every time I went out I saw two or three, in total, maybe 25 ambulances, the sirens were constant. I started to recognise them. I saw the same one rush up and down St Pauls Road in Islington at least five times.

It was a mizzling, murky night. The kind of thin rain that makes it impossible to see properly, especially on a motorcycle. My glasses, visor and mirrors were all thick with condensation. Apocalypse weather. It wasn’t a particularly cold night, but if you ride a scooter in it for four or five hours straight, it starts to feel very cold. I was all over the place, up to Kentish Town, and across to Hackney. The empty roads meant I could mess about on the scooter, see how fast I could get it wherever there was no speed cameras (or I happened to know the speed cameras weren’t working). Got to 55mph down Camden Road. Silly, but you want to get the job done as quick as possible on the off chance you’ll get to warm up a bit in the pizza place before the next order’s ready, so you ride fast. Telling what time it was was difficult. By eight pm I would have sworn it was more like two or three am. Funny, you realise as a Londoner, how much information you read from the traffic. A bit like how they say 90% of communication is non verbal, in London 50% of that must be auto related.

Every pizza was an hour late. It was chaos in the shop, they guy handling the orders couldn’t cope. Lots of mistakes. No one expected it to be half as busy. Today is Friday, I’m dreading my shift. Every time I picked up a pizza I could see the orders piling up, so I told the guy to stop taking them. Didn’t listen.

All the restaurants and pubs are still open. Boris told us not to go, but hasn’t shut any of them, so obviously a few people are still going to. Most of the restaurants were empty apart from a few chains, like Franco Manca, that particularly appeal to morons. The posher the area, the quieter it was, round my way, Shadwell, Whitechapel, life is carrying on, people don’t have much option. But in the more well to do areas, where people are more likely to have what David Graeber describes as bullshit jobs, things are quieter. Jobs that don’t really need to be done can be done from home.

One restaurant on Holloway Road was practically empty but had at least ten Deliveroo riders waiting outside it all night.

The more pizzas I delivered, the more earnest and sincere the platitudinous thank yous and take care nows got and the more I resented the people ordering them. And obviously the gratitude wasn’t reflected in the only thing us delivery riders actually care about, tips. If you know it’s a risk for me to be doing this, and how much of the virus I must be spreading, then don’t order the fucking pizza. I’m still doing it because I don’t know how else I can pay the bills. Even though just this pizza job isn’t enough to cover them anyway (I also rely on bits of freelance work, and am doing a course, but all that’s stopped now, my only option is to keep on). I worry if I stopped working, when the government finally offer support, I wouldn’t be eligible because I had given up work voluntarily or something, even though I know it’s not safe to carry on. The only thing that’s certain is that they’ll worm out of actually helping ordinary people like me.

I worked late to finish off all the orders. My last was harrowing. Like something out of the young adult fiction section. It was a no contact delivery, which actually doesn’t really mean anything, in an area where all the buildings have ‘you are not alone’ notices from a local church pinned by the door. A voice croaked over the intercom asking me to leave the pizza on the doorstep of the flat. As I did I heard a muffled, strained “thank you” fight to be heard between rattling coughs as a woman in late middle age peaked out from behind a curtain over a window in her front door. I dropped the pizza on her door mat, waved and got out. I dread to think what will happen to her. I hope she’s ok.

I messaged the pizza place group chat about what happened and said it was starting to feel like too much of a risk. The boss just said “wash your hands.”