Coronavirus: If we’re finding new ways of working, why can’t banks? – Bill Jamieson

Some businesses are struggling to survive but others are rushed off their feet, writes Bill Jamieson.

Bill now alerts his village to the arrival of food deliver vans (Picture: Bill Jamieson)

We are in a living nightmare for businesses large and small and especially for tourist firms across Scotland – hotels, restaurants, cafe bars, B&Bs – all are up against it and struggling to survive while they wait for government aid to arrive.

But from a thousand spaces we never imagined, new ways of commerce are springing up and businesses and communities adapting to the lockdown. Staff at a small café near where I live are rushed off their feet supplying 100 meals a day for delivery.

And yours truly is having to act as digital point man, alerting the village by email, text message, Face Time and Zoom to the arrival of the mobile bread and fish vans outside the village hall.

What I find inexplicable is that our small local nursery has been forced to close but the plant sections of supermarkets remain open for business. Plants and shrubs are now having to be thrown away.

It is also disconcerting to hear there may be a shortage of fruit and vegetables due to the sharp drop in immigrant workers from Eastern Europe.

When we have soaring unemployment here, why can’t we offer a tax holiday for those prepared to help out with the harvest? This is surely not a time to be discouraging local food production!

Meanwhile, I have grown weary of those ingratiating emails from banks and finance companies telling me they are all hard at work in the service of customers and asking if there is anything they could do to help.

Well, there is actually, since you ask. Send round a bag of onions, a dozen eggs, baking flour, a pack of KitKat bars – a bottle of Johnnie Walker and a case of Merlot. That would do nicely!