WALKING home from the park and I spot new To Let signs in several windows along the main street.

Over the past three or so years, Govanhill in Glasgow has been undergoing an interesting shift, in many different facets but, most noticeably, in the change of retail demographic.

To put it bluntly, the hipsters moved in. To put it more expansively, the community became an attractive place for independent coffee shops to open up, for new restaurants, bars and an organic supermarket.

Although, to be fair to the organic supermarket, it was an extension of a social enterprise that had been operating on the south side for a long time before it was trendy to do so.

From an area that people went out of their way to avoid, we ended up with regular queues outside our Vietnamese place, pizza place, taco place, new pub, Italian restaurant, new bakery, several new cafes and vegan cake shop.

This was on top of an already well-stocked array of Lebanese, Kurdish, Pakistani, Indian, Polish, African and Slovakian food places. Good luck with your BMI, is all I can say.

Just before lockdown, I was planning a feature on the change in the area, whether it was food-generated gentrification and what it meant for the community.

Now, of course, those queues are no longer.

There no easy popping out for a coffee or a cake or a freshly baked loaf of bread. Locavore, the supermarket, is still open with careful social distancing in place and has set up an online ordering and delivery system using its electric vehicle.

Others are operating on a takeaway only basis and others have closed entirely.

At the weekend, one of the local coffee places staged a tentative reopening, getting in just before Greggs, which is just along the street and has also announced a trial reopening of some branches. No offence to Greggs, but I want our small, local businesses to succeed.

Reopening in lockdown and beyond will require great care and a good deal of expense on PPE - something far less easy for independent shops to afford.

The tentative reopening, from the queue that formed outside the shop on Saturday, seems to have gone well. Roast and brew it and they will come.

In the past five weeks, other than friends and family, the only thing I have missed is cappuccinos. This is one of my favourite coffee shops. But I wasn't in the queue on Saturday to get myself a drink.

I'm not much of a shopper so I'm content to do without, rather than shop online.

My main stumbling block, though, is that I would feel guilt at knowing people were putting themselves at risk of illness to provide me with things I want but don't really need, whether that's a warehouse worker, delivery driver or barista. Of course, that's an absolute Catch-22, because what local businesses both want and need is custom.

I wonder, as an aside, whether people will be less consumerist at the end of lockdown, as they see they can survive without buying a load of extraneous stuff. Or whether they will feel deprivation and run out to purchase what they can.

Of course, there needs to be a balance there for the sake of economic recovery. The Centre for Retail Research (CRR) estimates there will be 20,620 store closures this year with a loss of nearly 250,000 jobs. We've already seen Cath Kidston and Laura Ashley go under, taking nearly 3000 jobs with them.

On the local high street, where you feel a connection to places like coffee shops and where you likely know the staff by name, it feels more personal.

But locally there's another issue. To safely buy your flat white, you need to queue up outside and the queue means there's less space on the pavement for social distancing. In the event that more local cafes decide to open, there simply wouldn't be enough room to allow safe queueing and safe passage past.

Hot beverages aren't really the best for home delivery, so collection is preferable but, to open all the cafes on the street there would need to be some kind of system put in place to ensure safe distancing of customers that sees different retailers working together.

Otherwise social distancing will become too difficult to do safely.

Ultimately, my desire for a cappuccino should not outweigh the desire that our local coffee shop staff and their customers, not to mention passers-by, stay healthy.

It's such a balancing act and, with restaurants and cafes perfectly allowed to open for takeaway, it comes down to consumer choice as much as responsibility on the part of the business owners.

There is so much talk now about easing lockdown. If merely buying a cup of coffee has become a moral conundrum, I'm not really sure I'm ready for it yet.

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