MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, Neale Hanvey, made a plea for the people of his constituency to think about ‘shopping local’.

The local High Street promotion group ‘Love Cowdenbeath’ have been putting out the ‘Shop Local’ message for a couple of years now and they have renewed their call.

The only problem is we don’t have any of the so called ‘non essential’ shops open and the communities of the Cowdenbeath-Lochgelly area are in the same boat as towns and villages across the Scotland.

The next stage of the route through to releasing lockdown has indicated that shops will be allowed to re-open on Monday June 29 but perhaps that could have been done a bit quicker.

With the stats showing that Covid-19 has shown to be controlled by the measures taken, and the Fife figures look particularly encouraging, the desire of the local business community will be high to get back into action.

Clearly the Scottish Government has been following their cautious progress to maintaining a control over coronavirus and the delay in re-opening the shops of communities has been part of that.

But the problem remains that unless they are able to get back open as soon as possible the shops of the Cowden-Gelly area will be struggling to stay afloat.

With the High Street of Cowdenbeath, and Main Street in Lochgelly, looking better now than for decades, it would be very sad if some of the businesses were unable to re-open.

It looks like they are going to have to wait a few more days to get the doors open, but when they do lets hope that they are backed by the community who turn up in big numbers to support them.

After four months out of action people may have forgotten what it is like to go to a local shop other than for food.

Hopefully that desire will come back strongly in the coming weeks and months