Annalog

The girlfriend of a friend’s son (late 20s) remarked that she didn’t like saying thank you,

“sweet peas mean thank you”

it made her feel obligated.   Less a chip on the shoulder than a whole sack of potatoes.  I have a particular relationship with courtesies in general and thanks in particular and off the top of my head, I can’t think of a circumstance in which I would feel obligated.  Wal taught me late in life that if somebody really wanted to buy your lunch, (a) they could probably afford it and (b) you should let them.  The rubric about “no such thing as a free lunch” is another matter.

My mother used to growl about gratitude being a dangerous emotion and in context, I can see what she was driving at.  Grateful that someone special (business or pleasure) noticed you, took you to dinner, took you to bed was a hiding to nowhere in particular.  Your gratitude might be expected – not appealing – or ignored – rejecting. There must be a better basis for social transaction.

I am sure I was just as resistant about thanks as every other small child and had to be encouraged to acknowledge effort, kindness and /or the gift of the last toffee but encouraged I must have been, because it is deep in my marrow.

And it didn’t take a pandemic to get me to notice the efforts that made my life easier.   Thank you costs nothing, takes a few seconds and often, means a lot.  So I was shocked when last week I thanked a man in the supermarket and he said with a shrug “No choice.  If I had a choice, I wouldn’t be here.”  OK.  So now I am facing 30 years of disappointment.   I said very levelly “There is always a choice. I’m just thanking you for being here today”, collected my shopping and the foot I had put in it, and left.

The same thing happened in M&S where a woman said “Don’t tell me, tell the management.   Makes no difference if you don’t” though other sources tell me M&S have been assiduously supportive of their staff.    As Abraham Lincoln said “You can’t please all of the people all of the time” and I used to add, only a fool would try.  The warmest thanks you ever get is for doing your best.

I risk going “on” about my parents because they were outstanding – with a full set of ups and downs, and family rows and difficulties.  Light shone round them, nothing to do with haloes.  They were married 48 years when my father died and in some ways it was a deeply conventional marriage (she cooked, he smoked) but it had roots of commitment and honour and respect.   Apart from loving each other, they liked each other and they bore each other up in times of trouble.

All the way through my childhood, till I was 17 and left home,  I remember my father thanking my mother as the punctuation to the end of a meal whether it was what she called “scratch”  or something with a bit more finesse.  My father knew that my mother always did her best and he thanked her for it.

It didn’t take a pandemic for me to realise that thanks is acknowledgement and in an increasingly greedy and materialistic society, you risk feeling that you are worth nothing if it’s not reflected in what you earn, or what you’ve got.

Thanking my dustbin men started years ago, when I realised what a decent bunch they were.  They’d take anything as long as it was properly wrapped.   I am capable of standing at the door and applauding the man with a vehicle called a Scarab that sweeps up dead leaves and the rubbish in the gutter, both of us grinning.  Who loses ?

One of the great freedoms of age is that you get to spread thanks around.   I don’t care if you think I am a mad old bat with white hair – I am – but I will stick my head round the door in a quiet moment, 24 hours later, to thank someone who tried to help me in the chemist –  no money, no calories, no problem – reciprocal magic.   

My first non secretarial job was with a sex magazine.   My first journalistic job was with a woman’s magazine.  For the next 20 years I was told at intervals that I wasn’t “a proper journalist”.  When I went to women’s magazines, they were just beginning to buy computer time to help with the compilation of quizzes.  Very popular, quizzes.   And I was bemused by the way the findings were packaged  – sometimes in fractions, sometimes in percentages, sometimes in ratios.   Usually in all three but never just one.And I learned that the object was not to tell the truth but to look as if you were.  Sound familiar ?

Yesterday a friend, who is actress/teacher/poet, speaker and reader in five languages and no fool, confessed that on Friday she’d been as low as she ever wanted to go and we discussed why.  Like a lot of us, she finds the sense of being played for a sucker punitive.  Work beyond her desk is closed to her.  But what most unsettles her is  an almost permanent sense of distrust and an outrage at the amount of plastic – PPE, disposable this, throwaway that – and we are not discussing what we are going to do about it, because “news”, like government’s coverage and update, is divided into bite sized pieces, right by size if unreliable in content.  See the line above .

I was never any good at science or maths, a considerable regret to my secondary school headmistress, herself almost overly qualified, who spent her time trying to encourage girls to “do” science.  The other day an old acquaintance sent me two youtube segments of distinguished scientists talking about aspects of corona response and I realised that – apart from unusually poor sound quality – I simply couldn’t understand what I was being told.  I watched 15 minutes of one, glanced at the second, muttered “God forgive me !” and put them aside.

But I do know about media.  And the daily press briefing is a disaster.   Yes, different ministers have a chance to shine but then some of them really don’t.   They wouldn’t if you polished them for half an hour.  And the tone is wrong.   It is a weird combination of Butlins and bluster.   It supposed to sound confident and make you feel reassured.   But you’d have to be committed to those feelings rather than an appropriate sense of human curiosity before it would work for you.

And those figures – oh, those figures.  I hear my father muttering “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.”  Back to where we came in.  Move the figures around.  Make them sort of truthful – but don’t commit yourself.

Instead of standing up and saying “We can’t give you reliable figures.  We have figures for deaths in NHS hospitals.  We have an estimate for figures in care homes.   We have an estimate for deaths in the community.    We are not going to marry an actual figure with an estimated figure because that wouldn’t be reliable.     The disease moves very fast and quite particularly.  We are still learning about it but you must know we are on your side and we’ll do our darned best for you.”   Not a chance.

Whoever is in charge of the press and publicity of the prevailing party has not realised how sick of cant many of us are.   The endless repetition of something doesn’t make it true.  And changing the slogan doesn’t make it any less robotic.  There isn’t an overview of the pandemic outside the current model of medicalisation with which we approach the world and that was already giving us trouble.

The Churchillian quote that appeared at the end of Darkest Hour is oddly relevant:  “Success is not final.  Failure is not fatal.  It’s the courage to continue that counts.”   Of course that presupposes that the continuing courage is dedicated to the wellbeing of an essentially trusting public, not the balancing act of party politics.  And this morning Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter who knows far more about figures than I ever did or will stated on the record that the public was “broadly supportive of the measures” and “hungry for genuine information”  but was being “fed this what I call number theatre.”

*see the meaning of Spiegelhalter.

When we saw Disney’s “Lady and the Tramp”, I was 11 or 12 and my mother whispered to me how clever it was to draw Lady as a spaniel so she could toss her ears back, like a girl tossing her hair, and Peg as a Pekinese so that when she shimmied through her torch song, her tail did it for her.   I’ve been big on ears and tails ever since (noses too, if you’re human – but that’s a whole other story).

So as I was switching through tv channels the other day, as you do and particularly at the moment, I came on an animal, prone, surgically blanketed, with a white coated vet standing alongside and the camera zoomed in on a badly torn ear, and I saw that I was looking at a not fully grown kangaroo.  The way the vet acknowledged and touched the beast was appealing, and he explained that the ear would have to be stitched  “… and now I’ll show you my secret weapon.”

He brought forward a jar of  very thin mother of pearl buttons, something like the size of an old copper penny and real nacre, and stitched them in, individually and carefully at three separate points, to support the ear as it healed.  Then, as the animal came round, he carried it back to its owner, a younger man plainly concerned, and they sat while the vet explained what he had done and how the supports could be painlessly removed.  “Is he going to be all right?” asked the kangaroo’s guardian.  “Sure” said the vet “ look …” and he showed if he pushed the palm of the roo’s paw, it was increasingly slow to fall back.  “He’ll be round in a minute.”    Forget Van der Valk, give me the vet.

I watched this same man talking to a turtle, stroking its shell while he and a knowledgeable woman discovered where it was injured, uncomfortably but not too seriously, which he could deal with there and then – this was part of a WWF project into turtles in that bay.   And with all the animal films I have watched – and I have watched a lot – I have never seen anybody talking to a turtle or stroking its shell before, though a friend tells me they feel everything through the shell.  I like that image.

What puts me off animal documentaries is also to do with ears.  I either can’t stand the presenter or the music, either way, aural room freshener.  Though people who give their intelligence, their energy, their lives to save wild animals capture my imagination.  I  remember a longstanding game warden, murmuring in patient Zulu to a rhino, knowing the animal could smell him but the team needed to net him and take him to a place of safety, and the Japanese scientist who designed a replacement tail fin for a dolphin who had lost his in a savage infection.

Because in all the truly terrible human suffering and endeavour of the last weeks, the animals haven’t had much of a look in.   Yes, the Chinese “wet” markets have been mentioned, where you can buy almost anything in conditions that would spook a horse – but not more than mentioned because the Chinese don’t like this laboured and we need the Chinese.   To eat wild animals is one of two strands of human behaviour as old as time – one is economy and the other is folk medicine.  It is believed that if you ingest the animal, you take on its most prized attributes -strength, wisdom, cunning and again, strength.  Two friends of mine have seen those markets and they both say they will never forget them though they wish they could.  Is it just my Western gutlessness which says if you must kill a bear, why must it be in filth and misery?

Reviewing a new book called Has China Won ?, Max Hastings writes ”A year or two ago I observed to a friend who knows Asia well that after many centuries of appalling treatment from the West, the Chinese seem to deserve their time in the sun.  “You may be right,” she responded cautiously and wisely “but I don’t think they will be very kind.”  Not to us and not to the animals.

16 bags of wrapped garden waste appeared in front of the flat next door whose owner is away staying with her elderly father – she emailed last week to tell me.  Don’t ask why she left it so late: an altered sense of time is one of the features of lockdown. So I got in touch to ask if she had arranged someone to come in to clear the garden ?  A month is a long time in garden time.  She said no.

She rang the owner of the upper flat and thus it was discovered that it wasn’t a dump – it was meant as a kindness by  the star of the upper flat, one of the young men who had already checked to tell me to ask for help if I needed anything.   I readied myself to apologise when next I met the SUF hereinafter referred to as Suffy. He knocked at my door in due course, “just checking …”

I apologised if I had caused kerfuffle.  He waved it away, less in denial than lack of interest and asked me if the woman I had contacted was a friend ?  I said no, we get on perfectly well but there is no social relationship.   “Well” he said carefully “she would immediately ring Poppy (not her name)” who owns the flat he’s in, with Poppy’s son.   I explained I had feared it was a dump because of the amount.  He understood – “ No” he said.  “I began, so I made a job of it.  But she’s tricky  -“ indicated with a sideways nod that he meant she of the lower flat.   “So’s Poppy” I said drily , looking him straight in the face.   “I don’t get it” he said.  “Neighbours in this street.”  “You may not get it” I said “ but it hasn’t been as you’d wish it.”   He asked me who I knew.

So I indicated – the nurse who has brought up her son alone, Kathy with the boss black and white cat, three at the end of the street (one away before the lockdown and two I am wary of), the therapist, the couple opposite, my thoughtful next door neighbour.  I made a comment on one which made him smile  “You described her so precisely.”.  In reply I told him a story about not judging a book by its cover and warned him – young, thoughtful, very driven and far from a fool –  that he must be wary of middle aged women living alone.  He asked why.   I said “Because whatever it is, it’s rarely right for them unless they choose it.  I told the story of you clearing the garden to a friend of mine, who fits the profile and she said immediately “Oh no,I wouldn’t like that at all. It’s trespass.”  D’you see ?”  He looked straight at me.   “Can you imagine anybody doing four hours’ clearing up for mischief ?”  I said I couldn’t but that’s how those minds work.  As socially defined as the barons, new and old, in television’s Belgravia.

“But” he said,  “it could all be settled by just a knock, and a bit of a chat.”   I couldn’t agree.  “We can settle things with you with a knock and a few words, but if I took you through the history of the occupants of the flat street level next door, your age rather than mine, you’d beg for mercy.   I spent the first four years on the phone to the (now defunct) council Noise Line.  The freeholder who lives upstairs and I took it in turns.  I knocked in calm and endeavour.  I knocked in fury at 3.00 am. Didn’t  make any damn difference.  I had never been treated like that in my life, I didn’t know what to do.   If I had been in a council property, I might have had recourse but in a private one, not a sausage !  And I’m just a mad old bat with white hair.  Dismissable.”  We grinned at each other.   He asked if he could put something through on the printer, save him going into the office and when that was done, I shooed him to the door.  “Anything –“ he said .   And he moved the tub I couldn’t lift,  with the winter broom I have spent all week pruning. 

The accountancy mentioned is strictly of the emotional variety.   As a woman remarked of pandemical behaviour in general “The nice is very nice and the nasty isn’t very nice at all.”   Never an optimist, cockeyed or otherwise, I expect the worst and celebrate the best.  I don’t believe Covid 19 will all turn out for the best but I do believe this is the only wakeup call the flatulent over populated spoilt world would listen to – no pop concert, no million billion Facebook friends, not the demotion of killing disease – none of that could have made the difference that this nasty bug has made.  It has frightened us half to death and we needed frightening.

You have to choose who you talk to in these terms.  The Kandinsky Kid only wants everything to be all right – her main progress in the last year has been to admit that about herself, before we were all Pollyanna’d to apoplexy.   Pam the Painter admits she can only stand so much reality sandwich at any one time but it’s more than it ever used to be.   Bunslove (having sold his millstone maisonette legally correctly) is now restored to bracingly cynical Celtic gloom and Ginny (presiding over job and house repairs of equal demand) is the blessed realist of the quartet.  You can say anything to Ginny, she won’t have a sleepless night.  She’ll sleep and fight again.  I do truly know who my friends are and I bless heaven for them.  Especially if the over 70s are going to remain in lockdown for the foreseeable future.

So when I talk about keeping the books, it’s about balance.  I felt very badly when the sun came out and I had a series of eye disturbances and head pains which frightened me, discovering that the hospital level tests are currently no longer available at the oculist ( because of social distancing) and that my specialist is doing video consults only.  But then I remembered the patient voice of my first eye specialist (now retired) who referred to my eyeballs as eccentric (very long apparently) which allows too much light into the wrong part of the eye – literally, a pain.  So while appreciatively noting the sunshine, I don my dark glasses and close the shutters. It may look precious but it’s gotta be.  I am very grateful for whatever vision I have.  Balance.

I regret to tell you that having time doesn’t make me want to study for an extra mural degree or take up yoga, though  I am impressed by the often very young who figure out how to make masks or shields or something useful.   Far too many of the joggers have the same self righteous attitude as many cyclists in the past.  They go straight at you, scattering body fluids generously, social distancing less important than the maintenance of fitness (obsession, anyone ?), very short on grin or greeting, clearly imagining they are a higher form of life.

The queues remind me of childhood.  I have always loved to talk and to be spoken to and that’s definitely on the plus side though there are still many glued to the phone.  And last week in Marks I met a Scot I know by sight (I’ll call her Maura), roughly my age, and a much younger woman and we began what I can only describe as joshing, verbally fooling about to our immense pleasure and, gathering from his grin, the delight of one of the shelfstackers.  We wound up laughing like the sillies we are but observed social distance , it cost us nothing  and when I walked round the fitment, another customer said “Thank you for laughing.”  I gave her my best smile and said that I thought laughter was power.

Yesterday I met the street sweeper whose wife has had corona.  And how was she ?  “Well, quite honestly” he replied “Better than for ages.  Because she has diabetes, and she gets bronchitis every winter, so she had to stay home and away from everything, complete rest.  She was pretty ill but she’s OK and so am I and –“ he grinned “the streets aren’t half tidy! “ Because large numbers of people are at home.   Balance.

Serena (not her real name) is what you call a woman with a good heart – if you can get to it through the brambles.

“I found this under plants to keep people away”

She has an advanced case of passive/aggressive and I am of the opinion that, when you put the seductive passivity of various enquiries to one side, you’re just left with aggression, the verbal equivalence of repeated lefts to the jaw.

She nobbled me one afternoon – hasn’t spoken to me for a year, put me through the catechism of “was I all right ?” not pausing to listen the replies, told me how much happier I’d be in the seaside town she couldn’t wait to move to and now can’t wait to vacate, condemned me to a further 15 years of life (I do hope heaven takes precedence over Serena !)  but I kept my temper more or less.  When she went off to find someone else to browbeat, I put the receiver down and did something I have not done for 20 years or more: I screamed.

Fortunately, my next caller was one with whom I can always share a good laugh so I confessed all, and she responded in between giggles that the vision of me screaming was alone worth the call.   So, no harm done.  As Mrs. Overall (one of Julie Walters’ finest creations) remarked, “It’s God’s way of keeping you humble” and it works.

48 hours later, I collected the post which has been reliable throughout the pandemic.   And I looked at writing which seemed familiar and opened the envelope to a card from Joan and Alan (their real names) whom I met 20 years ago on the second of two occasions that I “sang for my supper” on a cruise.

By the time of the second cruise, the famously named British proprietors had sold out to an American holding company, the food was less remarkable, the accommodations less luxurious and there were all sorts of problems starting with far too many separate incidents with waste disposal to other more serious complications.  But we went to several places I had never dreamt of going and for that alone, I remain entirely grateful.

Joan and Alan and I met each other and spoke occasionally, always easily because they are enormously likeable.  And when we were due to come into Venice, Joan asked me if I knew the city.   When I demurred, she told me it would be worth getting up in time to watch the arrival which remains one of the most magical things I have ever seen, for the buildings seem to float on the water.  We said goodbye affectionately (you know who you like) and we’ve exchanged cards every year ever since.

So there is this dear woman writing out of the goodness of her heart to hope that I am well and managing in the time of the lurgy and the lockdown, that my son is OK, that my eyes aren’t bothering me and ending “Keep in your thoughts and mind how lovely Venice was when we saw it together all those years ago.  Memories like that never (underlined ) fade.”  I got their number through directory enquiries and when we spoke it was as if we’d seen each other two weeks ago up the road.

We exchanged as we have always done stories about things we admire and things we admire a lot less and Alan came and joined in on the extension.  I don’t think we spoke for so very long but if it had been winter, I would have been warmed and as it wasn’t cold, I experienced the warmth in another way, in a sense of deep almost reverential comfort, like a trusted gentle hand when you were a child, the colour of a young animal’s fur or catching the smell of something long cherished and half remembered from long ago as you go by, your adult self.

Words don’t often fail me.  My mother used to beg me to pause for breath but this evocation of care and kindness, deep and sweet, made me happily dumb.

When I applied to go to the US aged 19, the Visa Authority had me send home to Middlesbrough General Hospital to make available to them the xrays of my lungs, before and after.  I have lesions on both lungs though I never developed TB.

(nothing like me, I just coughed)

I got my Green Card.  I don’t want Covid-19.

So I shouted for joy at a provincial doctor whom I saw twice on TV on Friday who said, clearly and unapologetically “ Don’t get it.  If you get it, we can’t cure you.  We can keep you alive till you’re better but there is no cure.”  Because while there is information slopping about like spoilt soup, few clear facts have emerged and even these are coloured by individual experience.

To mask or not to mask ?

A surgical mask and an N95 respirator. Officials in China are urging citizens to wear masks in public to stop the spread of the coronavirus. But can a mask really keep you from catching the virus?

You’d have thought if you feel better masked, mask.  Apparently not so.  You may not put the mask on properly.  It may be made of material that doesn’t filter reliably.  You may put on your mask in such a way that you re-ingest soiled air.  And then gloves ?  You need gloves if you are in any direct corona contact but that doesn’t mean developing galloping paranoia over what you can’t see. There is all sorts of bacteria your body will deal with perfectly well if you wash your hands as if you mean it.  Gloves underline the two extremes of response to Covid-19: one is panic and obsession, while the other is denial.  There is a great lack of middle ground.

I have had no symptoms, nor been in touch with anybody who has and I have no underlying medical condition.  I wash my hands often and usually dry them on  disposable kitchen paper.  Any towels in this house are only used by me and washed often.  I haven’t worn a mask or gloves.  I live alone, I keep several feet of distance and I was made very aware of this recently when I met a neighbour who usually works with a team of seven.  They are now all working from home but she says she is constantly on the phone keeping things up to scratch and is demoralised by being stuck within her four walls.

There are several of us, women alone (I’m not ignoring men, rather speaking whereof I know) who have managed well for years with company and jobs and pastimes and outings, all of which is now curtailed.  This is already beginning to undermine people’s mood. Some people take enthusiastically to technology, more to do with personality than generation.  What I privately call The Old People – meaning of a former time rather than age – don’t.  It’s not the same and we know it.

And the numbers that are thrown around – 4,000 beds with 16,000 staff and 100,000 tests – frighten rather than reassure.  As in the case of my friend Dora (not her real name) tall, bright, sharing a flat with her brother, a good friend and a wonderful cook, with lungs of tissue.  She was already at home with a cold when the pandemic hit and there she must stay for 3 months whence she wrote  ”I have very little exciting to report , except if one more person or governmental organisation calls me up to inform me that I am vulnerable, I shall scream.  Nothing I say to them seems to make them understand that while my lungs may not be in perfect working order, I do not need the help they appear to be insistent on giving me and would they please direct it at somebody who needs it.  The latest is that they refuse to believe that I am not in need of free food parcels or a befriending service. “ (She had called to volunteer as a befriender.)… “In the last three days I have received 54 bananas, 2.5 kg of cornflakes and 16 tins of tomato soup… “   She sent pictures.   She is in work, she can manage money, she is not alone and nobody is listening.   And of course I laughed. And then you think of all the people out of work, with children or other dependents, who need help and food.   Though, I must say, I find 54 bananas a bit challenging.

On Thursday I was just finishing supper when I heard a noise like dried leaves, insistently rattling,  went to the door and discovered it was Clapping Time, to show appreciation to the NHS.   I am with the Times cartoon on Saturday which says “Nice thought, but what we need is tests, masks and protective clothing.”  Not to hit a man when he’s down and I am sure the Blond is feeling rotten but that was a big Boris slip – to say  “we’ve got – the aforementioned items, rolling out figures – when more truthfully he should have said “we have ordered” ditto.  And there is always a time delay between order and delivery. Four people asked me yesterday – where is protective clothing coming from, who makes it ?   And I cannot answer. Be ironical if all came from China.

But Clapping Time shows you your neighbours, they see you, you share something innocuous and in these times it’s not enough to say “we’re all in this together” – you have to show it.  Applause over, I went back inside, watched Mark Kermode on BBC4 (British history in films – MK and compilation- hooray) and when it ended, went to front door and looked the sky before closing up for the night.

“by Mike Gifford”

And at my feet lay a bunch of roses.

They looked like I felt – a bit tired – and definitely in need of water.  No card, still wrapped, corrugated paper round the blooms.  But the thought !  I wondered if it was Jim who works unheard of hours at the radio, I wondered if it was my son, the boys next door  ?   So while the flowers were up to their necks in reviving cold water, I took the key(never go out without the key – see annalog keys and trees) and looked.   A dozen or more doorways had roses.

The next morning I met a Scottish social worker who lives locally and after the pleasantries, I told him about the flowers and he said” That’s my neighbour.  He works providing flowers for big events, all cancelled of course.  So he thought he’d give them away.” I asked for his name and the house number and I wrote a thank you and best wishes to you and yours.  Roses for no reason.

There are lists and lists of things you can do online but I cleaned the cooker and did the hated ironing.    I watched a bit of Jane Eyre (1943, still a preferred version) and a neighbour called – observing social distance – to see if I had a spanner.   I looked and I didn’t.   A good range of screwdrivers but no spanner.

I had two long telephone calls and a number of emails including one from a friend in Spain, still in health thank heaven.  And eventually I heard from a friend sharing a house with a sufferer from chronic anxiety, exhausted but OK.   The handsome Kurd in the supermarket agreed with me that the anxiety is contagious. “Look” she said.  “ Last week was insane.  I went home, carrying loads of stuff and a couple of hours later, I sat there.  Everybody’s OK.  Food is in the oven.  Why did I buy all those things ?  Fear.  This week much quieter,  we get used to it …”

But will  the street man, newly cleaned up in clothes too big for his emaciated frame, some kind of identity tag round his neck, money in his pocket ( I heard it) but nowhere to go for breakfast because nowhere is open ? 

Once I had seen the headlines about house sales grinding to a halt, I daren’t ring Bunslove who is selling his biggest mistake, has a buyer, all in progress, no chain:  I just pray he is an exception.

I walk up and down the garden and look at what is beginning come through, this is before I hear the weather forecasters listing lower temperatures lowered again by cold winds and possibly snow, and    after I read about the Borrowed Days or the blackthorn winter – thank you Paul Simons.    So many people hail spring because they see it move on through new life of every kind to the warmer days of summer.  I dread spring, the Loki of the seasons, a trickster, unreliable and changeable.   Just like these times.

*by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One of my neighbours a gloriously attractive Chilean wrote me a “Don’t hesitate to ask, we’re just up the street ” email.   Next door upstairs distributes statutory services for the local authority, they will keep her working, she wrote me a “just ask” email and when I saw her, underscored her invitation.    The delightful young men from next door but one came to knock on the door – ditto.   The girls next door street level the other side wrote me a note with their mobiles and so did my upstairs neighbours – their courtesy was moving.   Nat rang to say she was perfectly happy to load the car and come over the river, Brendan ditto.    My son rang and asked how I planned to manage and I told him how lucky I felt.

Staying well away from everybody, I go out, buy my bits and come back for the rest of the day alone. Most of the time it was ever thus.  And on Thursday I went to another area about half an hour away by bus, because it has three good independent chemists and I thought I might find cotton wool.  I did and tissues and soap and a couple of other things.

Walking up the street, I came to a little Waitrose with a woman arranging something in the window.   I stopped to think for a moment and we grinned at each other.  She moved forward and I went towards her.   “Madam” she said “would you like some toilet paper ? I have some, if you’d like it.”  I looked at her badge – “Linda the toilet tissue fairy” I said.  “Yes please.”

I thought I would have a look in my favourite bakery where the bread was as good as ever and the girls told me management was doing everything it could for them -masks, gloves, pay only by card – and they thought they might make it through.

I found things in M&S that I had not found elsewhere and the cashiers were patient and  pleasant so when I saw a manager, I grabbed her, explained I rarely shop there and please tell the staff how much we appreciate their effort.  She was delighted.

The fear is a great deal more frightening and catching than the bug. And the bug is making headway.  So we’ll see.  If we give up small pleasantries  – like talking to an Italian-Ethiopian teacher of special needs children on the bus this morning – we shall be even less human.  (How I wish I’d seen Wal and the woman in a vast ransacked Tesco’s, talking over the last bulb of garlic.  He made her laugh and she insisted he took it.)

It’s very sad how badly people behave.  In earlier days we’d never have got to an intensive care nurse, distressed and appalled after unspeakable hours of work, crying because there was nothing left to buy.   In the past, independent or chain, managers would have lined up the staff, arranged who was coming in, what they might have, how it was to be done.  Most of those in control of the situation would have been firm, clear and polite and we wouldn’t have had to look at those snarling faces, buying everything that isn’t nailed down out of a lethal mixture of entitlement, greed and terror.   But we have made several generations of anything goes and it’s ugly.

What my mother would have called “the crapehangers” among us (always expecting the worst) have long wondered what would happen if something went seriously wrong, more wrong than an aircraft blowing up or a terrorist incident.   Well now we know. 

The best news of the week was that, globally, the air was cleaner than it has been for ages.  The teacher on the bus said a friend in Venice had told her that the canals were cleaner.  And we must all know that no meeting in Davos, no accord in Paris would have granted us this breathing space, be it every so brief.  One of my favourite songs has the refrain “Hard times, come around no more” but here they are again and it is devoutly to be hoped that the human animal might learn a little something – which is not to say that the cost of the lesson won’t be  horribly high.

“What did you do in the war, daddy ?” may be rephrased nonbinarily to “what did you do in the plague, parent ?” because Covid-19 appears to be an equal opportunities employer.   And as the number of the quantifiably ill jumps, so scrapping among the suits breaks out, on how to run it.   As if anybody “runs” a pandemic.

Yesterday the woman with the cart before mine in the supermarket announced, gesturing to several cartons, ”I’m not stockpiling really, I’m making cheese.”   I said I’d seen everything and within three sentences she said ”And we’re being told bad science. This is a virus, you don’t build immunity.   They’re just frightened by the figures.  No vaccine will be ready in time and if it were, it wouldn’t work.”   I asked her how she knew ?  She told me that she was in something that sounded related and I asked how old she was (the quickest way to sort out the sensible from the rest, especially when the questioner has white hair and wrinkles) to which she deferred with “Oh, old enough.  Deep dark secret !” adding that Taurus was in Uranus which would affect the food supply.

A close friend emailed some information from San Francisco which was sobering but not surprising.  And I watched an hour of coverage thinking that the Middle Ages don’t know how lucky they were not to have had camera technology during the Black Death (can you imagine the closeups of exploding buboes ?)  Very little is known about Corona virus.  This is a smart bug. It learns fast and travels fast and we have been dilatory in realising there was a problem.   And as is often the way, the recognition of one problem reveals others.  Whoever would have imagined that the USA was short of respirators ?  Clearly this bug is unAmerican.

The most cheering thing I saw yesterday was a short interview with the retired head of the Royal College of General Practitioners, who had tested positive.  She said that the illness had been unpleasant and painful and she was – in my father’s old phrase – bloody ill.  But she was getting better.  She was however someone who was generally in health.

I watched the crowds at Cheltenham horse races wash their hands, stand in the open air and cheer while they could, and several smaller football matches did the same thing.   The message from the Arsenal manager – saying that if cancelling football matches saved one life, it was worth it – may have been mawkish but it was good to hear.

I went to the shops, bought my bits and came home. I am only an example of me.  I live alone, few people visit, I avoid throngs, so I am in semi-self-isolation.  I wash my hands a lot but then I always did.   A neighbour reduced me to giggles by explaining how she had instructed a young man to make hand sanitiser and we agreed that wet wipes or cologne impregnated tissues would be a start.

Opening the door to put out rubbish, I encountered Frank the rough haired dach (star of the street long before Daisy was top dog at Crufts) with Andy on the other end of the lead. To get a book back I went up the street with them to meet Liz who flew to give me a big hug (enthusiastically reciprocated) before standing back to say ”I shouldn’t have done that should I ?”    She told me that she had taken her baby son to the GP surgery.  There were four people waiting when a woman arrived, clearly unwell, her voice rasping, and said to the receptionist “I have Corona, please help me.”  Everybody froze, the receptionist told her to go home and call III but she said she couldn’t get through.   The receptionist told her to leave.   And what are you going to be told?   It’s a bug, it’s a bad bug but it won’t kill you unless it’s your turn.

It only took a pandemic to get all of the tills into use at the checkout and a watchable film on terrestrial television for Saturday – that’s next Saturday, we should live so long.

“Tibetan antelope”

*what Sonya says we should be singing