NHS striptease
Tuesday, 24th March 2020
I don’t sleep very
well and wake up before the dog starts thumping around downstairs and howling
for some company. This must mean it is near dawn. I don’t look at my phone for
the time and just lie there, listening to the woodpecker hammer his little head
against the giant ash tree just beyond the end of our garden like a very
determined vibrator. I heard him for the first time last year and now he’s back.
When I first heard him a couple of week ago, I thought of it as the first sign
of spring but today I thought it was a symbol of freedom. He’s out there,
nose-chiselling trees, free to fly wherever his little heart desires, I
thought. The lucky bastard.
Here, it’s Lockdown:
day one. I walk the dog with Amanda at about half past six, wearing a snood
that covers half my face, a woolly hat and a winter coat with the idea that I won’t
need any of these things later when I go out again with the dog. It’s probably
not great that I am already trying to game the system but all day I see no
police cars, no police on the streets and definitely no tanks parked at either
end of the street. It appears we’re being trusted to do the right thing.
Tell that to the
teenagers who are still hanging out in gangs because it’s cooler to get
coronavirus than play another game of Monopoly with their parents. A lot of
them are on bikes so it’s easy to see how they got permission: ‘Just popping out
for a bike ride,’ they will say, with a ready rolled spliff taped to the small
of their back in case they’re stopped and searched. It might be time to change
drugs, guys. Needles don't need sharing and doing smack means you won’t have to
use up your daily trip to the shops to buy a can of Coke and a bar of chocolate
big enough to paddleboard on.
*
I am both pleased
and slightly disappointed to see my wife mid-afternoon. Pleased because she’s
been sent home with a laptop to work here for the foreseeable but disappointed
because her coming home routine had just got more interesting. I had showed her
a message from an NHS anesthetist about infection control aimed at teachers, It
advised coming home to the door already being opened with a black bin bag just
inside. Touching nothing except one’s own clothes, it recommended stripping off
all outer layers and placing them in the bin bag. Then, these were to be taken
directly to the washing machine – door open in preparation – to place clothes
inside. Immediately after, one should shower, washing hair and body thoroughly.
The first afternoon,
she rings me from the driveway to say she’s home. I open the side gate and she
comes down the side of the house and in through the kitchen door. She takes her
clothes off in the kitchen, puts them in the washing machine and then goes off
to have a shower. Fucking hell, I think, this is good; it’s like having my own
private stripper. She doesn’t even wait for me to tuck a devalued five-pound
note down the front of her knickers. Shame it only lasted two days…
*
Finally, a confession.
Often, I feel a mixture of fear and paranoia about the pandemic but, I have to
admit that mostly I am filled with fascination. I can’t stop checking the data,
looking at world maps and the different size circles, all expanding at
different rates like hot-air balloons about to take flight. The trajectory of
the virus on graphs, the grim numbers of deaths and the records broken over and
over again of how many in one day, the blank spots on the maps where there are
no recorded cases, and imagining the remote places in the world where some
tribes may yet hunt jungle pigs with bows and arrows without the need to check
their phones every two minutes.
We have all,
unknowingly, slipped through a portal into another dimension; who wouldn’t find
this fascinating? Reality is now viewed through a binary prism: will get it/won’t
get it & will die/won’t die. Very simple, very fascinating, very scary…
Latest data for the UK (as of 9:20pm):
Infected: 8,077
Deaths: 422
Celebrity Deaths: None (my money’s on Rolf Harris)
People I know who are infected: 0
People I know who have died: 0
Song for the day: ‘Fascination Street’ – The Cure
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