Chilblains and some wrinkling in fond memory of my grandmother

‘YOU are looking very thoughtful,’ remarked Hermione. ‘Hmm.’ We were sitting in the kitchen after supper at Medders Manor, where we have been confined for what seems like an eternity. Horizons which once extended to the far-flung and exotic have now been trimmed to the ditch at the far end of the Rolling Acres.

At least we have a decent space in which to lockdown (whoever thought ‘lockdown’ would become a commonly used verb!).

Gardening has been our refuge and our tonic during this time of trial, with record potato planting in the Side Garden.

‘You will have that poor pencil chewed to death.’

‘Hmm. I am trying to look on the bright side of pandemic life.’ ‘I am not sure there is much of a bright side, Medders. The reports from all those stricken nursing homes are quite appalling.’

‘Absolutely so, but I thought I might at least try to work out what changes wrought by this wretched virus will be with us long term.’

‘Well, I hope the directive about limiting attendance at funerals to ten will not remain in force. I was looking forward to giving you a really good send-off.’

‘Eh? Do you know something I don’t? Is there some underlying health issue perhaps? – to use a phrase that has become all too current. All I will say at this juncture is that you must not count on being able to ply mourners with that case of port gathering dust in the corner of the cellar. I fully intend blowing the cobwebs off it before popping my clogs and drinking that port myself – even if it kills me.’

‘Maybe it will, Medders, maybe it will. So just be sure to keep up your credit union account… Here, give me a look at what you have written. What’s this – ‘points race’?

‘Yes, points race. You know the way that high-flying, academically-minded, well-intentioned school students all aspired in the past to be doctors. Medicine always had the pick of the Leaving Cert crop.’

‘Six A’s minimum – or is it H1’s these days?’

‘So now I predict it will be seven A’s or seven H1’s required to be allowed on to the first rung of the college ladder on the way to becoming an epademiologist. Since the onset of the corona-menace, epedimiology has become a revered profession which will save humanity. And a few months ago, most of us barely knew it existed. I did not even know how to spell it.’

‘You have ‘health service’ next on your list.’

‘Am I the only one to have discovered my inner Fidel Castro in recent days? To hear a Fine Gael Health Minister declare that the HSE had taken over all those private hospitals seems to have brought out the Cuban socialist in me. Whoever takes over as minister from Master Harris should be very slow to give the capitalists back their Beacons and Bonses, I reckon. Viva la revolucion!’

‘Okay, Medders, calm down now please or you will be finding out first-hand how public health deals with cardiac arrest… Next is ‘handwashing’, I see.’

‘That one’s kinda personal.’

‘You can talk to me.’

‘Hmmm. Believe it or not, I still remember my grandmother’s hands. Granny was born in the 1880s, old enough to have met people who lived through the Famine. Until she married, she worked as a domestic servant in one of the Big Houses.

‘She must have been constantly cleaning and scrubbing and laundering for Lord Such-and-Such until she was into her thirties. The backs of the hands I remember were shiny brown, the skin stretched thin and coloured with livery blotches.

‘Now, half a century after her death, I look at the backs of my own hands to see if they are becoming brown and shiny too, watching out for any obvious blotches. With all the extra handwashing called for under pandemic rules, I must be using soap on a scale comparable to anything experienced below stairs at Castle Such-and-Such.

‘So far all, the result is a full set of chilblains and some horrid wrinkling but the handwashing habit is now ingrained and I will continue to scrub often when the threat of the virus has passed, if only in memory of my grandmother.’