I’m in love with Nadine’s mum

ILOVE her so much I’d like to send her a bunch of daffs and a hug. I’ve never met her, but she’s 100 per cent my Pin-up Pensioner Poster Girl for coronavirus. Ladies and gentlemen, please be upstanding for health minister Nadine Dorries’ Teflon mum Sylvia Dall. When news broke that Nadine, 62, had tested positive for the virus, we all found out that her chief concern was not for her own health, but for her 84-year-old mum who just happened to be staying with her at the time.

Most people digesting the information automatically assumed Nadine’s mother would fall victim to the infection and never recover. So instantly ingrained in all of us is the notion that if you are elderly with “underlying health conditions”, coronavirus means curtains. She caught the illness and we thought her end was nigh.

How utterly splendid, joyful and revivifying it was, therefore, to read Nadine’s matterof-fact account of her mum’s relatively trivial and fleeting symptoms and cheeringly speedy recovery.The self-titled “old Northerner” was dozing in front of the fire with a blanket over her knees. Nadine only realised something was up when she didn’t bother to switch on her favourite game show The Chase.

THIS doughty lady has survived polio, rheumatic fever, major heart surgery and as Nadine puts it: “a world war… a lifetime of smoking… hard work in her early years and poor diet”. She experienced a full day and night of unpleasant coughing, endured a fever for 24 hours and then bounced back to health, wielding the vacuum cleaner under Nadine’s feet with all her normal gusto.

Nadine, by the way, was more severely afflicted. Although fit and healthy, she was subjected to high fever, night sweats, a cough so relentless she’s been told it will take six weeks for her lungs to recover, and muscle aches so profound “the pain felt as if it were lodged deep in my bones”. Her mum had the final say: “We old Northerners are made of much tougher stuff than you young ones.”

Why am I focusing so heavily on the twosome, and why did I read Nadine’s testimony aloud to my entire family? Indeed, why do I think it’s ultra-important to repeat all the good news stories, especially those pertaining to the vintage generation? In these unprecedented and unfathomable times, accentuating the positive might be the one tonic that works.