Ignore guilt of news bulletins

No doubt we are going through the worst national crisis most of us have ever seen. But are we getting over the top? There will be years of problems and difficulties to sort out but we will get there, because mankind has a way of surviving.

Maybe we have lost the knack of taking the long view of things. Life will be tough but eventually things will ease and life will go on. Yes, there are lots of problems to come but when the media go on about things, people who are okay will be feeling guilty. We make a point of only listening to one or two news bulletins a day.

Now in our 70s, we were the immediate post-war generation. Our kids learnt about the traumas of the period in history. But all we remember is a fortunately happy childhood, if money was scarce. We had our older children in the 1970s and we keep being told what a dreadful period it was but all I remember is the happiness and enjoyment of caring for small children and saving up for holidays.

We have to have common sense with rules. I have been abused in a store for walking past a queue with an empty basket - I only needed one thing and the store didn’t have it.

As a retired practice nurse, I often noticed patients wanted rigid rules, which are impossible to set. I hate jargon usually but I liked the positive one of ‘taking ownership’ of your disease. If you have a chronic disease, most of the responsibility for managing it is your own. Let’s hope we can ‘take ownership’ of our own response to the crisis.

Mrs J. Gooch