The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Can we have wine on tap?
What delightful ditty should you wash your hands to? With the otherwise cheery and celebratory bars of Happy Birthday To You now forever associated with the vision of the prime minister washing his hands of things (although who in their right mind would want his job at the moment?), I think we should put together a hand-sanitising mix tape.
I’m not really talking about revamping chart hits of my youth and childhood or even interfering with classics along the lines of Soap Gets In Your Eyes or that Bob Dylan foottapper, Boots Of Spanish Lather (you don’t even have to paraphrase songs like I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles or I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair). Instead, I have been taking great lavatorial comfort in humming a verse and a couple of choruses of the late, great Michael Marra’s Hermless as I try to kill off the nasty bugs clinging to my unsuspecting person.
The sublime east coast bard captured surreal moods and strange signs of the times like no other and I like to think he perhaps had an inkling of coming events regarding online shopping, home deliveries and self-isolation when he penned the lines (and I apologise for any mistakes or infringed copyright here, we live in desperate times): “Ah save a’ the coupons that come wi’ the soup
An’ when I have saved 53
Ah put three in the drawer and send 50 away
An’ something gets posted tae me.” A wee croon of that over the Cussons or Palmolive will soon have you nodding your head at the oddities of the human condition while ascertaining that stringent standards of personal hygiene are observed.
It’s life, Jim, and currently, as most of us know it. Marra also, however, wrote (with the aid of the ineffable Saint Andrew of Woollen Mill fame) songs entitled This World Is Phuhl
O’ A Number O’ Things and It’s Rare T’BE Ahlev, Is It. Better philosophical musings on life, the universe and everything, I cannot currently pinpoint.
Piccalilli, anyone?
Until the dove from above or the deus ex machina or the suitably Churchillian politico emerges from the gloom to lead us out of the darkness, I reckon we can learn a lot from the way we as individuals react to hard times and difficult decisions. And I don’t just mean panic-buying bog roll and scamming our elderly neighbours.
Most people, it seems to me, are doing pretty well on the “staying at home”and “thinking of others” front. And although it may have come as a deep shock to many in the current government, those previously regarded as expendable and low-skilled (which has hitherto actually meant under-paid and therefore undervalued by those with more money than sense) are proving themselves to be brave, stoic, efficient, dedicated above and beyond and utterly necessary at all levels.
These truths, to mis-quote the American constitution, many of us have held to be self-evident for quite some time. It has just taken others a little longer to catch up. Unfortunately.
However, all is not completely doom and despondency, even in times which should and indeed, must, be taken seriously for the good of all. So in an effort to introduce a little lightheartedness, I can only offer you a telling glimpse of life chez Broon.
I have not, I can tell you, hand on heart, succumbed to stockpiling of any description but I have found myself doing what might be termed slightly selective shopping while largely confined behind closed doors. Although anyone looking at my regular list of household necessities might struggle to spot the difference. Apart from the usual comestibles required to sustain life (even I can be Captain Sensible when called upon), the first things I ordered online at the end of last week were a hundred quids’-worth of red wine bin ends, fifty quids’ worth of plants and two jars of piccalilli. Fact.
I may yet be saved from myself by the joyous news that (alongside corner shops, supermarkets, pharmacies, banks and petrol stations) off-licences are now regarded as essential.
Quite right, too. We have not, after all, had the benefit of the wonderful plumbing-related blip that recently occurred in the Modena region of otherwise thoroughly beleaguered Italy when the taps started running red wine. And surely, any politician in their right mind would infinitely prefer to face a populace that is mildly p ***** rather than seriously p ***** off?