Michael DEACON
I wonder what it would be like to live with no idea that this pandemic exists?
Every now and then, we’d glimpse a tiny, cut-off community – and then nothing else but trees, for miles and miles around
Here’s a thought. What if there are people who don’t know this is happening? Or who, if not actually oblivious of the pandemic, are wholly untouched by it, and have been going about their lives precisely as normal? Not in this country, I think we can assume. But in remote little pockets of life, far from here. Far from anywhere.
Ten years ago I took a train journey across western Canada. Most of the route was through a vast and desolate Narnia of pines and firs. Fifty per cent of Canada is forest – which is saying something, because Canada is huge. Drop Britain from a helicopter into a Canadian forest and it would be lost as irretrievably as a pine cone.
The journey was beautiful, but extraordinarily lonely.
Much of the time, the sole evidence that mankind had ever passed this way was the track beneath us. Yet, every now and then, we’d glimpse a tiny, cut-off community, with a general store, gas station, post office – and then nothing else but trees, for miles and miles around.
I wonder how people in places like that are getting on. The virus is unlikely to have reached them, or changed their way of life. They live in self-isolation as it is. And presumably that’s just how they like it. At least the littlest children – some of them, anyway – are back at school. But how strange it must feel, at the age of five or six, having to adapt to all these mysterious new rules.
The teachers at my son’s school have been very good, doing all they can to make the experience as cheery as possible. Lots of lessons outside, and packed lunches in the playground. The hand gel dispenser in my son’s classroom, meanwhile, is referred to as Squirty Bertie. (“I like Squirty Bertie. I use lots of Squirty Bertie.”)
Even so, it’s not always easy for small children to get their heads around what they’re being told to do, or why. One new rule in the classroom is that after you blow your nose, you have to wash your hands. My son has certainly taken this edict to heart. The other evening, half an hour after he’d been put to bed, there came a cry of “Mama!”
Mama went to ask what was up.
“I sneezed,” he said. “I need to wash my hands.”
He hadn’t actually sneezed into his hands. He just believed that this was an immutable law: if you sneezed, you immediately had to wash your hands. Even when alone in bed, at half past eight at night.
His generation will grow up devout hand-washers, Squirty Bertie their light and guide. Never mind Covid. They’ll probably eradicate the common cold.