Grumpy Oldie Man
I’m diluting my parents’ Blitz spirit with Dettol
Nothing in this world is more repellent, as the philosopher Larry David posits, than the ostentatiously happy family that coexists in a cocoon of unbroken serenity.
In this regard, if no other, my family is anything but repellent. We love each other deeply. Yet, regardless of what Ali Macgraw told Ryan O’neal in that movie, love doesn’t mean never having to say you’re sorry.
What love means is ceaselessly having to say you’re sorry – but generally being too pig-headed, obstreperous and dumb to do so.
All of which is a preamble to the declaration that this column stands proxy for a giant mea culpa to my parents for the dementedly overbearing behaviour of recent weeks.
It would be distasteful for any writer, let alone a Jewish one, to describe that behaviour as ‘Hitlerian’. Even so, the remorseless screeching of rebukes and instructions has eerily reminded the three of us of the late Führer delivering one of his less temperate keynote addresses to a rally in 1936.
The cause of the crazy yelling, obviously enough, is a certain infectious disease emanating from the People’s Republic of China. My parents, possibly in common with a fair chunk of the Oldie readership, are not in absolutely the first flush of youth. In precisely which flush they are it would be indelicate to reveal.
But knowing that I am 56, you needn’t be the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics to compute that they are bang in the coronadanger zone.
Like most contemporaries, they have what we now call, with practised ease, underlying conditions. Unlike most of them, they share a home with an 18-year-old grandson, whose relationship with the aggressive application of soap has tended towards the literally hands-off; and who until very recently travelled to and from work on the vast subterranean Petri dish known as the London Underground.
Between him and my parents, standing inter-generational sentinel like a Khmer Rouge death-camp guard, though with palpably less patience and charm, is me.
Their house currently moonlights as the makeshift set of the unfunniest family-tension-themed sitcom ITV neglected to commission in place of On
the Buses (and how poignantly nostalgic that title sounds today) in the 1970s.
From soon after dawn until the edge of dusk, I patrol with the antiseptic wipes. Dettol poisoning is a likelier cause of death in this household than the virus.
If this were restricted to door handles, taps and the like, there would be less urgent need for this filial apology.
‘You know we appreciate your efforts,’ as my father murmured on finding his biro making no impression on his Sudoku, ‘but is it really necessary to wipe down every page of my Times?’
The truth is that I don’t know – and prefer to fill this knowledge void with a regime of draconian brutality.
‘I know we’re not allowed into America any more, but what about Cuba?’ I overheard my mother ask a friend down the phone after a furious reprimand for sharing kitchen space with a fork of unknown previous usage. ‘I could do with a break from this in Guantanamo Bay.’ She is no stranger herself to medical neurosing. She insists, for example, that tickling a baby’s feet causes irreversible damage to its autonomic nervous system. She shies from a bottle of Sarson’s like a wild mustang rearing at a rattlesnake, in the conviction that vinegar ‘dries the blood’.
My dad, while generally a paradigm of stoical common sense, has had his foibles. Back when he was smoking 80 a day, he issued a fatwa against saccharine sweeteners on the grounds that ‘they cause cancer’.
Yet in the face of more genuine danger, both my parents are magnificently phlegmatic.
I’m not sure why. It might be that maturity brings tranquillity with wisdom, or that a childhood during the Blitz imbues lifetime immunity against fretting obsessively about other lethalities.
Then again, it may just have something to do with fatigue at being bossed about by their deranged offspring with the newly acquired sobriquet of ‘Edward Dettolhands’.
The panic buying of tuna and sardines, so that the cupboard is visibly more replete than the John West depot, they have endured with startling grace. They have mistakenly brushed aside the threat to zap anyone who strays within 14 feet of an undisinfected kettle, with a Taser bought on the dark internet, as a joke. What threatens to break them is the edict, issued this morning, that they must wear one of the 500 pairs of vinyl gloves that arrived from Amazon yesterday when handling fruit, books, remote controls and teabags.
Whether love will be enough to sustain us as a family unit through the months of isolation to come is hard to call. But – and without any intention of reforming my ways – I am sincerely sorry for being such a bombastic bully that the least gifted facial analyst in Christendom would correctly translate their shared default expression at a glance.
O death, it unmistakably reads, where is thy sting?