My run-in with Germy and Septic made me question my sanity
Tuesday was a ghastly day. I trudged up Morningside Road to Waitrose, through sheets of horizontal rain, grimly recalling Bernard Levin’s 1980 crack about our famed Festival – ‘for edinburgh in august, dress as for Reykjavik in February’.
at the supermarket’s door, I paused to tug on my mask, then padded inside and grabbed a handbasket. Given the chill and damp, within 30 seconds my glasses had steamed up and I was in a world of perpetual fog.
I had but three items to buy – a man’s shopping is a grab, pay and go business, not a protracted social experience – and shortly had my feet planted in the queue for the handbasket checkout.
Waitrose do make social distancing easy. your place in that queue is marked by two green footprints on the floor, precisely two metres apart. so I was startled, moments later, to feel someone’s breath on my neck.
I wheeled about. It was an old man, well north of 70, chuckling. Not three feet away.
‘excuse me,’ I said pleasantly, retreating a little and glancing anxiously at the lady ahead of me, now being served at the till, ‘would you keep your distance, please?’ To my incredulity, the fellow took a step towards me.
I thrust out my hand, like a traffic cop, and my voice rose into a bark. ‘sir, would you keep your distance, please? That’s your mark there…’ – and I pointed to his allotted footprints on the floor.
He shuffled another six inches toward me and laughed. I took another pace back. I was now well within two metres of the old lady at the till.
The dude then drew to mock attention and saluted me. ‘aye, aye, sir…’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘we’ve got a global pandemic on, we need to socially distance, the rules apply to everyone…’
suddenly, from starboard, another old man hove to. I took a step sideways, away from him. White eyebrows danced with merriment above his mask. ‘eh, Ben,’ he said, ‘this lad picking on you?’
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘we know the rules…’
He, too, pulled himself to attention and saluted. somehow, I’d drifted into an episode of still Game. I cast an imploring look at the woman serving at the checkout. she refused to meet my gaze.
I glanced about for the security man. I ‘gold fished’ – my mouth opening and shutting soundlessly, behind damp cotton – and, in that moment I so wanted to scream.
I wanted to scream that I am 54, asthmatic, shouldn’t really be allowed out. But that I must go out because I am shielding two elderly parents, one of them living with cancer, and only I can get the messages.
That, so far, Covid-19 has killed near 50,000 people in Britain. That nine people I knew caught the infection.
That two of them died. That I am sick of Covid-19. That my hands are raw with incessant washing and murderous sanitiser. That I hate blundering into every shop damp-masked and steamy-spectacled like some bumbling doctor out of Holby City… that how I wish 2020 would just stop…
and, please the Most High, I am so exhausted of irresponsible people who believe rules are for others – like these two eejits, or the old lady, the other day, who actually grabbed my arm and asked if I would hand her a copy of the edinburgh evening News.
‘Please don’t touch people,’ I said. ‘yes, yes,’ she said, smiling and nodding.
I gave her the paper she sought. ‘Please don’t go about touching people, madam…’
‘Of course, indeed,’ she said, nodding and smiling.
What is it with these auld souls? Having fulfilled their childhood ambition – presumably, to outlive Hitler – why are so many senior citizens so contemptuous of elementary public health decrees?
Like that wifie, Miss Cover Girl 1949, I silently seethed behind in Morrisons back in May. I had to buy bacon and sausages, but she was ahead.
and for five long minutes she picked up packet after packet in her ungloved, unwashed hands, pulled it to her nose, studied it, breathed upon it, then returned it to the shelf, before moving off, most slowly, not taking anything. a shuffling, ongoing bioweapon in hideous Crimplene…
at Waitrose, I pulled myself together, was finally served at the till, and – perhaps a little loudly – asked the woman serving me how her day had been, and wished her a happy evening, before making fast escape from septic and Germy.
Back out on Morningside Road, I ripped off my mask with such vehemence I had to move fast to save my spectacles from the pavement. The rain so earlier detested was suddenly precious on my face.
and I wondered, then, what am I becoming? I have never wanted to be the tedious inyour-face bad guy, the sort carrying an imaginary clipboard and berating people he does not know about elf ’n’ safety.
YeT here I am in august 2020 and, after months of global pandemic, I’ve somehow turned into Warden Hodges. But that is what fear does to you, and it dawned on me that since at least mid-March I have been walking daily in fear, hour upon hour, day after day, less in fear of catching the virus myself than in dread of bringing it home and infecting elderly loved ones.
I notice how much, now, I pace the floor. How I find myself socially distancing my own father in the living room; shudder when my brother picks up my glass, by the top, with his bare fingers, to pour me water.
and then it dawns on me that we are now two tribes in scotland – and, for once, it is neither about religion nor the constitution. There are the nervous Nellies, like myself, long habituated in conscientious hand hygiene and militant social distancing.
and there are the cynical sandys, like Germy and septic, who have had it up to here with the whole Covid-19 malarky, never died a winter yet, fine mind the war, sae thae dae, and what a load of fuss about some bug.
We could argue about this till the Friesians come home. so far, my hyper-caution has kept myself and my parents safe, even if I have had on occasion to be assertive – all the more difficult in the age of masks and when non-verbal communication, save a thumbs-up or a frown that could crack walnuts, is all but impossible.
yet, in the past seven weeks, only three scots have died of Covid-19 and in vast tracts of the country no one is infected at all. In the Outer Hebrides there hasn’t been a single fatality. We only hear of ‘spikes’ and ‘upticks’ because testing is now on such a colossal scale.
accordingly, public compliance is breaking down – and especially among older people, long irritated by our age’s hivis yellow hectoring on a host of health and safety fronts and weary of this land of woke and moaning.
and we may now be perilously close to the point where that compliance will disintegrate completely.