As a daughter, I support protecting the older generation; as a mother, I worry about the bill
Do you remember the good old days... of last month?
Even though we knew in our hearts that Monday night’s announcement was coming, it was still a shock to hear the Prime Minister speak those momentous words aloud. Almost all of our precious freedoms, gatherings and rituals – “except funerals” as Boris added chillingly – were to be put on hold. It was by far the most solemn, sobering public announcement of my lifetime.
Ministers drew parallels with the Blitz spirit, but this is very different from a war. We can’t come together to defeat a common enemy. We must stay apart because each of us is potentially the enemy of another. That is the damnable riddle of Covid-19. Only through isolation can we serve the common good. It is a hard and painful concept to grasp.
“As they have in the past, so many times, the people of this country will rise to that challenge and beat the coronavirus and, together, we will come through it stronger than ever,” the PM insisted. Will we?
You have to admit the initial indications were not promising. At the weekend, a vast number of Britons ignored official advice to avoid social contact, flocking instead to pubs, parks, beaches and beauty spots. It didn’t seem to occur to owners of second homes that areas like Cornwall and the Lake District have limited hospital provision for their small populations and that incomers, possibly bearing the virus, could put a catastrophic strain on local services. How quickly might picnic rugs become shrouds.
In supermarkets, too often we saw a swinish rush to snaffle groceries that were badly needed by others. A shell-shocked nurse who had just come off a punishing 10-hour shift wept in her car because the shelves of her local supermarket were stripped bare.
In one Sainsbury’s in Hertfordshire, the manager was nearly punched by a man who was trying to buy ALL the powdered baby milk until he was restrained. Staff at the same store had to deal with a mother, with a six-week-old infant, crying, “My baby will die” because there was no formula left.
In the past three weeks, as coronavirus panic came to the boil, a staggering one billion pounds’ worth of extra food was bought by customers. In mischievous response, a member of the older generation posted a picture of the weekly rations for an adult during the Second World War. It was a sharp corrective to desperate people who were down to their last three packets of passion fruit granola. Horrors, darling! Imagine trying to get by on one egg, 4oz of margarine and 2oz of tea as people did in 1942. How on earth did they cope without pizza and Parmesan?
The irony is that the wartime generation has generally lived such long healthy lives precisely because their bodies were spared the 24/7 snacks available to perma-grazing grandchildren. A period of less, for a change, might be healthy for more.
You know, I felt ashamed when I saw that pitiful array of basic wartime rations. For I, too, had been one of the spoilt women practically hyperventilating when I couldn’t get an Ocado delivery for a fortnight. TWO WEEKS!
Accustomed to a period of plenty and doing as we damn well please, no wonder so many Britons struggled to adjust their lifestyles to the harsh new reality.
So now the state has stepped in to make us do it. The selfish will be forced (by the police if necessary) into selflessness. For all Boris’s talk about a “national effort” this is a slap across the face for the vast swarming multitudes infected with the moronavirus.
Yesterday morning, we all woke up to the extraordinary realisation that our lives are no longer our own to lead as we choose. Puzzlingly, Corbynists who had previously called Boris a “fascist” now professed themselves delighted that he had enacted measures far beyond the dreams of the most repressive dictator. Go figure.
For others, there was the immediate loss of the comforting and familiar. Personally, if life ever gets too much, I retreat to my spiritual home, John Lewis’s bath and bed department, and stroke the towels. With both JL and the churches closed, such solace will be hard to come by.
Things are especially brutal right now for the 4.8million self-employed people in the UK. Instructed to stay in their homes, they must somehow magic up the money to keep those households afloat. Many don’t have the predominantly middle-class luxury of WFH (working from home).
A bathroom fitter, whose work just dried up, told me that when the direct debits for his mortgage, council tax and bills go out of his account next week, his family of five will have next to nothing left to live on. He spent two hours holding on the phone to ask his bank for a mortgage holiday. When someone finally answered, they claimed not to have been told about any “arrangements”. No wonder people are afraid.
Meanwhile, I hear terrible stories of young people on temporary contracts staggering into work, trying to hide possible symptoms of the virus, so desperate are they to cling on to a job. We need an urgent gesture from you now, Rishi Sunak, to support freelancers so they too can self-isolate without starving.
I have been isolating myself for 10 days now, but I must admit I cheated and popped to the salon for a final haircut. Not the last of my life (at least I hope not). I simply couldn’t bear the thought of coming out of quarantine looking like Tarzan’s bewildered great-auntie.
The salon was surprisingly busy. “Didn’t you know hairdressers are the fourth emergency service?” the owner joked. It felt so nice, sitting there, sipping cappuccino, just listening to the chatter. That was less than a week ago, but already such blissful normality feels impossibly remote. When will we know its blessed balm again?
Every woman getting her haircut that afternoon belonged, as I do, to the Sandwich Generation. It’s hardly unusual for mums in midlife to feel tugged in two different directions. That dilemma is never easy at the best of times, but coronavirus has suddenly asked us to make the judgment of Solomon. We have to choose between our parents and our children.
My son and daughter are in the age group most likely to carry the virus, my 83-year-old mother is in the cohort most likely to be harmed by it. I’d love all of us to see this thing through together, but that’s not possible.
So, we Sandwich women urge our elderly relatives to stay indoors and give up those precise activities that keep them healthy and sane.
We urge our restless kids to observe the quarantine that may keep their grandparents safe, but which also has seen youngsters thrown out of work/university and will ruin their own economic prospects for years to come.
Statistics from Imperial College London starkly reveal that this week’s new, draconian lockdown is all about shielding the older generation from the virus so that the NHS isn’t overwhelmed. Among those aged 20 to 29 with Covid-19, 1.2 per cent of cases require hospitalisation, 5 per cent of those hospitalised require critical care and there are 0.03 per cent fatalities.
Among those aged 70 to 79 with coronavirus symptoms, 24.3 per cent require hospitalisation (over 80, it’s 27.3 per cent), 43.2 per cent of those admitted to hospital require critical care (over 80 it’s 70.9 per cent), the fatality ratio is 5.1 per cent (against 9.3 per cent for over 80).
No prime minister would willingly enact such measures, Boris told us in his announcement, which curtailed the historic liberties of the British people to a disturbing degree. Looking at the figures above, you can see why he felt that he had no choice.
“I know the damage that this disruption is doing to people’s lives and their jobs,” he said grimly. I really hope he does. Out here, things are already worrying for many families and, as more and more people lose first work, then hope, the misery will only deepen.
As a daughter, I support the wisdom of protecting the older generation; as a mother, I worry about the bill for the future downturn that my children will still be paying off when they are grandparents.
Boris has extraordinarily tough decisions to make. I don’t envy him.
‘Oi, did you see him touch that gate and he didn’t even go indoors to wash his hands and sing Happy Birthday?” comes a squawk of outrage from the sofa.
“Mum, they just hugged and they’re not related and they weren’t wearing masks or gloves,” objected the Daughter during Eastenders on Monday night. Given the recent kidnappings, murder and under-age drowning in Albert Square, gloveless hugs should really be the least of your worries. But that was in the days of yore.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s wonderfully nostalgic to be reminded of the days of yore, even though yore was roughly nine days ago. Yore was when you could still enter a room without Dettol-ing the doorknob. Yore was taking a parcel from the postman and not regarding it as on a par, hazardwise, with a small nuclear warhead.
Meanwhile, in The Archers everyone is still going to the pub, lucky devils.
And they think a gas explosion at Grey Gables is big news!
Thank goodness The Split has finished on BBC One because all that adultery business definitely belongs to the days of yore. Hannah and Nathan would be working from home by now and no way would Hannah be sneaking off to Christie’s love-nest. Forget lacy underwear, she would have to wear Marigolds for an illicit lovers’ embrace. Corona could well cause an outbreak of monogamy.
Watching Belgravia, Julian Fellowes’s new period drama on Sunday night, I actually found myself fancying one of those crinolines the women wear. Absolutely ideal for instant social distancing. Now, that would never have occurred to me, back in the days of yore.
This is a slap in the face for the swarming multitudes infected by ‘moronovirus’
I’d love my family to see this thing through together, but that’s not possible