A strict routine can ease boredom
Just as some of my parents’ generation had “a good war”, so many of those not directly affected by Covid-19 have had “a good pandemic” – appreciating perhaps more intensely than ever before the irrepressible joys of spring. Still, the prospect that the Government (in line with other European countries) will shortly ease some lockdown restrictions is obviously most welcome, though it will generate a new set of uncertainties.
At present, anyone who develops mild, flu-like symptoms knows what to do on the presumption that Covid-19 could be the culprit. It is less likely to be so as time passes, but even if the risk were to fall as low as (say) 1 per cent, the hazard of potentially endangering the lives of the vulnerable remains. The only way around this, in the absence of a protective vaccine, is that for the foreseeable future even a sniffle should warrant testing.
There is a sort of equanimity in all being in the same boat similarly inconvenienced together. But that too will change and the tedium for those who must continue to selfisolate will be compounded by knowing that others will be out and about enjoying the sunshine.
There is no solution here, but some might be encouraged by the advice of Jon Bailey, the former Royal Navy submariner who has had more experience of self-isolation than most, having spent weeks at a time in a steel tube underwater with little contact with the world outside.
“Routine gives you direction and keeps the time flowing,” he says – so set time for work, hobbies, meals, exercise (at least 30 minutes a day), “write it down and stick to it”.
Next, he urges perspective. It may be a bad situation but it will end, so “don’t obsess over the news, focus on what you enjoy and make plans”.
How the heart leaps
The Wordsworthian “leap of the heart” on meeting unexpectedly a dear and long-lost friend, as recently mentioned in this column, has prompted vivid memories of similarly emotionally charged encounters. “My heart leapt with joy,” recalls one woman, remembering the moment her firstborn was placed in her arms after a long and agonising delivery, while for another “her heart flipped with love” on holding her first grandchild.
The sensation may too be a premonition (“a message from on high”) of what fate has in store. “When an apprentice draughtsman came into the office where I worked I experienced a physical jolt in my chest,” writes a reader from Dumfriesshire. She thought little more about the encounter, but a year later they met again by chance and have now been happily married for 54 years.
The technical explanation, according to surgeon David Nunn (“based on personal experience”), is that an emotional surge of adrenalin causes the atria (the upper chambers of the heart) to contract prematurely. This is experienced as a missed beat and is followed almost immediately by a markedly forceful contraction of the ventricles (the physical jolt or heart leap), as they propel the increased volume of blood from the atria out into the circulation.
Praise for care staff
Finally, the Prime Minister’s eloquent tribute to the nurses at St Thomas’, who cared for him “when things could have gone either way”, is echoed by Patsy Calne for Caroline and all her team on Trinity ward at the Cambridgeshire Care Home in Great Shelford. “They are doing a sterling job in these most difficult times” looking after, amongst others, her husband, the transplant pioneer Sir Roy Calne, after he had a major stroke last year.
“They are not well paid, not celebrities, but the salt of the earth,” she writes of the care staff who, since visitors are no longer allowed, are now their patients’ sole physical contact with the outside world.
Routine gives you direction, so set aside time for work, meals and exercise, and stick to it