Black humour helps at times like these

THERE’S light at the end of every tunnel, when you can laugh – is what I was thinking as we drove away from a hospital car park this week.

I’d been waiting there because my mum was having a test related to an illness she’s had for a while. Obviously, I wasn’t allowed into the hospital with her – and it was no good going into town shopping or setting off for a walk – so I sat there in the car, writing this column.

Then I thought I’d have a snooze. But sleep was difficult, seeing I needed a window open and people kept walking past, coughing and sneezing.

Now I am watching two nurses covered in protective gear pushing an old lady through the car park in a wheelchair.

I think: “Blimey, I hope they don’t come this way. That old girl obviously has coronavirus and they’ve taken her out for a last look at the sunlight, or something.”

Zig-zag, they go. Up and down the cars – until they eventually reach my car. Now one of the nurses is gesticulating at me.

“No, no! There must be some mistake! I am waiting for my mum and she is going to ring me when she’s ready so I can pick her up from the side entrance.”

Bedraggled and sleepy, I climb out and the nurse says: “We’ve brought your mum out, she told us to look for the most dirty car in the car park. And we’ve found it!”

I look at the lady in the wheelchair, and it is indeed my mum.

“But…” I stammer. “She said she’d ring when she was ready to leave. I’m really sorry you’ve had to come out. I saw you, but thought you were taking some poor coronavirus patient out for a bit of fresh air. Sorry if I looked so scared.”

Both nurses laugh so much they almost blow away their masks – and my mum is in hysterics. She says: “And you really do have the most filthy car in Taunton. I told them that – and they knew it was you as soon as they saw it!”

“And I thought you were some old girl dying of coronavirus,” I reply, pathetically. We laugh half the way home. Black humour is a strange thing, but it’s there for a reason. It helps smooth bumpy places. And things are bumpy.

Now I get to the bit I wrote earlier in the car park. A car park I know well and try to avoid. Normally it’s hectic – queues at barriers, people driving round waiting for a space… Now it’s free, yet few people come and go.

My mum has a vital appointment, which is why I’ve left my remote valley for the first time in 17 days – and, my goodness, was I shocked by the emptiness of the world.

In Minehead, where mum lives, the main street was empty. I saw just three people and could have parked anywhere. The only time you’d ever have seen it like that before would have been on Christmas Day.

Journalists use the phrase ‘postapocalyptic’ too much – but could now, too. The postie has worn his footprints into our path. That is down to my wife who has ordered the entire contents of eBay.

I think she is planning to make an ark just in case the sewage lake rises further.

She has already built a self-isolation unit. There’s bars, a security system, a chaise longue and a dressing table as well as a single bed so I don’t think I’m invited.

Hold on.

Sorry about that. It was the postie. Oh, hold on again, there’s a delivery van pulling up.

The postie brought a book my wife this be the time? If you’d shown people the empty street or the silent hospital car park just a month ago, they wouldn’t have believed it. We’d seen footage of Wuhan during China’s lockdown, but we’d have shrugged: “That will never happen here.”

And ring-a-ring-a-roses if we don’t all fall down. With shock. It has happened and people are adapting with astonishing rapidity.

Most people. I don’t understand criticising police for being strongly persuasive in their ‘stay at home’ duties. This is not some Gestapo we’re defying – it’s a force doing its best to fight a deadly virus.

The hamlet up our valley has several holiday homes and suddenly they are all full with people down from London. One owner announced his entire clan was joining him next week.

A health worker who lives locally went ballistic. “I told him our village shop, doctors’ surgery and hospitals were all designed to cater for the regular population – not an influx from the cities. Certainly not from the hotbed of contagion that is London!”

This is happening across the West

Country, and foresee tensions between locals and the temporary incomers. We British are a polite and reserved lot, but we can get stroppy and indignant.

I am in lockdown and have plenty to do without getting myself worked up about incomers. But I do think the health worker was right to be concerned about the overload on local services.

It is a moral maze. What would we do if we had a young family in a cramped apartment in London and we owned a property in the countryside? Everyone’s got an opinion. I’m not running scared, but if you live somewhere remote and work from home, why go out and risk adding to the nightmare?

“We got through the war with a stiff upper lip – you should set an example and do the same now,” wrote one man.

I do have the required stiffness of lip – it’s just that I think it wise to keep it at home. Being gung-ho was good for a Spitfire pilot, it won’t do against the present enemy.

Neither will a sense of humour, but it does help.

I thought you were

some poor old coronavirus patient out

for a bit of fresh air