I’d like to wash my hands of germ-ridden family!

I HABITUALLY work from home, at the kitchen table. The only distraction is the dog who, when I am headdown on a news story and approaching deadline, senses my preoccupation and surreptitiously transfers to the sofa.

Deadline over, when I get up to make a cup of tea he has been known to slink back to his bed, but not often. For creatures that have such fantastic senses they can feign not noticing your presence when it suits them.

As can teenagers.

I almost forgot: there is another human occupant of the house, most of the time, but I only see him when he heads to the kitchen to graze.

He is self-isolating in his bedroom. Not because he has any concerns about the coronavirus but because he is a teenager. If you could catch anything from staring at a mobile phone screen, other than an impaired attention span, he’d be in intensive care.

At least his self-imposed isolation means he brings fewer infections into the house than he did when he was in school or college.

The supermarket where he works, some of the time, while allegedly saving to go to university – speed the day – just isn’t in the same league as a germ factory as is the average educational establishment.

My wife is a lecturer and when we had two school-age children I was the target of biological warfare. The enemy came at me with hideous, invisible weapons from three angles.

Now there is only one person in education living in our home the threat has diminished. My wife comes home with a cold/cough/ headache at the end of the first day of term and keeps the infection until the end of the final day of the university year.

I never catch anything from her. The bugs coursing through her veins and lungs and nose are having such a fabulous time they can’t be bothered to move on to me.

She accepts being disease-ridden as being part of the job, along with the risk of varicose veins, and rarely moans. The most she will say is, “I feel like I have a temperature.”

To which I always reply, “It’s a good job, otherwise you’d be dead.”

She glares and reaches for a kitchen knife.

The worst infections are those brought home by children when in the early years of primary school. Norovirus topped the lot. My daughter came home one Friday and threw up in every room bar two.

We cleaned the house all Saturday. Then my son threw up in every room bar two on the Sunday.

The only infection-free rooms were their bedrooms, and my wife and I wanted to keep clear of those because they housed infected children. Pointless; what they brought home we always got, eventually.

As a matter of habit, I still tell my son “wash your hands” when he is about to sit down for dinner, even though he is 19. He waves his hands in the general direction of a dripping tap, and wipes them on his shirt.

“Don’t you know how to wash your hands properly?” I rant.

“Yes: soap and hot water, backs and fronts, nails, individual fingers, rinse, turn the tap off with one paper towel and bin it. Completely dry your hands with another paper towel and bin that. They told us at work.” “Why don’t you do that at home?” “Because I’m not at work.”

Yes. But. Sigh. A conversation of the kind you can only have with a teenage male. Wait until he has kids. I’ll be laughing all the way to the pharmacy.