Just a quick one. I could not resist this.
For those of you who have been following me, you know I am spending my quarantine in a house within a large walled garden surrounded by some more houses currently inhabited mostly by elderly couples. (For those who have just joined here is the summary.) We are talking 75/80 age range here.
Most of them are lovely and rational. Then there is one quite extravagant couple no-vax and pro- all sort of weird things. You name them. Their doctors are anthroposophical (whatever, excuse me, the Rudolf Steiner stuff). Their gardening practices are biodynamic. Their children know how to knit but don’t do maths. They are also big bores in the sense that whatever you do they tell you you do it wrong and you should rather follow some esoteric practice instead. They also stated that even if a coronavirus vaccine is found and Bill Gates or the state pays for it, they won’t have it. They’d rather follow nature. (Nature??? )
There is a WhatsApp group (I had never been in one of those before) of the ladies who have houses here. No men allowed. Most frequent subject is state of blooming of plants. Followed by pictures of sexy men (bad taste really) – and comments on said subject. Followed by some populistic mostly anti-German videos (they obviously have not watched the Fawlty Towers episode of Don’t mention the war).
Tonight, yes, well tonight while I was cooking my spaghettini with cherry tomatoes and ricotta (btw I cooked an absolutely fantastic courgette flowers tempura for lunch) drinking a glass of Sicilian red wine, my phone beeped. I don’t normally interrupt cooking because of a text msg, but I had been exchanging messages with my daughter and thought it might have been her, so I picked it up to have a look.
So there was this msg from the no vax lady saying ‘yes, the name of the instrument is pulse oximeter and tomorrow we should buy from the chemist’. Tomorrow is May 1st. I doubt you’ll be able to buy anything anywhere. This was too good to let it pass. So I wrote ‘OMG are you sick?’. She replies ‘I just want to have it before I go into hospital’. So I start thinking maybe she IS sick. And I go ‘so you need to go to the hospital? You must be feeling unwell’. She says ‘it’s just for prevention’.
Deep breath. This is the woman who decides who she can get close to depending on how much she likes the person. Prevention is not the name of the game. Lottery, more like it.
Well anyway I think she got pissed off when I said ‘maybe we don’t need it, we should not buy something that others might need during this time of scarse resources’. Truly, it’s not just the toilet paper, but people have been hoarding malaria tablets and heparine for Gods sake. And let’s not mention face masks. Let’s just so not go there (another time, I know, I haven’t written about those because I was fuming and it’s not a good thing to write about a subject you are feeling very upset about unless you are Joan Didion).
grrr and grrr. Idiots. What are they going to do with a pulse oximeter? Personally until 40 days ago I did not even own a thermometer. When my kids were young and I lived in London I used to have a plastic strip which you could put on their forehead and it would change colour if they had a temperature. Then you would give them paracetamol and if it still looked like they had a temperature you would call the doctor. Then one of the other ladies bought it for me (she probably felt sorry I didn’t have one, maybe she thought I was stupid or eccentric). It’s still in its box somewhere.
Oh Britannia (For those of you who don’t know me I am so very anti Brexit, but still allowed to love the country, right?). I learned so much about how to live when I was there. Simplicity. Logic. Rationality. I want to go back. Especially, and this is a non sponsored recommendation, after watching the Ricky Gervais series After Life on Netflix. (Fleabag was good too, although it was not shot in NW3, and Hampstead with Diane Keaton was a little bit too corny.) I feel soooo homesick.
night night
