Hands – Space – Blank Face

“It is perfectly reasonable to believe that someone is out to get you!”

So, lockdown continues and life in the Newland Avenue Care home has settled into a cycle of walking, eating, walking, eating and after another cheerful documentary about mass murder on Netflix, it’s back to bed. As the weather continues its determined attempts to make things worse, the highlight of the week has become a weekly drive to Knaresborough McDonalds for a drive through coffee and cheeseburger.

Patient ‘H’ also has a daily routine and somehow manages to make breakfast last until about 11:30, following which she gets dressed and arrives downstairs just in time for a short walk to the local Co-Op supermarket before lunch. Now this would of course be fine with the staff if it were not for the fact that she returns from the shop a walking bio-hazard!

As I write this, I have not yet had my COVID19 jab, unlike my wife and ‘H’, so I am naturally feeling vulnerable. You can imagine then my dismay at finding ‘H’ wandering around the Co-Op without a face mask. When I point this out to her she looks blankly at me for a moment before announcing “I know”. There are a few explanations for this reaction, a, she was embarrassed when she realised that she had forgotten, b, she knew that she didn’t have a face mask but decided that her need for crumpets outweighed my need to continue breathing or c, she, like the rest of her generation believe that they are indestructible.

“Don’t mention the war!”

I have come to learn that there is a strange attitude, common amongst the generation of British people that lived through World War II as children. Unlike the generation that actually fought in it, ‘H’s generation never shut up about the war. “Oh well, after what we went through, we just get on with things” she was heard boasting to her best friend when talking about lockdown restrictions. Apparently us younger ‘wishy washy’ types are not getting on with it by going out running, walking, getting coffee’s and shopping, whilst her generation are battling bravely on by sitting on their arses and watching back to back TV quiz shows starting with ‘Countdown’ at 2pm and not leaving the lounge until ‘The Chase’ ends at 6pm when we call her through for dinner.

They have an attitude of superiority about their wartime experiences but ‘H’ was 9 when it started and 15 when it ended, so wasn’t even old enough to serve as a ‘Land Girl’. To hear her and her friends bang on you would think that as little girls they had kicked off their sandals and with their pretty little floral dresses fluttering in the breeze, charged screaming up the beaches of France, their machine guns spitting death at the terrified Germans.

As the evidence shows, Harrogate (where ‘H’ and her friends spent the war) was not even a target for the Luftwaffe with only one bomb falling on the town and that appears to be by mistake. Unless of course Hitler had decided that if he could destroy the Harrogate springs, the devastation caused to supplies of expensive fizzy water would deal a crushing blow to the moral of the British.

This arrogance about the war feeds into that generations sense of being impervious to anything and therefore not needing to concern themselves with trivial matters such as not giving me COVID19!

PS: Since writing this I have now had my first jab but that is another story.