Dear blog reader
When this message reaches you, I might no longer be here. As also you might not. The Corona has been unleashed and it will eventually kill us all, if not after lunch probably tomorrow, next week or before summer at the very latest.
And if it won’t it will be worse. Hell, they say, is a place without toilet tissue and that’s where I’ll be heading rather soon as my colleagues have been hoarding it for weeks already. Over lunch in the crammed NHS-staff room the other day I shared that I wasn’t nervous about all this Corona business but that I might as well buy a bottle of hand sanitiser. It’s a sensible thing to do after all, I said as I filled my mouth with supermarket pad thai. Oh yeah? And where would you buy that? asked my colleague. Because there was none left yesterday after he’d picked up the last remaining seven boxes, he informed me. It felt like he just had pushed me out of the boat we were supposed to be sitting in together. Well, at least now I know. Won’t share any more jokes with him on dull shifts, that’s for sure.
The paper tells me that“military police” might be deployed on the streets of London to tackle “civil unrest.” I’m not entirely sure what military police is, but I remember the term from when reading about South American countries as a child. Their presence was nothing positive, that much was clear.
Well, as we’re heading, faeces smelling bums first, to a Corona induced post civilisation state marked by physical isolation, mental alienation and eventually death caused by breathing difficulties in total loneliness, I think it’s about time to, again, highlight the all time heroes of London NHS patients. Step forward the capital’s remaining blitz boys and girls.
No patients I’ve looked after during 16 years in London’s recovery rooms have been more polite and grateful or more resilient to suffering, delays and all sorts of NHS mishaps than these people.
The Corona is most dangerous for the elderly, but it’s them, the people who survived the war, the ones whose flats were bombed out in East London, whose dads’ dug shelters in the back gardens, who can show us that life will go on and who can teach us that a “thank you” and a cup of tea will go an awfully long way. Even in Corona times.
See you around. I’ve decided to stick through this. After all, my one year stint in India taught me all I need to know about life without toilet paper.
Yes we have it too, I refuse to act like a mad one although I am an elderly woman.
Absolutely right! People have lost their senses, empty supermarket shelves, people buying blindly, stupidly things which they have previously never bought!
I believe that there is now going to be a kind of rationing, so one pack of loo paper per person? You are right. us “oldies”who have gone through the war had it much worse…we are just going to sit it out, hopefully surviving it!!
XxxxLucy