Browbeaten by quarantine but still forthright after a fortnight inside
continues her isolation diary for Covid-19.
You can read the first entries in the isolation diary here
No offence to post offices, widely regarded as the heart of the community, but pharmacies are more fun.
They really are. Instead of being corralled in a rope-managed queue, you get to wander around while they’re making up your prescription and realise how bleak your life would be without a barrel of Epsom Salts or a bottle of Feverfew. Older people get to do what Maeve Binchy memorably described as the organ recital, telling someone behind the counter precisely how iffy each of their organs is on that particular day.
Plus, Jane Brennan’s people in my local pharmacy have this miniature spiral slide overhead, down which your prescription tumbles. Most of the time they don’t use it, but when I visit, they humour me. I love that thing. One day, it caught me off guard and I applauded, which brought on early social isolation, right there.
The pharmacy texted this morning, asking me to email them a list of what I need and offering delivery if I can’t make it into the metropolis of Donabate, which I can’t.
Big Pharma basically keeps me in working order, which is a good thing, because work continues.
Some of that work takes the form of client phone calls beginning: “Terry, I’m really sorry, but…” The response rule is that you don’t make them feel any more miserable than they already do. I’m getting good at being funny in this situation. Not so much moving chairs on the deck of the Titanic as doing standup while it sinks.
No crying in baseball.
The eyebrows get dyed today. Past a certain age point, your eyebrows go so white, it looks like you don’t have any. So I dye mine with a will, knowing that, while today they may be startling, it is a Sunday and by tomorrow I will look human again.
I forget it’s Mother’s Day until I glance out a downstairs window and find my son making like that da Vinci guy in the wheel, in order to attract my attention to him and the hand-hewn chocolates he proposes to leave outside the kitchen door. That’s when he’s done cowering in a theatrical way as if I was a spectacularly bright laser. It takes me a minute to work out he feels threatened by my eyebrows. I put my arm over them as if I was doing an upward elbow cough and he relaxes.
At the end of a busy day, I am re-reading Molly Ivins, the Texan political correspondent who, unlike most mainstream media political correspondents, absolutely loved all the unprincipled, unfaithful, corrupt and flagrantly outrageous politicians her job required her to hang about with.
At one point she writes: “Many of us have endured sexual harassment (boy, didn’t we all recognise the truck driver in Thelma and Louise?)”
Some of us didn’t. I’ve never seen Thelma and Louise. Shocking, I know. It’s just one of a long list I feel guilty for never seeing.
Then it strikes me. Now is the time. One beaker of coffee later, courtesy of Netflix, I am enmeshed in the movie. What a cracker. In every sense.
Reports that the Spanish army, going into old people’s homes to sanitise the premises, find residents dead. Abandoned. Abandoned, it would appear, in demented life, long before death intervened.
This is the time to be grateful for having a short attention span. It prevents you looking at the shocking white glare of despair too long or too directly.
My son appears outside and tells me that my eyebrows have bedded in well.
In order to be heard through the treble glazing, he bellows this so loudly people on the cliff walk can hear it and are mystified. I can’t go out to show them that I no longer look like Bozo the Clown. (“Mr Bozo, to you…”)
I have been trying to locate a big former marine I did work for in the US a couple of decades back. I end up on websites that demand copious dollars from me.
So I do what I always do in that situation: Get Jennifer on the job. Within 12 hours she has him. He confirms he is who she thinks he might be. He says he is still quoting me but warns that the statute of limitations has run out if I’m looking for royalties.
When I joyfully email him, I ask, en passant, his views on his president. Because you never know, my marine might have changed since I knew him.
“I despise Trump in every way possible,” he crisply responds. “Governor Andrew Cuomo of NY State is running daily briefings that are clear, have both strategy and tactics that are helpful and include creative ideas. Then Trump comes on and looks like a fool. Three days later, Trump is saying what Cuomo had said and is trying to make it look like his idea. Funny if it weren’t so deadly.”
The two cats, Specs and Dino, spent the first week of my solitary confinement importuning me for food, on the basis that whenever I come home, normally, I feed them, therefore my presence indicates nosh on the way. That’s irritating. Invader Cat is more than irritating. Invader Cat is spectacularly ugly, constructed like a badly built compost heap with a stove-in face and random black spots that look like someone punched him in the eye with a dirty fist. He comes in the cat flap and steals food.
Initially, Dino took Invader Cat on with a will, which cost me more than €500 in vet repairs, with him then walking around with a lampshade on his head, which drove him nuts and prevented him from eating. So I want to capture Invader Cat, put him in a feline carrier and ask someone to drive him at least a hundred kilometres before turfing him out to enjoy pastures new. Tranquiliser gun? Suggestions welcome.
Please don’t tell me to get a cat flap that lets in only Dino and Specs. I did. It was expensive. It confused the hell out of my own cats. Invader Cat simply battered it until it fell off.
Now that I’ve been in complete isolation for 14 days, I figure I probably didn’t bring the virus into my tower with me. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that I may never get out of here, and reclusive though I am, the hug-famine is getting to me.
Actress Dearbhla Molloy once said that what she missed, after her divorce, was not the great moments of passion, but the capacity to get a hug when you needed one.
Soon as they’ve tested vaccines, found one that works as vaccines always work and manufactured enough supplies, someone needs to invite every known anti-vaxxer to a briefing just to tell them: “You’re not getting any until everybody else is served first. How’d you like them little apples?”
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