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Day 6 - The Problem With Other People


Sure enough …...

I was awoken from a restless sleep, plagued by zombies and scientists, not with my usual Sunday morning cup of tea but with an anguished face leaning over me.
     "Have you heard?  Dave's infected !"
     "Christ, John! What time is it?" I said, fumbling with the alarm clock.
     "He's just been on WhatsApp.  Look at these photos!" he said, thrusting his phone into my face.  "Why does your phone say it's 9.20 but the clock ….. oh, they went forward, didn't they?"
     "Never mind that.  The photos Daisy.  Look at the photos of Dave!"
     I blinked a few times until pictures of a blurry baking potato, enshrouded in blanket or duvet, came into focus. "What? He looks the same as usual to me."
     "He looks bloody awful Daisy."
      "Exactly!" I said, swinging my legs out of bed.  "He's no George Clooney at the best of times, is he?"
     "He said his temperature is off the scale!"
     "I'll call Karen later," I said, putting on my dressing gown and heading for the door, before …..
     "Last week!!" he shrieked. And there it was. "You saw him late last week. You told me you got so close to him that he choked on his Eccles cake!"
     "Chelsea bun," I said and kept on walking.

I wasn't at all surprised to hear that Karen had already spent an hour googling family law solicitors by the time I spoke to her (in case she needed to start divorce proceedings online).  She was already a bit pissed when I phoned her at 1pm.  Daytime drinking; one of the perks of not having kids. Dave's temperature was not 'off the scale', she told me. Far from it.  It was slightly raised and he had bit of a cough (another reason for a possible divorce).  He'd been following her about, hacking away just so that she knew that he was in fact, truly suffering.  When she'd told him to pick a room and then 'just fucking isolate', he'd suggested that he should get some sort of bell so that he could ring it for his food and drink requirements.  She had told him that she would shove any bell that he sourced 'right up his arse!'
     Oh how I love stories of other people's Lockdown hell!

I have always hated the Sunday after the clocks go forward, where a whole hour is shaved off your weekend.  It throws me all off kilter for days.  Today, we chose to ignore it.  Time had already started to lose its significance.  There would be no lunchboxes to be prepared or shirts to iron this evening. Just like that, we'd gone from working to a regimented timetable to a bit of a free-for-all. As a result of Dave's melodramatic activity on WhatsApp, most of the day was spent trying to divert John's attention to more practical matters, the most urgent one being his mother's toilet paper situation. "We can spare a roll," I said.  "That should see her through the next couple of days."
     "What about us?  How are we fixed? Be honest with me Daisy.  Can we really spare one?"
       John waited, chewing on his bottom lip as I tried to make the calculations in my head. "Let's see, we've ……" The tension grew.  "I put a new one in the cloakroom this morning and there's still half a roll in the upstairs bathroom too."
     "Daisy, we'll never make it on one and a half!"
     "Wait John!  I was just gonna say that I opened a pack of four to get one for the cloakroom this morning.  That leaves three in the bathroom cabinet.  It's not gonna be easy but I think we could do it!  I think we could give one to your mother and manage for a few more days."
     John grabbed me and kissed my forehead in a fit of gratitude.  "I knew I could rely on you!  I'll take it to her after dark and leave it outside her back door in case there are any thieves around."
     "Ok. No problem. But realistically, in a day or two, before we are really in dire straights, one of us will have to track down some more."
     "Well, it's not gonna be easy," John said.  "I can't remember the last time I saw a pack of toilet roll in the area."
     "I can," I said.
     "Where?"
     "Right next door.  Margaret's a stock piler!"


So under cover of darkness, John drove a roll of toilet paper, encased in a plastic bag, round to his mother's house.  He told me that he went around the back of the house, put it on the doorstep and sprayed it down with disinfectant.  He then knocked the door and waited in the bushes at a safe distance until she came out to collect it.  He wasn't going to take any chances on the contents of that bag getting into an opportunistic neighbour's hands.
     Another successful mission for John. My hero!



   
   

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