A distraction isn’t always a benefit

I’m dictating this while heading south on the A3, part of my Covid audio diary. Well, that’s the intellectual version, basically it’s just me talking to myself which in fairness is what I do most of the time. If any of you have a husband and two teenage kids, you’ll know where I’m coming from.

Yes, I know it’s technically illegal to use your phone while driving but what I’m doing is no different from singing along to the radio, and I am staying alert thank you. I haven’t been out of the sodding house for ninety days; I think I may be developing claustrophobia. Make that spouseophobia. If I have to spend one more day staring at my husband Spencer’s saggy Calvin Klein pants, I swear I’ll gladly swap lockdown for a life locked up. That’s why I had to escape for a bit of, ‘Me Time’.

I do this quite often, escape, I mean. Spencer’s generally at work, so it doesn’t matter if I abscond for a bit. About ten minutes ago, I stood in the hall and shouted, ‘I’m just popping out.’ Not a single response, no words of concern like, ‘No Mum you’re not allowed out’ or, ‘Don’t forget to take a mask’, I wasn’t too surprised though, I’m accustomed to being ignored. My mother warned me life would be this way, I never listened to my mother either so, I’ve only myself to blame for allowing it to happen.

My husband and my two kids inhabit a parallel universe where everything is simplified, food, clean clothes, phones, outrageously overpriced trainers, and a comfortable place to live come as standard—they are the selfish incarnations of my devotion.

My son Laurence is seventeen, and my daughter Melisa is eighteen. I look at them sometimes and I think proudly; ‘I made them’. Then they do or say something stupid, and I think; ‘why did I do this?’ I blame social media, you can’t deprive them of it; when I was their age I made friends, they have photo-filtered followers. And then there’s likeaholism.

I often earwig my daughter when she’s chatting on her phone, some of you might find these conversations familiar; I spend most of my time with a perma-frown. ‘I was like no, and she’s like full on, then I’m like no way, so she says do you actually like him, and I’m like screw you.’ This is my daughter speaking who achieved A grades in English, French, and Sociology.

My boy isn’t showing any likeaholic symptoms, he generally prefers not to speak at all, he just pouts and nods if he enjoys something, or does an Elvis lip-curl if he doesn’t. He has over five thousand followers on Instagram none of whom he has met or is ever likely to. He wants to be a journalist. I have explained that being a social commentator would involve quite a lot of verbal communication; that intervention received the lip-curl shrug response which, for Laurence, amounts to the effort required of Abraham Lincoln to deliver the Gettysburg Address.

It's not unusual, kids not speaking. We had him assessed by Vivienne Barret a psychologist who, after a few rather expensive sessions, astonishingly concluded; ‘he’s a fascinating boy, very bright too, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed spending time with him. When with you he may be demonstrating a form of selective mutism due to, and these are his words, now let me see.’ Vivienne began frantically tapping her mouse, then turned her monitor to reveal a video recording of my son to whom Vivienne asked, ‘What causes you to feel the need to shut down Laurence?’ To which he replied, ‘The unrelenting twitter of middle-class banality.’ Spencer and I just laughed nervously.

I don’t mind what they want to be, I just want them to feel freer and be happier than I ever was, with fewer emotional scars too.

If I think too long about the word isolation, I start to feel panicky. It’s the same feeling I get if I think about infinity, try it, imagine space and how vast it is and then apply infinity. Your brain starts to get all mushy because we’re not programmed to absorb eternity. I suppose Christians accept infinity as in the concept of eternal life. You die then your soul goes up into space where eventually you find a one-way escalator that takes you to the Pearly Gates. Everyone you’ve ever known will be there waiting for you; imagine that horror. Even the girlfriend whose hamster you killed one summer while she was on holiday in Majorca. Of course, you never told her you were responsible for Mr Tumnus basically starving to death.

I enjoy the peace. In London there’s normally the constant rumble of traffic and stuff plus, there are no aeroplanes just now. You don’t notice the hum until it’s not there, then you realise something’s missing, like when the fridge switches off; that’s when you really feel isolated. We sometimes rent a house in Dorset overlooking a river next to an RSPB bird sanctuary; the kids think they’re on death row. All I hear from my daughter is, ‘Mum, there’s no signal again’, as if I care, then I find my son sat on the garage roof in the rain where there is a faint signal so, I suggest Cluedo and then I’m voted the worst mother ever to have given birth.

Spencer’s piles have been bad during the lockdown, I told him in February that he should have got them seen to, but Spencer’s very touchy about his bits, most men are in my opinion well, obviously not all of them, there are exceptions. Gay men for example are generally very proud of their bodies. But that’s pigeonholing, isn’t it? Strange expression pigeonhole, I suppose I’m making a subconscious connection with Spencer’s rectum. Sorry, erase that thought. Do pigeons live in holes?
He spent two days writhing around in bed as if he were undergoing an exorcism, with the priest using battery acid instead of Holy Water, then he turned to Google, Images. He found one detailed medical diagram he was proud of. It looked like an ordinance survey map of Mount Vesuvius, even Laurence was forced to comment, ‘you’re sick’, he said, with clarification, ‘and I don’t mean sick in a good way, I mean obnoxious’, I was quite proud of my boy.

I blame the elderflower wine Spencer makes, I’m sure I read somewhere that elderflowers cause constipation. Or is it a laxative? I know it’s responsible for some kind of dietary dilemma. Do I care? He made twelve bottles of nettle and ginger wine one year. I said at the time that he should’ve labelled the bottles with skull and crossbones, I’ve never tasted anything so nauseating in my life, but Spencer loves it. Little wonder his intestines are literally revolting.

His bread is quite a success, he makes it once a week. I must praise our local shopkeeper’s ingenuity, they’ve been buying twenty-kilo sacks of flour from the cash and carry, then splitting the big bags into small one kilo bags, so, thankfully we haven’t experienced a flour famine. Same with bog roll, the newsagent bought up all these huge industrial-sized rolls, like the ones you get in pubs in those big dispensers—the ones you have to spin like a wheel of fortune to find the end. First prize, one tiny piece of tissue about the size of a beermat. Minus the dispenser, we’re only on the second roll so, Spencer’s bowels permitting, we might make it through lockdown without reverting to expensive Kleenex. 

For some random reason, Spencer said to me the other day, ‘how much is five shillings?’. I’m not old enough to remember pounds, shillings, and pence, so my mind went blank, like when I take Nellie our dog to the vet, ‘she’s nearly thirty-six kilos. You’ll need to put her on a diet, Mrs Wallis.’. I find myself doing calculations in my head to convert kilos to pounds and ounces. An utterly useless exercise because the result is the same. Regardless of how many pounds there are in a kilo, a kilo is a kilo end of.

The other day during our weekly panic-buy visit to Sainsbury’s, I bought myself a colouring book and some felt-tipped pens, I thought it would pass the time while watching Midsomer Murders.

I can’t understand why it takes these so-called detectives so long to figure out who did it, it’s always a well-known actor, Richard E Grant isn’t going to agree to be filmed for only five minutes as the pub landlord, it’s not worth getting out of bed for, of course, he’s the culprit. I feel sorry for the actors who die in the first scene. All that effort in make-up and wardrobe, then you spend the next two hours lying on a slab holding your breath with Emilia Fox poking around your bits.

Now, back to the colouring book. I thought it was strange that it was sold in a sealed plastic bag alongside the men’s health and fitness magazines. I mean, why the sealed plastic, you want to see what’s in store for you, don’t you? I got the shock of my life when I opened it later. I thought the title, Colouring for Adults was just an age range like Teen or Five to Eight, I didn’t expect the outlined version of the Karma Sutra. Spencer seems to enjoy it, but you know what men are like, show them a pair of tits and they immediately turn into a pervert.

I see they’re showing Downton Abbey again as if that’s an incentive to stay home. I was never a fan, all that sitting around moaning about not having found a suitable husband, that Lady Mary never cracked a smile for the whole series, and don’t get me started on Lady Edith. If she were my sister, I would have wrung her neck in the first episode saving me and the whole Nation hours and weeks of misery.

I try to make a phone call every day. It’s strange when people don’t answer, you know they’re in because they can’t go out. A few of my friends have disappeared—no effort to keep in touch. Strange really given we have so many communication options available, most of which don’t actually require speaking.

My sister stayed holed-up in Malaga, she did it on purpose, she just wanted to show off, especially when she was interviewed by the BBC sprawled out like an ex-pat Cleopatra next to her swimming pool, I’ve never been so ashamed in my life. Sparkling water my arse, she was drinking a gin and tonic before lunch, she’s a lush, always has been.

People started phoning me saying how marvellous her house was and asking why I wasn’t there, I’m not there because I can’t stand the sight of my sister’s smug face. She married a Bookie. She likes to call him a Turf Accountant, thieving bastard would be a more accurate description. Even my sister’s Botox injections are tax-deductible. I received an email from her the other day asking me to download Zoom, but Spencer said I’d be leaving myself wide open for identity theft so, I wrote back and said our systems were incompatible. That irony will be totally wasted on her.

My nerves are on edge, and it’s a strange sensation. Usually, I’d be panicking because there’s so much to do, but there’s nothing, and all the nothing is driving me crazy, clichés aren’t really my thing, but the silence is deafening. Those films of the empty London streets are so scary, they’re not images I ever thought I’d see in my lifetime.

 Londoners are always complaining about noisy tourists wandering about with their hair sprayed green. Usually, at this time of year Trafalgar Square looks like a refugee camp, now there’s no one, just the pigeons. I’m developing a pigeon obsession, Ornithophobia it’s called, can’t think why but I looked it up the other day. Crossword maybe? Why can’t they just simplify it and call it Birdophobia, or Birdomania? I think I might be losing the plot here.

How will we all be when this is done? We Brits are not known for being particularly tactile, or chatty. You can travel on a crowded tube train during rush hour and never hear a word spoken for the whole journey; maybe that’s just London where everyone is a stranger. The idea of empty theatres makes me feel uneasy too, places that are generally filled with people, and even though the audience may not speak to one another, they’re still connected by the experience. 

Lying awake the other night I was thinking about all those paintings hanging in dark empty galleries, they’re used to crowds of people staring at them. Later I had a dream that all the paint started slowly melting off the canvases, hundreds of priceless works of art reduced to pools of sticky wet paint.

For a while, Netflix was a handy remedy for my frayed nerves, but now even if I watch a comedy movie, I’m in floods of tears before the credits start scrolling. They can’t do the live shows of Britain’s Got Talent, which is probably the only good thing to have come out of all this. It’s the fact that you can’t see this threat that makes it worse, it’s as if a bunch of tiny little extra-terrestrials landed and decided to wipe us out. Well, that’s basically what it is, isn’t it? An alien species, except it didn’t arrive in a flying saucer, it’s not green, and it doesn’t speak as if it just inhaled helium.

In the past, film studios have made millions from the profits of disaster movies, who in their right mind will want to go and see COVID-19 THE INVISIBLE THREAT? That’s another thing that makes all this so scary, you couldn’t have made it up, or at least if you had no one would have taken you seriously, ‘Mr Spielberg I’ve got this idea for a movie…’, Spielberg reads the first paragraph of the synopsis and calls security—end of story.

Now we’ve got the recession to look forward to. This generation isn’t programmed to deal with financial decline because they’re all way too materialistic. I said to Spencer at the start of all this, it’s a warning, the planet is retaliating, we’ve gone too far. Of course, Spencer thought I was losing the last of my still functioning marbles, so my hypothesis was silently designated as pointless.

Every night the news includes a death-toll, we’re all glued to the screen, ‘how many will it be today?’ Then you get Boris offering his support promising a ‘New Normality’, thousands of years of evolution and all we have to show for it is normality. Unfortunately, it’s true, as boring as it might sound, we all want to be ‘back to normal’. But everyone’s normal is personal, isn’t it?

We denigrate species like ants all working together with a common goal, their nests are quite tidy too considering, unlike my son’s bedroom occupied by one relatively small teenager. Look at us now, under threat from something even smaller than an ant, yet capable of wiping us all out; truly scary. I’m not suggesting we live in a dictatorship, but we could all park our inflated egos for a while and do something unanimous, instead of destroying everything we encounter.

The NHS staff have all worked as a team, that’s what you call cooperation.

If Spencer tells me to relax one more time, I’m calling my Solicitor, and I will file for divorce and claim irreconcilable differences, i.e., insanity; by that I mean his stupidity. I’ve always had an easy-going attitude, well I had until I met Spencer Matthew Wallis. Even his name gives me a migraine, he’s migraineous. Is that a word, migraineous? Someone or something that triggers a migraine, well it’s a word now. We stopped communicating properly around the time he grew his hipster beard. He thinks he looks great; I think he looks like a gay Rabbi if such a thing exists.

Spencer is a chef, well he was, there’s not much chance the restaurant will re-open after lockdown. His restaurant was doing really well, he’s depressed now, that’s why he doesn’t bother getting dressed. I’m worried about the future; our savings are slowly running out. Who wants to be job hunting at our age? I’m too hard on him, but I must try to keep him motivated, he’s a good guy on the whole. We used to be really happy; that’s the place where I want to get back to—our happy place.

I was a primary school teacher, then I had two of my own kids, one of each. Soon after they were born, I realised I’d given birth to the Children of the Damned then, the fascination for teaching lost its sparkle, so I gave up my job. It’s true what they say, other people’s kids are great because you can hand them back. When my daughter Melisa reached sixteen, it was as if overnight she’d been possessed by a spare Kardashian; I didn’t recognise her and talk about demanding. We thought about getting her psychiatric help, but instead, we sent her to dance school. As a result, by the end of each day, she was too knackered to speak, let alone argue.

My son Laurence had a lousy time with bullies, mostly online, so I felt helpless. I’d willingly have driven the length of the country to punch them unconscious, but you can never track them down. To add to the confusion, he’s non-binary now. Of course, we thought he was gay which wouldn’t have been a problem, but he says he’s not gay he’s pangender. One day he decided we were to call him L, not Elle as in Elle Macpherson just L, some days he’s feminine L other days he might be masculine L, or occasionally he’s gender-neutral L. There are no daily gender choice warning signals like make-up or involuntary testicle scratching, you have to guess the day’s gender by process of elimination.

I suppose I’d best head home now, all I needed was a bit of time on my own to let off steam. I love the bones of Spencer, Melisa didn’t mean to be a nightmare, she was just growing up in a society that has its own demands. L is a beautiful, kind, gentle person, and I’m proud of, not sure about today’s appropriate personal pronoun, so all of them will do, him, her, they. We’ll be alright, I reckon.

I honestly didn’t see the cyclist; he just came out of nowhere when I was turning right. You see, Kingston Road is generally like a lane on the M25, stop, start all the way to Vauxhall, lockdown has changed all that so, today I didn’t even have to slow down to turn into my road. Then BHAM!

Two policemen arrived with the ambulance. One of them took my details and said, ‘it’s hard to say who was to blame, but the cyclist shouldn’t have been on your right side.’ The cyclist didn’t have any ID on him, so they had no idea who he was. The paramedic said, ‘he’s unconscious, and as far as I can tell amazingly there are no broken bones, but there’s no telling what internal damage there might be, we’ll only know the extent of the injuries once he’s been thoroughly examined at St George’s A&E.’.

Then, the other policeman who’d been hanging around the back of the car popped up, and after a bit of a chinwag with his colleague he said, ‘your right indicator light doesn’t appear to be on Mrs Wallis, just flick it on for me to check it’s working.’ Of course, it was. I hadn’t indicated I was turning right. First policeman’s mood dramatically changed, he actually seemed quite happy. ‘You didn’t indicate Mrs Wallis, did you?’. ‘No, no I’m sorry I didn’t.’ I replied and promptly burst into tears.

I can’t remember all the details, but the charge went something like this. ‘In breach of the Highway Code number something-or-other, I’m charging you, Mrs Wallis, with driving without due care and attention. The charge includes failure to slow down to an appropriate speed when turning right into Willow Road, and failure to use your right indicator causing a cyclist, name currently unknown, to collide with the rear driver’s side of your vehicle. Do you have anything to add Mrs Wallis?’

I just shook my head. ‘This conversation is being recorded Mrs Wallis you have to speak’, the policeman said. ‘No, I have nothing to say’, I replied. That was it, I was told to go home and wait for the station to contact me.

The seriousness of the charge depends on how or if the cyclist recovers. According to my Solicitor, based on what we know from the paramedic I will be disqualified, and I could face a fine of £2,500 maybe more, depending on the seriousness of the cyclist’s injuries, I will be liable for court costs too.

Ninety days and I haven’t broken a single lockdown rule. I’ve sat here and shouted at morons on TV breaking social distancing rules, then I decide to selfishly head off for a moan alone in the car. Now I’ve ruined two lives, no, many more in fact. The cyclist could have life-threatening injuries, or worse, he might even die. What if he has kids? His whole family will be devastated. I sincerely hope he survives unscathed. Whatever happens, I’ll deservedly carry this guilt to my grave. One stupid mistake, that’s all it takes, one foolish mistake.