Day Sixty-five

Feest Isolation Days – 18 May

Monday morning and the beginning of Week Ten of the coronavirus pandemic.  As though we needed reminding!  Sunday is a day for speaking to friends family and neighbours we are keeping in touch with and connecting with via the telephone. Old fashioned technology!  Our lovely neighbour who is eighty-eight has had no phone since Bank Holiday Friday and apologised for not being in touch.  She received a piece of that homemade apple cake and a posy from the garden. We spoke over her garden fence and she said it was wonderful receiving the posy especially as it made her feel part of the world again.  Sometimes she says she doesn’t believe what is happening as the cars are parked the way they always are, the street looks exactly the same as it always does, and it all doesn’t seem real or possible. As she is shielding it will be a long time before she will be able to return to having a walk outside of her home.  Yet she still smiles and copes.  As she says, what else is she to do?

Our neighbours across the way dropped some very special small pastries off to us from one of our favourite Village shops. They were consumed along with our afternoon cups of tea.  We are indeed fortunate to have the people around us that we do!

Memorabilia keep heading in our direction. Terry received some photographs in the post that Gillian, his first wife, had found whilst using her isolation time to tidy up!.  The photo of his Twenty First birthday present was special. His parents, Syd and Doris, bought him a Vespa so he could get around.  He was in his final year at Cambridge, and they sent him the photo with a note to say that the wheels would be waiting for him when he got back to the family home again.  Loving parents who cared so deeply about their son brings a tear to my eye, as well as a story about his lovely Mum and a scooter of hers many years later.

Doris was the treasurer of a Church group for years and when she was ninety we discovered that she was still sitting on her mobility scooter and driving herself to the bank with the weekly takings.  When we discovered that she was doing this, we suggested that perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea.  We had visions of her being knocked off her perch by some local kids if they ever discovered her regular Monday banking mission. She eventually agreed to stop making the deposits.

 On our monthly visits, she and I would always go shopping together.  Her scooter circled round Debenhams and many other local dress shops as we sought the latest style that she might wear to one of the many church meetings she attended. When she eventually moved to a care home in Bristol, we tried to keep up some of the routines that we had previously shared together. There was a place downtown in the shopping centre where we could hire a scooter and so the two of us set off.  Debenhams of Bristol was our first stop.  Unfortunately, her eyesight had diminished and she slammed into racks of clothes that I couldn’t move out of her way quickly enough.  Down on the street as she manoeuvred through the crowds, it was clear that her vision was much worse than she had let on.  It’s impossible to stop an independent woman driving a mobility scooter or change their direction other than with a loud shout.  She aimed her scooter straight at a queue of people waiting at the bus stop and they fled in every direction as she clearly wasn’t about to swerve away. The apologies I proffered to those whom she displaced were largely greeted with knowing smiles.  “No harm done”.  It was however, the last time Doris and I went shopping with her riding a scooter!

Now in the time of coronavirus, there are no bus queues of people to run into. No friendly knowing smiles from strangers. Neighbours on the other hand make us smile, and we try to pass our smiles onto others where we can.  Life goes on!

With love,

Kathy x