Not Just a Granny

I’m not someone who panics easily. I tend to be calm and logical in the face of adversity and hold my meltdown for the after party…..LOL

Whether panic is needed seems to depend on those who seed it …~Na’ama Yehuda

But I must admit to having gone from “bloody Chinese eating wild animals and treating those and other animals in a most appalling way – the animals have risen and are taking revenge” a couple of months ago, to the faint stirrings of unease, and concern at how fast this virus has spread and how vicious it is.

I’m guessing that none of us expected this virus to jump borders and spread so rapidly, taking down swathes of people and leaving fear and despair in its wake.

But suddenly we’re in the midst of a pandemic that the authorities seem unable to contain. And so the infected numbers and deaths mount up. Every day now the figures go up in the hundreds rather than the occasional report of one or two.

For obvious reasons this has brought about a sense of panic and the possibility of a lockdown is causing irrational behaviour.

I know that I for one have started to feel somewhat stressed….mainly for my little family; my daughter, son-in-law and my cherished grandson.

While we were away in Devon last week the first reports of panic buying started to filter through. I said to my daughter that as soon as we get back we must go shopping. Well that turned out to be a bit of a fright since the shelves were practically bare of essentials and necessities…..panic buying was in full swing.

However, we calmly walked along the aisles and bought whatever we could find, particularly things that can be used in soups and stews. Baby food was high on the list of essentials and nappies. We bought as much by way of prepared food as we could without emptying the shelves.

Since then I have raided my tax savings and on a daily basis I buy a small quantity of whatever I can find focusing on dry goods and tins where there’s availability.

We went shopping at Tesco’s a few days ago and the shock of the empty shelves was so overwhelming for my daughter that she had a meltdown in the store. Like she said, she has a baby to consider, and besides that her levels of empathy for older people wandering about looking for something they could buy was just too much.

I’m due to leave tomorrow morning for my next job…in the depths of Somerset, a 4.5 hour journey on 2 trains and the tube, and frankly I have no idea what will happen in the next few weeks. Will I contract the virus? Will my elderly client? How long will I be stuck there? If I do get ill basically I have no home to return to for either recovery or self-isolation.

Of course I wouldn’t want to return to my daughter’s home because I may well end up infecting them, and it begs the question….when my assignment is completed in 2 weeks time, should I even have any physical contact with them at all? And what of my accommodation? It’s on a very tenuous basis anyway. I rent a tiny room on an adhoc basis in a shared house. I have no lease and no guarantee that the landlady who currently rents out the room would even allow me to return to the property if I need to self-isolate.

Besides that, I have no food where I stay between jobs. I can’t store stuff there because not only have the permanent residents recently helped themselves to some of my fridge stuff, but where would I keep it….its not a permanent place of residence with a secure place to store anything? And even if she agrees to let me stay there, I wouldn’t be able to prepare anything in the shared kitchen if I was ill as it may affect the other residents.

So even though I don’t normally panic, I do confess to feeling rather uneasy and uncertain. I can only hope that the person I’m going to care for over the next couple of weeks doesn’t turn out to be a nightmare, and if I’m required to extend my stay due to a lockdown, that we’ll have sufficient food to see us through.

The other aspect is the worry I have for my family….will they have sufficient food for an extended period if there’s a lockdown? Will they be safe from the virus? Will I be able to return to help out if they happen to get ill? I have urged my daughter to be very conservative with her food and to not waste anything….I can only hope that they do.

My grandson is right in the middle of weaning and I worry that she will not have enough food to cope with his requirements. A lot of food already goes to waste when he plays with the food instead of eating it and it ends up on the floor and subsequently into the trash.

So while I am not normally given to panicking, I do admit that I’m beginning to feel incredibly stressed and worried, especially if there is a lockdown and all that that implies.

Onwards….