Counting the Days

‘Five foot two, eyes of blue, but oh what those five foot could do. Has anybody seen my girl?’

‘I had green eyes, reader; but you must excuse the mistake: for him they were new-dyed I suppose.’ (Or was it ‘dear reader’?)

Such things stick in my head: not a jot of originality, just the dead leaves of other writers, scraps of ancient songs. I’ve always been ‘Mrs Average’: green eyes, five foot five (now five foot three) weighing in at a steady nine stone four, shoes 5 ½ and dress size, 12. Average. Dead ordinary. However, judged by my age (another number) I have suddenly become ‘Mrs Vulnerable’.

I need to look up when to use the numerical symbol and when to write it in words. Why are shoe and dress sizes written one-way and other measurements the other?

Now is our Pompeii moment – the sun is shining and it’s Spring. I have enough to eat and everything appears to be normal. Yet… I am obsessed with statistics. How many dead in the last twenty-four hours? I wash my hands singing two choruses of Ring-a-Ring-of-Roses and observe the way the death count jumps when care homes are remembered.

Both the Heir to the Throne and the Prime Minister were afflicted; I wonder what the statistical chances of that happening were? Come to that, I wonder what the odds were on my super-fit, first-born having the virus, (well we think he did) while – thank God – my second son, paralysed from the chest down, remains fit and well with me, in isolation.

On second thoughts, Pompeii is not a well-chosen comparison: that happened with a bang, not a whimper (sorry!) It’s the knowledge we now possess about their quality of life, before the pyroclastic flow, that seems apt. They were so much like us in their sense of security and their love of material possessions.

I will start to count my material possessions. That should pass the afternoon. Perhaps I should put my diaries together somewhere so that my granddaughter will find them and be able to get to know me when she’s older. On second thoughts, (for the second time) perhaps six years old is a little young to have such a responsibility. She might not take after me; might even be a mathematician.

My mother-in-law stuck a label on the back of all her china – Moorcroft, Clarice Cliff, Gaudy Welsh – giving its make and age, thus hinting at its possible value. Clever. I’m still stuck with all of it now and yet her tired tea sets, her stained vases, are about to time travel into the next generation. They will be the only survivors.  

Does anyone anymore have Afternoon Tea?

Ah Life, ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’