Of hopes and hygiene problems

Two weeks (tomorrow morning) to go…

There are so many things I am looking forward to being able to do again, it would probably be unwise to list them. Using cutlery. Being able to dress myself normally. Cooking my own food. Eating a pomegranite. Putting my hair up…

Unexpectedly, one of the activities I am missing most is washing my hands. I’ve never been one of those “wash every time you touch a door handle” hygiene fiends – I figure you have to accept that microbes do exist and sometimes they get you, and I normally wash my hands after the loo, before cooking, and (because I was taught to as a child) before going to bed. But I have, now, not washed my hands since December the 8th. Now isn’t that a disgusting thought?

I’ve washed my hand – the left one. At least, I’ve had it under the shower once a day (as soon as I got my “Limb-O” brand limb protector, that is), and have slopped it with liquid soap and sluiced it under a tap regularly. But the poor, puffy bits of the right hand that appear like extrusions from the end of the cast have not been washed in over five weeks. They’ve been wiped, with those disinfectant “handy wipe” tissues one can buy. These are, I was assured by the hospital, adequate for a time, from a hygiene point of view. But the alcohol-based stuff with which they are impregnated, while it may be removing bacteria, is also drying out my miserable dirty hand. If I moisten my exposed knuckles and then rub hard, the dead skin cells slough off in a greyish paste - and underneath is noticeably paler. It’s gross. It’s grotesque. It’s my own body, reduced to its fundamental basics; I am made of cells, doing their thing and then dying.

Please, you gods and little fishes, just let the other cells, the ones inside, be growing and packing in lots of calcium (or whatever it is that goes on inside a healing bone fracture).

Meanwhile in the wider world, natural disasters shatter homes and communities and lives, idiots get themselves killed doing stupid things in the snow, talented people who had something to contribute to the world die, and a long-lost Chagall painting goes on exhibition in London. At least that’s one good thing happening; otherwise the world seems to be in a right royal mess at the moment.

It's a mad mad mad world (Pt 2)

On the bus into work: A very smart specimen of the dreaded species Chiswick Mummy got on, pushing a huge baby buggy with a very small baby inside. She sat down, picked up the baby, and immediately began to change its nappy. Perfectly natural, I grant you, but rather smelly, and clearly embarrssing for an elderly gentleman a couple of seats away who I think had not been prepared for a dung-y infant's scrotum on the bus at 8.45 am. However, on finishing this job, Chiswick Mummy then, without washing her hands, proceeded to do her eye make-up and lip gloss. She then opened the front of her dress and began to breast feed the baby (needless to say the elderly gent by now was unable to look up with embarrassment, and nearly missed his stop because he was staring at the floor).

I just keep thinking about the sequence; baby's bum, mum's eyes, mum's mouth, baby's mouth. In that order, with no noticeable attempts at hygiene in between.

Am I getting squeamish in my old age? Have I got the wrong idea about cleanliness and babies? Should I in fact be commending her for exposing her infant to bacteria nice and early in life, in order to toughen him up?

Chiswick Mummies scare me slightly; they drive in heavy traffic while talking on their mobiles, they cut-up cyclists, they park on double yellow lines because it's too far to walk, they yell abuse in their exquisite voices at helpless pedestrians who dare to cross the road at the zebra crossing; they career round supermarkets, blank-eyed, plugged into ipods or yapping endlessly into what one suddenly realises must be handsfree 'phones, and smashing into other shoppers, their trolleys loaded with Plymouth Gin and organic ready-stuffed portobollo mushrooms... Now I have reason to believe they are capable of trying to poison their own offspring. Please don't let them win; please don't let this be the future of my country, my gender, my species...