Murdo in Manor Park doesn’t quite get the finer points of virology.
He pulled up beside me on his new bicycle and told me he had finally sold his old Ford Fiesta and was now on two wheels. I asked him why, at his age, he had gone for a colder conveyance.
With no hint of a smile, he said: “I don’t want to get this car owner virus that’s going about.”
Like Murdo, some of us have to make changes. For me, lockdown is much the same as always because I work mainly from home anyway.
This column is devised, banged out and catapulted to Australia from my laminated cubbyhole. Australia? Nah, the Press and Journal isn’t on the move. That’s where my email provider is.
I have a table, nay a long plank, straddled across small filing cabinets to make the most excellent desk any writer could have. It’s so wide there’s room for coffee, biscuits and drams.
For my other job, I go out in the van for delivery companies. Conversing with other souls, even the muffled tones of the airport workers, the opticians, the shop workers and the care staff behind their masks, is great. Distancing makes it difficult to hear them. They don’t seem to hear me either – particularly when I say there is an extra £10 import tax to pay on their parcel since Brexit.
Schooling is difficult for parents and kids. Annie in Laxdale tells me her six-year-old son is upset because Annie’s husband turned up at lunchtime and kissed the wee fellow’s teacher in class.
Shocked, I asked Annie what she was going to do about the incident. She said firmly: “Nothing. He’s home-schooled. I’m the flippin’ teacher.”
So I feel for anyone stuck home-schooling. I would go doolally. History, noooo. Geography, aargh. Having no interest in what the economy of Peru is doing, I couldn’t deal with a youngster throwing the seventh wobbly of the day, because they’re bo-o-o-ored. Parents who do that have my utmost admiration and not a little sympathy.
Mrs X is meanwhile educating herself about phone apps. She can see ships with an app. The ferry Loch Seaforth plying back and forth and the little dots are fishing boats with their essential worker crews putting haddies on our tables.
She loves that tech. Now she has a new aviation app to see planes. She can see the few Loganair planes from Glasgow that come up via Benbecula as well as the airliners going past up at 37,000ft.
When she asked why some airliners were showing the tag LAX, I didn’t tell her these tags were destination codes and those particular planes were heading for Los Angeles, which has the code LAX.
I said that air passengers often get constipated at high altitudes and that the LAX tag was a warning for airport staff at the other end to have laxatives ready for them. Don’t put her right.
Last week, we were having coffee and Abernethys – they’re still crunchy, everyone – and we heard a low rumbling roar. Mrs X leapt to her phone.
She couldn’t see any planes flying around on her app. There was nothing happening in the air near the islands at all.
She got so excited. “I bet it’s that American spy helicopter. They have blocked it from showing on my app. Maybe it’s a low-level stealth bomber. Let’s go and see.”
Rushing outside to scan the skies for an incoming stealth bomber, there was a low-level non-military bomber sitting outside our house.
The council sucker-upper. The Noo-Noo, if you remember the Teletubbies. What a racket from the industrial vacuum cleaner that cleans the gutters.
We may be in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars – like cyclist Murdo. When he heard the news on Friday that the islands were going back into lockdown, he cycled to the supermarket to get the messages and a bottle of whisky to help get him through the weekend.
Murdo placed his eggs, bread and the bottle of Grouse carefully in the wire shopping basket.
He told me afterwards: “As I was about to leave, I thought what if I fall off my bike and break the bottle? That would be a disaster. So I opened it and drank it there and then.
“Good job I did really because I fell off my bike seven times on the way home.”
