I
brush my teeth carefully and thoroughly each day and night. With a damn sight more care than I have normally
done, I might say. I have a morbid (the right word I
think) fear of getting toothache during lockdown. Toothache is like headache – one of the
debilitating, almost unbearable pains that can’t be ignored. But, in these strange times, where would I go
to have my teeth seen to?
When you hear of cancer treatment being
delayed because of the medical demands of the virus, a mere toothache would
appear to be of less than secondary importance.
Flossing has become a protection against the fear of future oral pain
ignored!
On one web site I saw warnings about those
people in confinement being careful about how they approach any do-it-yourself
projects suddenly started because of time on ones hands. Home improvements always come at a cost and
the number of accidents from the handling of unfamiliar tools, especially power
tools, has ever been a significant way to injure yourself. Now, the consequences of these accidents have
very real costs in terms of the extra pressure on the health services and
whether you would actually qualify for attention.
I have no personal experience of what the
medical services in Castelldefels are like at the moment and how those with
chronic illnesses are being dealt with.
For example, my next scheduled appointment is in July in a local
hospital and is part of the on-going treatment for my thrombosis and embolisms
after a blood test in my local medical centre the week before.
I have been given no information about delay
or cancellation, but I think it highly unlikely that the schedules that we sets
six months ago are still going to be kept to.
Everything has changed, and my light touch supervision is more of a
confirmation of progress rather than a necessary medical intervention – so my
appointment is one that can easily be delayed.
It will be interesting to see exactly how our medical system copes, and
I can take a reasonably disinterested view as my hospital visit is now more
concerned with checking progress rather than active treatment.
But one thing is certain; I have no wish
to find out just how prepared our emergency services are to cope with any
household domestic injuries or how medical centres and dentists are
coping. I want to live an uneventfully
contained life in my home with occasional forays to the collective bins my only
contact with the outside ‘outside’ world.
Last
night I (and a quarter of a million others) watched a matinee performance
of ‘One man, two guvnors’ a reworking of
the Goldoni original on the National Theatre Live Facebook site. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but virtually every
moment made me want to be in the audience seeing the performance live rather
than looking at it on a computer screen!
Filming ‘live’ plays produces an odd media
type as its end result. The actors have
to play to a full theatre, so many of the exchanges between characters seem
over emphatic; the actors are playing a ‘live’ real audience and we watchers
are not part of that organic entity; this production had interaction between
actors and audience which distanced we watchers even more; some of the stage
business was complicated and could easily have gone wrong – all the things that
make a live performance ‘dangerous’ were limited by our knowledge that this was
a recorded performance. The
artificiality that we saw is something that I would have enthusiastically
embraced if I had part of the actual audience.
But, I am grateful that I had an opportunity to see a performance that
passed me by and I look forward to the other ‘performances’ over the next few
Thursday evenings.
Although I am grateful for the opportunity
to see a much-appreciated performance, the lack of immediacy in a videoed
version is more telling with theatre than it is for me with ballet or opera.
But, every little helps!
At
least the sun came out today and I was able to ‘take’ it on the third floor
terrace. As the terrace is fairly
sheltered, it lessened the effect of the breeze that would have made the
sunbathing more gesture than pleasure – but for an hour or so I was able to
laze around and think that summer was getting closer.
Please!
