Day FIVE - Headphones.

​It’s taken four full days to get there but I would like to start day 5 by announcing that I have found the answer to every question asked of you by a child or for a child at any time: the answer is always: a lovely little glass of Rioja. Let’s try it.
 
Q: A square is 4cm wide. What is its perimeter?
 
A lovely little glass of Rioja.
 
Q: There are eight apples in one box. Who many apples are there in six boxes?
 
A lovely little glass of Rioja.
 
Q: Eighteen cupcakes are shared equally between three boxes. How many cupcakes in each box?
 
A: I don’t share cupcakes and a lovely little glass of Rioja.
 
Q: Daddy, I picked something of my leg and there is now blood and some other stuff that is a different colour and the cat was on my leg and now he has it on his back and some of it I got on the wall where it was on my fingers before I came to tell you about what I did with my leg. Can I get the virus by eating the scab? I think I ate the scab.
 
A: A lovely little glass of Rioja.
 
Q: 355 < A lovely little glass of Rioja.
 
Today school has none of the structure of the last few days as the work set for the week has largely been completed in the first four days. As a result we agree to give the girls a long weekend and buy a new game on the Playstation Virtual Reality for them. It is a game they have been after for ages. It is genuinely a game where, among other things, they can tidy their ‘virtual’ bedrooms with two controllers and a headset. They are both adept at the task at hand. Their virtual rooms are soon sparkling clean.
 
Their actual bedrooms, remain dark, dank and abandoned. Entering either of the rooms is dicing with a likely animal attack of some sort. Certainly something rodent-like is lurking in the corners, kicking over abandoned yoghurt pots, unsettling the underwear that is stuck to the wall as it reacts to the sound of my entry and makes off, spilling stale breadcrumbs and tiny raison-like droppings. It might be one of their school friends. A week before lockdown they had friends over. We didn’t count them out.
 
 So as today there is no teaching there is also no purpose to my day so I find myself wandering around the house in a dressing gown, lamenting the fact that I didn’t get a haircut before all of this started. I haven’t shaved either. I catch regular glimpses of my wild bouffant mingling with tufty facial hair in the numerous reflective surfaces around the house and decide that I should at least get dressed. Suddenly inspired, I opt for the tightest jeans imaginable – enough to take my voice up an octave due to the grip they take up around my gentlemen’s area and a shirt with oversized cuffs that I leave unbuttoned right down near to my navel. I finish the look by backcombing my belly hair to make it look like it is sprouting from my chest and top the look with a classic shape of sunglasses.
 
I figure if I’m going to have the hair of a Bee Gee…
 
Barry Gibb was my aim. The mirror however, shows me a sex offender with back-combed belly hair and sunglasses that are ideal to hide where I am actually looking. Go out like this at any time of the year and people will be demanding I stay back a lot more than two metres. Realising my mistake I quickly change back into the same clothes I have now been wearing for what feels like months – board shorts and a hoody. I ask myself a question to test my new found theory. What should a bored, pointless individual who is no longer impersonating a sex offender have for breakfast?
 
A lovely little glass of Rioja.
 
It is 8:40am.
 
In an effort to feel like I can achieve something I wash the cars out the front. I am passed by a lot of dogwalkers. After an hour or so I realise that it is actually the same dog just with different walkers.
 
 It is an odd atmosphere. Anyone passing seems desperate for a conversation. These are strange and testing times after all and we are being told to isolate, to stay away from our fellow man and for good reason but we are just not very good at it. People miss people - even an idle chat about the weather with a total stranger. These people might live alone, they might not have seen another soul since the lock down and they probably see me as an opportunity for a little bit of human contact as they pass, for some compassion perhaps or maybe just to feel like everything’s alright, like all is normal – to be assured.
 
After the second person interrupts me, bleating on about the world we live in I’m back in the house for my headphones. I go for the big cans that are not ideal as they bump of the car door and roof when I am hoovering it but they’re big and obvious and should send a message so I get left the hell alone.  I figure if the headphone cans don’t work then I will go shirtless in the sun. Nothing says cross the road and avoid conversation like back-combed belly hair.
 
At this point I wonder if this phrase should actually be up-combed? I mean it’s not really back-combed. I google search up-combed body hair and now I have to delete my internet history before my wife sees it.
 
And some of the bleach we have been using sparingly to kill nasty virus germ I have now rubbed into my own eyes. It is too late. Some sights cannot be unseen.
 
Red-eyed and shocked I am back to cleaning the cars. Both get a polish and a hoover. A dogwalker ignores the headphones to talk at me while I am getting up a good lather on the bonnet of the Volvo. I can’t hear what she says. She does it again so I step closer to her, take them off and say: What?
 
‘You should be staying away from people, I said.’ She says.
‘I was over there a minute ago!’ I reply. ‘On my drive!’
 
This seems to confuse her immensely, like she has suddenly realised she is not in her home, she is in fact outside. I consider that she might have been home-schooling children all week, she has that haggard, confused look. I check – she is wearing the backless slippers of the confused home-schooler. She is one of us. ‘It’s okay…’ I say gently, ‘it’s Friday! You know what you should do? A lovely little glass of Rioja…’
 
And that is what I am going to do. This has been fun. I wish each and every one of you a wonderful weekend. I may be back next week. Thank you to the people who have got in touch and been kind – in this current climate I am delighted that I have made some people smile, the response has been lovely. If you want to get in touch, just for a chat, maybe even because you’re feeling a little anxious and you just want someone to talk to then I’ll be somewhere else with my headphones on ignoring eye contact. And if you have any questions:
 
A: A lovely little glass of Rioja.
 
 
 
CG.