Side effects of the virus

There is a certain spot in town where you can sip coffee while watching little whirlwinds play games with fallen leaves and paper serviettes. It’s a result of the prevailing northerly winds blowing air past a tall building and creating vortices.

Today an especially powerful vortex had captured two flimsy plastic gloves and was whisking them at speed past my nose then under my feet, time and again. I succeeded in catching them only when both got snagged by a low bush.

Plastic gloves are one of many unforeseen side effects of the new coronavirus, Covid-19.

Plastic gloves
Lightweight, transparent and single-use, these things are now issued at the entrance of every supermarket and you must wear them, along with your face mask. Some shops have already run out of plastic gloves and give you a plastic bag bearing a stencilled drawing of a hand. Whoever thought this was a good idea should try opening a plastic bag to put their tomatoes in while wearing a plastic bag on each hand.

Worse, these gloves and bags regularly escape into the wider world. Treacherous little devils, they jump from supermarket disposal bins, slip from people’s grasp as they take them off, fly from municipal litter bins or simply wait to be thrown to the pavement. They’re an entirely new form of environmental pollution.

Beards
How the virus has achieved this I can’t imagine, but the fact is that male chins of all ages are breaking into blossom. They range from timid two-day stubble to full-blown, rebellious foliage. At a rough estimate the number of beards and moustaches walking around town has at least doubled, perhaps quadrupled.

Closely related to this effect is its exact opposite in which the upper skull is shaved down to a blue-tinted, shiny dome with intriguing knobbles at the back. This is easier to explain: when you’re faced with trimming your own hair because all hairdressers are in lockdown, shaving it all off is the most reliable technique.

Queues
Spanish culture tends to view queuing as a freewheeling concept that relies on knowing who arrived just before you did. You ask the most likely person if they are el ultimo (gentleman) or la ultima (lady). That has become far more challenging now that everyone is required to distance themselves from everyone else by at least two metres. Queues can snake backwards along the street towards the shimmering horizon. In more constricted spaces such as the covered market they disintegrate into random placements intermingled with all the others who are just hanging about, waiting for their wife, waiting for a table at the café, passing an hour or two in the (distant) company of others.

And what does two metres of distancing look like in the real world? Nobody’s very sure. Children were briefly seen waving long-handled brooms to poke the person in front, a rough measure, but parents seem to have decided this has too much fun potential and I haven’t seen any brooms lately.

Humiliation
The law dictates that café tables must be disinfected between every set of clients. This is fine and reassuring until it’s your turn to leave, when you look behind and see the waiter spraying your table and chairs to eliminate your personal contamination. Now we know how dogs feel when their owner stoops with a plastic bag to clean their deposits from the pavement.

Microsoft Windows
Suddenly it’s not giving trouble any more! Nobody calls you at home from Microsoft Support to tell you they’ve detected a problem with your computer, even if you’re not using Microsoft at all but Apple! The virus has convinced all those dedicated support teams in India that their welfare is more important than yours. If your computer is on the point of cracking up yet again, you’ll just have to sort it out for yourself.

Flu and colds
There aren’t any. We’re all so clinically sanitised, distanced, untouched and untouching that the bugs have nowhere to go.

Smoked herring
There isn’t any. We personally depend on smoked herring - kippers - for our government-recommended weekly dose of oily fish, but try finding it on Amazon these days. The world stock of canned kippers is now stacked on the shelves of private kitchens, emergency rations for when the virus wins and people have to barricade themselves into their houses against the wild-eyed hordes outside.

And many more…
Once you start to think about it there are endless side effects of this novel situation. One of them is plain old boredom, which means people have been desperately looking for new ways to occupy the kids or themselves. Like, for example, writing lists of unforeseen side effects of the virus.

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Enjoy your meal!

Gustavo, a young waiter in one of our local restaurants, swirled over with one hand balancing a pizza plate and the other behind his back in proper waiterly style. He tends to self-parody, a natural comic. The pizza made a smooth landing in the middle of our table and Gustavo bowed his head theatrically: ‘Buen provecho!’

‘Gracias, Gustavo.’ I picked up my knife and fork. A fresh pizza is strangely irresistible considering it’s just bread with a few bits of stuff on top.

Gustavo paused. ‘How do you say it correctly in English?’ he asked in Spanish. ‘Enjoy your meal?’

I hate this question because there’s no satisfactory answer. Historically nobody in Britain has ever been expected to enjoy their meal, the food being lumps of meat with instant gravy and two boiled vegetables, so the English language has never felt the need to get involved.

Yes, you can say Enjoy your meal we told Gustavo, it sounds fine, but we don’t usually say that in Britain. It sounds more the kind of thing an American might say, like the very irritating Have a nice day! I shall not have a nice day, young lady, because I’ve just been evicted from my flat for non-payment of rent, my wife’s run off with a Japanese weightlifter and my only remaining friend is an ancient poodle with age-related dementia.

A neighbour, by the way - this is a brief digression - who drives a taxi once asked us what was the word that English people used all the time about everything. Ny-ee, ny-ees? Something like that. On trips around the island, for example, he’ll stop at a scenic viewpoint and they’ll say it’s nyees. They have a coffee and it’s nyees, so is the doughnut. Nyees weather. Nyees people.

It’s nice, we told him. If there’s one English word you really need to learn as a taxi driver, it’s nice. Just don’t tell anyone to have a nice day if they look anything like me.

But to get back to Gustavo: in smart restaurants, I told him, the waiter is likely to say Bon appétit! which is not English at all, it’s French.

‘Bon appétit,’ Gustavo nodded doubtfully. You could tell he’d thought about this problem before. ‘Buen apetito, no? But why,’ he continued in Spanish, ‘would you wish them a good appetite when they’re already sitting in your restaurant? If they didn’t have a good appetite they wouldn’t be there.’

No, they wouldn’t.

‘And anyway, if you’re going to wish them a good appetite, why can’t you say it in English instead of French? That would be, what: good apetito? No...’

‘Good appetite. Don’t learn it, Gustavo, nobody ever says it.’ He went back to the kitchen shaking his head – how full of mysteries is this complicated world we live in.

This is just one of many important failures in the English language, in my view. Mind you, the Spanish Buen provecho! - Good benefit! - isn’t much better when you come to analyse it. Of course you’ll benefit, it will make all the difference between being hungry and not being hungry.

Or you can say Que aproveche! which means ‘May you take advantage, may you make good use of it’. By eating the pizza perhaps, as against putting it on your head to keep the sun off, tearing it up to feed to passing cats, spinning it across the restaurant like a frisbee to the small boy in the corner… It’s a daft thing to say, really.

What we need, all of us, Brits, Spanish, French and the rest of the world, is something meaningful along the lines of ‘We hope you enjoy this creation of our chef, made with skill, love and only the very best ingredients’.

Or let’s just dump the pizza on the table, smile cheerily and leave everyone to get on with it. Simplicity!

Perhaps simplicity is the key to everything. I’ve just read - this is another very brief digression - that in a particular region of Costa Rica (the Nicoya peninsula) there are vastly more centenarian old men than there should be. They just go on and on being alive, and a key factor seems to be that they have no challenging bucket lists, no unfulfilled dreams, they expect nothing more from life than to do tomorrow what they’ve been doing today. Simplicity!

But then, that sounds terribly boring, doesn’t it? Perhaps the Spanish have got it more-or-less right after all. Que aproveche! May you make good use of everything, even if it’s only a pizza.

-------------- Do they still whistle? --------------

THE BOOK

Now available as a high-quality paperback book: a collection of 50 earlier stories from this blog, edited and with new illustrations.

An ideal present for anyone who knows La Gomera, or who would like to know it!

Search for Do they still whistle? on www.amazon.co.uk or any other Amazon website.