[A short of-the-peg piece while I am on summer hiatus and also working on something more substantial]
For some reason, when I am out and about walking I often get asked for directions. Not just in the place where I live, but even in cities that I am visiting as a tourist myself. And generally, I can help people out with the right directions to the railway station, hotel, that sort of thing. I have no idea why random strangers seem to think I know my whereabouts as well as resembling a mobile spatial directory, a kind of bipedal NI (natural intelligence) app, although my son thinks it has something to do with my alert appearance and confident demeanour, while presumably the fact that I am a middle-aged female makes me unthreatening - if you ask me for directions I am unlikely to mug you. Personally, I genuinely have no idea why I get asked, because most of the time when I am walking somewhere I am strictly minding my own business and am lost in thought, as walking is a form of meditation and helps me think through the draft for my latest Substack article, my shopping list, how to solve the local litter problem, what I would do as dictator for the day, and any other random thing that happens to pop into my head at the time.
So yesterday afternoon on the way to a supermarket I was politely stopped by a Middle-Eastern, possibly Turkish woman with what I guess was her teenage daughter. They were looking for some small street near the centre of the town I live in, which I had never heard of. But by looking at our respective mapping devices, we managed to compare notes and figure out where the address was. As I was trying to explain the best walking route to this lady in English, I noticed she was struggling to understand. She then said something to her daughter in what I recognised as German. Thinking about the incident afterwards, speaking German if she was of Turkish heritage made sense, since she may have grown up or at least lived in Germany, and if just visiting here in South Wales the German language would have been more familiar to her than English. Since I am fluent in German, I responded in that language and she immediately grasped the directions, beamed at me with a huge smile and then spontaneously gave me a big hug of thanks.
That brief time of random encounter with a total stranger made my day, and hers too I hope. This totally banal, little, insignificant episode suddenly summed up for me all that I have been deprived of for some two-and-a-half years. Officially two-and-a-half years that is, since the fear of fellow humans who might be carriers of a deathly pathogen, the notion of a human being as a walking biohazard, the hatred of the non-compliant, or even the envy of the Followers of The Science and The Rules over those who flaunted, or just ignored the hysteria, has lasted longer than the government diktats. And in a few sad cases is still ongoing, and may even be chronic. But this random woman with her daughter reacted warmly, gratefully and genuinely human, despite all the (anti)social distancing rammed down out throats.
Admittedly, someone other than me may have had an apopleptic fit, or a major mental health crisis, or been compelled to shower in sanitiser after being touched, can you believe it, actually even hugged by an untested, unmasked, unprotected foreign microbiome transferal agent, aka a person. My facetious comments come to me because in many ways we have, unfortunately, transcended irony and retained a kernel of the Covid Moment, so that despite the best of our knowledge that any threat was massively exaggerated, despite our intentions to 'return to normal', some vestige of the past three years is there to stay for ever, and underneath a veneer of trying to approach and interact with other people in a 'normal' human way, the seeds of suspicion that were sown have established little roots, and the weeds of mistrust have sprouted. For me therefore little things like my experience yesterday give me hope that human nature will win through, and that the hysteric hygienists, the risk averse, the misanthropes, the pathologically introvert will return to the woodwork they crawled out from three years ago and leave the rest of us alone again.
Something similar happened to me last week. I was so surprised to be hugged by someone after an interview with them, having already been somewhat surprised that they were willing to meet in person.
On the other hand, watching all three hours of the RFK congressional testimony the other day, I found the occasional masked aides sitting behind various senators a helpful clue as to the party affiliation of that senator. So germophobia can be useful on occasion.
That's lovely, would've loved to've seen their faces when you went from perfect English to perfect German. My friend who was told she has looong covid by her doctor is now convinced she has vaccine damage. She got the shot and shortly after had pain in her extremities, head aches and was severely physically impaired. It seems my step-brother Ian has the same thing with the same first medical prognosis. My parents banged on to me to get the shots every time I spoke to them on the phone. My eldest daughter Nathalia has had all three and she also complains of similar symptoms, but we don't talk about it as she's one of these very clever people that thinks daddy looks at the internet too much... My youngest twice-jabbed daughter who lives with us sees her unjabbed healthy mum and dad as people with a healthy distrust of authority. Her mind may've been changed after our nearest neighbour died of a heart attack after his and our organic veg delivery driver Terry was found dead in his flat of a blood clot in his brain. Also our buddy Jimmy had a stroke days after his, luckily he survived, but reported back to me that the hospital ward he was in was full of men with similar stories. Practically all of these adverse reactions were unreported, leading me to believe it's worse than I thought. I love hugging people.