My husband’s on the phone to our son for the umpteenth time this week.
“So… if you have a test on Tuesday… and then don’t see any of your flatmates… OK, I accept that’s a little unrealistic…can you wear a mask at all times in your house?”
Our boy is a student at Manchester University, living in Fallowfield, epicentre of Covid-19 infection and — so far, keyn ayin hara — he is virus free. We are in London, keen to see him, but equally keen to stay alive. The plan is that he will come home next week, arriving just in time for Chanukah. The question is how to do that as safely as possible. We’d rather not die for the joy of seeing him. And neither do we fancy Long Covid as a Chanukah gift.
For reasons that I surely do not need to go into, our faith in government advice is not all that solid. Operation Home-Coming is a delicate combination of our parental caution, and our son’s optimistic can-do spirit.
Is it better to get the train, packed with hundreds of other students, potentially seething with virus, all the way to Euston, or divert to Leamington Spa, where his mate is at uni, so the two of them can drive to London together? Will the windows in the car be open, asks his father, through gritted teeth. How strictly are his seven flatmates keeping the lockdown rules? How can they be in a “social bubble” with another house of eight? What even is that?
Once he’s in London, should he self-isolate? How long for? In his bedroom (two floors up) with meals delivered to the door? Or — a new idea — can he borrow the basement of another friend’s house? Do her parents even know about this plan? And so it goes on.
Talking to other parents, I hear about students taking coaches from Scotland, confidently planning social events for when they hit London. But some mums and dads plan to rise at 4am to drive hundreds of miles to pick up their darlings, there and back in a day. I’m consumed with guilt. Surely we should do that? “No way,” says my husband. “Are you mad? If he’s got it, we’d catch it no question, cooped up in a car with him for hours.”
But he’ll have taken two tests, I point out. “False negatives,” says my husband, darkly. In the meantime I develop a cough and get tested myself, in an eerie car park full of masked figures. The NHS Covid app rejects my email, fails to send me a QR code and then, once I have my negative result, won’t accept it. In the end I delete the app. Did I mention that our faith in government advice is low?
Our daughter, thoroughly fed up of working from home, is hardline. Winter Wonderland is off, she can’t go to Nottingham to see her friends, but nothing will keep her from the gym, now that lockdown is over. If her brother is banished to his bedroom for weeks, so be it.
I have a brainwave. We’ll buy a firepit so we can sit outside en famille for meals and Chanukah. But my husband vetoes this. With our tiny garden, he warns, “you’ll burn the house down.”
Somehow next week, our family will be back together. Just don’t ask me how. And as for seeing my beloved parents, brother, niece or any other human being … well, there’s always Zoom.
