Low life | 28 February 2019

My fifth week confined to barracks as nurse, chief cook and bottle washer. I drive to the supermarket about twice a week, otherwise my horizon has shrunk to a vase of cut daffodils on the kitchen table, and through the window a fluorescent orange football in the garden with the grass growing up around it, and in the field beyond furry heifers enthusiastically nosing up hay from their circular feeder.

Nevertheless I am far from unsocialised. The house is close to the centre of the village. The front door is always open — you enter via a conservatory — and there are plenty of visitors. Some of these stand at the door and diffidently call out for permission to enter, others stroll in. The doctor waltzes in like a ham Oscar-winning actress breasting wild applause on her way to the podium.

The vicar plods in as though there were not the slightest difference in her mind between the public space and the domestic. But she was a medical missionary in Papua New Guinea for more than half a century and can be easily forgiven. The postman wearing shorts who comes in to drop letters on the hall table is on autopilot, his mind elsewhere, on the vagaries of Tottenham Hotspur football club most likely. The next-door neighbour, who comes in punctually every day at four o’clock bringing freshly baked cakes, cringes on the threshold like a whipped dog until bidden to enter by myself, in person because my distant, sometimes irritated voice isn’t permission enough.

Otherwise it’s all armour-plated elderly Christian women, ranging from the deeply nominal to those ablaze with the Holy Spirit, the lot of them aged between 70 and 90. Even the mobile hairdresser, who used to go on holiday to Thailand as often as he could manage it and is most definitely not a Christian, is in his eighties.