Has anyone else been bathing in nostalgia as the Corona virus story unfolds?
As I follow the lead of our health advisors, dutifully washing my hands for twenty seconds and more, at every opportunity, and often for pleasurably longer, I find myself transported to my early 1960s Grimsby primary school, St Mary’s; to the long row of hand-basins that stretched from front to back of the wooden ranch-like structure that was the junior section.
Off the veranda, at the end of the classrooms, in the long cloakroom with its age-dulled floorboards, I watch my hands pumping and pooling the green, slick, liquid soap, working it up it to a frothy white bloom then submerging it into the oh! so! hot! water; feeling the exquisite burning reviving frozen fingers, watching the glowing redness reach beyond my wrists to warming forearms, dampening rolled up sleeves.
I seem to be alone. Yet it must have been a communal experience. It must have been after play-time snowball-fights with over-the-road neighbours at Holme Hill School. Yet the sense of solitude is strong. Is it the idea of being charged with a mighty sense of selfish guilt and personal indulgence that removes my classmates from the scene? Or has another memory imposed itself upon this recollection?
I mean that scene, captured in their separate forms by both Barry Hines and Ken Loach, of Billy Casper enjoying the same hot indulgence and rare solitary pleasure in a steamy school toilet.