Germ Warfare.

When did germs become such a thing and a cause of major panic?  Covid exacerbated everything but long before that products were being advertised that killed 95% of all germs.   People seem to have a meltdown at the very word.   I don’t remember ever thinking about germs when I was young.   As feral children growing up on a farm we spent our days running wild.   If we had to answer a call of nature there was nowhere to go expect behind a tree and certainly nowhere to wash our hands.    There is an old joke about an Etonian and a Harrovian meeting in a gents loo and the Etonian says to the Harrovian ’ At Eton we were taught to wash our hands after having a pee,’ to which the Harrovian replies  ‘At Harrow we were taught not to pee on our hands’

There was a report some years ago that attributed allergies to super clean houses whereupon my son, rather unkindly, said “It’s not surprising I don’t have any allergies.”    Shirley Conran famously wrote, many years ago, that life was too short to stuff a mushroom.   I agree with the sentiment behind that although I don’t mind stuffing  the occasional mushroom life is certainly too short to hoover every day – the dust and dirt is only going to come back.   Do it when it looks as though it needs it! 

I don’t remember us having baths every day and there certainly wasn’t a shower in the house.   We only washed our hands if they looked dirty – which they usually did!   At my boarding school we were filthy – I don’t they had ever heard of germs.   Access to soap and water was strictly rationed – the idea that we might have a shower after gym or games would have been looked upon as very odd.  

Nothing had a sell by date on it – and I have to say I don’t take much notice of them now, although I confess that I was caught out by some prawns the other day.   School food was pretty disgusting but the fact that all vegetables had the goodness boiled out of them had nothing to do with germs or food safety.   When we used to stay with people who had an ‘old school’ cook my husband used to say that they put the sprouts on before church.   Green was certainly not a colour associated with vegetables; they were mostly grey.   In the event we have turned ourselves into a nation of worriers although it seems unlikely that the hundreds of thousands of people who live on the poverty line  have the luxury of worrying about every little germ. 

There are germs in the air, on food, plants and animals; and in the soil and water. Germs are on just about every surface, including the human body. Most germs cause no harm. The immune system protects against most things that cause infections.   There are obviously a few that you probably want to avoid such as Listeria, Salmonella and E-Coli, if you can as they can be extremely unpleasant even if they very rarely kill healthy people.  It is surely far better to forget about germs as much as possible particularly as I believe that Donald Trump is a germaphobe – that must tell us something!!

But we live in a world of trigger warnings and not just for germs – there are trigger warnings everywhere.  Apparently, there is one warning people that Shakespeare’s The Tempest has a storm in it!   Who would have guessed that!   I went to buy a knife today and the shopkeeper warned me to be careful with it as it was very sharp, almost as if I was looking for a blunt one.  

Apparently I belong to the Silent Generation, I only found this out the other day and I wondered why.   I still don’t know the official reason but I imagine it if because we look at modern life, sigh, shrug our shoulders and mutter ‘Really’ under our breath.   There is a great deal that is confusing to us and there is very little we can do about it.  Although I do know that being treated like a small child of limited intelligence is very irritating.   Maybe the all the subsequent generations need a notice telling them to be careful of hot water taps because they have hot water in them or a warning letting them know that ponds could contain deep water (although I doubt it: the human race hasn’t survived this long through breeding generation after generation of congenital idiots) but my generation certainly don’t.    I look around me in bewilderment much of the time.   Scarcely a day passes when I don’t read a newspaper story that makes absolutely no sense at all.   Why, for example, are MPs and other public figures, so naïve as to imagine that posting offensive remarks on a WhatsApp is a good idea!   We all know that the written word remains and however ‘private’ you think something is – it is out there!  It seems that life becomes increasingly perplexing but perhaps it was ever thus.