Children return to pandemic frontline

THE summer holidays are over and children aged between four and 16 are enjoying their first day back at the frontline of a pandemic.

After six weeks of respite, primary and secondary school students have returned to the trenches of a nationwide experiment to see whether or not they increase transmission of an airborne respiratory virus and what it might do to them.

Mum Nikki Hollis said: “The first day back’s always the worst. Have they got everything they need? Will they make friends? Are they going to give the whole family coronavirus? There’s been lots of sleepless nights.

“And with no social distancing or masks, we’re waving them off to a petri dish swarming with coronavirus variants. But if it means they’re not under my feet all day, that’s a risk I’m willing to take.

“They need to learn maths, English, handwriting, all that and the government needs to learn how frequent long Covid is in adolescents. So everybody’s learning.”

School kid Martin Bishop said: “Apparently there are going to be air monitors in the classrooms to keep us all safe, which would make a real difference if we weren’t all sitting cheek by jowl on the school bus.

“I give it a month until we’re back home and struggling to learn algebra over Zoom all over again. I wonder who Gavin Williamson will blame this time?”

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Bananas and other foods that go off on the way home from the shops

JUST been to the supermarket? Bought a few lovely fresh things that are spending the journey home rapidly decomposing? These are going straight in the bin:

Bananas

If anything they were too green when you picked them up in Sainsbury’s an hour ago, but now they’ve got more brown spots than the hands of a 90-year-old expat on the Costa del Sol. They couldn’t even do a job in a f**king banana bread recipe.

Raspberries

‘Delicious’, you think, dropping them into your trolley. ‘They’ll make a great snack for tomorrow’. But there’s already a sickly blue mould populating one corner, the middle lot are melting to mush and the rest are sour. That’s what you get for trying to make being healthy anything less than an ordeal.

Pitta bread

Pitta bread has the look and feel of the kind of hardy bread that never goes stale, but that’s a lie. Open the packet on Monday and by Wednesday you’ll be able to use the remaining flatbreads as frisbees or arranged beneath clothing as a makeshift stab vest.

Avocados

Waiting for the hot guy to text back, waiting for a parcel, waiting for avocados to ripen: all just as frustrating and ultimately unrewarding. So you go for the ones the supermarket gods themselves say are ‘ready to eat’. And it’s easy to eat them, particularly if you have no teeth, because by the time you leave the shop they’re soft and rotten.

Yoghurt

Yoghurt, like its brother cheese before it, should just embrace mould as a flavour feature, because it’s always f**king covered in it the day after you buy it. Oh well, it’s all ‘good bacteria’ isn’t it? Or is it?

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