My first thought was for my friends & relations. Since I will not be able to meet up with them for a while, I first considered sending them little care packages, with thoughtfully chosen pick-me-up gifts. Sort of like cheer-up boxes:
http://dblenck.blogspot.com/2016/08/do-you-have-cheer-up-box.html
However, this would involve me leaving the house to go to the post office, which is a bad idea - I could catch the virus along the way or while there. Plus, I think delivery people and posties are busy enough as it is, so I don't want to burden the system with unnecessary packages.
The same rationale applies to sending gifts via on-line shopping platforms like Amazon and Ebay, of course. I am staying away from all that for a while. No buying, no selling - I am staying at home!
Instead I have taken to skyping in a big way! I have never really liked telephoning - it costs a fortune, and not being able to see my counter-party has always bothered me. Who knows what phone-partners do while talking to me? For all I know they pick lint out of their belly button, or perpetrate even greater horrors!
But skyping now, that is a much better proposition. You can see what your conversation partner is doing, and assure yourself that they are properly attired for the occasion, and have shaved recently. It is remarkable how many young men these days think that it is perfectly acceptable to answer the telephone to a lady while in a state of complete dishevelment, unshaved and scantily dressed!
While being confined to our homes, perhaps not even having to work, it is easy to fall into a state of moral turpitude, sleeping all hours, not washing and dressing, eating unwholesome foods at irregular hours, and generally becoming willing victims of degeneracy.
That's where skyping comes in useful! Unable to deceive friends, colleagues, and relatives as to the state of our mental and physical being, we are forced to perform - perfunctorily, in all too many cases, but still - the daily rituals of ablution and bodily decoration that are the hallmark of gracious living, and shamed into a wholesome lifestyle we might otherwise disdain to embrace.
Thus I have started to connect to friends and relations via Skype. Sisters, friends, and members of my book-club, have all been cajoled into continuing their connection with me via this accommodating medium.
To further make myself useful, I bethought myself, and took inventory of my myriad talents - was there anything I could do to serve my friends and colleagues? Aside from writing this daily blog, of course, which I plan to keep up as a way to sustain and entertain my cooped up readers.
I then remembered that I had in the past run a German conversation club, for colleagues at lunch time. It had sadly fizzled out, since I objected to talking with full mouths, and my colleagues valued their sandwiches more than their linguistic skills. But now might be the time to start again! I am imagining a captive audience on a Wednesday evening, bored to tears, slumped over their laptops, scared witless by incessant news-flashes about death and microbial menace - surely in another week or two they will be sufficiently tenderised to welcome any novel experience, even learning German?
"I haf vaiys to mayk you tawk!"
And if you can pronounce 'Streichholzschaechtelchen' you'll get a virtual star!
Skype is free for personal purposes, of course.
