Should Coronavirus make me change my unhygienic ways?

6/3/2017 (EP)

Queen Alexandra Hospital wants to work alongside The News to launch an infection prevention campaign. They want to remind people about hygiene and how important it is to wash your hands, especially when you are in a hospital.

Picture: Sarah Standing (170279-3496) PPP-170803-145837001 — 6/3/2017 (EP) Queen Alexandra Hospital wants to work alongside The News to launch an infection prevention campaign. They want to remind people about hygiene and how important it is to wash your hands, especially when you are in a hospital. Picture: Sarah Standing (170279-3496) PPP-170803-145837001

We did know though, that we could get a refund on the empty glass bottles returned!

During this same era, whenever a childhood infection loomed, my mother would accept the inevitability of contagion and make us five children sleep in the same bedroom. Usually we caught whatever was going.

‘Let’s get it over and done with’ seemed to work- as my 95 year old sister will attest.

This is not meant to be an oblique criticism of the way things need to be dealt with nowadays- just my recollections of the so-called ‘ good old days’.

As regards to hygiene in the home- in 1956, as a first wedding anniversary present to my wife, I shaped a chopping board out of a piece of mahogany.This very board is still in daily use, as it has been for the past 64 years- washed, of course, but only in soap and water.

I guess that my family and I are just plain lucky nothing untoward has happened to us for being so unhygienic.

Should I change my ways?