We've heard people who shave their heads say that they did it to conceal the fact that they were thinning on top which gave a piebald effect. So that's an excuse to not worry granny about the cancer. In any case she's so small she can't see the top of her son's head.
Preparing food has become a cleanliness overdrive.
You can't take a pill, which involves putting your fingertips in your mouth, without washing your hands again before meals. In fact you wash your hands straight away. Because otherwise they contaminate everything.
I remember when I was teaching watching pupils who blew their noses and coughed into their hands and then borrowed my pens or handled the pages of my books and dictionaries. Same principle.
Wash before 'clean activities' (eating) and after 'dirty activities' (picking up items you dropped on the floor, handling the boots you pulled off, or moved to the side of the room or corridor, or handling the wastebin, or taking out the rubbish.
It's like keeping kosher so that your parents or in-laws can visit, or keeping a special frying pan not used for meat, scrubbed with sand, for the visits of your Hindu family. I have to keep my home ultra-clean, even if the affected person is away overseas, ready for the return.
I've always thought that paper kitchen roll is cleaner than kitchen sponges and wiping cloths. If you are brought up in a home where your parents thought that using kitchen roll was wasteful, and a sponge can be washed with a kettle of leftover boiling water that is the compromise you make. Now, there's no half measure.
I look with disgust at tea towels. When I was at grammar school our domestic science teacher taught us to wash tea towels in boiling water after every meal. General knowledge from books on health and looking after your teeth has taught me germs multiply within an hour - so any used cloth should be disinfected within an hour - ideally after use so you don't go off and forget.
The new system is to use a bowl of bleach as a resting place for the kitchen cloth. How about adding the sponge? Will it dissolve!
A restaurant has to become our second home, in the sense that we are creating a clean space around ourselves. Last weekend he asked our friends if he could take the communal bread and butter first.
In the restaurant I clean the basin and taps. The toilet handle. The door handle. If they've more than one cubicle I go back on a second visit to the same cubicle. So, nothing's changed.
You watch other people rubbing their noses, touching their hair, dabbing at their lips, even wiping their mouth with a table napkin. Don't even put me near children who pick their noses and then hand you sandwiches saying, 'Scuse fingers!'
I think, 'Are we exaggerating the fuss we are making?' Yesterday I spent the evening in a crowd of people (writers). A merry widower told me that his late wife died of breast cancer.
We phone and email all day with any news to do with cancer. TV celebrity Jane Goody, according to my understanding of the newspapers, now has cancer spread from the cervic to other parts.
And today's old are yesterday's young. Another news report says that three quarters of the baby boomers, the postwar generation who enjoyed the Swinging Sixties, now have cancers of the ulva, vagina or anus - or all. 'Should have heeded the medical advice and warning - use condoms - the long term view.'
People say, 'It may never happen'. When you have cancer, you know it's already happened. And it will happen, if you aren't careful.
So our motto becomes, 'You can't be too careful.'
I've been in one home for several days. I don't want to go to another family home. If I go to visit my son I am tidying up as I go. The longer I stay away from a location the worse it gets. I go back and find dust to dust.
He will be here after lunch.
Yesterday I wiped the toilet handles - with throw-away wipes
What shall I do now? The doorhandles. The light switches. I need hand cream as antidote to the loss of moisture caused by all the washing.I always washed a lot. The undersides of my slippers.
Maybe I should clean the keys on my laptop.
That leaflet from the hospital about smoking giving you mouth cancer. I want to go up to all the people standing outside pubs and restaurants, telling them, 'Give it up!'
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