The one person I have come across, in this whole Covid-lockdown thing, who really seems to nail what exactly is wrong for us all is my 4 year old grand-daughter Meg. I finally got to see her a couple of weeks ago as the English government then “unlocked” us to go and sit in the garden of a family member as long as we kept 2 metres apart.
It was wonderful to see her and my daughter, Lucy, but it also felt so wrong not to be able to hug or have her sit on my knee. She clearly understood she could not come close to us and stood jumping up and down the required 2 metres away telling us what she would like to do when the “nasty virus was gone”. She drew a picture for me – it is her standing between myself and her step-Grandfather better known to her as Gramps! We were not socially distancing…
Then a few days later Lucy sent me a copy of a message that had been sent home with Meg from her pre-school group which she has just started attending again. The teacher wrote: “In imaginative play Megan said to Keri, her friend, “This person is very clever so that they have created a machine that two people can go in when the virus is here and it means they can get close and hug”. Then Orla added, “Yeah you can hug one each other! And soon an even cleverer person will make a machine that will make the virus go away!”
These 4 year olds have got it all sussed – I too long for a machine to go in to safely have hugs and even more a machine that makes the virus go away!
