When I was 9 years old I caught a bug. Sue had been ill a few days before. Her place at the school dinner table was next to mine. "Don't breathe on me," I said, as we put our plates on the table on her first day back. She blew a gust of air directly in my face. To her it was a joke. For me, being sick was my greatest fear. I was in a state of high anxiety for the next two days. On the third day, I was sick. It's highly unlikely she was still contagious by the time she breathed on me - she'd recovered several days before. And I was in such a state, it's quite possible the whole thing was psychosomatic. But what this incident did was cement my belief that when sick people breathe on you, you get ill.
Being sick is a fear that has dogged me all my life. Until it inevitably emerged in a counselling session a few months ago. My terror extended to the point where I couldn't even bear people talking about it. If I heard or saw someone being sick, it would take me hours to calm down afterwards. And if someone had actually suffered from a bug and I'd been in their company, I would spend two or three days worrying that I'd caught it. Being unable to eat much. Slugging back the wine in order to forget about it. Going over and over the unlikelihood that I had caught it in order to try and reassure myself.
Mum was petrified of me being ill. And instilled in me many rules that were designed to keep me safe. Don't get too near people who are or have been ill. Don't drink out of the same glass as anyone else (including members of the immediate family). Don't share food (she'd have considered tapas tantamount to a germ swapping session). Don't eat anything even approaching its sell by date. Don't eat any foreign food (unless it's French or Italian). Especially Indian foreign food. Oh, and we had special "builders mugs" for people who came to the house to fix the boiler or do the decorating. These were not to be used by family or guests. Once I'd left home, she administered the safety rules from afar. Mainly by sending me newspaper cuttings warning me of "Salad scare in Tescos" or "Indian restaurants receive lowest score in hygiene audit".
Mum did all this with the best of intentions. And maybe she prevented me from picking up a few colds and bugs. But her rules were way out of proportion with the problem (some would consider our home an early example of health and safety gone mad). And all these rules really did was scare the living daylights out of me. Outwardly I laughed about them - just as I have in the paragraph above. But in reality, I was afraid to break them just in case something awful happened to me.
When I went away to college, I began to realise that other people had not lived by these rules. And that obeying them wasn't great my for my social life. In the bar, people would pass round a bottle of lager. No one seemed to think anything of swigging from a bottle that had touched other people's lips. The first time I went out for an Indian (around the same time as I lost my virginity), I was petrified of getting food poisoning (far more than of getting pregnant). But my friends wanted to go. And I wanted to be with them. I can still visualise the restaurant. And being awake half the night worrying. Indian is now one of my favourite cuisines. But because I'd been scared witless by an incorrect piece of information fed to me as a child, I could have missed out on a lifetime of delicious samosas, baltis and naan breads.
I continued through life following mum's rules to a degree. Or feeling stressed when I broke them. But of course, I could never be really sure of protecting myself from sickness bugs, because you can't live any sort of life without being near other human beings. I'd never have been able to date anyone or snog anyone or even hug my friends. I'd never have been in the crush of the mosh pit at a gig. I'd never have gone anywhere on a tube. And wasn't the life I wanted to live.
A year or so after I had finally shaken off my fear of being sick, Covid-19 hit the news. And I found myself hearing that powerful message from my childhood all over again: "don't get too near anyone - it will make you ill". Only this time, I ask myself, "Is that really true? Or is it another one of mum's Indian restaurant stories - a crazy notion borne out of someone else's terror? Am I yet again not living the life I want to live purely because someone else has put the fear of god into me?"