When life gives you lemons, don’t fake a Covid test

Apparently, half the children in Britain are currently self-isolating thanks to the bursting of Covid bubbles.

Absences are playing havoc with the plans of parents and teachers, causing distress among smaller children and triggering absolute delight for a sizeable proportion of teenagers. So keen are some to get themselves and their friends out of the classroom, that they are said to be using lemon juice to produce false positive results when taking a Covid test. Handily, this also gets them an A in chemistry (or a nine in new money).

Quite why all these young people would rather isolate at home than go to school is a mystery. I suppose we’ve got the Euros, and now Wimbledon’s on the telly too. Not to mention Fortnite for the gamers, weed in the park for the bolder older ones, and TikTok for any secondary school child with an ounce of self-respect.

And don’t forgot the simple joy of WhatsApping long strings of emoticons to your mates. When Gavin Williamson bans mobile phones from every school in England there will be even more reason to find an excuse to stay away. He’d do much better to ban citrus.

As it happens, I’ve had the company of a poorly child this week. When my daughter started coughing on Monday morning, we feared the worst and took her straight off for a Covid swab. Thankfully the result was negative – and came back in time for my son not to have to isolate on Tuesday (he was livid, obviously). But still, for two or three days my daughter felt really rotten, gently mouldering under her duvet and occasionally croaking for Calpol.

On Thursday she seemed a little brighter and we were in two minds about whether to be firm and send her back in. We gave her scratchy throat the benefit of the doubt and kept her off, which seemed the right decision until later in the day when my Zoom meeting found itself competing with an 11 year old belting out Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”.

At lunchtime I had hotted up some soup for her, which was not only comfort food for my daughter, but comforting for me as a sign of how little some things change. Whenever I had been off school as a child, my mother always gave me chicken soup, assuming I felt up to eating. The other habitual offering was Lucozade, back in the days when it was sold as a recovery aid to the poorly, rather than a sports aid to the portly.

I also, just like my daughter this week, would regress and watch programmes on TV that were aimed at much younger children. For me it might have been a single episode of Postman Pat; for my daughter it has been back-to-back seasons of the brilliant Hey Duggee.

Did I ever pull a sickie? Well, not exactly, although I did happen to miss sports day in year 8 – and thus avoid near certain humiliation in the long jump – thanks to a relatively minor sniffle. And a year or two later I convinced my mother that I had picked up the cold that was already keeping my brother off, when really I just couldn’t bear the idea of him being at home while I had to go to school.

Halfway through the morning on that fateful occasion I went into my brother’s room, probably to annoy him, bent down to pick something up from the floor and managed to force a large splinter from the side of his desk underneath the full length of my index fingernail.

The pain was excruciating, and since we couldn’t remove it, I ended up at the village health centre, where a nurse endeavoured to cut the nail down sufficiently far to remove the wood. Her efforts were so vastly more painful than the agony of the splinter that I nearly fainted. In the end, I was sent home with some strong antiseptic cream, a bandage and an actual reason to be off school.

Still, it taught me a valuable lesson: that lessons were more valuable than fannying around at home. So, when life gives you lemons, don’t waste them on faking a Covid test, or indeed on making lemonade. No, slice them neatly and put them in your gin. But only once you’ve finished your A-levels.