Coronavirus: Making a song and dance over thanks comes naturally to a show-off – Susan Morrison

Now, me and the Western have a bit of history. I’m used to seeing the place go like the proverbial fair.

The clear liquid on offer was not gin, disappointingly

There’s usually a constant mild roar of noise and bustle from cars dropping people off, smokers getting ticked off on the benches, visitors shouting details of intimate surgery into mobile phones, and, of course, those beloved mildly bonkers volunteers chatting in the shops and pushing squeaky-wheeled tea trolleys around.

It’s all gone.

The building is holding its breath. There are few trolleys and beds being moved about, hardly any patients clutching bits of a paper and asking each other pointlessly for directions, and no kids running up and down whilst parents yell at them. You could have run a Formula 1 victory lap around the place. Only the staff are moving around in the empty corridors. It’s a battle waiting to happen.

I fell on the hand sanitiser like a sailor on shore leave seeing his first booze for a year at a dockside shebeen, and I made my way along the corridors flattening myself against the wall like a special agent hunting a serial killer.

Our NHS staff, as ever, are playing a blinder. I babbled our collective thanks at everyone I spotted in scrubs and a lanyard, and believe me, everyone got thanked. Everyone got talked to. Everyone.

I could not shut up, even as I was having needles stuck in my arm and even when a nurse forced me to drink a clear fluid that was a) disgusting, despite her assurance that it wasn’t and b) not gin, despite her assurance that it was. Even for a chatty bird like me, I was truly off on one. I was baffled until I realised that these were the first people I had spoken to face-to-face in a fortnight who were not my family.

The loneliness of the isolated extrovert show-off is beginning to bite. There were about five carefully spaced out people in the CT Scan waiting room. That’s a decent sized Fringe audience. The temptation to leap to my feet and start a show was nearly overwhelming, but a nurse came and took me away.