Volunteering is nothing like parenting, it turns out

I have a confession to make. I’m not all that fond of babies.

 

Shocking, isn’t it? Particularly from a benign old senior with three children of her own. 

 

Obviously I find them cute and would gladly cuddle one when offered. But I’m not a big fan of all the helplessness and dependency that comes with the territory of the very, very young.

 

Human babies are pretty hopeless, it has to be said. Other animals are born with finely-tuned survival instincts and are able to walk – albeit unsteadily – to their food source practically from birth. But while human infants are born with all four limbs, they are powerless to use them for anything other than to flay them helplessly around. And when they do finally work out how to totter around and pick things up with their beautifully-engineered fingers and thumbs, they promptly fall over and drop things. And the onus is entirely on us to feed them with a breast, bottle or pap from a jar warmed to exactly the right temperature. Not exactly nature in the raw.

 

Anyway, my own aversion to helpless dependency means that while I’m more than happy to help people out, I’d rather assist the ones with a bit of get-up-and-go rather than the really hopeless cases. Does that make me a bad person? Probably.

 

So I was a little wary when I signed up to be one of those Royal Volunteers during the COVID crisis. My two tasks were Check in and Chat and Shopping Aid. The guidelines concerning the latter were somewhat alarming. It was all, “Don’t go into the house, ring the doorbell and leave the shopping by the front door, then ask the sheltering person to do the same with the payment”. It was a bit like one of those alarming TV detective shows: “Step away from the cornflakes, ma’am.”

 

But it was all academic anyway, as no-one seemed to need my help. 

 

I thought I’d been overlooked altogether - and I wasn’t too fussed, to be honest. I’d dutifully toggled “On duty” each day and had clocked up more than 700 “volunteering hours” which meant I was bound to get a badge if there was one going. Then when I did finally receive my first alert, I missed it because I was in the bath. The next one was little better: I was given a woman’s phone number and I tried to call her three times, but there was no answer. The only option then was to click the “Pass to another volunteer” button, there being no “Possibly dead” button to toggle.

 

Since then I’ve received two more live alerts involving calls to delightful elderly women who were obviously glad that a complete stranger was checking in on them. So while I’m no NHS hero, the experience has been pretty positive all in all and I’ll carry on helping just as long as they want me. Though no babies need apply.

No disrespect to this particular baby - I'm sure he's delightful