They can tell us what will open but they cannot make us go. Reopening of betting shops (July 3). Resumption of further close contact services including tattoo parlours, piercings and spas (July 6). Lots of this will be popular. There will also be holding-back.
Like most bureaucracy the lists do not do psychology. In this case, how the last three months have changed us, and also intensified longings like the lure of the sea. But oh how it called on the eve of lockdown. Portstewart (March 19), a winter coats walk along the shore, ice-cream in Morelli’s, sparkling toilets with sanitiser at the door. We were told off all the same by distant daughters.
But the now-reluctant, cautious ‘we’ does not include the young busting to get out, eejits jumping on cars in the Holy Land, teenagers who believe they are risk-free and therefore – what? That they cannot infect beloved grandparents? Or who are determined to be blithe as the loudest of the friends.
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No drives to the sea now until toilets open. Tough. There is no pay increase for the cleaners on whom so much depends.
Twinges of conscience are all that remains of ‘now we know whose jobs are really important’.
Those with few or no choices might well mock the notion of breaking free now for people with generous living space, gardens of their own. For someone who has worked right through in a poorly paid job, true luxury might have been a furlough. Though not if they saw furloughing as the step before the job disappears.
Rules bent to absolve Mr Cummings dissolved faster than the scientist ‘advisers’ have liked. Never mind following ‘The science’. The direction of travel had already been all the one way before showboat prime minister Johnson proclaimed ‘Our hibernation is over’. By last weekend there was no holding people. Johnson had given them his fluffy-headed nod, and yet those packed beaches brought shock and distaste.
Hours sweltering in queues for car parks, with their tents, complained a man in a Bournemouth suburb. Out in their pyjamas in the morning, he said, into the dunes with their toilet roll. There was also a sad, unanswerable, childlike response to ‘why did you head for the beach on the hottest day of the year?’
A 27-year-old there with his housemates said: ‘We’ve not been out of London since lockdown started. I’ve not got a garden. We’re not here to do any harm, we’ve got a football and some beers and it’s baking. We’re not hugging anyone.’ But he gave only his first name to avoid public shaming.
Those of us with adult children far away have at a guess pined for the most part, and been completely disciplined. We could have got on one of those planes that kept on flying or the boats that never stopped. Who could have stopped us? The photographs of that crammed flight at the City airport stopped us. Fear stopped us, and well we knew the children would have been horrified. It may be some time before many of us strap ourselves into another metal flying tube. (Whisper: would the boat be less scary, plus a train? The car on a ferry, motorway with minimal stop, the Eurostar?)
Getting the hair done tops the list for some. Arlene Foster says she misses congregational singing but singing is high-risk now, up there with the sign of peace, shaking hands all round you. (Although a long-gone devout friend always said he didn’t go to Mass to make friends.)
No more mwah-mwah kissing friends on the cheeks. Handshakes gone; no loss. But oh, the dark magic of a cinema. Which pubs will survive a safety makeover with any character? Restaurants with young staff whose ill-paid jobs hang by a thread...but who has the nerve? Not me, not yet. New spikes, tricky illness, tricky politicians. What to trust except time.
