Under lockdown, we thrived on pointing the finger at rule-breakers. What now?
I am starting to wish I’d made some sort of feelings-based track and trace app at the start of lockdown to plot my evolving morass of emotions and longings throughout a period of what can reasonably be described as “tedious agitation”.
There was that moment in Week #3, for example, when I took my first walk through a local park and saw a group of six people sitting down together, and menacingly – before I could even process it – thought, “Well I hope they are all in the same household.” Can you imagine having that feeling now? Who cares if six people sit down vaguely near one another. What am I going to do, call the police? Who do I think I am?
At the time I took the feeling home like a hot, ugly gem and disposed of it appropriately once I’d got through the door (hand sanitiser, turn the taps on with elbows, thorough 20-second handwashing routine), but I felt like I’d learned something about myself that day. Who are we when we are locked inside our own mental prison? I, for example, turned out to be a neighbourhood busybody with Terminator-vision used to determine exactly how close to one another people are when sitting together and laughing.
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This didn’t go away lightly: there was a period of lockdown when I didn’t leave the house for 10 days, went extremely interior and weird as a result, and had to go for an exhaustively long walk – pacing huge avoidant arcs around people – until I regained cabin pressure. But all of this feels like the actions of another person right now. These days I’m almost emotionally able to get on a bus, for instance.
Yet the feelings persist, even as lockdown loosens. The pubs opened this weekend – finally, finally, the only significant culture we have beyond “having a queen” returns – though social distancing is still enforced at one metre, so navigating a bar and buying a pint is a delicate dance akin to Tom Cruise going through those lasers in the first Mission Impossible.
Super Saturday came with a predictable wave of media coverage – journalists in bars at 6am eyeing other journalists in bars at 6am, trying to ascertain if they were journalists or not, all of them rushing at once to vox pop the first visible non-journalist, ie the first person who walked in wearing actually worked-in workwear who wasn’t talking about their Twitter blue tick out loud – alongside celebratory photo opportunities for all the major parties. The prime minister was snapped holding a pint with Wetherspoon’s boss, Tim Martin; Keir Starmer got that haircut he always gets. For most of Saturday, we were allowed to enjoy it.
And then someone took phone footage of Soho in central London in the evening – streets filled, bar crowds chattering, the giddy, thrilling feeling that comes as cool night air falls over a warm crowd, a taste of the old world transported to the new – and that was that. The exact point the coronadiscourse split in two. On one side: “Wouldn’t it be good to light a cigarette on Dean Street and puff it joyously into the ink-black sky?” On the other: “Well, I hope any group larger than six is all from the same household.”
We’re at a strange place in the Coronavirus Post-Lockdown Emotional Cycle™, where drinking a pint is legal, but watching someone else drink one still feels wrong. A lot of this is to do with the enforcement of moral absolutism that this country thrives upon, a squirming part of our national identity that has, secretly, been hoping for a moment like coronavirus for years: an opportunity to go to the shops in a mask, see exactly one person there not in a mask, then stomp home – a combination of vindicated and smugly furious – and seethe about it all day.
I’m convinced that for a vast swathe of people, the main motivation for locking down hasn’t been protecting the NHS, or the government threat of a fine, or even the idea that doing so is for the broader good: it’s for the opportunity to feel the self-satisfaction of being in the right, and having others, beneath them, in the wrong. The Soho scene is a reminder that even legal (and practically government-sanctioned) behaviour like drinking a pint can be looked down upon, and of the 48:52 split that still fractures the country. It’s going to take us a while to take off our gloves and masks and shake it off.
It’s hard to believe how much our collective attitude has shifted since the Barnard Castle Incident came to light a mere six weeks ago. How much did that week where all the 6am pub journalists waited outside Dominic Cummings’ house to urgently ask him how to pronounce “Barnard” inform our attitude towards a loosening lockdown and the pubs reopening? It’s hard to imagine that scandal playing at the same intensity now.
What’s changed: have we all had a gulp more fresh air, seen friends and family a metre closer to us? Has the slightly lower R rate really altered the collective mood? Or could it be that one single weekend in a pub can break months of nationwide cabin fever? Possibly all that, but something else, too: extreme moralism has a boredom threshold.
There are other emotions in the post for the rest of this pandemic – you’ll still have a chance to get mad at one of your neighbours for doing something extremely minor, don’t worry – but for now this tentative reopening feels like oxygen. You can sort of go to a restaurant again. Rejoice in it.
• Joel Golby is the author of Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant
