What will happen when this is over?

THERE has been a massive amount of behaviour change going on over the last ten weeks. Much of it compulsory. We have to spend a much higher proportion of our time at home than is normal. There are the choices we make about how to spend that time. Some of these changes are beneficial to physical and mental health. They are just plain good things to do. I hear people asking time and again, “what will happen when this is all over?”

Will the changes stick or will we all go back to the way we were until Covid-19 becomes as distant a memory as the last Olympics?

During the lockdown, people who were allowed out have walked as never before. Getting in your 5km walk has become as much of a habit as brushing your teeth.

I don’t believe the hordes I see are all normally in gyms that are closed to them. I suspect that a lot of them are first-timers enjoying frequent exercise.

Will they keep it up? Maybe Boris going on about obesity will do us all good. He didn’t even look all that fat and he needed to lose about four stone.

If the social media is to be believed, and I have no reason to doubt it, cooking and baking have become the norm. We are bombarded with pictures of beautifully scored bread. I have seen artfully plated delicacies that would be at home in any restaurant. People are learning to know what they eat.

Will it last? Well no — if the queues to eat a Big Mac are anything to go by. Have we become a country where it is normal to cook at home and fast food is an occasional convenience or treat? Have enough people learned that a chicken korma that you have cooked yourself is hard to beat? I doubt it.

The planet is recovering. There are civilisations that are seeing a blue sky for a change. Forget it. In no time we will have the smog back in cities and the canals of Venice will lose their transparency. We will not, indeed cannot in most parts of the country, give up our love affair with the car and it will be a good while before they are all electric.

I do notice that we have slowed down a lot. Around where I live you dare not go much faster than 20kph most of the time. Around every corner there is a family being led by a two-year-old on a trike.

The speed limit on these country roads is ridiculously 80kph. I know it is a limit and not a target — but if I went near it I would have wiped out about 10 cycling families by now. Driving slower is a good idea, though there are still idiots on the M50 doing the ton, and a big shout-out to the woman who tailgated me in Kilkenny last week. She and her children must have been in a dreadful rush to God knows where.

While many of us have had to endure too much of our own company, I suspect that some have realised that they needed a bit more time alone than had become the norm. I am old enough to remember when hippies went to India to find themselves. I don’t think many of them found much to write home about. But they had a point.

We can lose ourselves very easily in the humdrum routine of everyday life. We need to stop the world and get off now and again. We all need an occasional look in our psychological mirror.

Could we become less materialistic? There is a lot of chatter about rediscovering ‘what really matters’. People are waxing lyrical about rediscovering cycling. But will anything of significance change? My feeling is we will race back headlong to whence we came.

I have one major achievable hope for change. A long-serving GP told me with frustration and sorrow that he was seeing childhood illnesses that he had not treated since he was a young doctor. Maybe after all the talk of finding a vaccine, we will have heard the last of the anti-vaxers.

I certainly hope so.

‘A big shout-out to the woman who tailgated me in Kilkenny last week. She and her children must have been in a dreadful rush to God knows where...’