After a drought of 109 days I’ll finally be downing a proper pint at my local — but can it ever be the same?

ALL being well, you’ll find me downing a proper pint at my local shortly after opening time tomorrow, precisely 109 days since I last crossed the threshold of a pub in the week before the lockdown became law.

At the time, we were told that the enforced closure of pubs, shops and restaurants would be reviewed after three weeks. But now we’ve been kept waiting more than three long months for this day of supposed liberation.

I wish I could say that the prospect fills me with joy. But let’s face it, nothing will be the same as before — not for a while yet, anyway.

In fact, if the queue stretches round the block, I’m not even sure that I’ll bother to join it. After all, the atmosphere that awaits us promises to be less than convivial — more like a neurotic board meeting of the Health and Safety Executive than my idea of a carefree hour or so with my fellow regulars.

Signs everywhere instructing us to keep our distance, with yellow tape on the floor to ram the point home; hand-sanitising fluid dispensers by all the entrances and exits and dotted around the bar; table service only, with no standing up to drink, except in the garden, where we must keep well apart; a ban on loud music (for that, at least, I’m grateful) to discourage us from spreading lethal droplets by raising our voices; food and drink to be ordered via phone apps, where possible . . .

Suffering

Most off-putting of all, it has also been suggested that pub-goers may be asked to give their contact details to the bar staff, so that they can be instructed to selfisolate if anyone sitting near them turns out to be suffering from Covid-19.

(As many wags have pointed out, this means that when ‘Mickey Mouse’ contracts the virus, the staff will have to tip off ‘Elvis Presley’, ‘Genghis Khan’, ‘Lord Lucan’ and ‘Benito Mussolini’).

Ah, well, I suppose I should be grateful for small mercies. At least the landlord of my south London local, where my face is well known, is unlikely to demand documentary evidence that I don’t live in poor, picked-upon Leicester.

Much as I love a pint of real ale, however — and though I desperately miss the company of my fellow regulars — I’m not entirely convinced that the pleasures I’ve taken for granted throughout my adult life are worth all this hassle.

I feel the same about returning to the office. For weeks I’d been itching to go back — not for the work, you understand (I’ve always hated having to earn my living) but for a change of scene and to catch up with colleagues, pick their brains and exchange ideas.

That was until last week, when Virgin broadband crashed in my neck of the woods, leaving me with no satisfactory means of working from home, and I seized the excuse to put in my first appearance at Daily Mail HQ since mid-March.

Reader, it was as eerie and depressing as the Mary Celeste — the American merchant brigantine found abandoned by its crew and drifting in the Atlantic in December 1872.

Before I was allowed into the office, my temperature was taken by a machine in the lobby, I had to strap on a mask and complete a two-page form about the state of my health.

Then, after trudging upstairs (the lifts were out of bounds — incubators of disease, apparently) I counted a grand total of five people on the premises, in place of the hundreds who beavered away, filling every desk, the last time I was there.

Ever since I started out in this trade, some 45 years ago, I’ve been in awe of the sub-editors, layout designers, production whizz-kids, printers, advertising, circulation and distribution people who keep newspapers going, day after day.

Now there are at least 50 of my colleagues back in the office. But even so, since my visit last week, I’ve been totally lost in admiration of the way they’ve adapted so rapidly to the extraordinary difficulties of bringing this whole enterprise to fruition from homes scattered all over the country, with no discernible effect on the quality of the paper that arrives every morning on my doormat.

Terror

Please God, though, tomorrow’s easing of the Draconian restrictions heralds the beginning of the end — and employees of businesses of every kind will be allowed to come together again before the leaves turn brown.

True, some people don’t seem to mind the lockdown at all, while surprising numbers say they positively enjoy it. All I will say is that of course they can stay cut off from the world, if that’s what they want — though state employees certainly can’t expect taxpayers to carry on funding them on full pay if they refuse to go to work.

As for those who are most at risk from coronavirus, it clearly makes sense for them to remain on their guard.

But as the daily death figures linked with

Covid decline, and those for job losses climb inexorably, isn’t it high time for most of us to shake off our terror of this invisible killer and get on with real life?

I hate to strike a sombre note, but in all the hysteria surrounding the lockdown, one profound truth about the human condition appears to have escaped the Government and its expert advisers: sooner or later, every one of us will die.

Death is always terribly sad, whenever it happens, but happen it always has, since long before coronavirus — and happen it always will. As we learned only yesterday, indeed, a total of 541,589 people died in England and Wales alone last year. That’s an average of 1,484 per day, a figure that knocks Covid’s toll into a cocked hat.

I’ll go further, and risk obloquy, by pointing out that most of those who have died in the UK with coronavirus had long outlived average life expectancy at the time of their birth.

According to the UN, even when I came into this world, as late as 1953, the average Briton could look forward to only 69.41 years of life — which would give me less than three years left if the same conditions applied today. And I’m a mere stripling of 66.

Optimism

Meanwhile, almost half (47 per cent) of those who have died with Covid were over 85 — born in the mid-1930s, when life expectancy for women was only 63, and less than 59 for men.

For the avoidance of doubt, I’m absolutely not saying old lives don’t matter. On the contrary, I believe all lives matter very much — black, white, old, young and unborn (I’ve never met anyone who thought black lives don’t matter, and I never wish to; but I’ve met plenty of righton liberals who say it’s OK to kill unborn babies, though they’re unable to offer any convincing explanation for their belief).

I’m just saying it’s pointless to pretend we can extend our lives indefinitely — and borderline mad to destroy countless livelihoods in the hope of giving the likes of me a little more time on this Earth.

But away with such morbid thoughts! The truth is that after weeks of almost unrelieved gloom, at last we have grounds for optimism.

If we’re to believe the experts (a huge If, I grant you) the rate of infection with Covid-19 in England has dropped almost 40 per cent in the past week — with no sign yet, almost four weeks on, of the upsurge so many feared after the mass breaches of social distancing rules by the Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

Meanwhile, the miracle drug Dexamethasone has been found to save almost a third of the lives of the most seriously ill — at a cost of a mere fiver per patient.

Add the latest finding that immunity to the virus may be far more widespread than previously thought, and surely we have plenty to celebrate.

Queues and officious rules permitting, therefore, ‘let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow . . . ’ But oh, dear, I’d better not finish the quotation!