Don’t buy the ‘new normal’

The “new normal” belongs with “social distancing” - to the category of ugly phrases which have emerged alongside the rows of shuttered-up shops and scenes of policemen harassing sunbathers to define the times in which we live.

Last week’s Kentish Gazette front page may have introduced us to another such concept thrown up by the Great Health Panic of 2020: “Abuse of freedom.”

This phrase perfectly reveals the schizophrenic nature of late lockdown officialdom.

On the one hand, come near maniacal exhortations to resume our lives, to go out and spend money.

On the other, myriad departments, authorities, public services and quangos serve up a gruesome diet of menaces, warnings and furious denunciations of any activity or behaviour which offends against this modern cult we might label “hygenicism”. Beachgoers in Margate, for example, seeking respite from the heat a fortnight ago and the stateimposed misery of lockdown, are “morons”, according to North Thanet MP Sir Roger Gale, if they do not get with the programme. The same story speaks of “shocking footage” of a train containing people some of whom were not wearing facemasks, those symbols of timid acquiescence to the sterile conformism of the new order. Failure to comply carries consequences.

The people of Leicester, through no fault of their own, have already been selected as laboratory rats for the first experiment in local lockdowns with police deploying roadblocks to stop citizens escaping. More worryingly, fresh assaults on liberty will come from those snobs, puritans and prigs longantagonised by the freedoms afforded to ordinary people. Gerry Warren’s story in last week’s Gazette [‘Lockdown thirsts to be quenched as pubs finally reopen’] darkly hints at residents’ groups in Canterbury ready to exploit the effects of lockdown to renew their feverish campaigns against particular licensed premises and our nighttime economy in general. Finally, there are those who do not regard the lockdown as a social and economic disaster, but rather see it as a staging post or guide to how we should live. As much as they insist that this is now “normal” or the “new normal”, please don’t buy it. There’s absolutely nothing normal about what we’ve been forced to endure. Alex Claridge The Old Tannery, Canterbury