How love became a lethal weapon

My mother messages from Italy with a tiny but telling anecdote that sums up the difficulty of the situation. the assistant manager of her local Carrefour express in turin (like tesco express, only with nicer wine), is being driven to distraction by little old ladies roaming endlessly around his supermarket.

he keeps telling them to go home and stay home because it’s not safe, and that he’s more than happy to deliver their groceries to them — but still they come.

one of them stayed for two hours the other day — the place is tiny — chatting with staff before buying two small items and finally going home. the poor man was squirting her with hand sanitiser, but still she refused to get the message.

It’s the same story at the chemist. With all the bars, shops and restaurants closed, elderly people who live on their own have nowhere else to go for human contact. And it seems that, for some at least, the ordeal of total isolation is far more gruesome than the prospect of catching the virus itself.

Governments are right to talk about this pandemic in terms of a war: the risk to life is very real. But unlike traditional wartime where people, however terrified, however exhausted or confused or demoralised, can come together to support each other, the nature of this current threat demands we do precisely the opposite.

The terror of an invisible foe that lurks within each of us is the stuff of sci-fi horror. And yet that is what we are facing. An enemy that does not show itself but which hides in the fabric of everyday life. that can only be defeated if we do the exact opposite of what our instincts tell us to do, namely distance ourselves from our nearest and dearest, from the vulnerable, the weak and the old.

you can’t hold your loved ones close because the contact might kill you. A cold, Darwinian force that takes our greatest gift to each other as human beings — love — and twists it into a lethal weapon.

It is that, I think, that goes to the heart of this crisis. And it’s also what makes it so difficult for politicians to calibrate their response. on the one hand, the disease modelling is telling them to limit human contact, to shut down interactions, to all but call a halt to life as we know it. on the other, they know that what they’re asking people to do is, quite simply, inhuman.

In Britain, we are in the relatively early stages of this contagion. there is still a lot of defiance at the notion of self-isolating, especially among our feisty and independent older population.

Indeed, the Prime minister’s own father, Stanley Johnson, said yesterday that he would still go to the pub ‘if he needed to’. And while I fully respect a man who considers a trip to the pub a necessity, it nevertheless shows the challenge the Government faces.

that is why I think, on balance, they have little choice but to allow shops and businesses to continue trading, and to keep children going to school.

It’s not just a question of maintaining morale, keeping up a semblance of normality; it’s also a case of supporting business and jobs for as long as we possibly can.

And all of us must also give serious consideration to behaviour — that drink in the pub after work with friends, that mother’s Day lunch, that glass of wine with a girlfriend — that previously wouldn’t have merited a second thought.

Let us pray that one day soon we can go back to taking our lives — and our loved ones — once again for granted.