We’ll be dancing around each other for years to come

IN the high jinks which attended the arrival of the new decade not five months ago I dimly remember a few of our number attempting the Charleston.

The Roaring Twenties were back, our dance steps appeared to indicate, and ahead lay music, laughter and, who knows, perhaps a snifter or two of post-austerity decadence.

Yes, we’d drink to that. We drained our champagne flutes on the stroke of midnight and, innocents that we were, lurched around the house party living room hugging humans we hardly knew.

Today we stand on the threshold of another milestone which supersedes the one we celebrated on January 1 and renders those festivities naïve. It is Day 67 of lockdown and, in Scotland, Day 1 of our journey out of there to a mode of existence we are calling the ‘new normal’.

One need not invoke hyperbole to convey the strangeness of this brand of normal. The early days of the regime will, for example, afford me the right to a face-to-face audience with my daughter for the first time in more than two months. But I am not allowed in her house and she mustn’t be in mine. Nor can I touch her; no hugs, not even a reassuring tap on the hand. In phase one of the new normal, it’s the law.

Riskier

What will future versions look like? Well, in the medium term at least, expect to see a lot more of your neighbours. A survey for the BBC this week found more than 60 per cent of us feel it is either fairly unlikely or very unlikely that we will return with any regularity to pubs and restaurants after they reopen.

Cinema? Riskier still, surely. My last outing was among the most lavish of my film-going adventures. Tapas and beer delivered to our double seater berth of plumped red velvet cushions as we took in the splendid South Korean black comedy Parasite. Ah, but a stranger sat not three feet away.

Live music? I have never braved a mosh pit yet I have stood in crowds so dense with bodies that they could sweep you 20 yards in any direction in a heartbeat.

You didn’t think about catching a virus. You worried about being trampled underfoot.

At some live music events the more ardent of the audience members would toss their plastic pint pots in the air in appreciation as the musicians took the stage. Whatever happened to be in the pint pot at the time would descend on people’s hair, drenching them in a stranger’s partially drunk drink.

I don’t anticipate there being a lot of that in the new normal.

Theatre? Ballet? Opera? Not in the short to medium term, I should think, unless we are all to be offered royal boxes.

Thus in the space of five short months the rebranding of the Roaring Twenties is all but complete. This time around they will fret and whimper.

Many of us will be too frightened – or too loathe to expose ourselves to the litany of fresh hassles – to holiday abroad.

Aircraft, those pressurised sardine cans of humanity’s irritation with itself, will in the Covid-aware era be latter-day torture chambers.

We will half expect to see Lucifer strutting down the aisle with the drinks trolley.

Airports will be filtration systems not only for terrorists and travellers whose bags weigh too much but for every blameless Joe feeling a bit off colour. You thought you were off to the Seychelles? Well, your temperature reading says you’re off home for a fortnight’s self-isolation. Enjoy.

Those poor blighters who do pass the one-stop health inspection on the concourse, meanwhile, face the prospect of almost a month’s quarantine for their trouble – two weeks on arrival and another two on return.

Holidaying in the new normal? A week in the garden with a new book. Maybe the sun will come out.

Jobs will remain, through every foreseeable phase of the new normal, uncertain components in many of our lives, contemplated with a sense of foreboding and, perhaps for the moment, best not contemplated too deeply at all.

Will we ever return to a workplace as we used to know it? Will those of us who used to put on suits and mutter dry observations about hamster wheels as we presented ourselves for yet another week of desk duties ever truly know office life again?

I wonder when next I will wear a suit and reflect bleakly that it may well be at a funeral.

I wonder, too, about that twice-daily commute borne with stoicism until March by hundreds of thousands of Scots, including those unfortunate enough to work in one of the nation’s two biggest cities and live in the other.

What will the 8am Queen Street to Waverley look like on a wet Tuesday in October? The Mary Celeste? A mobile hospital ward, wild-eyed workers PPE-d to the max?

Counselling

Me, I’ve rarely been so happy to live within easy striking distance of my place of work – should it ever return to being so, that is.

For now, though, indeed for as far into the future as we can reasonably look, a Home Sweet Home sign dangles over our lives, counselling caution.

A quiet soiree at a friend’s house appeals? Well, on your own head be it but, in the new normal, it is exactly this kind of sociable conduct which might prompt that dreaded phone call from the test and protect people.

This, of course, is the nationwide public health innovation that would have had novelist Franz Kafka mesmerised: a phone call comes and a voice on the line tells you that you have associated with someone who has tested positive for Covid-19.

You are not told who that person is or when the association is meant to have taken place. You are told only that, whatever you are doing, whoever you are with, you must stop it and go into self-isolation immediately. Failure to do so may, if too many people flout the rules, eventually make you a criminal.

I do not say everything about the new normal will be weird, scary and dystopian. No, you will still be able to dance the Charleston, although if you do not live with your dancing partner it may have to be in their garden, at a six foot distance and, obviously, without loo breaks.

And there is a spring in the step of every prepper and prophet and conspiracy theorist who, of course, foretold the whole thing ages ago.

For the rest of us, well the lucky ones, there’s our gardens and the special dispensation we are now afforded to purchase things from garden centres to put in them.

There are our precious mobile phones and wi-fi connections and the touching ability of our more tech-savvy relatives to send digital selfportraits reminding us what they look like.

And – again if fate smiles kindly – there is our health. Beneath the layers of societal madness pervading the new normal, that, I seem to recall, was the bottom line.