We’re not quite ready to go back to ‘normal’
DID you head for the pub on Wednesday? Take a loved one out for a longawaited meal? Stroll arm in arm through the city centre marvelling that the world is getting back to normal? nope, me neither.
In fact, it seems that despite the concerns over one big national boozeathon, Wednesday’s much-heralded return to normality was something of a damp squib.
I feel for the bars and restaurants. every day now my email inbox pings with a message. ‘We’re opening again,’ they trill. ‘We’re back! Pop in and see us!’ There’s a fervency to their correspondence. An entirely understandable desperation. Please come and have a pint, they beg. Don’t abandon us now.
And yet increasingly it seems that we – the Great Scottish Public – aren’t quite ready to get back into the swing of things. Why are we so ambivalent about getting ‘back to normal’?
As far as I can tell, there are several reasons. First of all, we’ve had the living daylights scared out of us. In an unprecedented crisis, our Government has hammered home the message that we must Stay. At. Home.
Say that for long enough, and eventually people will become so conditioned that going anywhere starts to seem dangerous, even as the number of cases fall and that very same Government encourages us to poke our noses out of the burrow again.
Then there are the mixed messages. Suddenly it’s against the law not to wear a face covering in a shop (no complaints from me, I’ve been banging on about it for months), and yet we can all sit inside restaurants to eat without one? This seems... confusing.
There’s also the knowledge that every outing still does, whether we like it or not, contain an element of risk. In the normal scheme of things, we are used to weighing up risks in our daily life: do I cross the street even though the light is red? Should I walk down this darkened alleyway? Is that milk on the turn?
But the risk of Covid-19 is new, terrifying, and unknowable. Is it surprising that, with a global pandemic still in fullswing, we have become a nation that is increasingly risk-averse? A country that says, ‘I’ll give it a miss, thanks’ when their favourite restaurant tries to entice them out for a plate of pasta?
The tragedy, of course, is that our hospitality industry has never needed us more. Bars and restaurants are shutting down daily, no longer able to shoulder the burden of months with no income. Just this week we heard of the permanent closure of Hendersons, Scotland’s first vegetarian restaurant. I fear there will be many more to come.
It’s not that we don’t trust them to do the right thing. Those same emails stuffing up my inbox are full of thorough instructions about ‘what to expect’, with novel adaptations from booking services to one-way systems. They’re trying. They really are.
Yet many of us aren’t ready to listen yet. Look at our city centres, still empty ghost towns because no one is working from the office and precious few are shopping. There again we will no doubt see more closures, more To Let signs, our once bustling heartlands reduced to bleak, desolate wastelands.
IHoneSTLY don’t know what the answer is. You can’t push people out their own front door, in the same way that you can’t expect the restaurant industry to run on fumes for months on end. Perhaps, in the end, it will be a slow and measured return.
‘Keep the heid and balance the feet,’ my Dad always used to say in times of trouble and strife. It’s not bad advice.
And so, at some point in the next week or two, I will venture out. A drink perhaps. Maybe a meal. If my vanity dictates I must go to the hairdresser, as I am doing in early August, then my economic duty is surely to go for a drink in a much-loved bar, too.
The question, in the long term, is whether such things as a meal out or a drink in a pub will become rare treats, rather than a regular part of people’s lives. Whether we’ll become a more home-based society.
I suppose only time will tell. But I can’t help but think that whatever the muchlauded ‘new normal’ looks like, it’s going to be very, very different.