There’s a simple reason the PM had to force pubs to close
It took until last night for a pandemic that had already shuttered schools and offices to close down the still-bustling cafés and restaurants on high streets. Why had city-dwellers continued to put their lives, and those of others, so pointlessly at risk by persisting in mingling in non-essential spaces? Plain selfishness? Sour dough?
Neither, in reality. Just a combination of simple factors: that it was only yesterday, two months after the UK’S first confirmed case of Covid-19, that the Government saw fit to finally crack the whip; and that, for many young urban dwellers, a few days under the weather is a reasonable trade-off for keeping the freedoms that make city life – otherwise cramped, expensive, uncertain – worthwhile.
In places like London, young professionals largely live in houseshares with friends who become surrogate family. The reason people are here, and not in the often greener, cleaner places in which they grew up, is because the comfort of being surrounded by constant signs of life and loved ones outweighs the discomfort of, well, almost everything else.
The often brilliant unpredictability of inner city life has become, in the past week, brutal. It has left many trying to fathom indefinite loss of income, hard-won livelihoods all but snuffed out.
The only solace has been out, not in, in places you can’t call your own, where your rental bed might be at any moment ripped from under you. Self-isolating – voluntarily making yourself as alone as can be – has seemed a prospect deadlier than the virus itself.
Cafés in recent days have not been about oat milk flat whites, but about desperately clinging to a life that was soon to be erased.
Locking down the nation, especially cities, which thrive on bustle, is awful. But it is the first decisive action this Government has taken – its advice until now halfhearted and wishy washy, presumably for fear of being cast as authoritarian cop. It is curious to me, however, that the Prime Minister’s briefing yesterday mentioned nothing of shops.
It is there, not in restaurants or bars, that I have seen people of varied age and health packed together most tightly of all. Every day this week, queues have snaked outside my local supermarket and pharmacy; punters of all ages standing shoulder to shoulder, bustling for the last can of tinned tomatoes to unnecessarily clear from otherwise barren shelves. Admonishment has been doled out in abundance to the young in (significantly emptier) establishments, but not those piling on top of one another to grab more food they don’t need without regard for those that do. How that is not more dangerous on every level than eating breakfast at a half empty café and washing your hands afterwards – at bathrooms that, unlike supermarkets, actually have soap – has not yet been made clear.
If a lockdown were needed, it should have happened long ago – not in another half measure now, when we are desperately trying to wrangle the horse that bolted long ago from the stable door.
The first emergency Cobra meeting was on March 2; on the same day as Mr Johnson’s announcement of pub, café and restaurant closures, UK Covid-19 deaths jumped the highest in a 24-hour period so far. One hundred and seventy seven lives have now been lost here, a rate rising faster than Italy, the country that has seen more fatalities than anywhere else since the outbreak began.
There has been selfishness in continuing to go to bars et al. But beloved local cafés and restaurants have been going under, and, if the Chancellor’s new economic measures prove ineffective, could now sink without trace: the impact of the downturn on people’s lives and livelihoods may prove to be most injurious of all.
That selfishness has been just as present in shops every day, a situation that will now only worsen with no means of sourcing food or drink elsewhere (takeaways aside). This has to be about need, not want. And what we need from the Government is a clear, all-encompassing strategy, rather than more half measures.
Going outside is one of the few things we are allowed (for now) to do, so a new study surmising that fresh air pursuits boost happiness more significantly than any others is a shred of good news worth clinging onto.
Research from the World Happiness Index deduced that, whether running, gardening or otherwise, the outdoors can exhilarate like nothing else – something the National Trust has bolstered this week in opening all of its green spaces to the (socially distancing) public.
I will be taking them up on this offer. Not because I have no other shared haunts to occupy now that everything else is closed, but because 2020 for me has thus far yielded one solitary day out of lockdown conditions, and a short stroll may be as close to freedom as I get for the rest of it.
I have spent the past three months – that is the entirety of this year, save for its opening 15 minutes – with a broken foot. Unable to walk, and without use of my hands, repurposed for wrangling crutches, my world has been, week by week, getting smaller.
On Thursday, I was told – at an appointment that had very nearly been cancelled less than 24 hours prior due to the strain the hospital is under – that this private isolation was finally over. I expected to hear at the Prime Minister’s briefing later that day that a public one was set to begin. The announcement didn’t come.
Until it did, 24 hours later than first thought. But at 9pm the night before, when it was cold and dark, I took a 10 minute walk in my own shoes (ta-ta, moon boot!), for the first time since the turn of the decade.
It felt like heaven. I can only hope it lasts.