How can we obey the rules if we don’t understand what they are?

Got any plans for next weekend? Will you be going to the pub with up to five people from more than two households to sit outside in a beer garden? Or will you be sitting inside, in which case you’ll be back to the current two-household restriction? Or perhaps you’d rather visit friends or family at home, and even stay the night, which is – or rather, will be – fine, as long as you observe the new one-metre-plus rule, which means you can now get a bit closer to each other as long as you take other safety precautions such as wearing a face mask and sitting at an angle. Unless you’re within a support bubble, in which case you can’t see anyone else, but you can hug the people you’re allowed to see. I think.

Is there anyone out there still following these rules? If so, I salute both your conscientiousness and your powers of deduction. Lockdown was so much easier when it was harder. With only one essential rule to follow (avoid everyone), a person knew where she stood. But since then the Government’s policy of cautious relaxation has generated a succession of different guidelines, each layered over the last to form a bewildering palimpsest of amendments and modifications.

You can see how it got like this. Everything about our predicament is messy: the politics, the science, the economic fallout, the human cost. Trying to give us back as much freedom as possible, while also keeping the R-rate down, was bound to be a knotty task.

Most of the new rules, such as the injunction against singing in church, make sense individually. (Singing is a surefire way to blast saliva particles over your fellow congregants.) But put together they look byzantine, confusing and sometimes downright bizarre. (Who, apart from Lord and Lady Crawley, has a house big enough to host overnight guests without coming within one metre of them?)

The other day, my daughter was invited to a birthday party in the park. There were only six other children there, and the adults tried (in vain) to enforce social distancing. “I think this is allowed, don’t you?” muttered one of the other mothers, uneasily. “But in that case, why can’t they go to school? Oh God, do you think we’re going to be arrested?”

Judging from recent events in Brixton and Bournemouth, the police have bigger problems to deal with. But from kids’ parties to beach invasions, the principle is the same. Rules that are hard to understand soon become impossible to enforce.

I don’t want to see any 

businesses go under, but I cannot mourn the demise of the shopping mall. Even in the Sixties – as the concrete for Birmingham’s Bull Ring was being poured – wise heads warned that this new American way of shopping would destroy the delicate ecosystem of the high street.

And so it did, but still they flourished. Each mall came wrapped in promises of local regeneration; yet the surrounding high streets just became shabbier and more desiccated, the blood sucked out of them by glass-and-steel vampires.

Now, though, who would want to go to an indoor, air-conditioned mall, where you can’t get anything (except Covid) that couldn’t just as easily be ordered online? Wouldn’t you rather go to smaller, specialist shops – somewhere local, so you can walk there in the fresh air? Somewhere, in fact, remarkably like a high street.