Music ban hits a sour note This Covid ruling is simply a step too far for hospitality industry

SCOTLAND’S pubs, cafés and restaurants are preternaturally quiet. Music is banned; TVs are muted. If you shout, or raise your voice for that matter, you could be told to get out. Don’t laugh too loudly. Focus instead on the clink of cutlery and glasses, the occasional swoosh of kitchen doors, the footsteps of your servers echoing through eerily-empty premises.

Above all, try not to feel self-conscious, or unnerved by the reduced hum of human conversation in establishments forced to operate at half their previous capacity.

Perhaps the restrictions don’t go far enough. Why not ban espresso machines? They make a hell of a racket. What about babies and children?

They scream and shout, and everyone knows that small kids are vectors of disease anyway. Ban arguments: they can get heated and spluttery.

But then you can’t stop people winding each other up, so wouldn’t it be safer to make hospitality venues silent? Eat, drink, then get out? Where does this paralysing risk-aversion end? Let’s all just stay home and never go out again!

Of all the civil liberties I would jump to defend, the right to play music in hospitality venues is not top of my list, but when restaurateurs and publicans protest that this measure is killing their businesses, I believe them.

Seventy-five per cent of them are staring insolvency in the face. This over-the-top measure may be the last straw for many. Failed businesses take their toll in human misery and lives just as surely as any virus. Coronaphobia can do more damage than coronavirus. I speak as a survivor of the 2017-18 “Aussie flu”, a six-week bout from start to finish, but I didn’t expect the government to wreck the economy, culture, public transport and the arts because of it.

This music ban strikes me as disproportionate to the risk. We can’t hide from this virus for ever. Deaths are so low they barely show up on a graph. It’s been that way for weeks. We flattened the curve.

The NHS did cope. Through Europe and the UK, new clusters or “spikes” in cases have not been mirrored by a consequent increase in deaths, or even illnesses. If there

Gary Townsend is head chef at One Devonshire Gardens by Hotel du Vin, Glasgow. See www.hotelduvin. com