On Saturday I can’t even remember what ‘normal’ is

THERE are times when every newspaper columnist wishes they had a direct line to readers so they could gauge what’s known as the ‘zeitgeist’. Of course, we get paid to write these columns precisely because we are supposed to have our finger on the pulse of everyday life – but I wonder how many of us have an accurate hotline which is linked to the heart of the common mood right now?

Because we live in confusing times. For example, over the past week epidemiologists have been predicting a “return to normal” could be just around the corner – which of course is a wonderful thought – but I’d like to know what the British public regard as “normal” nowadays?

If you’d asked that question at any time before Covid, people would have looked askance. Why bother to ask? Normal was just that: normal. For most of us, it didn’t need pondering or analysing. A few navel-gazing worthies on Radio Four may have agonised over the concept, but the majority of us would have regarded attempts to deconstruct “normal life” as daft.

Normal didn’t need talking about because, by its very Zen-like nature, it was what it was. The intellectuals would have called it existentialism – the rest of us would simply have known it as plain old everyday reality. Now though, it seems we’re heading for a new kind of normal. Perhaps an everyday reality which will be at odds with the old one in many ways.

Maybe it’s me being an old dinosaur, but everywhere I look nowadays things seemed to have changed just a little bit. Some things are even in the process of profound or rapid change. Take the concept of holidays… Just about everyone I know here in the Westcountry is not taking a holiday this year. There are obvious reasons, of course, but that is a huge sea-change because in the past everyone I knew took at least one holiday a year.

However, even now, after a whole raft of foreign travel conditions were relaxed this week, most of my friends are shaking their heads and saying they’d already made up their minds to give it a rest until 2022.

So no flights or ferries abroad. But what about a holiday at home?

You must be joking! Have you seen the price of hiring an ex-pig-sty, a lean-to or half-a-dustbin in certain parts of Cornwall or Devon? You’d pay several thousand quid a week for anything with a couple of bedrooms within a seagull’s flight of a beach.

Someone I know recently parted with a vast sum (which could have seen her holidaying in the Caribbean) for a weekend in a shepherd’s hut in Cornwall, advertised as being “near a farm”. It turned out to be six feet from a milking parlour where the cows were busy before dawn. This person is a country girl, so wouldn’t normally be fazed, but the four o’clock moos were shaking her and her partner out of bed. Added to that, the much-vaunted jacuzzi didn’t work and it rained non-stop for 48 hours. Not surprisingly, given the number of tourism providers taking advantage and the wall-to-wall ‘fully-booked’ signs, all my Westcountry friends and acquaintances are relying on single days-out for their getaways this year. If my recent experiences are anything to go by, ‘days-out’ will mean long hours behind a steering wheel on the region’s highly congested roads.

So there is one new-normal: the annual holiday. For the time being at least, it’s up a Cornish creek without a paddle.

Then the question is: what are we going to be doing in future? Continue to holiday in a highly expensive land of dodgy weather where greedy landlords evict permanent tenants to turn their cottages into holiday lets? Or say, “to hell with global warming” and jump on an environment-wrecking machine otherwise known as an airliner, and head for distant heatwaves where we can slowly boil and catch a tan while escaping forest fires?

There used to be just one question concerning a holiday: can we afford it or not? But then, life used to be simple. It isn’t any more.

Take the wearing (or not) of masks… I have just returned from our local supermarket where I reckon roughly two out of ten shoppers were not wearing a face-covering.

I found myself despising those people.

To me, mask-free wasn’t so much a case of, “I don’t care whether I get Covid or not!” It was more… “I’m the sort of person who doesn’t give a hoot if I give a communicable disease to shop staff who must work here day-in, day-out. What’s it to me if they get Covid? Nor do I care about other customers. Because I am someone who doesn’t consider others at all, ever!”

Of course, it’s dangerous to generalise. Some may have had genuine medical reasons for not wearing a mask. Nevertheless, we’ve all heard of road-rage – will mask-rage now become part of everyday life?

Or, as I say, is it just an old country hick like me who’s worrying he might find the new normal difficult to navigate?

I’d be interested to hear the thoughts of readers.

‘The 4am moos from the milking parlour shook my friend and her partner out of bed’