Alfresco drinking raises the loo problem

SUNDAY I suggest to my wife that we go for a walk for an hour. Maybe we would bring a can of beer, I mutter. The weather wasn’t great so there wouldn’t be too many people around. Funny how we nearly prefer if it’s not too sunny now.

She was up for it, so we sat on the grass in the park and had a can. Okay, two cans. Small ones, though. I’ll admit it’s not exactly a good look to be sitting around on the grass drinking cans, but once I reassured myself that everyone else sitting around was having a drink too, I relaxed.

On the way home, there was no queue at the off-licence so I suggested we should get some beer for home, as we were nearly out. Then I said maybe we would go and sit in the green nearby and just have one more can before we went home. I hadn’t quite thought through how this looked. It basically involved us heading into the green with a bag of cans, sitting down and cracking out a couple. Any reasonable bystander would have concluded that we had arrived into the green to drink a bag of cans.

But of course that would not be physically possible. One more can, and we both needed to go home sharpish. Facilities.

Basically, lavatory restrictions being what they are, any kind of al fresco drinking has an in-built time limit of, say, two hours, depending on your bladder control. The worry I have is that some people seem to be hanging around boozing in public places for quite some time. Unless they are quietly popping home between cans, I don’t even want to think about how they’re managing it.

Whoever comes up with a portable toilet cubicle that cleanses itself with UV light in between users could make a real killing here.

Monday

To celebrate our freedom I go for a walk with a friend and we get a socially distant take-away coffee and sit shouting at each other and saying “what?” It’s actually exhilarating to see a bit of life coming back, to see people out and about working, a bit of movement around the place.

That awful silence and stillness, punctuated only by those damn birds and their singing, is hopefully going to gradually recede into memory over the next while. Seeing the gusto with which people have gone back to business, you’d be tempted to think that there is a human impulse here that will kick in strongly when it is allowed and when it is deemed safe to do so. Maybe not quite V-shaped but maybe not some kind of eternal L-shape either. People want to work, they want to trade, they want to consume, they want to be busy.

Tuesday

How can a person be both sick of food and yet be unable to get enough of it? I’m trying to experiment with some non-bread-based lunches.

There’s this thing called a salad, which apparently doesn’t involve any bread. Interesting notion. I try it, but it doesn’t quite hit the spot. I hit on the compromise of having a salad but with some bread on the side. I also resolve to try and vary my evening carbs, maybe try some rice or potatoes instead of too much pasta. Or maybe a bit of bread.

Wednesday

My regular swimming spot is open again. Since the 5km came in we had been able to swim again at a different, more urban spot, but it wasn’t really much pleasure.

Today, back in Seapoint, I actually remember how to swim again and it’s heaven. Weirdly, my body had completely forgotten how to swim very quickly. There are a few other things I’m forgetting how to do as well. God knows what other neural connections, what impulses are being lost in all this through sheer lack of practice.

We go swimming first thing in the morning, and from what I hear from swimming spots later on in the day, we were right to get there early. The big concern among the regular swimmers is that they’ll close the swimming spots again if people don’t exercise some cop-on. It is, I’m told, “mayhem” there on sunny afternoons, and many are not observing the rule, which is ‘swim and go’.

Simples. Have your swim and then buzz off so other people can have their chance. We could be in for a tense summer.

Thursday

It’s always a warning sign on the mental health front when I just want to eat crisps and watch A Place in the Sun. I’m allowing myself an hour a day of it between the endless news. I sit there resenting these people not only for being able to buy a holiday home abroad, but also for the foolish carefree world they inhabited, where you could be so cocky about the ease of flying abroad that you could buy a house a three-hour flight away, secure in the knowledge that you could pop up and down to it with abandon.

And when they were at their second home they were confident they could thoughtlessly eat and drink in bars and restaurants. Hopefully we will live back in that world again.

Friday

You’d miss the Fridays when they get up on the pulpit and tell us whether we have been good and if we deserve some freedoms. I’ve wiped from memory that there have been more lockdown Fridays at the pulpit than good ones. Hopefully they’ll all be good from here on in. As you read this, only 13 more sleeps.