Phase 3 gives a glimpse when we want the vista

IN AN idle moment, well okay, an idle day, I rang the hairdressers fully expecting to be put on a waiting list for 10 months and saddled with an eyewatering bill for undoing the damage caused by both of my attempts with home dye. But alas I was mistaken as I have been about everything connected with Covid-19. The hairdresser sounded actually pleased to hear from me and, pandemic pleasantries over, she put me down for Monday week on condition that I submit to a patch test – another necessity it seems born from the home dye kits – and arrive armed with mask and pen. Pen? Me neither.

To be honest I was more than a little crestfallen at the prompt appointment as I had hoped to use the endless waiting list as cover to delay my return to society.

Of course there is always the possibility, unlikely, that once the hair is in place, I’ll feel like a new woman and eagerly head off on a shopping/dining /drinking spree, such as they might exist in Phase 3.

Experience tells me though that the upshot will be I’ll just feel under pressure to prise off my trainers, shake off my corona carapace of flab and physical neglect and take more steps to look part of the human race.

WHEN the lights went down on normal life in March, I assumed that whenever lockdown eased I’d be among the first to get back into the swing of things. My mistake was believing that real life would return, on the flick of a switch. That one day we would all be going stir crazy indoors and the next we’d be milling around bars shouting for more bags of Tayto.

Not once did it occur to me that when the gates of Covid19’s high-security jail snapped open, we’d be transported to a vast open prison rather than the sunlit uplands of total freedom.

The halfway house scenario that awaits us tomorrow is in some respects the worst of both worlds; the arrangements that pubs, restaurants, hairdressers, museums, cinemas must make call for a form of human behaviour that is tightly controlled and regimented and where the one upside of lockdown – invisibility – is lost.

The pubs will be devoid of atmosphere, the spontaneity of casual drinking and sudden camaraderie sucked out of them. Their rigid appointment system, the signing in and out protocol and socially distant tables that one can’t move from on pain of death makes it sound like you’re going for a drink in the Mountjoy Prison bar, rather than the Palace bar.

In the top restaurants, diners will have to race through the courses and drain their carafes within 90 minutes. There will be Perspex screens between tables and waiters in personal protective equipment. Our surroundings will be so clinical and spotless that we won’t know whether we are in for keyhole surgery or curry.

THE museums and galleries will operate one-way routes with more prominent invigilation, ropes and partitions. And don’t get me started on buying make-up. Whoever bought cosmetics without trying on the full panoply of testers? Another bit of harmless amusement bites the dust.

Now don’t get me wrong, Phase 3 is undoubtedly progress, a considerable improvement on what’s gone before it.

And in our delicate state after a long quarantine, it’s natural to be jittery about a big change, particularly when it unfolds beneath the spectre of a second outbreak of the virus.

That said what awaits us tomorrow is a very pale version of what I imagined all those months ago. And I’m pretty dubious about whether the occasion warrants a new hair-do

at all.