We’re all learning a strange new dance as we avoid the enemy invisible

IT is not – yet – quite the Masque of the Red Death – but it is a dance, of sorts. New, watchful steps we have fast and fearfully learned: the selfpreserving measure of social distancing.

And we are all doing it now, even here in classy Morningside when we dare timidly to leave our houses.

We weave into the open road at the sight of an oncoming pedestrian; pass that elderly hand-in-hand couple while leaving enough room for a tank; move nervously about inside those few shops still open in strange, dainty gavotte.

It is as if we were at war, a feeling underpinned by the sound of distant gunfire from the Army firing range in the Pentland foothills – though the crack of an SA80 makes no one start now. We flinch, these days, at a cough.

Our enemy is everywhere, invisible, random. We had never realised before how much we touch, unthinkingly, in the course of an outing – the button on the pelican crossing, the keypad on a cash machine, handles here and touchscreens there, all potentially seething with the foe, so silent, so erratic, knocking Prince Charles himself from public life while sparing some dustman.

I never go shopping now without, when leaving the house, snapping on fresh latex gloves, like some friendly proctologist. At Margiotta’s, our high-end corner shop, the youthful staff wear them too – unusually watchful, subdued.

So we all move about, two metres apart, settling up at the tills standing as far back as we can, with pasted smiles. I think I am doing grand till, as I make for the door, there explodes from nowhere an 11year-old boy, cannoning into my side as I spring back in instinctive, unfeigned horror.

Destroyer

Everyone stares; his mum turns very red. ‘Social distancing,’ I grate. ‘I know,’ she sighs, ‘he’s been told,’ as the child nuzzles into her coat, not visibly chastened, and you wonder momentarily why you bother to obey the rules, why you try and sweep out of everyone’s way as if they were an oncoming destroyer, why, some 19 times daily, you wash your hands till they hurt.

As I head down our street, a police car crosses it slowly, alert for unlawful association.

We never usually see the cops on our manor: the worst offence hereabouts would be displaying a Brexit poster.

Morningside Road is among the finest shopping thoroughfares in Britain. Not three weeks ago, it bustled as ever. Today it is as quiet as a Stornoway Sabbath.

A few of us move about, in our courtly zig-zagging, to a modest soundtrack of traffic at 1970s levels.

Inevitably, some jogger hurtles by, regardless of anyone in his path, gasping out who knows what, and after he has passed I hold my breath as long as I can bear.

Almost everything is shut – the cafes, the Pizza Express, the nailbars, the hairdressers, the nice little place that exhorted us to ‘Keep Calm And Eat Waffles’, the travel agency, the greetings cards place. Most display polite little Microsoft Word notes of apology.

Few, I note, can bring themselves to mention the C-word. Perhaps one day, as timorous Americans used to touch on their past, dreadful Civil War, we will talk of ‘the late unpleasantness’.

Not one of the many charity shops is open now: their silver-haired volunteers are, no doubt, self-isolating. This venture or that tearoom or my favourite deli, too, could be closed for weeks. Or months. The little social networks that had made the likes of Karina’s or Blackwood’s their daily hub of chat and cheer cannot long survive.

Some, in all probability, will never reopen.

Behind every locked door, I know, are lost jobs, forfeited pay, fraught overdrafts, the slow choking of an entrepreneur’s dream – and all because of a virus that, only in November, was exclusive to bats.

I stump along, up the brae. More and more folk seem to sport makeshift masks – a scarf, or simply a jumper pulled up and over their nose.

I mentally toy with buying some suitably dystopian builder’s mask myself – a scary one, with protruding filters – but, when I reach Houseproud of Morningside (half hardware store, half cookshop), it too has fallen under the yoke, its shutters halfway down.

All pharmacies seem mobbed. Day by day they show increasingly fraught notices. Who would go into a chemist’s now anyway, when they are clotted with sick people? And the artisan baker, as of this week, only accepts contactless payment.

At Sainsbury’s Local, lines of shrieking hazard-tape by the tills keep us at a firm distance; shelves have been stripped bare. ‘It’s been busier than Christmas Eve,’ says Douglas, a student of international trade in what was, till last week, his real, university life.

Drained

Colleagues looked drained, wan; we vaunt the toil of doctors and nurses, and rightly so, but the pressure on shopworkers now must feel intolerable.

I decide against a pointless visit to Superdrug. There will be no Lemsip Max and hand sanitiser, the breadth of Scotland, is the stuff of fantasy.

Our local library threw in the towel last Friday. And a week ago, I was fighting upstream against homeward-bound schoolchildren – from feepaying George Watson’s, in their maroon blazers; or in the black and green livery of the local comp. Not today.

The few youngsters sighted have been solitary, watchful, as if they had somehow been privatised. All about us, late but beautiful spring makes silent mock; nodding daffodils, greening lawns, the blackbirds flying to and fro with wisps of stuff for their shady nests.

I reach Waitrose: I find things far more regulated than they were yesterday.

We queue politely, a handful of us, outside, the regulated coffin’s length apart, and as one customer leaves one of us is allowed in.

My mother’s favourite biscuits are still unavailable, but there is some pasta and rice, though I need none. I do secure the few items on her list – 50s stuff, like Knorr stock cubes and ground pepper; and add a bottle of wine to cheer the latest evening of voluntary parental quarantine.

At the checkout, young Daniel, too, sports gloves. ‘Latex shall speak unto latex,’ I joke, giving him clear and courteous berth. He chuckles. His eyes are tired. The panic-buying has eased off, he says, but they still have no toilet roll.

Normally, he would ask for my loyalty card; today, pointing at some glowering laser, he asks me to tap it myself. Another hazard spotted, sorted. Outside, the queue is much longer. Few chat.

It feels like past, enslaved Eastern Europe.

I pad home with my modest purchases and cut through the cemetery. Something strikes me – the unwonted freshness of the air.

With so little motoring or flying now, it is clean, clear, positively Hebridean.

Just be careful, even here, what you touch.