Hope was on the horizon. Now we’re reversing away from it...

SIX months ago, coronavirus cases in Scotland were rising fast. First it was one case, then three. A day later six people had it.

In offices there was talk of some staff having to work from home for a while until this blew over – which it surely would by late spring, when the virus would prove no match for our balmy Caledonian climes.

Weekday mornings in midMarch would find me wedged into a windowless room in edinburgh with around 40 other journalists – all of us moaning about the lack of space – as we viewed the more sensitive passages of evidence at the Alex Salmond trial via a CCTV feed.

Some of us managed to squeeze into the few rows of benches. ‘room for one more?’ a latecomer would ask, and we’d squeeze still tighter. Others set up camp on the floor.

Innocents

Social distancing? Never heard of it, mate. Budge up.

day by day, it was getting harder to find a place that would do you a lunchtime sandwich. Signs were going up in café and restaurant windows saying they were closing for a wee while. Back soon.

Innocents that we were, we took this to mean a week or two. Six months – and some 22,000 Scottish coronavirus cases later – the upheaval wrought on society and individual freedoms for the greater good has proved easily the most drastic since the 1940s.

Who would have imagined, to take a small example, that the High Court trial I attended in March would be the last in Scotland for six months and that, when they resume shortly, juries will have to sit two metres apart in cinemas and watch the evidence as they might a movie?

Who but sci-fi nuts dreamed of a world where top-flight football matches and tennis Grand Slams were played out in eerie, empty stadiums with fake crowd noise piped in for TV viewers at home?

Who would have believed the restrictions on our movements and social lives and – six months in – the degree of application required to keep track of them?

As I write, no more than eight people from a maximum of three different households can meet indoors. If, however, they live in Glasgow or one of four neighbouring local authority areas, this indoor space cannot be their homes but it can be a pub or restaurant so long as they sit at least a metre apart from people who do not live with them.

remember to bring a face mask for trips to the toilet.

Up to 15 people from a maximum of five households, meanwhile, are permitted to gather in your garden.

Got all of that? Well, forget it because it’s all been changed again. Now it’s six people max from two households tops both inside and out, notwithstanding locally locked down areas. I do hope you’re getting this down and that your pen is poised for further revisions in days to come.

What, then, are the key lessons we should take from our six months of living with a global pandemic?

Well, speaking for myself, I have learned there is plenty from pre-Covid times that I do not miss. The personal space invasions, for example, on public transport and the hospitality sector.

Indeed, for borderline claustrophobes, the re-configuration outwards of the acceptable distance between humans who do not know each other has been, on a personal comfort level at least, quite welcome even if it is less so on an economic one.

I have learned that, among all the freedoms to lose in a pandemic, the loss of freedom to travel is among the hardest to bear.

On rainy mornings I still struggle to reconcile myself with the fact, for almost the entirety of the last six months, much of mainland europe has been off-limits to me and will remain so for possibly months to come. I choose to live in this country but, for reasons which still trouble me, I have become a virtual prisoner in it.

Why is it safer for me to remain in a place where more people have the virus than to travel to a country like Greece where it is less prevalent?

I have not yet learned to take this lying down.

Other people have learned during lockdown how much they missed sweethearts (or, in sorrier circumstances, how much they didn’t), how sweet life can be without the daily commute or how awful the wrench when deprived of Saturday afternoons at the football or the shops.

I know from the queues snaked around Mcdonald’s drive-ins up and down the country when they reopened a while back that a good many people learned about the critical role the Big Mac plays in their lives.

Many of us have learned encouraging lessons over the past few months: that we are, perhaps, more resilient when the chips are down than we imagined; that, even in Scotland, some things still matter more than constitutional politics.

Horrified

We are wiser, too, about demographics. Fascinating, isn’t it, that it is predominantly the young and invincible and the old and intransigent who are proving rebellious as the state meddles ever more obtrusively in our lives?

I thought retirees would be the ones horrified by the scant regard for the rules displayed by Generation Z. No. It’s forty and fifty-somethings who want their guts for garters.

We have, in the last six months, discovered truths which should all along have been obvious. That no Tory government would ever trump Nicola Sturgeon in the caution stakes is one such lesson.

Has a single Westminster imposed limitation on liberties gone by without a corresponding or yet more draconian Scottish one being announced by the First Minister within 24 hours?

Moral: however committed Boris Johnson says he is to keeping people safe, Nicola is exponentially more fiercely committed on behalf of Scots. Hence the apparent ‘arms race’ of restrictions. Kennedy and Khrushchev have nothing on this pair.

Could it be, though, that the two most important lessons have occurred to us only lately? The first, suggested by edinburgh University professor of public health Linda Bauld this week, is there may be a ‘use-by’ date on the public’s willingness to abide by this litany of constraints.

Indulgence

She warned that there was ‘declining’ support for measures intended to halt the spread of coronavirus and that ‘social unrest’ may lie up ahead.

Two months ago we were making stately progress out of lockdown and the sense of relief as normality loomed on the horizon was palpable. Now, after weeks of gear grinding, we are back in reverse for who knows how long.

Is the ‘use-by’ date on the Scottish public’s indulgence, then, six months? Look around. I do not see it remaining fresh for longer.

The second lesson we are learning lately is all the more sobering in view of the first: This is not nearly over.

Those who imagined coronavirus would be in the rear view mirror by the time we were sunning ourselves on a Spanish beach in the summer holidays – which is to say most of us – were sold a pup.

Summer ruined, we now cast ahead in our diaries to possible future casualties, already fearing the worst. Christmas? The easter break? Next summer even?

What might Scotland look like if, by then, caution still trumps all and our First Minister’s caution trumps that of all comers?

Withered and defeated is my guess. And sorely in need of new leadership.