Why do so many Londoners refuse to keep their distance?
Maybe it is because Londoners are used to surrounding themselves with a mental carapace of self-isolation during their grim daily commute; or perhaps they simply can’t abandon the rookery habits of citydwellers. Whatever the reason, the capital’s inhabitants have turned out to be rubbish at social distancing.
Friends in the countryside report the emergence of a new greeting protocol. When they meet a fellow walker, there ensues a kind of crane dance – a graceful joint two-metre swerve to right or left, accompanied by a bob of rueful acknowledgment. But Londoners seem impervious to such elegant viral etiquette. My daily exercise circuit has become a wild slalom as I struggle, often in vain, to avoid close contact with the exhalations of strangers.
An anthropologist would have a fine time observing the different styles of egotistical insouciance: the lone half-wits hogging the pavement, eyes glued to their phones; the prampushing mothers, gossiping animatedly as they stroll two abreast; the inseparable lovers taking the air hand-inhand, unwilling to relinquish their grasp for an instant; the dog-walkers winding their canines’ extendable leads around the legs of hapless passers-by; the exiles from pubs and football grounds, roaming the streets in pursuit of bantz, contriving to manspread even while vertical; the runners in delusional training for a cancelled marathon; the impregnably entitled cyclists, riding down pedestrians like medieval barons trampling wretched villeins.
Meanwhile the park, despite forlorn signs chalked on the paths imploring visitors to stay two metres apart, looks like an animated version of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande
Jatte. Many of these characters are ostentatiously masked, as though covering their face with a scrap of fabric, as permeable to viruses as drainpipes are to rats, conferred on them some kind of sanitary superpower. “I’m wearing this mask so you don’t have to worry,” snapped a haughty madam in the grocer’s at a fellow shopper who had dared to ask her to keep a distance.
A friend who is an ICU doctor recently posted on social media a meme of a scythe, with the legend: “Do you know what this is? Stay home and you won’t have to find out.” Well, quite.
The only place to observe proper social distancing is the supermarket queue, where patient lines of shoppers evoke memories of a trip to the Soviet Union in the Eighties. No one has yet quoted Pushkin (which happened to me in the queue for the Hermitage), but it can’t be long before someone remembers Shakespeare’s line about “I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought”. And there is the same exhilarating uncertainty about what we will find on the shelves. Recently the vegetable aisle was empty, but for a glorious display of glossy purple aubergines.
At home, I cast a speculative eye over various previously overlooked comestibles: unopened jars of Christmas mincemeat, a superannuated tin of fancy sardines, half a packet of pearl barley (best before July 2016). Increasingly, the contents of our storecupboard suggest the ingredients for one of the dire recipes from Cooking with Fernet Branca, James Hamilton-paterson’s black comedy of culinary vengeance: salutory reading for these exceptional times.