Lessons from social distancing, dogs and Nietzsche

OLD dogs can’t learn new tricks. But middle aged men can learn to dance.

All it takes is a pandemic – a drastic step, I concede – but the result has seen a transformation in my performance. Not super, man, but a passable Paso Doble.

Take your partner, please, for the social distancing fandango.

While out, you see somebody you know well who you haven’t encountered since the lockdown. Your instinct is immediately to take two steps forward then you think ‘virus’ and you take three back.

While previously you had a lower personal space threshold for somebody you know, you now add half a metre to the recommended two, out of respect.

You both feel the need to move, so each does a half step counter clockwise. This feels better, but not entirely satisfactory, therefore a full step clockwise follows, with arms thrown wide to suggest there would have been a hug in normal times.

Or you come across an inseparable couple in the supermarket aisle. One is the natural shopper, the other is there just because. The spare part stands in the middle of the aisle and, fortunately, takes the hint, offered by your hard stare, that they need to move to allow you to pass.

There follows a variation of the shuffle of old, when two people approached one another on an otherwise empty pavement and mirrored each other’s evasive action, repeated in the opposite direction, laughed, and finally got it right and passed.

In the supermarket, this becomes a variation of the country dance move, the do-si-do: step in, coming almost shoulder to shoulder – oh no! Both step back, and do the same on the other side – argh! – before shrinking against opposite shelves and edging past, arms wide and low, like prison escapees trying to avoid the guard tower spotlight.

Out on the lanes you can take the dance lead with your dog. Dogs don’t do the two-metre rule. But they do do pulling your arm out of its socket as you desperately cling to the lead to try to keep the mutt in check.

If the Olympics ever come back and there’s a sport that requires an extraordinary amount of single straight-arm strength, I’m a shoo-in for the gold.

Dogs are so starved of canine interaction that when they see another of the species, even the most human-friendly will ignore the twolegged and head for the four.

This results in a maypole-ribbonstyle twisting of leads and owners going under and over to undo the knot, all the while trying to keep at arm’s length from each other.

The dogs, sensing that mankind is facing an existential threat, have taken advantage of the distraction to engage in some determined humping to try to populate the planet with more of their own kind.

You end up laughing with a complete stranger. Or usually you do: there are some po-faced people who can’t see the funny side of a dog’s attitude to life (if it moves, chase it; if it doesn’t escape, hump it; if you can’t chase or hump it, eat it).

They are the kind who when you meet them under a perfect blue sky and they are asked to share in the joy of a rare experience of Mediterranean Britain reply, “but the garden could do with some rain”.

Yes, and we’re all going to die some day but just because the times are troubling we don’t have to be permanently troubled. “We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.” Even Nietzsche believed in fun.