Making Up our Own Minds

 We’ll Mostly Make Up Our Own Minds 

 

 

March 2020. It all seemed very strange. We were in Spain, leaving a couple of days before the lockdown that had just been announced there. 

 

Given two days’ notice, the second homeowners of Madrid and other metropolises busted out in refugee numbers, fleeing to the Costas. At the time, it seemed that the Spanish authorities had badly bungled. This year, a similarly signalled lockdown in France was deliberately timed to allow people in Paris to escape to second homes… thus it goes. Nothing short of police state tactics is going to prevent the well-off from arranging their lockdown lives away from the cities, if they so choose, in spite of the hollow guidance of governments everywhere.

 

This is just one example of a general tendency. 

 

In those early days, however, we were all rather fearful and timid. It was as if air raid sirens were going off, and we all had to rush to hunker down in our chosen shelters.

 

I remember feeling rather panicked, on returning from Spain, through sombre airports. Lockdown was about a week away, but we all knew it was coming. Where should I go? There seemed to be irreversible choices – stay put on my own, or move to a friend’s ample house. So there was much mad scurrying about, against an imaginary clock. Choice made, it seemed that a gate clanged shut when formal lockdown commenced.

 

And, of course, most of us felt that way, diligently timing our excursions, meticulously avoiding contact outside the social unit we swiftly came to identify with – our “household”.

 

Over all this strangeness presided an unusually balmy Spring and early Summer.

 

As rules changed, the weather encouraged small garden events as if nothing was untoward. And it was at about this time that the law and personal judgment about obedience to the law began, for many, slowly to part company. (Influenced in part by the noble example of the far-travelling Dominic Cummings, senior aid to the Prime Minister.)

 

It was one thing to be banged up in our households, in awe of the unprecedented emergency. It was another thing to be allowed day release, as it were, subject to what has seemed increasingly arbitrary limits.

 

“Rule of 6”? Try managing that with groups of children. And why “6”? Surely the big divide is between crowded mainly indoor places and the uncrowded outdoors; between prolonged close personal contact and distanced dealings.

 

Many started following their private rules away from public areas, and continue to do so. They make judgments about family and friends – how cautious are they? How vulnerable? Inevitably there are inconsistencies, some glaring, especially when it comes to indulging families. Rules, either public or private disappear at times, to the despair of political and medical authorities.

 

In about June 2020 came the inestimable invention of “support bubbles”, linking any lone adult with another household or enabling informal childcare between households. These licences have been adopted under private rules to create serial bubbles (legally expressly forbidden), including to circumvent the prohibition on dining or holidaying except in single households. A friend or family member can be added on as an ad hoc bubble partner.

 

Recently even scientists in semi official positions have joined in the quiet subversion. The official rule, at present, remains that even fully vaccinated people should not meet indoors, unless in the same household. But the leader of the King’s London/Zoe symptom survey pops up to point out that the risk that two fully vaccinated individuals pose to each other is vanishingly small. Further, the risk of asymptomatic infection passing between the two (and therefore posing a risk to unprotected third parties) is also minute.

 

Therefore, says the scientist, you may wish to consider observance of the strict rules in the context of this assessment..Enough said.

 

But there is a big BUT. I mentioned earlier the distinction between private judgments in private contexts and behaviour in public contexts. I don’t think any responsible citizen, vaccinated or not, has given up observing distancing and mask-wearing observance.

 

 

April 2021