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We have been through a collective trauma and need time to adjust to the new world. Instead, we are being told to go and have a pint. No wonder we can’t handle it
The least-helpful piece of advice in the world is: “Just be yourself.” (Seriously? It won’t go well.) The second-least-helpful is: “Just act normal.” I have been acting normal sitting on a train in a mask and gloves, while my glasses misted up, telling myself: “This is just fine.” Then I acted normally by sitting in the drizzle outside a pub with a young man desperate for his first pint of Guinness in a while, only to be told by frazzled bar staff that they had no Guinness. Then I acted normally in another small town and had a drink outside! Until I got up to go to the loo, and my mate stopped me. “Don’t go in there,” she said ominously. “I have a bad feeling about it.”
In a world in which we’re all “acting normal”, we shouldn’t have all these bad feelings, should we? But they won’t go away. We are now required to make snap judgments about what is safe and what isn’t because, actually, we don’t really know. Friends have reported “accidentally hugging” their own grownup kids over the weekend. And despite the pictures, most people in Soho in London on Saturday night were not really engaged in some bacchanal. (Nudge, wink, what was all the outcry about, if not homophobia?) The truth is, most of us are edging back into the water, not diving in. Continue reading...