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Boys and girls come out to play …. lockdown is lifting and Easter is coming. The good news is that people have emerged from their solitary lives ready to have a lovely time….young, single and ready to mingle. The bad is that we’ve been inside so long, we’ve lost our manners.
The other night by the river it was like Glastonbury, with people huddled together on the grass as if the last year had never happened. It turns out that what we’ve been missing is physical proximity. Just as well the virus doesn’t really do outdoors because everyone was as close as can be. It’s also just as well the sunny scientist, Chris Whitty, wasn’t there. It’s good that social distancing hasn’t become a habit, but maybe an arm’s length wouldn’t hurt? Not that there was room.
Then there’s the idea that outdoors is the new indoors. That is to say, we’re bringing our home habits into public spaces. If you’ve got a back yard, you can roast your own sausages in it. But public spaces are ours. Lighting fires on the grass for your little barbecue may make you feel like an Australian on an outback, but it leaves a blackened hole. And it’s invading other people’s smell space to have smoke from your man roast wafting across the park. Bring sandwiches and a flask of tea; it’s just as good.
And if you’ve been nicely brought up, you’ll leave things like you found them. But have you actually been in a park the morning after revellers have been at play? It’s just horrible. We need park keepers with truncheons. And more and bigger bins.
Then there are outdoor gyms. Not the public ones with sturdy equipment. We’re talking personal trainers suspending straps out of trees and railings – and a nice balustrade in Holland Park – and hanging their bodyweight on them. We’re talking lines of yoga mats with an instructor barking at young women to lift their rumps. We’re talking people taking up paths by skipping on them.
Of course we’re bound to lose the run of ourselves after all that time indoors. But before we return to business as usual, maybe we could remind ourselves what the old normal looked like?