Social distancing as a way of life is inevitable

Rachael Revesz, The Independent

There’s been a lot of talk about what kind of world we “want to go back to” after the coronavirus lockdown, and how our lives might change. That is scary. It’s much easier to ignore the bigger, unknowable picture and to instead argue about whether we should keep two metres apart, or one, or one and a half. And which person in your house gets to “bubble up” with someone outside of it. And which grandparent you like better.

The problem is that avoiding passers-by on the pavement has become really wearisome. I dropped off group Zoom calls long ago. Grazia says “Zoom face” is now a thing. When I head out for a walk, I no longer see eyes and mouths and hands or hear an accent: I see a human-shaped object and walk onto the road, around a parked car, to avoid it.

We’ve come to the stage that we need to choose people in our lives very carefully. On Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour I heard a woman talk about dating in the new world, and that “random boys” wouldn’t feature in her life again for “a long time”.

But hey, focusing on yourself instead of meeting new people for a while isn’t all bad? We can “take stock” in lockdown, work on “finding yourself” and discovering “who you really are”. The problem is we do this through spending time with people and letting them show us who we are, not by doing Yoga with Adrienne and writing in our diaries with the curtains drawn.

Perhaps social distancing as a way of life is inevitable for now, an extension of the track many of us were already ambling along. When I moved to London, I remember talking to people suddenly felt curt, and more transactional. There is no need to acknowledge someone as you walk past. In London, you are unlikely to know your neighbours, and many relationships, including at work and with your landlord, are more about competition and making money than offering them a mince pie.

Coronavirus will ensure “health and safety” culture skyrockets, and it will do nothing to cultivate new friendships or relationships. Already, we’ve become oddly used to being herded around supermarkets and airports and car showrooms and garden centres, to being told to enter via this door and exit via this one, to wait here please. Life could become very dull, and we will sink into the warm soup of it, only remembering what it was like to be spontaneous.

I do understand why are heading in this direction right now. We don’t know enough about the disease or how it is transmitted; at this stage we can barely track it. Our local shop owners have ended up showing more competence and caution than our political leaders. Half of Covid-related deaths in the UK are reportedly in care homes, not helped by the fact we shipped in ill patients from hospitals. It was callous, unthinkable recklessness from leaders who, in that instance, didn’t seem to give much of a toss about health and safety.

But once this is all, safely, over, can we push back a little bit? Just a little bit, please? If not, younger people will not only pay for coronavirus with their economy, it means that all of us will pay the atrocious cost of living in a world where we shrink away from each other even more than we already do.

“Social distancing’ might not be a temporary movement to slow the disease – it might be a new way of life. I hope not.