Although this phrase is bandied around eagerly in anticipation of the forthcoming easing of restrictions on July 19th, I can’t help but feel it’s like opening up all your presents before Christmas day. For weeks now, at least since the pubs reopened back in April, I felt surrounded by an aura of emancipation, set loose from the shackles of the ‘stay at home’ mantra and released back into some kind of conventional day to day living. Not that I’m a huge frequenter of such establishments, but the knowledge that I could be if I wanted to was truly liberating. From around mid May we were once again permitted to mingle indoors officially, although the reality of the situation was, and had been for some time, that lifestyle and work commitments had resulted in this happening on more than a handful of occasions in people’s lives because it was absolutely unavoidable. However, being able to do it ‘officially’ did alleviate some of the anxiety thrust upon us by the curtain twitching lockdown militants.

I’m not ashamed to tell you that I’ve broken the ‘rules’ several time over the last 18 months. I’ve also never had Covid-19, nor has anyone in my close family. I’ve been on public transport, in shops, worked in local authority buildings such as schools and hostels, been in the gym, been in pubs, restaurants and bars and on occasion hugged a friend in the great outdoors for a split second. What I did do was use my common sense. What I didn’t do was follow a rule just because it was a rule or when that rule became null and void, I didn’t immediately go out and do all the things that were now permitted. And this, in the fullness of time, was probably how I avoided it.

When the lockdown was first announced back in March 2020, there seemed to be this overpowering stench of camaraderie and the mantra, “we’re all in this together”. We were terrified, anxious, paranoid and confused and were skittish even leaving the house for our daily walk. It was like James Herbert’s ‘The Fog’, or Stephen King’s ‘The Mist’ whereby people were paralysed by fear of this invisible presence that nobody really knew anything about apart from that it came from bat-soup. We crossed the road whenever we saw somebody coming towards us and followed one-way systems in shops and supermarkets religiously. If a jogger approached you from the rear and expulsed their hot breath on the back of your neck you went straight home and doused yourself in pesticide and if they approached you head on, it transcended into a battle of wills about who was going to move aside onto the muddy grass verge or into the road. Everybody was temporarily neurotic beyond a reasonable threshold and I’m not exonerated from that accusation either. I still suffer with the PTSD caused by setting my alarm for 11.50pm every Tuesday night and logging onto the Tesco website, waiting in a virtual queue trying to book a delivery slot, then feeling terribly guilty that maybe I should have left them for the most vulnerable.

And then, for a while there, we all became Covid-Nazis. Curtains twitched incessantly, people watching people, everybody’s beady eye on you unloading the contents of your car boot whenever you left the house to make sure that a) you had only been to the supermarket and b) you were harbouring a reasonable amount of toilet roll, pasta and tinned tomatoes. There was one particularly cringe-worthy occasion when I went out to do my usual tedious neighbourhood loop on foot and counted the number of cars I had seen on the road, just so that I had something to rant about to my Mother. The local neighbourhood social media pages turned into a cess pool of vigilantes and lynch mobs because a family of 5 had all gone out at the same time. Dog walkers were raging because the rugged, rural and usually deserted paths they once perambulated, free of human traffic, were now teeming with children and their parents in non-conforming ramblers footwear. The ‘non-clappers’ for the NHS didn’t go unnoticed and were called out on the Facebook community pages. People began to bicker and squabble over inconsequential subject matter and then dagnammit…..Dominic Cummings goes and gets himself collared on a trip to Barnard Castle. And then the hissing got real.

I fell out with multiple people over this. I’m not a fan of Cummings, just to clarify, but it would have been hypocritical of me to caste him into the sin bin like everybody else did. And this is where the ‘common sense’ aspect tears through the funk, in my mind, actually supporting what he did. Let me explain; I am a single parent. I have a young child and a very scattered family. I have no surviving grandparents, my siblings live overseas and I only have my elderly mother close by, so we are pretty isolated. At the time, the evening news was besieged with images of intubated hospital patients or people in oxygen masks gasping for air. The feeling of inevitable doom was overwhelming. I began to panic about my daughter being left alone if I had to go into hospital as I couldn’t really ask my vulnerable elderly mother to look after a child who had been exposed to a potentially deadly virus. But the problem was that I really had no back up plan. But had I had the option to relocate temporarily somewhere close to family to mitigate the potential damage then I would have done, without hesitation. The error he then subsequently made was his unnecessary jolly to a popular, but deserted tourist attraction, followed by some fanatical tale of dwindling eyesight. It was foolish, dare I say ‘short sighted’ and probably a bit selfish but what the public completely missed throughout the entire pandemic was that these rules were only implemented because we’re all incapable of exercising simple common sense ourselves. One of my favourite tweets which followed on from the Matt Hancock fondling expose was, “I haven’t been able to kiss my 93 years old granny and Matt Hancock has been snogging his bit on the side!” No, dear, you were ‘warned’ against kissing your 93 year old granny because there was a small risk that she might die, it wasn’t actually a crime to do so and you weren’t forbidden but thank the lawd you thought it was or she might well have expired by now. I felt a bit sorry for Mrs H, the fact that the media and the general public were more concerned with the heinous felony of breaking social distancing etiquette rather than his sordid infidelity. I could picture her jumping on the sofa in her comfies, glass of pinot in one hand, clenching the other hand into an angry fist and screaming at the telly, “Never mind the ruddy rules, how about what a slimy, cheating, lying b*****d he is you bunch of ignorant cretins!!”

And then the battlefields were wide open, the furloughed on one side, self-employed on the other with the key workers sort of malingering in the middle somewhere, bitter that they had to work all the way through but made to feel grateful for still having a job. The arguments became very vinegary, the furloughed went on the defensive, the self-employed began to rabble-rouse, the key workers grew irritated at the disingenuous weekly round of applause. I was cruelly taunted by acquaintances for furloughing myself as a sole Limited Company Director and have a small PAYE income, what they failed to acknowledge was that it barely covered the mortgage and I was largely living on savings. Slowly but surely, the self-employed crept incognito back to work. Hairdressers, nail techs, personal trainers, gardeners, non-essential plumbers, painters and decorators until it was clear that the lockdown was starting to fail dismally in its quest to keep us contained. The verbal wars recommenced. The furloughed put down their beers, leapt off their sun loungers and demanded that we “all make sacrifices!!!” The self-employed responded with Scargill vigour and a huge collective two-finger salute, the key workers just carried on regardless, most, by now, had developed Marie Antoinette Syndrome. It was so mucky that the only solution really was to stay at home and binge watch ‘Breaking Bad’ for the fourth time.

But aside from all the chaos there were also some positive aspects. Many people took up a new hobby, parents bonded with their children a little more and appreciated the long walks, the lie-ins and the silence, Zoom actually started to connect us more with family members and friends we rarely saw, we had some headspace, some breathing space, we learnt to cook again, online fitness (at least in the early day) really took off and enabled a lot of fitness professionals to thrive. There were some great TV shows like ‘Grayson Perry’s Art Club’ which I was strangely captivated with and normally untouchable, unapproachable celebrities began cropping up all over the place, entertaining us from their lounges, musicians looked after us with impromptu kitchen performances and we were now invited, albeit virtually, into the private lives of the rich and famous. We were, to some degree, “all in in together“. I think, with my hand on my heart, that these memories will be cherished long after the stresses and strains of normality resumes.

So I raise my glass to new beginnings, the burning of the mask and a World free of bat-soup!