Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

In defence of the lockdown

(Getty Images)

I realised things were getting back to normal when I threw away a third of a tin of chopped tomatoes last week. Back in March you couldn’t get them for love or money. I still remember the appalled look on a woman customer’s face at our local farm shop, in mid-April, when she was told that, while the store was out of tinned tomatoes, she could have real ones instead. ‘That’s not the same,’ she said, with a degree of rancour. ‘Um… if you chopped them up with a knife, I think they’d be pretty similar. You know?’ she was informed, but she wouldn’t have it and stomped off. There was always something a little spurious about those early shortages, with people panic-buying yeast when the shelves were stocked with loaves of bread. The run on hand sanitiser, as if it were like those nosegays of herbs with which people in the Middle Ages tried to ward off the plague, without success. Waitrose totally out of manchego and nduja paste.

Anyway, I threw out the leftover tomatoes and mused that soon I would be every bit as wasteful as I was before lockdown struck and nothing of this peaceful and joyous lacuna would remain with me, or with anyone else. The notion that we might end up kindlier, greener, gentler as a consequence of our brush with this ineffectual Armageddon was always horribly misplaced. The only lasting impact will be that reform of the cumbersome and often fantastically inept National Health Service will be off the cards in perpetuity and instead we will probably still be forced to kneel down before it every Thursday evening to give praise, clutching a used face mask in lieu of a rosary.

In John Updike’s excellent but very unfashionable (now) 1968 novel Couples, sex replaces God as a religion.

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