Those with a watchful eye might spot something this week (or next) not seen in a while. And I’m not talking about a freshly poured pint, or the sight of your forehead after three months without a barber’s care.
Rather, as England and the whole of the UK, begins to ‘open up’ after the third national lockdown, and as we emerge socially emboldened into the spring sunshine inoculated to the tune of some 32 million first doses of Covid vaccine, there’s a chance we might see the handshake make a tentative return.
I can’t be the only one who has begun to wince slightly every time I see someone on TV shaking hands in a social setting, in a film or programme evidently filmed in the world before Covid robbed us of such basic, everyday civilities. It’s difficult not to reach inwardly for the hand sanitiser whenever such a scene appears.
After a full year of Zoom calls, elbow ‘bumps’ and toe-rubbing (remember that?), do we actually feel the need to undertake this – let’s face it – rather archaic greeting-ritual anymore? Perhaps a year of enforced absence has consigned it to history, as emphatically as it seems to have done with a swathe of venerable department stores and Sir Philip Green. 2020 could well have been the year that we all shook our last hands.
I seriously hope not. The good news for those of us who like handshakes is that they have endured for 3,000 years or more. The practice has seen off the likes of the Black Death – a rather more fearsome foe than even Covid. And, more recently, shaking hands survived the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago when (like now) it fell out of use because of virus transmission. So, fingers crossed.
But even as a committed ‘shaker’, I have to admit to a certain trepidation at the prospect of its return. I would probably think twice about shaking hands until I’ve be vaccinated, at least once. I might also resort to a dollop of hand sanitizer afterwards, just in case.
Which poses a question: will a discreet rub of the hands with some sanitiser after a handshake become a new taboo? The handshake at its root is an emblem of trust – an old way of showing a stranger that you are unarmed and that you do not mean harm. A year of social distancing has made many of us distrustful of touch. More than ever before, clasping a hand is a sign that you are putting aside personal risk in favour of forging relationships.
Its revival could stigmatise the hangover of hypochondria that the pandemic might otherwise induce. Rather than the ring of bells, will the social lepers of tomorrow be accompanied by the reek of cleansing hand gel?
It remains to be seen whether society will go out to bat for one of mankind’s most longstanding forms of social interaction. Are you prepared to put your life quite literally in the hands of others, and to boldly go where Man has been going since at least the Assyrians?
I for one can’t wait for the blessed simplicity of shaking the hand of a stranger. I’ve missed it – that moment of human contact which can often communicate more than all the banal verbal back and forths that follow it, particularly in a culture as emotionally inhibited as ours.
I pray that handshaking survives the Covid hiatus. Going to Tesco I can live without, but not shaking hands.
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