The texture of our country is changing before our eyes

On Saturday night we sat around the kitchen table, my family and I, and had a takeaway from the Turkish restaurant on our high street. We opened box after box: chunky tzatziki; calamari in crisp batter; salty ovals of sucuk; flatbread studded with black and yellow sesame seeds; hot homemade falafels, crunchy outside and yielding within, smeared with cool hummus. And, which I’d been missing since lockdown began, lamb ribs: skin salty and crisp from the grill, the meat underneath sweet and chewy, tarring their bed of rice.

God it was bliss. But it made me feel melancholy, too. Meze & Shish only opened in the past couple of years — a well-appointed, tableclothy sort of local restaurant, well priced and serving first-rate grub. The sort of place that survives on neighbourhood word of mouth and relatively narrow margins. When I went in to collect my food I was the only customer. There were two staff, masked up, in the cavernous half-dark of the empty space. Will it survive this lockdown, I wondered. Will it survive the next?

Across the country, there will be local restaurants like this one — adapting to a sporadic takeaway business, making rent month by month on their empty square footages of floor space, finding new ways of hanging on. Who knows how many will make it by the time all this shakes out? Who knows what our high streets will look like? Our day-to-day lives? The lives of the people who bet their futures on these small businesses?

I’m not trying to make a point about the politics of this. You can wholeheartedly embrace lockdown as a necessary means of preserving the NHS and saving lives; or you can think that it is the greatest and most pointless imposition on the British citizen’s liberty in modern history.