We should talk about horizons, and the setting of desirable ones. A newspaper gave it a go the other day with the front-page news that it is possible pubs may reopen in April rather than May. Given that we read elsewhere that when pubs do reopen, they may not be allowed to serve alcohol, the thrill from this news was limited. This cannot be our best hope: that if everybody behaves themselves and everything goes according to plan then we might be allowed to drink an orange juice in public sometime after Easter. This horizon is not sufficiently motivating.
And societies, like the people within them, need motivation. There can’t be a person who hasn’t spent at least part of the past year feeling listless or even hopeless. Whether it’s elderly people cut off from relatives, younger people whose life-start keeps getting put on hold, or even middle-aged folk, a certain amount of glumness is forgivable.
Some results of this can already be seen. The British Medical Journal recently reported that experts are demanding ‘an urgent inquiry’ into why alcohol-related deaths hit record levels in the first nine months of 2020. If the government wants a fast turn-around on that inquiry, I would be happy to give it a go myself. If called upon, I would focus on the fact not just that booze is cheaper to drink at home than in the pub, or that there isn’t much else to do in the evenings. I’d focus on the fear that there isn’t an end to this, that this is what life is going to be like for the foreseeable future and that whatever comes next may be worse. None of these are unreasonable fears. All of them sit almost unaddressed.
At the beginning of Lockdown 1 we were told we needed to stay housebound for a number of weeks to ‘flatten the curve’.
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